ZemX

Just can't stop making shit up, can you? I didn't call it an "honored path." It's nothing more or less than MY advice. Plain and simple. If someone chooses to ignore it, how is it unreasonable of me to say that person who ignored my advice shouldn't come back to me with their complaints? Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Nobody in this thread has said, even once, that they want to "force" anyone to play their way. Prove me wrong by quoting the person who has done so. Maybe I just missed it. The thread HAS gotten quite long, after all. You are making this out to be absurdly more difficult and more important a decision than it really is. This is a freakin' video game. Not career advice. "What's the best way to learn a new video game?" isn't a terribly weighty life-altering decision to make. My advice is to learn the game from level one rather than from level 50. Why? Because nobody expects you to already know your way around at level one as they do at level 50. You have fewer powers to figure out and more time to figure them out. It's just simpler. And I'm not going around TELLING people they have to do this. It is what I'd say if I'm asked and they are free to do whatever they want with my advice including ignoring it completely. It's advice on how to play a game. Calling it "pushing a narrative" is just absurd. Do you write angry letters to game guide writers telling them to stop giving advice on how to play games?

Quoting and responding to people in a thread is not against policy. It's called... "discussion". If people are actually saying this then you should be able to quote them. Can you? Because you just, again, wrote another post where you get to tell us all what we think and then why we're all wrong. It's easy to do, I guess. Much easier than actually responding to things people are actually writing. It says nothing of the sort. I put it very simply, IF someone asks me for advice on how to get started playing this game or, as the person in the OP does, "What do I do next?" then this is what I tell them. It's not up to you to "leave the choice up to them". It's already up to them. Again, you keep wanting to pretend that people in this thread are attempting to do otherwise. They are not. They just have different advice they would give to new players on how to get started playing this game. Anybody I tell to level up from one on their very first toon at least as far as needed to become familiar with this game can always say, "Gosh, that sounds boring. This guy over here can make me 50 inside of an hour!" Then knock yourself out, chief! But don't come to me asking how to get to Peregrine Island after that to join some team. Don't complain about not being able to keep up with that team moving through the mission. Don't, in fact, complain about anything you could have learned for yourself quite simply. You followed someone else's advice. Ask them. Choice was yours... and so are the consequences.

I disagree that it depends all that much on the player. Starting out by leveling a character organically teaches you all the basics of the game which will come in handy later regardless of whether you intend to play on missions and TF teams or just exclusively endgame/incarnate trials. And you don't have to stick with it all the way to 50, like I said. You decide when you think you have enough of a handle on the game if you want to just skip to 50 in a farm. But you're doing so with a better idea now what the game is like. You're not gonna be the guy the OP mentioned who PL'd to 50 and then had no idea what to do next.

Wrong. But thanks for illustrating how this thread became such a mess of strawman arguments by... immediately employing another strawman.

Nobody seriously expects this. The only advice I'd give a new player is to actively play the game at least for a while before plopping their ass down at a door in a farm and letting someone else carry them to 50. That doesn't have to be missions exclusively. It doesn't even have to be all the way from 1 to 50. It just has to be something that requires you to actually play your character, learn your powers, and learn how the game works... none of which happens when you are door sitting. I don't know why this thread is such a mess of strawman bullshit arguments. It's really a very simple question: Do you think it's in a new player's best interests to be carried to 50 on their first toon and THEN try to figure out the game -or- should they try actively playing first to see if they like it and maybe learn something on their own first? And to be clear, this is not about forcing anything on anybody. None of us CAN do that, so we can drop that bullshit line of argumentation too. This is about what you'd suggest to a new player. They can always do what they want and ultimately they WILL do what they want. But if they asked you for advice... what would you tell them?

If you are primarily teaming, I'd guess it's probably less important to have -res in an AoE than an ST attack. The first things to drop on a fast moving team are the minions, then the LTs, then the bosses. Put a few -res in ST attacks, then walk over to smack the boss around a few times first thing. The debuff will help the team drop them a little faster and avoid having them linger around after the AoE salvos have 3x overkilled the minions.

Correct. Tankers get bigger AoEs with more targets and Brutes get Fury. There are various exceptions to the AoE size and target cap rules. Foot Stomp and Axe Cyclone for example, are 15ft radius for everyone. Most other Tanker AoEs that are 8ft or 10ft radius, however, become 12ft and 15ft respectively. So that makes a lot of tanker PBAoEs as big as Foot Stomp. Ice Melee's Frozen Aura is basically an Icy Foot Stomp. It's on a power-by-power basis, so best place to check it is City of Data. Look for this mouse-over icon in the power and see if Radius or Arc strength are disallowed. That means basically the Tanker inherent size increase doesn't apply (also, it's covered a bit by the mouse-over popup, but behind that is the statement about target cap: "Max Targets: 16 - 6 * Source.Mode?(kDisable_GauntletTargetCap)" (basically, everyone but Tankers has GauntletTargetCap disabled, so they get, in this case, 16-6=10 targets max. Tankers get 16. A bit backwards to read, but you get the hang of it). Anyway, in this example below, Axe Cyclone has disabled Radius strength, which means it ignores the Tanker +50% radius buff and keeps its 15ft radius it has for all ATs.

The PBAoE is the same size as other ATs but it hits up to 16 targets on a Tanker. Pendulum gets expanded to a 12ft radius around the chosen target and hits up to ten. Cyclone into Pendulum is just ridiculously effective. Then there's recharge. EVERY attack in Axe can slot FF:Rech. You don't have to. But you could. This greatly benefits either Rad or Bio where faster recharge on powers like the self-heal or absorb shield can mean immortality. Not to mention yet more damage output. And both have excellent endurance recovery and drain resistance tools to fuel a high-recharge monster.

My first tanker to 50 was a Rad/Staff. Staff generally gets looked down on for being a poor performer on damage... which is fair. But in my opinion it's a fantastic and fun tanking secondary because it had three AoEs that get super-sized by the Tanker inherent. Rad then adds its two proc-bombs for even more AoE and now you've got not just decent damage, but a lot of ability to spread that taunt around and grab attention and keep it. And that's the actual tanking part. What Staff adds to Rad is mainly that 13% +Res(All) from Sky Splitter's bonus in Form of Body stance. This makes it that much easier, combined with the Tanker ATO, to cap most/all resistances (except probably Cold). Very tough customer. The +def Guarded Spin is nice, but I generally only use that as a place to stuff another LotG. I generally ignore defense because of the lack of DDR. That said, my most player Tanker is easily the Rad/Ice. I love being able to drop Ice Patch on one group of enemies and then go deal with some other problem. It's a bit like being able to be in two places at once.

Oddly enough, as bad as my memory usually is, I remember this one vividly. I was about level 20 on my first character since joining HC and in Faultline, standing in front of the vendor near the trainer. I'd just run out of money to buy SOs. So I did a Google search, probably something to the effect, "How do I earn money in CoH Homecoming?" and found out about several methods, the easiest and fastest of which looked like buying converters at the reward vendor and selling them on the auction house for around 70k a pop. Reward Merits? Oh... you mean all these things I've been collecting for running story arcs? I was literally already a CoH millionaire and didn't know it. Haven't had a single problem buying enhancements since.

I think the best method is to first build with no (or few) procs and cram as many set bonuses as you can in there. THEN start proccing, because now you know what those procs are costing you for how much benefit they give. Will they allow you to do more damage? Sure. But they will cost you x% +res or +def, y% recharge, etc. etc. Going heavy on damage procs is great if you're building a soloist. Not so much, in my opinion, if you want your tanker to actually tank for a team. To build a tank that won't fold under heavy assault, you need one that's going to feel like is over-built 90% of the time. It's a choice.

I would second just reading that guide post. And I wouldn't view Incarnate System mechanics as "spoilers". This stuff wasn't meant to be organically figured out. You're not skipping the solving of some puzzle here. It's all very arbitrary and overly complex. There's no in-game path leading you through this, so you're not missing anything reading the guide.

Nobody is preventing people from making their own choices in this game. Nobody can, no matter what people suggest here on the forums. But with choices come consequences. If you're PLing to 50 after having already become an expert on the game, you know exactly what you're doing. If you drop in brand new and this is the first thing you do? Yeah, you're gonna end up 50 with no idea what to do next and maybe not enough resources to do it. That's not the community's fault. That's their fault. Volumes of information about this game are literally at anyone's fingertips. But you gotta lift that one finger first to find out. Am I really just being that much a cranky old man gamer here? Has gaming "culture" advanced to the point where people really expect to be lead around by the nose in tutorial after in-game tutorial these days or they have no idea how to proceed?

In the world we presently live in the only way NOT to know... is not to have looked. And that tells me everything I need to know about them. If this was a real /help request and not a troll, then this person really joined a new game, got PL'd to max level, and then just asked people in game to tell them what to do next? No. They can move on. It sounds like no great loss. It's also not a huge problem. The vast majority of people who come here try to figure out things for themselves and then ask questions when they are confused or stuck. That is far more worth my time than someone who apparently just expected the community to wait on them hand and foot. I don't care if someone PL's or not. I only care if they tried first. It's like people who just drop a "Give me a build for ____" request in an AT forum. Tells me you didn't even punch in a search first. Or hell, just toss something together first in Mid's and ask people to look at it. Shows you at least tried. Doesn't even matter how badly.

I do this in conjunction with NOT adding extra slots to Stamina or Health for endurance procs/IOs and it works very well. Even so, I often only need to use RT for endurance replenishment when I am under heavy endurance drain assault (Carnies, Malta, Arachnos, Freaks, etc.) Thing to remember about RT is that although it has a generous AoE area, it also has a target limit of 10. Still, it's not a bad way to grab aggro when team tanking if GZ is on cooldown. Ground Zero, of course... is nuts. It hits a total of 30 allies/enemies, so if you're well ahead of the team laying down the first strike on a new spawn... it will hit every one of them. I trade one damage proc for the Avalanche KD proc. Again, more of a team tanking decision but I find it communicates "come and get 'em!" to the team better than words when one shot of GZ puts damned near every enemy in the room on their butts. It's also nice for interrupting their damage for a few seconds if a teammate is in danger, on top of which it shoots your ally with some moderate healing and HoT.

We all play this game for our own enjoyment, but understanding that when you join a team, it's not JUST about you anymore is kind of the difference between an adult and... a Magnificent Asshole! 😈

It's entirely plausible a lot of people just don't know. A big reason is that it's legal to cosplay their favorite characters in real life, so they might assume that's all they are actually doing here. It isn't, but it's not like we're all copyright lawyers around here. There are also plenty of fan-made mods for other games that allow people to play other copyright IP characters in their single-player games. So they might be conditioned to think it's okay when it's not, and it's just that nobody has bothered to go after some rando modder. Only the big projects seem to get C&Ds.

I like PuGs for being different and unpredictable, but "reckless" is just another word for bad gameplay. If the team is so OP it can handle this kind of chaos then it's by definition not "reckless" anymore. But if the team can't handle it... it's pretty much just griefing, really.

I'm not saying your MA wasn't indeed a MA for everything else they did on this TF, but this one specific thing is kind of a pet peeve of mine from the Tanker's perspective. There's no need for ANYONE to hang around fighting rezzers. Move on. The rezzers will follow. Waiting around to be sure no Freaks are standing up after their time delay is a waste of everyone's time... not just whoever is tanking. Same goes for PP Elites who pop a god-mode (MoG, Elude, Unstop, etc.) FFS.... don't just stand around whiffing them for damn near a minute. Just move on. Course you only move on to the next spawn. If your tankers were going past that or in different directions, yeah.. they were hotdogging.

Why does it matter you've been using this same tactic the whole mission? This guy isn't like any other enemy in the entire Task Force. He has extreme energy damage, up to mag 4 stun, knockdown, and, crucially, can ignore 3/4 of your Hurricane's toHit debuff. You ran up into this guys face, effectively, with nothing that you'd need to survive in melee range: And you didn't. Game worked exactly as intended there. What you need to take away from this experience is that you need another tactic if you want to go at him with the same team. You've gotten some good advice already. Try to fight him at range. Hover. Make him use his weaker ranged attacks. Bolster your resistance and KB protect with inspirations so you aren't mezzed and then KO'd. On a team, share the aggro. Kite him if you have to. Run away while your teammates pound on him. You're fixated on the fact you couldn't react when you should have been proactive. You should not have put yourself in a position where you needed to react to a 1K energy punch + mag 4 stun. This game rewards smart play. That IS good design.

I think I spotted the problem with your "Snarky" PuG story already.

3K is not "typical". This number came about because @Luminara was trying to make sense of your claim about 11k damage and is speculating it must have involved max. challenge and notoriety settings. The conditions necessary to get Hopkins to hit you for even 3K at this level are pretty weird and I seriously doubt you were running with those settings given you are also saying the AVs had 5% chances (impossible) or 7.5% (possible only at even-con) to hit you. Hopkins as an even-con level 35 AV can hit you for 1K with Total Focus. That goes up to 1550 if he's +5 to you (the maximum if TF is set to +4 difficulty). It goes up again to 2325 damage if the TF is set to "enemies buffed". But if we're going there, you already have no argument. There's no "I should be able to tank an AV with my SO-built Defender on the the hardest difficulty settings" argument to be made. The game is not even designed to make this easy to do at +0 difficulty. I don't. Eight small oranges or fewer larger ones would have capped you at 75% energy resist. His Total Focus, even at +5 level to you would then have done 388 damage. A single break-free would have prevented you getting knocked down, giving you more than enough time to react to that hit and heal, move, or do something else. Your tactics and your build need to match the challenge you're facing or you won't do well. The specific tactic you were using the entire rest of the TF relied heavily on -toHit and controls that would work fantastically well against boss-level and lower enemies, but an AV class enemy typically can ignore that or reduce it in effectiveness.

I doubt this occurred at all. edit: Okay, to be less blunt about it. I think OP probably did get dropped instantly by Hopkins, but that would not have required any challenge settings or even any raised difficulty setting. At level 35, the max for Manti TF, and even up against an even-con Hopkins it would be OP at around 830 hit points (Defender average hit points at 35) vs. Hopkins's Total Focus which can deal 1K pure energy damage at that level. Or even his Bone Smasher which is 839 energy. With no energy resist, that's enough right there. It needs no 11K damage or challenge settings. A Defender trying to melee Hopkins at level 35 would need significant energy resist to mitigate the lucky hits. Defense alone might work but the more swings he gets, the less likely you are to stay upright. Again, that's at minimum difficulty settings, essentially. It gets worse from there. But point is, it doesn't need challenge settings for his Defender to be in trouble standing next to Hopkins. When I tank him, I always remind squishies that even if he's focused on me, he still has a couple hard-hitting AoEs in melee range. Hopkins has both Foot Stomp and Whirling Hands. He probably surprises a lot of squishies who built primarily S/L defense or who rely on toHit debuffing. His attacks are almost all purely energy based except for Foot Stomp and his couple ranged rifle shots.