UltraAlt

oh, sorry. I forgot. You have 1000 character slots per server. Make one of each and try it out for several levels. Then switch back and forth if you get bored with one of them.

Honestly, if you are going for character conception, I'll tell what I do. As I'm levelling up, I pick the next power that seems to make them most sense. That can either be which of the power more fits my concept, or which of the powers at that point do I need to pick because my character seems to have a weakness either in attack/damage or defense/mitigation. It may come to that level where maybe you want hover, but you really need another attack, so put hover off for another 2 levels. The other way around, if there is a good attack to pick but you keep getting hit, then it maybe time to get hover and slot a defense enhancement in it. Primarily, you have been talking about picking powers and not slotting. You aren't going to have a lot of influence to start. Yelling out that you could use a little influence in the help channel will usually end up getting you mailed some. Just don't abuse it. Click powers: I make sure to slot all my attack powers with 2 accuracy SOs as soon as possible. Your character isn't doing damage if they don't hit. If a power cost more than 10 endurance to use, my next slot after accuracy is going to be and end reducer. I would try to have 2 slots in stamina by level 10-15 and 3 in stamina by level 20-25. If a power has a special effect (stuns, slows, debuffs, etc), I'll usually try to slot one of those in after the first 2 accuracy (and the possible end reduction) Toggle powers: If it cost more than .26/sec then I usually start with an end reducer before slotting it up with anything else. If I'm slotting with SO's, I generally don't put more than 2 defense or 2 damage reduction if it is armor - or - go for that 2 accuracy if it is a damage shield. If you run a lot of toggles and your character is running out of endurance frequently, you might want to look at putting an end reducer in it even if it is less than .26/sec.

Any build is valid for the most part. The main gimping is not taking powers that are critical to make a set work/be as powerful as it could be. For example, if you are a melee character and don't take the anti-mez power that the armor set will provide then you are opening your character up to getting mezed in battle. In many cases, it only takes 1 additional slot to reduce the recharge time of that anti-mez power to than less than how long it lasts, so if you don't give it that second slot for a recharge enhancement then you are also open the character up to being mezed in battle. You don't necessarily have to take all the primary or secondary powers. I usually end up skipping self-rez powers on melee characters. Validity in combat tends more to be based up how you intend to play the character, who you are teaming with, and if you are solo. Unless you are in and end-game steam-rolling level 50 team, the tactics of each archetype and power set are very different and so are the way sets work. You have to play the tactics that fit an archetype and set to get the most out of it. That is to say, you can't play a blaster like tank or, obviously, vice-versa. Use the archetype and power sets strength, and do what you need to do to avoid the enemy from using your character's weakness against them. Sometimes you will be on a team and the team is going to be working together and sometimes you might be on a team where everyone is running around berserk and could care less about what the rest of the team is doing. So say you are on a team with a tank that taunts (actually has and uses the power taunt) and you are playing a squishy, as long as they are taunting your character can AoE targets around the tank and they won't all turn around and attack your character. Same scenario on a team without a taunting tank, avoid using AoEs and cones to limit the amount of agro your character is pulling. Same scenario on a team without a taunting tank, use and AoE immobilize on the middle of the mob and dodge back around the corner. After dealing with whatever damage you are taking, peer around the corner of the wall so that you only see one or two targets, start attacking one of them, and periodically set of another AoE immobilize to try to hold down some of the group you can't see. If one breaks out and runs around the corner, then back up enough so that they are the only target visible and start attacking them. Same scenario, you are playing the tank with taunt, if there is someone on the team that can keep your character healed then they can taunt all the time, if you can't get heals, then you are going to have to mitigate when you're taunting. Soloing is a quite a different thing. CoH was built for teaming, but it has been made more solo-friendly over the years. Melee characters tend to work best for soloing according to most people. Defenders are probably the worst to solo with. lol. You don't really need to even point that out here. It is sort of the other way around, if your intent is to PvP then you need to make sure that is what you are interested in. The best PvP you will find in THE CITY is the Auction House. The game wasn't built for PvP and so PvP is very unbalanced. Pretty much everyone knows that so they don't bother PvP'ing.

But it doesn't fit @markuswaters 's concept. They are obviously going for a concept. There are some that are always going to push for the mini/max, but that means building toward the mini/max instead of staying true to the concept. There is no problem with building to concept. I think the characters end up being more fun to play when they fit a concept.

Based on the information you provided I would go for an electrical/invulnerability Sentinel if you want to cast ranged electrical attacks and be tough/resistant to damage. Electrical armor and Willpower might be an options as well.

@dkeith2011 Go in through the Homecoming link, then you will be able select one of the "live" servers. Excelsior is the most populated server. Everlasting is 2nd highest populated server and the unofficial RP server Torchbearer is the oldest of the servers and tends to be the 3rd most populated. Reunion is the EU server Indomitable is was the least populated of the four original Homecoming servers in North America. Victory was a private server that was recently ported into Homecoming, so currently - appears - to have the lowest population.

What do you mean by "Paragon"? Are you able to run the Homecoming launcher?

We all have to know our limits and not let others push us past those limits. I've let other people push me past my limits too many times. I suffered the consequences. Those that pushed me past those limits didn't care when they caused me harm in one form or another. You didn't let any of us down. Find wellness and peace. I hope things get better for your soon.

I have one character lately that has ended up zoning back into the game coming in through a back door at the university on the library side after parking (where I generally always park in the University) upstairs near the crafting station right around the corner near the back wall. I've never seen that happen before either, but it happened two times with that character, so I started parking them deeper into the library.

yeah, okay. Not as alert as I thought I was at the time apparently. But the fan flack for remaining true to the series was never really an issue with most of these as for as I know. ?Josie and the Pussycats? Wow, I didn't realize that started as a comic book before it was animated. The Sin City movies and the Spirit as well. Men in Black #1 came out during an independent comics deluge. There were like 80 new black and white comic book series that came out from independent publishers that month.

I'm glad you have found someplace to have fun with a group as at a set time. There are supergroups out there recruiting. Sometimes the announce it in-game. Sometimes their posts are buried here in the forums ... probably under the various shards. Myself, I PuG. When I don't see a team to join or don't feel like recruiting, there is plenty of other stuff for me to do in THE CITY. But then, I have had error messages like this in the past ...

I agree that the recruiting for ITF is quite frequent on most servers.

Are you periodically coming on to post the same thing? I could have sworn I saw another post like this from you not so incredibly long ago. But I'm old, and time seems to be going by faster now. ... meanwhile, your complaint about here ... It seems like you can't get a team as fast as you want regardless where you are gaming. With the amount of Mids use here, you can say the same thing about the "cookie cutter" builds here. I can say this about changes in population, it seems that there is an increased number of players that are only playing level 50's on most of the servers by looking at the /search list.

I'm glad that you posted about it. I never knew about this issue. Thanks for posting about it.

There are are only 30 spots on the ignore list. When you add the 31's one, the first player you ignored rolls off the end of the list. You can see by my signature, that I have no issue with putting players on ignore. I rolled through that 30 spots petty quickly when I first joined Homecoming and people were falling off the end of the list for a while ... maybe a year. After that, I have rarely had to put someone on ignore. The people that had put on ignore that rolled off the end of the list weren't around any more or I wasn't coming into contact with them any more. Sounds like you are using it to fit what you need. No need for the DEVs to change something that is already working as intended. (NOTE: the ignore list can't be made longer because doing so causes game crashes) If someone is spamming a channel, you can ask them not to in that channel or in direct tells or place a support ticket (the GMs will take care of it). Of the chat spam mitigation options from the DEVs side, I think first and best thing to do is remove the "say" command. Why "say" was ever a command, I have no idea. That was a bad idea from the get-go. New people tend to write macros with "say" instead of a channel name which means the chat is targeted at whatever channel you are in ... like say /lfg or /help (for the most part these days). I know that some players will find it cool to yell out something every time that they use a power, but it is very quickly annoying to other players that see the chat. Can't stop that, but you can stop players from sending that "spam" to the channel that they have currently selected by removing the "say" command.

Current, use rights issues are one thing, but I've noticed that in several superhero films that go out of the way to make fun of the comics that they are based on. Which leads me to ... Believe that the "larger demographic" that the superhero movies are targeted at these days, look down on comic books and comic book readers in general as much as they used to. That is to say, "Superhero movies are cool"; "The people that created the comics that the movies were based on were nerds." And I say that as someone that read comic books avidly until a couple of different editorial teams came onboard the comic line that I read for decades and destroyed the comics that I loved that had managed to stay pretty much true to themselves for all the editorial shifts before then ... and single issue comic books were just getting way too expensive so I didn't bother looking for alternatives to the comics that I had subscriptions to over those decades (at the same comic book store ... which at this point, the people that had run it retired for health reasons). I've run into people that won't read comic books but graphic novel that are compilations of comic book issues. Sometime this is due to the price, but, for the few that I have run into that read only graphic novels, they consider it to be a book and, therefore, not a comic book. I tend to see that as one of the reasons why plot lines and other content are changed by "Hollywood". They know what the "larger demographic" will consider to be cool. And they don't realize that the reason they have a job working on superhero films is because enough people loved the comic books that those supposedly "nerdy" creators created. I mean how many characters from comic books that weren't absorbed into Marvel or DC have we seen movies based on? Mystery Men (of Flaming Carrot comic book fame)? Rocketeer? The Phantom (started as comic strip in newspapers)? The Shadow (which had a run in DC and then mini-series on the years around the release of the movie; started as radio series)? The Green Hornet (newest movie was a spoof; started as a radio series)? Dick Tracy (another newspaper comic strip)? I think of those, I think that the Rocketeer was the closest to being true to the comic ... but I didn't read all the issues of the Rocketeer. And I'm seriously doubting that most of the viewers even knew it was based on a comic (which was roughly based on the 1952 Commander Cody film serials with the added bonus of a Bettie Page like character). Some of the direction to go for obscure characters seems to be due to avoiding comic book fan wrath pre-movie release ... and that the "larger demographic" will think it is something new and wasn't in a comic book previously.

Corrupters do tend to dish out more damage than Defenders. I can agree with that.

I'm not really up on the whole "stature" thing, but I'm assuming that is only related to Origin contacts. All of the contacts for specific level ranges for any given origin all have the same missions. Each level range of Origin contacts has multiple contacts. Note my comments in the level 15-19 contact range in regard to the Science and Mutation contacts. There are actually four Mutation contacts with arcs that end up fighting Dr Vahzilok. They are listed here https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Vahzilok_Wasting_Disease So, I'm assuming, that running that mission arc in the Ouro would relate to all 4 of those contacts. I haven't tried to figure out what determines which version of the level range of archetype contact you get. I have guessed that it may be due to archetype or possibly what origin your character is versus the origin of the contact. I'm pretty sure all the origin arcs are in the Ouro, but I have only run things in the Ouro sparingly.

... but the trams!

I ran a Champions campaign back in late 80s - early 90s that took place in Nexus City. It was divided into sections/neighborhoods related to the different type of criminals and, of course, had a City Hall. The players chose where to go and what they wanted to do. They never really bothered to get involved with City Hall which was run by what were obviously aliens. One player decided to go to the edge of the city, watched the limited traffic coming and going across the wide open space that appeared to surround the city, but never tried to leave. The characters would have been stopped, of course. The player characters had been put in Nexus City when they had exhibited "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men".

Impressive!

Sorry to jump into this late. Bubbling is a teaming power set. The game was created for teaming and not soloing. Things have been done by the DEVs to make the game more solo-friendly over the years. Forcefield was one of the original power sets, so the intent is to use it on a team. And I agree that forcefield is not a good choice for soloing. Bubbles stack so a team with multiple bubbler/force fielders (force field isn't the only set that has "force fields") can bubble each other. A Repeat Offenders group known as the Pinball Wizards was (and probably is) very successful with an all forcefield team. So, yes, a force fielder really needs to team up to be successful, but I do not feel that teaming is a bad thing. If people aren't recruiting, you can recruit for a team. Most people are scared of recruiting for some reason. Don't worry about being scared about recruiting; most people seem to be for some reason, but you can tell from /LFG that if you start recruiting for something, people will most likely send tells to join. Just make sure to list what level the team will be and what you are doing. If you are doing door missions, don't worry about filling. Get a couple of the team and start running, and send more /lfg messages in between messages or when someone sends a tell to join. This is a good practice as players will join and fall out of PUGs (pick up groups) and constantly recruiting helps keep the team number high throughout your play session. And here we see where part of the trick is. If you are a bubbler, you want to avoid using multiple target attacks and you want target through the most resilient member of your team. If that player is a tanker - even if they don't have taunt - they will tend to keep the agro. Also, if you are a bubbler, you are going to do less damage than the archetypes that do not have bubbles; if you are targeting through a character that does more damage than your character - the character you are targeting through will keep the agro. So this is why you want to avoid the multi-target powers. That is to say, if you do damage to targets that aren't being taunted or are aggroed by someone doing more damage than you do, you will agro those targets. I hope that makes sense.

So are you for force fields for brutes, tankers, scrapper, and stalkers as well?