nihilii

If you're going to make beautiful, hilarious comics for every suggestion, I'm going to agree with anything you suggest. Use this knowledge as you see fit.

Indeed, yours is the best summary of the whole dynamic. 1) the economy is fine 2) the range of options can be overwhelming for newcomers I think the best path is to just play and not worry about it. Discover things slowly, make mistakes, refine your patterns bit by bit. The core tenet of this economy is you cannot mess it up. There's hardly any reward exclusive to anything, and prices have been heavily smoothed. Remember the Live days of gladiator armor selling so high people went offmarket to bypass the 2B influence cap? On Homecoming if you screw up and overpay for anything, the next IO is 1 hour of play away at most. Given that no mistake can be catastrophic, there is room to experiment. On my first Homecoming character, I traded merits for LotG +recharge IOs. Then for other rare IOs. Then I traded empyrean merits for merits and got more IOs. To be fair in those very first days the market lacked supply, but it was highly inefficient regardless. Still got me a fully slotted character in a reasonable amount of time. The system works. Devs have done a good job balancing this out so you can reach the highest heights simply being a player. Gone is the need to engage with activities like farming or playing the market to fund a top build.

Possibly bigger than the previous round of Placate buffs. How many times have you used Placate only to see the effect broken immediately, lose your crit and feel stupid? For me the answer is *all the time*. Which is why to this day I still avoided Placate in most of my builds, even since the buffs. Even Stalker Guile is broken every now and then, even if you chain attacks immediately. Hello DoTs. Losing the "free" crit feels paaainful. This update is going to be good.

I used to optimize, optimize, optimize. Not necessarily in terms of running the most efficient XP/second farm, but in the sense of playing the best possible way within any situation, nonstop. Also in an aggressively "solo" manner, even on a team; i.e. leading the charge, snatching loose aggro, and so on. Making an effort to do things well and do things fast. Nowadays I'm much more casual about it all. I don't team much but I'll happily make room for others players to be the star. Mostly I solo and take my sweet time. I will do dumb challenge stuff on occasion, but I've untethered from caring about the clock.

Can confirm IOs are a strong choice for Energy Aura.

It was not me: @Frosticus is the one who posted amazing Placate gameplay videos!

Here's a quick attempt at a cheap SS/RAD. I kept set IOs to a minimum, although I did include: - core IOs that provide a tremendous benefit to the build, like Gladiator's Armor, Shield Wall - set IOs that give a good little boost and are in the 1M-2M range The power selection and slotting is mostly similar to what you would do with an endgame build, except it slots Punch which you would never do normally. Punch is here because we lack the recharge to cycle attacks otherwise. I made the opinionated choice *not* to proc bomb Radiation Therapy or Ground Zero. Dark Obliteration on top of Foot Stomp is in my opinion enough AoE, and I prefer to focus on other constraints in a cheap build. This can be improved in many ways, but it should be a good base to refine and under 100m inf. I use Ninja Run for all my characters to travel. Here you can easily remove Summon Widow if you want to fit Super Speed or Super Jump. If you wanted something more exotic like Teleport or Flight, it's also palatable to ditch Maneuvers.

Sovera's advice is excellent and I would follow that first. Fill your inspiration tray with purples, chomp on 3 per minute (this puts you close enough to the defense softcap) Buy 300 Envenomed Daggers, put them in your tray next to your attacks and use them as soon as they're up (on top of high -regen, they do very high DoT damage) Buy as many charges of Recovery Serum as possible, use as soon as the fight begins. This preparation takes 2 minutes and will dramatically increase the solo AV efficiency of any lowbie character. If it doesn't work, you can move to more time-consuming steps. But, it's often not necessary to tweak beyond that. Even just mixing the above formula slightly can change results significantly. For example, lvl 2 purple insps (Good Lucks) can be bought through /ah for a pittance, and they give twice the defense as a lvl 1 purple. Which means you can use merely 2 per minute or even just 1 if you're feeling confident. This stretches the length of time you can fight, *or* it gives you opportunity to fill the rest of the tray with red insps to increase your damage output.

Giant Monsters get 5% of their life back every 10 seconds, and a lvl 50 GM has... 70k HP I think? Assuming that's right, they would regen 350hp/s. Seems about right, 300-350 DPS was the number I had in mind for breakeven anyway. At 500+ DPS you can take on GMs for sure provided they don't resist your damage.

For the sake of completeness let's add CLEAVE from nuAxe. The one and only "extreme" level base damage ranged attack available to scrappers. It also AoEs in a tiny radius, and takes PBAoE procs, and is almost guaranteed to KD your targets. All of this with a meaty crunch and a shiny golden hue from the heavens, that sometimes weirdly lingers forever. I like to pretend I hit my enemies so hard I cracked the fabric of reality. What's not to like?

DM/nin is fine. Some of the opinions you read may be based on old Dark Melee, but it got a buff somewhat recently which improved its capabilities slightly. Your bread-and-butter AOE (at least "conventionally") is Shadow Maul, it is a cone that requires good positioning for optimal use. Many other powersets have AOEs where you simply click and everything within radius is hit. So this influences opinions, some people love cones and some people hate them (although most players tend to agree a PBAOE is easier to use than a cone). I echo SomeGuy's sentiment on the (lesser) importance of AOE. Bosses have significantly more HP than lieutenants and minions. There's generally 2 bosses per group in a maximum difficulty mission. So let's consider 2 scenarios: - as a solo player, you will want to attack the bosses. If you use a standard AOE everytime it recharges while you work on the bosses, this tends to be enough to clear minions. For some powersets with strong AOE abilities or weaker ST output, you might even clear lieutenants too before you're done working through the 2 bosses. - in a team, there will almost always be so many AOEs flying around the bosses are the ones left standing. So AOE helps when your team is slacking or if you are separated for whatever reason. But otherwise, you'll likely have a better effect focusing ST damage on boss-level targets and above.

I'm going to second the sentiment that just about any Tanker can take on most level 50 AVs and some level 54 AVs if you pour a billion influence into the character and optimize your build and attack chain to a reasonable extent. For immovable object the obvious answer that comes to mind is Stone. These days you can play in normal armors for good damage output, then fall back to Granite the moment you're in trouble. But, the look may be a concern. There are many valid options so I will rather list the primaries and secondaries I would personally avoid: PRIMARY - Ice: some strengthes but also various holes, to the point it's a bit more involved. In theory Hibernate would be excellent as a panic button that allows you to recover. In practice letting the AV regenerate is a bit bothersome. - Willpower: functionally a slightly less survivable Bio, also losing the offensive tools. There's never a good reason to go Willpower when you can go Bio, unless you hate Bio GFX. - Elec Armor: all resistances with a weak heal will make this primary more involved than some other choices. Rad tends to be a better option for pure resistances for example. - Fire Armor: resistance-based with some holes and great offensive tools. I'm listing this one here because you mention specifically wanting to be an immovable object. Fire has great boons but generally takes more active management. Note all of these primaries, even Ice and WP, are perfectly capable of soloing AVs regardless. I just rank them as below the other options, given the objectives I infer from your post. SECONDARY - Staff, Kinetic, Spines, Elec, Psionic, Broad Sword, Katana, Savage all do (!relatively!) weaker single target damage. Again, you can make any of these work. You would just have an easier time with other choices.

To be sure, it's possible to say this will never work as long as we refuse to try it at all. 😅 Personally, I believe in inertia and friction. If nothing else because I see it in my own behavior; I create most characters as villains for the easy +5% hp mayhem accolade while leveling. Then it's not like I rush to the gull once I'm 45+ and accoladed up, I just move to hero once I want to do something hero-side. It's a lot easier to slide into other content if you're already there than if you have no incentive whatsoever to do so. For most other players the equation differs because they're more likely to team than I am. People are heroside, so people move heroside. But once there's a critical mass of people who are already on villainside for the XP, what happens next? My guess is we'd see nonzero (and significant) retention. In fact I would bet everything I have the #1 criteria for the average user is "be where most people are". Hence the playerbase eventually congregating towards Excelsior. Nothing else matters as much as this dynamic, so it takes radical changes to reverse it.

So... if I'm reading the patch notes correctly, it looks like we are saying goodbye to Pylons in page 7. The end of an era.

What a list of changes. I'm glad to see new options threatening the supremacy of certain past choices. The one thing I'm iffy about is the ST immobilize standardization. Those are fairly unused powers in the first place, because who wants to trade their native attacks for a ST immobilize at lvl 35+? Faster recharge and lower damage will hurt the few edge cases that made good use of it, like exotic melee builds fitting in Ring of Fire. It's almost a double whammy because meanwhile, 1) on Tankers and Brutes, Gloom goes from 12s to 16s. Which you might think as a nerf and may very well be in some cases, but from some other builds it will just mean higher proc chance; and 2) on Scrappers and Stalkers there's even more juicy fast snipe options to crush the RoF alternative.

Ahh! I, too, was pulled in by the @Troo vortex. On this particular topic I am strongly opinionated: incentives, incentives, incentives. An infinite amount of effort can be deployed into tweaking existing new content and creating even more stuff, to reverse the tide of a wave we intuit (most of us prefer to be the hero than the villain). OR We can look at one global variable, adjust it and see if it moves the needle. Namely, I wish we had a dynamic global XP and rewards buff for villains. Say, adjusted weekly. Start it at x2. See if people move to redside. If they do, do nothing. If they don't, crank it up to x3 the following week. Do this until we reach parity, or whatever arbitrary split we're happy with. The love for AE strongly hints reward rate is an excellent motivator in guiding player behavior.

I'm curious about this as well. Pretty impressed with the team here, it must have been a lot of work and a long road to reach that agreement.

Perhaps an alternative solution could be to mod out Subdue's sound specifically.

Yes, this is correct: it got buffed to toggle status and it's now excellent seeing as it's perma. "Ranged Damage Aura" is a good way to look at it.

If Total Focus crits on a scrapper or stalker, you get two charges of Energy Focus. So you can chain 2 fast ET before using TF again, or you can use fast ET and higher target Power Crash in a row.

What Christmas sorcery is this?

CoH was lightning in a bottle. Other MMOs lack the mechanical depth. Many confuse "difficulty" or "reward gating" for "mechanical depth", but IMO they're unrelated. Difficulty and reward gating are just vehicles to force the players to engage with the mechanics. Whereas CoH is a very easy game with profound mechanical depth, which you're free to explore at your own pace. It's not just combat. When you think about it, even the costume editor has layers and layers of interesting play space. Uh, which is to say... I dropped out of the MMO genre because it falls flat in comparison. The best I could muster was a brief stint in GW2. That game had beautiful artwork to run through once. This quest for meaningful systems drove me into roguelites, Binding of Isaac in particular is the one I can play forever. I also managed to get into Dark Souls completely blind, a fascinating experience which more or less amounted to my childhood dreams about video games becoming true. Been a lover of the series ever since, although I make it a point to avoid interacting with anyone else except close friends (who also follow the same self-isolation), so we experience each new entry like an immersive adventure, no spoilers. In truth, maybe NCSoft did me a favor because CoH was too good a game. Opportunity cost was real. I've talked about games above, but "freeing up" all those Paragon City gaming hours also pushed me to make radical strides in real life. Back then with the constant updates and the size of the community, you could have CoH as a "lifestyle", and I did, and objectively that was a little too much. Much more fond of the relaxed pace we have here now.

Gold-tier post, applies to all software in my opinion - and more than just software, of course, but software seems to be the most egregious example where makers believe they've got unilateral right to radically change the lived experience of their users, with full disrespect for continuity and permanence.

It's even worse: it's a native EB, so it's always an EB even if you're set to fight AVs. This is the real problem. The Sentinel of Mot should be an AV by default and downgrade to EB for soloers, like the vast majority of key villains you meet in story arcs.

Water! I'm a neat freak and a longevity nut. Which makes snacking a doubly remote concept. And this thread three times as interesting. It's easy to get immersed into one's life bubble so thoroughly you forget how different other life experiences can be.