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This is a Rad/Rad build I cobbled together. And by "cobbled together" I actually mean "I put a lot of effort into this, but you can't tell from the final result". So this is my plea to you corruptor savants: What improvements can you suggest for this build? Build goals: - PvE only; mainly PUG's, no 4* or hardcore content - Mostly for team play, but would like the build to be pretty good non-terrible for solo play as well - Can't be dependent on incarnate powers or epic pool powers, as I like to exemplar down for sub-lvl35 content - Cost is not an issue, I can buy whatever expensive IOs are needed I am open to scrapping the build entirely if need be, if someone can post a better Rad/Rad build to use instead. Many thanks in advance. ScareGlow 3e v2 - Corruptor Rad_Rad.mbd

I used to think the same thing, but the official HC Discord has a channel showing constantly updated players numbers - total and by server, no less - so presumably secrecy of player numbers is not a concern for the HC team.

I use it maybe once a month on average. Usually for goldside arcs, more rarely for red or blue arc. I would miss the flashback system a lot if we didn't have it, even though my usage frequency is low. Because the thing is, even though my craving for any particular old arc rarely pops up... well, when it does pop up, I crave it NOW, not in a few days or however long it would take me to unlock that same arc on a level-appropriate character.

+1 vote for the dark/atomic, I have one as well and it plays very smoothly. There are a few extremely nice powers in the secondary, but also a bunch of skippable ones; for me, this is a positive, as you can get a lot of goodness with just a few power picks and still have a good number of picks left over for utility/pool powers. The damage of dark/ is a bit underwhelming compared to some of the other blaster primaries, but as compensation you more controllery effects than from most other blast sets. Another possibility to consider, since you are looking to learn the melee blaster lifestyle, is the /ice secondary. The sustain power, Frigid Protection, is a thing of beauty when it comes to keeping you alive and fighting, and Ice Patch helps with that as well.

Same thing here. Screenshot attached. The game tells me to "Please post a bug report on the forums.", so that is what I am doing. Hopefully this can help our awesome dev team to resolve the issue.

This phrase should be posted at the top of every AT subforum. Or even better: Auto-inserted as a footer in every post in any of the AT subfora. To remind all of us, including myself, not to get too caught up in our arguments for why a particular AT of powerset is better than another. I happen to be in the "no, sentinels do not perform quite as well as a scrapper, a blaster or a corruptor in most game modes in CoH" camp BUT I also concede the point that several people have made in this thread: Whether sentinels are as powerful as other ATs or not is irrelevant, because their main raison d'etre is to fill the role of ranged scrapper, which is a role that a lot of people wanted to be able to play. So I am one of the people being admonished (gently) by @drbuzzard and the abovementioned quote, and I stand corrected.

Wait, what? Which story arc is this in? I must have totally missed it.

The fact that Hero Corps are "...selling their super-powered services to those willing to foot the bill" [quoted from the wiki] makes them difficult for writers of story arcs to use in any high-ish level storylines. Truly epic save-the-world stories need that constant sense of impending doom, and there is not much tension if the heroes stop in the middle of a huge battle and say "Well, that's my 9-to-5 for the day, time to go home. I will be back tomorrow to battle the lovechild of Ruladak and Hamidon which is steadily eating the universe. No universe-saving between 10-12 AM, though - I have to attend a workplace sensitivity seminar then. Mmmhhh, maybe there will be donuts at the meeting!" I exaggerate, of course, but I do think the paid-by-the-hour mindset of Hero Corps lends itself well to low level heroics but not so well to grand, epic showdowns. Hence their redundancy in large parts of CoX gameplay, IMHO.

Definitely this. Good observation, @Greycat. Personally, I wish I played more of the redside content which uses the less-common enemy groups. Coralax, snakes, wailers etc. There is a lot of good storywriting in the redside arcs, but I often forget about them and keep playing my ol' standby blueside arcs. And because one rarely sees teams for this content in LFG, don't get reminded what I am missing unless I read threads like this one. 🙂Btw, this is not a knock on blueside at all, just a comment on the fact that there is (also) lots of good redside stuff that I miss out on due to no one's fault but my own. On a tangential note, the question in the OP was "What content do you wish you could be playing but are not because other players are not playing it?". As in, currently existing content - not content that one wishes existed. A few posts seem to be responding to "What content do you wish existed?", which is an interesting question in itself, but not germane to the thread at hand.

What if we expand the search criteria to include more legs and/or fewer legs?

I second this nomination. 😉 I agree with the idea to require a bit of thinking by the teams/leagues who fight the GM's. I personally prefer something fairly simple, like the forcefield projectors in Market Crash' Big Red Robot fight or the Essences at the end of Dilemma Diabolique, i.e. some kind of of invulnerability gizmo that has to be disabled multiple times during the fight. The Reichsmann fights at the end of Barracuda's and Dr Kahn's SF/TF also have some interesting "you must do this, and you absolutely mustn't do that" requirements. I prefer it to be be something which league leaders can explain to their minions league members in a few concise sentences - prepping for the battle and designating team members' roles should not be a very time consuming task. Easy to explain, difficult to actually do, that is how I prefer it. I would not want to add any new GMs to CoH. If anything, I suspect we have a few too many GMs overall. Generally speaking, the more rare (rarer?) something is, the more likely people are to consider it precious and thus worth taking the time to team up for.

Thanks a bunch for the info, guys. For the overview as well as for the detailed pros and cons and hows and whys. The reason for my question is/was that I already have 2 blasters at lvl 50, a Dark/Atomic and an Energy/Ice, both of which are fun to play but kind of underwhelming in damage (at least when built for ranged damage, which how most of my squishy chars are built). So if/when I make another blaster, I want it to have better damage output than its two predecessors. This thread is a big help for that - thanks again. 🙂

If Fire/ is not an option because of self-imposed concept limitations, and if focus is only on ranged damage (again because of a self-imposed restriction) - what are the best primaries for AoE damage, besides Fire/ ? Like, what are the top-5 primary powersets for ranged-only AoE damage?

Ditto here. Partly because of my CDO, and partly to automatize hitting the correct F-key when in trouble, without even having to look at my keyboard. On all chars regardless of AT and build, the system is: Column 1 = Blues ; Column 2 = Greens ; Column 3 = Purples ; Coumn 4 = Reds ; Column 5 = Varies according to AT/role requirements. It does mean a bit of wasted space, because most AT's mostly only need 2-3 different types of inspiration, but on the other hand this system saves time in hectic fights.

Whenever there is a farming-related thread, there are usually a few people posting that they do their farming on some offbeat AT or powerset combo, as opposed to the Fire-, Spines- or Rad brutes/tankers that most people usually think of as farming builds. So, since I have a lvl 50 invuln/BA tanker sitting unused and forgotten on my alt account, I wonder if this character can be repurposed (and very much rebuilt) for a bit of farming. Am I crazy for even thinking of this, or have others done this before - and if so, perhaps I can see your build? Heck, even if +4/x8 is too ambitious, perhaps something like +2/x8? If this idea makes no sense whatsoever, feel free to tell me so with creative use of verbal abuse - I can take some heat, and trash talk is entertaining for all the other readers of this forum 😜 Thanks in advance.

You can run Architect Entertainment missions alone, you are not dependent on having other players (or rather, other player characters) together with you. Go to one of the computer console-looking thingies in the big AE room and search for an interesting mission. After you select and confirm the mission, you go talk to one of the NPC's who stand around the shimmering, Matrix-esque data stream in the middle of the room. Unless by "...hoping to get some levels..." you mean that you were hoping to join another player's farming mission and get some exp that way. In which case, yes, you would be dependent on finding other players who happen to be farming at the same time you are there. But once they enter their mission, you won't actually see them in the AE building anyway. So there might be lots of other people using the AE in the same building as you, but you can only see them for the brief time they spend in-between AE missions. If, on the other hand, you were looking for other players to team with on a non-farming AE mission, e.g. one of the SFMA-tagged missions like Cranebump mentioned, then I would say your best bet is to shout out in the LFG channel that you are looking for like-minded players to join you on an AE mission.

A propos fads - does this mean we are going to see FOTM builds which maximize the moistness of critical hits? I, for one, have never paid attention to how moist my crits are, but I guess that I have to wait for @Ston or @Croax to publish a listing of stalkers ranked by moist crits. I can already guess that Fire/ has the driest crits, but the rest in anyone's guess.

Yes, the Mission Architect system is where you can play in missions created by other players. And make your own missions for other players to try, if you feel like it. More info here: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Mission_Architect. There are Architect Entertainment buildings in a lot of zones, both redside and blueside. The lowest-level zones with an AE building are Kings Row for heroes and Port Oakes for villains. AFAIK there is not a minimum level requirement to use the Mission Architect, but I might be wrong - I have never tried to acces it with a lowbie character.

Thank you for all the feedback and info, everyone. Definitely useful, and this has helped me streamline the way I play my Elec/SR. 50'ed and IO'ed out now, with t3 in all incarnate slots except Hybrid. Great stuff, thanks all. :)

Thank you for adding this last part, @Riot Siren, but after three days of no other replies, I will assume that no one is going to take the bait. Not a big deal, though, because the general stalker tips you posted are very nicely explained, enough so to help me figure out a better attack rotation on my own. Which is better than just being given the rotation by a(nother) expert, because it is better for a man to learn to fish than to just be given a fish etc etc. 🙂 So, many thanks for the help - much appreciated. 💪

So, I made a new Elec/SR stalker. Lots of fun, and I am killing arresting stuff left, right and center. But the thing is, it feels like I am not doing so very efficiently. As in, there is probably way more damage potential in Elec/ than I am currently* getting out of it. I have played an Ice/Energy for several years, and Ice/ has a very simple attack rotation to make the most of Hide, crit mechanics and ATO procs. I wonder whether Elec/ has something similar. So here are my questions to this forum: 1) Is there a generally agreed "best practice" attack rotation for electric melee on stalker - vs. hard targets and vs. groups of minions/lieutenants? 2) If not, what is everyone's personal preference for attack chain? 3) What are the "must use" and the "must avoid" powers in the Elec/ primary? I hope the questions make sense. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Well, if the info came from some online place, then it must be true. I, too, recently searched for info on some online place, it is odd that we didn't see each other while there. 🤔

Oops! Is it too late to remember to include my in-game global? If so, this might teach me to read the instructions before posting next time 🙂 If not: @Atrocifist.

That was actually what I intended to reply when I first read this thread, but then the suggestion of a suburban neighborhood intrigued me so much that I got sidetracked 🙂 That said, there is plenty of unused real estate in the exisiting residential zones, so the suburbia could be added to e.g. the open areas of southeastern Talos Island or Founders Falls.

I second that motion. We have nice residential neighborhoods in Paragon City already, but they are built up with high-rise buildings which gives a different feel than a suburban neighborhood - street after street with single-family houses, white picket fences and well-cared-for lawns. Nothing is ever quite what it seems in the City of Heroes, of course, so there needs to be something sinister going on in suburbia 🙂 A few possibilities: 1) A Stepford Wives kind of place - it is a Nemesis plot somehow. 2) The underground Oranbega zone (as per @Spaghetti Betty's suggestion) is located directly below suburbia. So a very literal "evil lurks beneath the surface" vibe. As an added bonus, the presence of underground sorcerers probably keeps the moles away, which is great for property values because no one likes moles ruining their lawn.