nihilii

I'd second Demons/ if only because it's relatively easy to build a 200+ DPS attack chain without pets. If you can deal 200+ DPS straight, you can beat level 53 AVs. You can separate the LRSF AVs. Single pulls are pretty hard, but duo/trio pulls are relatively easy. Numina will often come alone in the sky. And if you can fight in flight, you only have Citadel and Positron to deal with together. Only Numina, Citadel, Positron and BAB can reach the globe - so if you took the first 3 in flight, you can fight BAB alone on the globe. Then you're down to Penny, Manticore and Synapse. They link pretty well, but if your build allows for jousting, you can easily use Synapse's speed against him by hitting, moving back, hitting, moving back, so the other two AVs can never quite keep up.

I took the stone/em on a MoSTF spin today. Now, technically I brought a couple alts on the team. It was set at +0/x1, and I didn't lock inspirations either. But in spirit, I wanted to behave as if this was a legit no insps/temps solo attempt. The alts were there to leech a reward, and also incase I hit a brickwall at some point. I didn't use amplifiers. The first missions went fine. This was an interesting test in itself because the STF makes you move a lot, and vertically too. Combat Teleport is truly a game changer for stone. Even against the Thorn Tree, it was no trouble to remove all the vines in time. I have left shift bound to combat teleport to my selected target, so it's just one tap to get there. The various psi AVs were no trouble at level 51/52. Sometimes I'd swap to minerals, really more for the extra damage out of Granite than out of need. 1 on 1, they're fine. It might be different on a hypothetical +4/x8 attempt; if nothing else because you'd have to make sure to clean the AV's posse before damage and debuffs stack too much. I was weary of Aeon, even used Earth Embrace preemptively. Sometimes one of the clones lob radiation defense debuffs at you, and cascading railure rolls down fast. Stone has DDR, but I'm only running about ~49% defense on my build, not much of a buffer. Anyhow, the Aeon fight went without a hitch. Last mission gets interesting - of course! I first tried to pull Mako, hoping to get either him alone or him + Black Scorpion. Mako came alone. Then Black Scorpion followed 20 seconds later. Followed by Ghost Widow a few moments after. Ohhh boy. Now this I was trying to avoid, because even stone is at the mercy of a lucky Soul Storm. And with Black Scorpion taunting you, you can't focus on Ghost Widow first. Nonetheless, I tried to play it out. I had no real plan, save that I didn't lock my insp tray. So I figured if I got hit by Soul Storm, I would "betray" the challenge and chomp on breakfrees. But in retrospect, I think you need a whole bunch of breakfrees to break out of Soul Storm, so I probably would have died! It did play out lucky. Black Scorpion was about to go down, and then I saw Scirocco come closer. This would have spelt disaster, because while it's possible for Ghost Widow to miss her Soul Storms long enough against softcapped defense, Scirocco and his autohit tornados would reduce my defense to the point landing a Soul Storm would be inevitable. But strangely enough, Scirocco stopped about ~60 feet away from the fight, looking at us and not doing a thing. I've seen him bug out like that before, and it seems to play out the same way. When you're far enough from him and don't damage him, it's like his AI gets stuck on a particular power that is out of range or somesuch. Black Scorpion went down. Ghost Widow went down. No Soul Storm, whew. Then I went to town on Scirocco and Mako. Not much to say about these two. You'd think Mako might prove difficult with a proc build barely reaching 95% accuracy against +4s, what with Elude and all; but fishboy truly is the Aquaman of CoH. His Elude cycles last roughly, I think, 1 minute, and he ate dirt after his second Elude. TOWER RECLUSE. Now this part I didn't know what to expect. Was I about to get obliterated? I went in with my Banished Pantheon and Assault Hybrid up, shooting for the blue tower first to remove Recluse's recharge buffs. This is probably no surprise to stone tankers aficionados, but playing generally squishier characters myself I was pleased to see Recluse could dent my life a little but not overly so with Earth Embrace and Rooted. It could get iffy with Energy Transfer's -HP whenever he landed a defense debuff, especially when the Arachnos Flier threw down hordes of Bane Spiders on top (yet another thing that would be much harder at +4/x8). A bigger problem was endurance. Despite Rooted's significant endurance protection, while the Blue tower is up Recluse did enough -recovery to severely slow down my pace during the second minute of Ageless. Once the repairmen come, there's no shortage of balls to juggle. Got to punch these guys down in time, got to make sure there's enough end, got to keep an eye on that HP bar, and so on. The repairmen were hell to deal with. Whirling Hands is just too slow to activate, and all too often it would miss one of the two repairmen. TF is obviously too slow for a single target attack. Gloom delivers too much of its damage in a DoT. So I was left with EP and BS, the issue being that if I need to clean a duo and either of the two misses (or god forbid, both), Stone being Stone I'm left waiting for recharge / using Gloom. There was a loooooot of frustrating back and forth on that first tower. I actually broke the no insps rule there. I used blues first because I wasn't expecting that level of -recovery despite Rooted, and it took me a while to adjust my pace to be sustainable without insps. I used a purple here and there when the Bane Spiders swarmed me while Recluse landed a def debuff. On that note, the Arachnos Flier is definitely a pain in the ass with repairmen. Stone can survive the damage with some care, even without insps, but that's not the question. The problem comes down to targeting those repairmen in time while a bunch of Bane Spiders vampirize your tabbing and clicking. I actually tried to make a bind (midfight!), trying "targetcustomnext alive Arachnos Repairman", but this seemed to select the corpses still and wasn't as helpful as I wished for. So in the end I pulled back... and thought, hey, why shouldn't I try taking down the Arachnos Flier anyway. Thankfully, Combat Teleport binds are more reliable than targeting repairmen. I looked like a bozo spamming Combat Teleport to land a hit, falling down to the ground like a rock, rinse and repeat. Essentially the attack chain looked like Combat Teleport -> Total Focus -> Combat Teleport -> Energy Transfer -> Gloom -> Combat Teleport -> Bonesmasher. You'd think this cuts pretty bad into DPS, but against a level 50 Arachnos Flier, this is still enough to get the job done. At last, I was rid of the pest. Went back to the blue tower. Let's do it no insps. Lore pet up. Hybrid up. Making good progress... Letting the Banished Pantheon Ravager deal all the damage to the tower, so I can put full focus on eliminating repairmen the second they pop. Even then, still some frustrating moments with 2 misses in a row and whatnot. But we're moving forward. 30%. 20%. 10%. That lifebar is shrinking and shrinking. 5%... 3%...! And then my Lore pet disappears softly, its 5 minutes up. I let out a loud, elaborate curse in English that must have puzzled my non-English-speaking family (yay Christmas). Nothing to do but to carry on. I start attacking the tower, splitting my attention between dealing enough damage, killing the repairmen, managing end, surviving Recluse... And it went down. It went down as I had maybe 600hp left. Which isn't as scary as it would be on a character without 90% RES. The average Recluse hit, even with red tower help, is in the 300 range. But still. I Combat Teleported the hell away to save my precious, precious future badge. Came back to it. Red tower this time. At this point, Recluse wasn't a danger anymore. Even the end drains became next to irrelevant, without the Blue tower he doesn't spam them enough to really matter. To be honest, at this point I was 1h50 in. With Lore still recharging and the realisation there was virtually no way I would die, I decided to cut on the grind and brought a second character for the remaining towers. Said character was a stone/rad tanker, which definitely made handling the repairmen easier. With a second Mud Pots and a procced out Irradiated Ground, they will die reliably each and every time before they get a heal off. At least during the length of time it took me to clear the 3 towers. (Which brings to mind the question, would stone/rad be better than stone/em for a MoSTF? /rad also has the advantage of a selfheal. However, it is very very endurance heavy compared to /em, requires much more aggressive procs to perform, and will deal less ST damage in any case. /rad is undoubtedly a better choice for the tower phase, but it remains to be seen whether it can kill patrons fast enough before Ghost Widow gets lucky with Soul Storm. Tradeoffs.) After the towers went down, I stuck the stone/rad away and took on Recluse 1 on 1 with the stone/em. That fight went fine, with Lore on his back so he doesn't AoE them into oblivion. Took maybe 3-4 minutes all in all. Perhaps I should have moved the other tanker wayyy out - you might see in the screenshot that he aggroed the respawned Flier, which could have made the solo Recluse fight more interesting. So that was fun. I might try a proper solo attempt at some point, either with that stone/em or with the stone/rad. I'm also left contemplating what might be the best possible tanker for the task. Perhaps Invul/Rad? Invul pays less of a damage tax than Stone for its survivability, and still retains 3000+ hp, softcapped S/L/E/N, strong resistances, some defense debuff and some endurance drain resistance. But Energy resistance might be a little low while Recluse is tohitbuffed. I'm not comfortable with Elec, Rad, Dark... Great +recovery and/or end drain tools, great capped resistances, but the lack of defense debuff resistance has often spelled disaster for me. Shield/Fire/Bio/SR I can't see as sturdy enough while Recluse is tohitbuffed. Although, amusingly, perhaps SR could run a near perma Elude build, complete with Burnout for a 6 minutes stretch. This would add the benefit of a reliable solution against Soul Storm that isn't just "pray for good luck". 6 minutes is a long enough stretch of time with modern Tanker DPS, especially with Lore pet support.

I'm reminded of the idea that goes, we humans are pattern-seeking machines. Faced with complex enough systems, we break down that complexity with symbols that speak to us. It sounds like nonsense to me as well. I'd wager if a -res debuff happens during server tick T, the next time any form of damage is multiplied by it is at server tick T+1. Slot order doesn't change a thing either, even though it's easy to understand why the notion persists. It's appealing in an intuitive "my actions and choices matter" sense. Should be a 2 minute check on Test server if anyone cares enough. Pick a blaster nuke, slot Arma proc and Fury -res proc (~90% chance to fire off on such a long recharge). See if you get different results when you swap the IOs.

I'll throw a vote for invul. The ease with which you can control your crits on a scrapper lets you turn ET into a reliable self heal, which invul loves. Beyond that, you get the standard invul sturdiness (minus psi) and a strong aggro aura.

The average hold is mag3 and (I think) player characters have mag2 resistance by default, so Acrobatics will indeed stop one hold. If you don't mind using inspirations (as they drop, no need to stock up or anything), a pool boy character is viable if slow.

I might be projecting my own passion for systems here, but I think game design deserves credit. CoH is a game designed from the ground up to be cooperative and creative. There has been constant efforts to minimize friction between the player and these goals. It's the subtle things like getting xp/inf multipliers when teaming, but not being FORCED to team. Which creates an accessible experience, where everyone is welcome but nobody is needed. Many other games are seemingly cooperative but actually adversarial. You'd assume a PvE game can't be competitive; but if you have strict roles for classes, and hard skill floors to complete tasks, then there is competition. Between you and your teammates, between you and people from the same class for a spot on the team, between you and the entire playerbase. Meta builds everyone is expected to use are soon to follow. CoH isn't void of competition either, but the pressure is low enough you are free to completely ignore competitive aspects and play your own way. And you're not relegated to be an outcast by doing that, either, as plenty of players will be happy to have you on their team, including power players (if only because they've got to flex their shiny minmax builds somehow 😉 ). I agree with @Grouchybeast the Homecoming community doesn't seem too different from Live. But I also agree with your point. We're 10 years older, less likely to yell at each other for stupid stuff.

It's truly a sight to behold. I have even successfully soloed Apex Battle Maiden like that, even if objectively it wasn't as efficient as a jousting character with Combat Jumping would be.

I like the market as is. I like Faultline's perspective on it. I'm only concerned we're seeing slight deflation lately. Which makes more and more items useless and even detrimental to sell. So I think my only wishes wouldn't be directly related to the market, but more to UI and ease of use. Stacks of x99 rather than x10. Expanded salvage/recipe storage on characters. All of this could be optional upgrades that you pay influence for, for another inf sink. Perhaps a look at crafting costs. When a level 50 IO has a hardcoded 450k fee to craft and sells for 500k, it just means the only people who are going to supply the market at a profit are those aware you can craft that same IO at say level 20 for much cheaper. The following is speculation, but I worry some number of casual players are crafting IOs and selling them on the market without noticing the crafting fees, and sell at a loss. Because a shrewd marketer wouldn't bother crafting level 20 IOs of the types that sell for 500k, anyway. There's much more profitable venues. If it were me, I'd do away with crafting fees entirely. Their existence doesn't make sense anymore with a level-independent market. Edit: but I suppose I'm advocating for deleting a significant influence sink there. Alternate wish, do away with the scaling on crafting fees. Tie it up to the maximum, or the average. But maybe people would complain about their lower level alts not being able to craft anymore. Ah well, it's a good thing I'm not a dev. 🙂

SR for sure. You just can't top having near softcapped defenses that early. Especially if you got your 8 hours of 3 amplifiers at P2W for 24000 inf at level 1, then you are truly softcapped. Low level foes just don't have the tools to deal with it. For a secondary I'd go: - TW. Stack even more defense with Defensive Sweep, not that you need it, but it's also a cone right at level 1. You can also get either Crushing Blow for a reasonably big ST attack or Titan Sweep for even more cone AoE goodness. - Rad. Add either Radioactive Smash or Proton Sweep. The "Contaminated" effect gives you small AOE damage regardless. - MA. No AoE at all, but Thunder Kick + Storm Kick feels smooth and reliably boosts your defense. Easily the best choice if you want to be untouchable without amplifiers.

For realistic builds, I'm running 12 toggles all the time on my dark/rad tanker maximised for damage. Dark Embrace, Death Shroud, Murky Cloud, Obsidian Shield, Cloak of Darkness from DA. Irradiated Ground from Rad. CJ, Tough/Weave, Maneuveurs/Tactics/Assault. Ageless NOT optional, even with it I can run out of end during the low part of the buff if I attack at full speed.

I've tried to make these pools on many characters, but there seems to be a trend: the newer pools are balanced, while the legacy power pools are left alone in their mix of overpowered and clunky. So I end up with Hasten, Combat Jumping, Tough/Weave and Maneuvers/Tactics/Assault 99% of the time. Sorcery is a solid replacement for Leadership when you're building a character without native mez protection, or even when you're just looking to be beefier. Rune of Protection, basically. If you want to fly and have the powers to spare, you might as well go Sorcery rather than Fly.

You can actually run +5 through using huge negative numbers with the slash command for reputation. It won't give you level 55 enemies, of course, but farmers should be fighting at the lowest level at which they retain their set bonuses and incarnates anyway, as the mobHP:playerDamage equations get better for the player the lower you go (personally, I fight at level 47). I don't remember the command, and for the life of me I can't find the topic in Bug & Reports. It was from a few months ago. The purple patch starts to hit you hard at +5 (+4 really, but we're assuming a level shift), so I don't know how efficient it would be ultimately. For AFK farming, probably not worth it. But it might make sense for active farmers who clear their instance in ~3 minutes anyway.

You're right. I have a bias towards highend builds. Ageless, Musculature and procs smooth out much of the Granite penalties; at least enough the extra survivability vs damage lost ratio becomes very, very interesting.

Up until I27 I wholeheartedly agreed. With Combat Teleport now, Stone is pretty cool. Still unlikely to cut it for a speedrunner or in some incarnate trials, but in most content I don't feel hampered at all. Combat Teleport is truly instant, instead of the awkward Teleportation lag. It's a game changer. But one last hurdle remains with Stone... You don't get to see your costume. Just like Bio Armor, perhaps it's a fair price to pay.

I strongly disagree with some of the advice ITT. Mitigation is multiplicative with different mechanics. Stacking defense on a resistance-based set helps tremendously. Yes, you will get defense debuffed often. The thing is, you will also get defense debuffed without defense - even faster! There is a common misconception with defense, namely the idea that if you have no defense, enemies hit you all the time. But this isn't true. You're often worse off without defense than with defense, because enemies don't start at 95% chance to hit you. Furthermore, your defense determines the effective floor once defense debuffed all the way into negative values. It's easier to use, say, Barrier or inspirations reactively if you start from -30% def than if you start from -50% def. And on that topic, Barrier and luck insps are a thing. So are teammates. If you start from ~20% def to all, which is trivial on a Tanker (Weave/Maneuvers/Combat Jumping, Steadfast and Glad unique), you only need 2 small lucks or 1 medium one to softcap, and your mitigation improves tremendously. If a teammate has bubbles or Farsight and bumps you from 20% to 40%, it's going to matter so much more than if he bumped you from 0% to 20%. Also... We are talking about Staff. Staff has Guarded Spin. Guarded Spin is a +DEF divine avalanche like power, and stacks extremely well with other sources of melee defense. On Assault vs Maneuvers, or Leadership in general. Assault is great. Maneuvers is great. All of Leadership is great on Tankers. Tankers got their Leadership values buffed back in the Tanker buff earlier this year. Get one, get both, get both and Tactics, it is all up to you but there is no wrong choice here. Personally, I would never build a Tanker without Leadership. The values are worth it on a solo build, and they're especially worth it buffing your entire team and your pets. Tanker is IMHO superior to Brute overall in the current balance. You get 2-3x the mitigation of a Brute, while dealing 85-90% of the damage. I would be fine with either the Tanker or the Brute in your OP, and I think most people would. I think the Tanker would be objectively stronger as you build it (Spring Attack is fun but it isn't a great power). But really, either choice is fun.

If you want to run fast, the Sentinel version of Bio Armor has a quirk in its passive that causes you to move at near the speed cap and flight cap, unsuppressed, when you're also in Offensive Mode.

I would take BU over the replacements... even on scrappers. Gaussian's chance for BU makes BU awesome. I never cared for FU/BF too much. The "constant" +damage is great in theory. In practice, much of your gameplay time is spent moving from group to group, or even enemy to enemy; making the maintenance of +damage not as straightforward. Adding insult to injury, BU doesn't root you, so you can use it as you move and get "free damage". All of that is speaking just from a scrapper's perspective. On a stalker? Throw in keeping Hide status, the ATO... The deck is heavily stacked for BU on stalkers. It just works.

Scrappers get a lot out of it. ET heals on a crit, and with TF 20 base recharge and the Critical Strikes proc, you get the choice to crit at will. Low DPE (ET costs 0 end) and lenient recharge requirements (EP/BS/TF and slow ET all have great, mostly similar DPA) gives scrappers a chance to grab Barrier or Rebirth, too, rather than Ageless.

Ashen Reaper sounds pretty cool to me!

I'm basically the opposite. Expanding reputation, more bosses per group on optional hard++, tying merit rewards to already existing (enemies buffed, players debuffed) options, adding new enemies with better powers to old factions would make it interesting and satisfying for me. Special creative mechanics akin to what is seen in iTrials, where X players (or Y amount of preplanning) is required, have little appeal to me. I'm not interested in the social challenge of coordinating other players, but in the personal challenge of toying with numbers and having the right execution to push the bar as far as I can. I'd assume CoH should be biaised towards people who like "very simple" ways to beat challenges, because... that's how the entire game is built. So why would one play the game if they're not satisfied with the gameplay? But, admittedly, there are many reasons to think of. Liking the costumes, the superhero theme, the personalisation, perhaps the elusive feel, or even inertia; and with Apex/TinM and then iTrials (casual as they may be) opening a moat for players who prefer raid-type mechanics. The great strength of the game is in how much freedom we have to approach things, and we end up with players like you and I who both cannot imagine the other would enjoy what they enjoy. 😄

(Crossposting from blaster forums) I think there's something wrong with Strident Echo's animation. Here's how I tried to test it: I made a level 50 DP/Sonic on the Test server. I didn't slot any enhancements. No toggles were activated, nothing boosting recharge. Pistols has a base recharge of 4 seconds. Executioner's Shot, Echo Chamber, Dual Wield and Strident Echo all have 1.67s animations (1.848s with Arcanatime). If the listed animation times are correct, whenever I use Pistols then 2 of the other 4 powers, I should have a slight lag of 2 server ticks before Pistols activates again, provided I queue powers in advance to eliminate my own lag. When I did Pistols -> Echo Chamber -> Strident Echo, Pistols was recharged before Strident Echo finished and activated immediately. When I did Pistols -> Echo Chamber -> Executioner's Shot, Pistols was not recharged before Executioner's Shot finished, and took a couple ticks to activate. When I did Pistols -> Echo Chamber -> Dual Wield, Pistols was not recharged before Dual Wield finished, and took a couple ticks to activate. I repeated this test 10x with each combo and got the same results 10x. This seems to suggest Strident Echo has an extra root time in its animation. It's not much, perhaps the real animation is 2s rather than 1.67s.

I came here wondering about this very topic. I'm only level 5 and it bugs me already. Are we sure the animation for Strident Echo is 1.67s (1.848s with Arcanatime)? It feels longer for me, on a female character if that matters. It's like there's a slight delay at the end of the animation. Edit: I think there's definitely something wrong with Strident Echo's animation. Here's how I tried to test it: I made a level 50 DP/Sonic on the Test server. I didn't slot any enhancements. No toggles were activated, nothing boosting recharge. Pistols has a base recharge of 4 seconds. Executioner's Shot, Echo Chamber, Dual Wield and Strident Echo all have 1.67s animations (1.848s with Arcanatime). If the listed animation times are correct, whenever I use Pistols then 2 of the other 3 powers, I should have a slight lag of 2 server ticks before Pistols activates again, provided I queue powers in advance to eliminate my own lag. When I did Pistols -> Echo Chamber -> Strident Echo, Pistols was recharged before Strident Echo finished and activated immediately. When I did Pistols -> Echo Chamber -> Executioner's Shot, Pistols was not recharged before Executioner's Shot finished, and took a couple ticks to activate. When I did Pistols -> Echo Chamber -> Dual Wield, Pistols was not recharged before Dual Wield finished, and took a couple ticks to activate. I repeated this test 10x with each combo and got the same results 10x. This seems to suggest Strident Echo has an extra root time in its animation. It's not much, perhaps the real animation is 2s rather than 1.67s. (Also, the character was male, so this probably isn't a male/female/huge issue. The animation is likely bugged on all genders.)

If I'm not mistaken, I think this is the only story arc that does it (and it is so cool). I'd love for devs to sneak Ouro versions of older story arcs with changes like that. Without telling us!

Even Stone at 49% DEF and 40-60% DDR struggles to survive large packs of buffed cimerorans with 90% RES. The exact numbers are probably upthread, but if I had to guess and remember, "buffed" gives them a 1.5x accuracy and damage multiplier? So that's 2.25x as much damage, *in a hypothetical scenario without debuffs*. Once defense debuffs are involved, the 1.5x accuracy modifier translates into more hits, more debuffs stacking fast, even more damage. So a buffed ITF might do as much as 3x or 4x more damage than a regular ITF, for sets without capped DDR. Rad and Fire would likely get obliterated, on passive mitigation numbers alone. Now this doesn't mean you can't do it with Rad or Fire. Just that your strategy would involve active mitigation like AoE knockdowns, kiting, using Barrier. Overpowering enemies with sheer damage also helps but I believe it wouldn't be enough on its own. There is truly a world of pain between a regular +4/x8 MoITF and a buffed one.

Woah. It's mindblowing to reflect on the possibilities now compared to then. We went from just barely above a hundred choices (which was already pretty damn nice) to thousands of different combos.