High_Beam

Speaking of unfocused feedback, ever since McDonalds started to allow people to actually choose to have or not have certain things on the food they ordered, their service has gone to shit. And what's the deal with ham being more expensive than sausage at Dunkin Donuts to where they remove it as a breakfast sandwich option . . . on a croissant. I mean really ham and cheese croissant is the standard, not sausage and cheese.

I am sure at some point I will, but at the moment I have to work out how to fit in the changes that I did test into my overall or new build. Serum will have to wait at least for now. But I will pocket your advice for later review.

Okay so I copied over my level 43 Mercs/Traps MM (kinda stopped playing her even though she was the first character I (re)created when I arrived on HC). So that means no incarnates and only about half of her slots filled with either IOs or Set IOs. She is kind of built as a proc monster on certain things and the pets have the RES and DEF procs (1 of each) spread around. Parked in PI and started hitting street mobs (46-48 Possessed Scientists/Death Mage types as well as Rikti and Malta), so we are talking Red to purple. Now I do have Tactics running. Bottom line, enemies didn't wipe me out, something that when tested on live in the same area (and same type) was happening. Granted at 48 there were tough fights but I was doing solo small mobs (3-4). I am not little miss hardest setting. Jumped into a Council radio mission (since they are heavily resistant to S/L) and the boys did their job, I even notched the diff up to +2/+4 (about my limit). On the live version at that same setting, I got my a$$ handed to me. Also, and this is just because it felt good, I jumped a large spawn of Malta creeps, like 8 or 9 with 2 LTs and the rest minions all yellow or orange. Wiped their sneaky xenophobic butts. It felt good. Hollywood. So in summary I am supremely pleased here. I have never expected them to be buffed to some kind of uber level and while I still think the issue of their level scaling needs to be addressed, I feel that this is pure win for Mercs. I mean when my Reinforced Fire Team rolls in with a wall of bullets, the bad guys should die loudly and now they do. The pace is a little faster and they feel more fluid. I did not test Serum, never took it and may never take it because I am content, I will leave the testing and feedback on that to others. The Resistance and Defense slotting I did test by adding a second slot to each so that those buffs did provide a noticeable (at least to me) improvement when coupled with the pet global in that area. I will tweak the future build a little to factor this in when it goes live, but not three slots there.

Here sir or ma'am is the Gasoline you ordered. I was told you already have your own matches.

I am at work right now but Dispari, your posts are making me tingly and HR may not be happy with the results 🙂

They are kind of chunky.

This means I might not have to pick undesired secondary powers: I think I need some private time: Storm Kick instead of Ki Push on my DP/MC Blaster Sting of the Wasp instead of the Dart on my DP/Ninja Blaster So after Edit. The feedback here is that the idea of expanding the options of the secondary power selection at creation really is a great idea and totally harmless in the scope of . . . well anything. The other secondary level adjustments make sense to me in that I always thought that primaries and secondaries should have always shared the same level availability; leave it to the player to pick. And that is the only quibble I have. Primaries should be left where they are, you should have to learn to play (that specific character and their specific powers) a little before you get that big old Tier 9.

Which is always better than finding a bug in your dinner.

Obviously I am going to put certain pieces of this through the paces because I roll with them. Specifically Mercs; that has me excited. There are definitely going to be some tweaks considering the upgrade powers (on all pets) are always the default slot only. Now maybe it gets slots. Also I am gonna will look to see if there are trade offs that are better for some of those pet-centric DEF and RES buff Set IOs that I might now put elsewhere (plus that note about changes to the call to arms proc). Respecs will be performed for sure. I am not sure how I feel about the changes to level availability relating to powers. It feels . . . needless but I am not going to have a drama explosion about something that is mostly about how you play. I am not a big Sentinel guy (I have 1) but I will take a look there because the reason I don't really play sentinels. I agree with a comment made by Bill Z Bubba about power creep. But like I said, I don't really play Sentinels. I have a baby Necro so those changes look interesting.

Same goes for Unstoppable on an invulnerability tank. I took it on live and almost never used it and don't even have it in the mix on HC. But then again Unstoppable doesn't change your look. I wonder if Paragon Protectors debate takin their Tier 9 because it makes them look fat in their costume 🙂

The layers of creepy in this image are glorious.

Lord Nemesis says you are not meeting your daily performance benchmarks and must attend remedial work efficiency training. Meet at the O'Gaffney Law Firm after the pact is signed with the Circle of Thorns. No hero would be foolish enough to disrupt that.

That is very good information. On live, for me, the Shard TFs were the ones I did once, and only with my Badge Hunter then never visited them again. Now I will have to sit and prepare because while I am not OCD about badges like I used to be, I am interested in revisiting all of the content I may have dismissed or just straight missed. Your tips are helpers and your positive write-up motivating.

Why not, the Confederacy lost and they got statues and military bases named after their treacherous Generals.

Yeah I am having to retrain my web page muscle memory on it as well.

Walk on two legs not of four, walk on four legs breaks the law. What happens when we break the law? What happens when the rules arent fair? We all know where we go from there? To the House of Pain.

I like these Masks

I evolved. I have been, since I was like in the second grade, a lover of writing, and I love to write. Most of that writing even now, bad. Short stories, long stories, paragraphs to whole books (not kidding). None of it published, and the web site I used to post my stuff on, I let go. Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs of eighties spurred a lot of my writing and that was where character creation and back story became a big thing for me. Then real life as an adult and 20 years in the Navy put some of that on the back burner but also pushed more traditional writing to the forefront. Then came City of Heroes and initially I created characters based on the powers that sounded the coolest then created the story around them; and most of those stories were crap. Their back stories were riddled with comic book tropes and in general zero actual creativity because I was trying to craft stories around the actual powers. Then I evolved. And started to create characters based on story ideas I had. and that was it, the rest of my characters on live and all on HC had their story written up before I even picked powers and as such, there are a lot of hard to play characters in my alts stable. And because of this, many of those alts don't go very far as my attention span from a story concept starts to wane. I have six and a half full books (650 + pages each) about the Munitions Mistress (a recreation of my live 50 Mercs/Traps Mastermind) who still sits at level 38 on HC (nobody picks this because they are teh uber, she epitomizes theme over function) yet in those books she is a high end incarnate, and I am still writing about her. And now, pretty much any new character I create is built on a character from that writing if at all possible due to power constraints. And that is where imagination is awesome and this game is awesome because it spurs that imagination. Runeslinger (daughter of the Munitions Mistress) is a DP/Atomic Blaster but in the writing that atomic isn't atomic but lucent energy, I just chose atomic because the mechanics of what it did fit the mechanics of her light powers. So I pretend she isn't radiating radioactive mist when Beta Decay is active but rather she is radiating rune-infused light auras that do the same thing.

I meant to say Illusion and Grav Controllers two separate controllers. So many alts. thanks for the catcxh.

That is in fact incorrect. Society is where a set group of individuals establish a set of rules or "societal norms" and others agree to follow them, or at a minimum follow most of them and then, over the course of time small numbers of individuals speak up and make or force changes, generally minor that build up over time. But most members of a society never contribute, no less make any rules, because humans are as a whole lazy which is how tyrants or morons come to power even when we say how is that possible. Those that defy those norms are generally ostracized and shamed. And remember societal norms are not about right or wrong, they are about what that specific society defines as right or wrong. The societal norm of the United Sates once said slavery was fine, once said women didn't rate a say in things. That changed in American society yet there are other societies whose norm still says these things. If the game is a society then there are most definitely norms and they are most definitely not defined by everyone. More importantly it is a game so the societal norms outside of the game may not play inside the game. Now are there certain core values that transcend societal norms? Of course. But those also tend to show up in all societal norms. Don't kill people for no reason. Try to be nice. Protect the weak. Drink more Ovaltine. Beyond that, its fair game really. Just think about the words in the American lexicon that were considered socially acceptable not a decade ago that will now see you excoriated for saying. The societal norm shifts. There is an old saying that says just because you don't like it doesn't mean its wrong.

Oh hell, all the more reason to just wander in and cause chaos. I mean drunks do that in bars all the time anyway. I mean bars are role play right, some guy telling some girl lies in order to get in their bikini 1.

Talos Island was my old go to with regards to catching large numbers of multiple badges. I would head southeast at night to get a good 10-12 BP masks then work around popping Warrior Elite and Tsoo Sorcerers, then get the DE to drop emanators (cairn, etc.) and by the time that cycle was back to the southeast, it was dark again and more masks had spawned. I am not saying it trumps certain missions but if you are doing cyclic sweeping, Talos is some good badge hunting grounds. Plus don't forget there are Freakshow so if for some reason you don't have Tank Buster you will catch some of those there.

I generally run characters with a Magic origin through Croatoa no matter what. Two blasters were run through in real time leveling with just SOs, a DP/Atomic and a Seismic/Seismic, no problems and not blown timers or escaped dudes). They didn't take very long and there were zero deaths. These were set to normal difficulty (0/1). I also ran through the entire Croatoa arc via Ouroboros on a DP/MC Blaster (not magic but secksi awesome) when she was in her early forties. I note that part because I had not slotted much of anything in the way of Set IOs or even IOs at all. Mostly all SO and a smattering of IO. Bottom line there for me at least is blasters with AoE fare well. Now the Empathy/Psychic Defender, a little slower and had trouble with the "stop the escape" or "protect the thingy" missions. My Illusion/Grav troller was also slightly problematic. But to me the Croatoa arcs are less about hard and more about tedious and sad really. By sad I mean as you move through them you realize that there are no really good guys in that zone; everyone is kind of a jerk and it makes you want to not care about them. Okay Sally isnt a jerk but if you are having a hard time fighting her you might want to respec.

Yeah, PT and AM both have slots allocated for procs because my mercs need all the help they can get. It has made a big difference. I have since slotted a Positron's Blast in Caltrops and I am pleased. I will be slotting the proc from Impeded Swiftness.