ZemX

It makes more sense to compare Savage Leap to those others than Feral Charge because Savage Leap is an AoE. The advantage of location targeting an AoE is that you can precisely target the area of effect to cover the maximum number of enemies. e.g. You can hit two enemies standing 30 feet apart with one Shield Charge if you target the ground between them but NOT if you are forced to target one or the other. In practice, it's often the case there is someone standing near enough to the center of a pack of enemies that you can select them but it can also be difficult to do so if there are many largish enemies all standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Location targeting ignores all those hit boxes in the way and lets you pinpoint the approximate center of a pack of enemies. That's what you want. And as pointed out, you can turn that into an enemy-targeted AoE if you really want. You can't do the opposite. The power is perfectly usable without "needing" any keybinds. It is simply more versatile with them.

I agree and nearly always take it for that reason, but the truth is that it's possible to maintain aggro without it. It just involves more hustle. It's not the way I do it, but it can be done. It's a good example of the sort of difference people should tolerate on PuGs. Embrace a little chaos. Not too much. Definitely do not tolerate speeding on a declared "kill most" for example. But in general expect people won't do things your way all the time. For example, I'd love it if Controllers would keep that AoE immob in their pants more often... but I never actually expect it. It's the PuG life!

No Tanker is without taunt, though some are without Taunt.

If only we could time travel to the future to see how Recluse's... victory turns out.

This is the way. It should be obvious by now that this person is not sincere and is just trolling. Stop feeding the troll.

Pendulum is amazing now too. As a melee TAoE instead of a melee cone there is no longer any positioning necessary. Just target whoever is unlucky enough to be in front of you and this power will hit them and everyone else in a 10.5ft radius sphere around them. Works specifically well after a Cyclone packs enemies in close to you.

Rad Armor could certainly use some power customizations that remove or limit vfx, but what you can do for now is select "Bright Radiation" and then choose colors from the left side (darkest) of the color palettes. I find the dark reds/blues work best for being least visible. You'll still be able to see the taunt aura as a smoky haze at ground level and you'll noticed the flying ping-pong balls still orbiting your character but they will be less eye-searingly obvious or distracting.

It is. True Random Number Generators can generate streaks of similar numbers too. In fact, they wouldn't be truly random if they couldn't.

Axe Cyclone, yeah. 15ft Radius AoE, so it's as big as Foot Stomp in Super Strength. It uses a Repel effect (which despite the name actually sucks mobs inward towards the Tanker). This helps set up Pendulum to hit more enemies. Pendulum is also sort of a strange AoE. It's not a Cone like Crowd Control in War Mace. Actually Battle Axe and War Mace used to pretty much be clones of one another. Now Battle Axe is different. Pendulum is a targeted AoE, meaning you target an enemy in melee range and the area of effect for the damage is actually around THEM, not you. Upshot is you don't have to worry about positioning yourself to hit multiple enemies like you do with a typical melee cone. It's going to hit everybody around your intended target, and thanks to the Tanker Gauntlet buff, it's not 7ft radius like it is for everyone else, but 10.5ft radius. That's why it works so well as a followup to Axe Cyclone. Suck em in, and you're basically increasing the odds you hit the target cap on Pendulum. It might even help you a little bit with Invincibility at times by getting a few more enemies into range. You can also try some silly tricks with Axe Cyclone's Repel feature. I do it with Combat Jumping, but you might see how well it works with Hover. The idea is to begin moving in a direction the instant before you press the key for Cyclone. Your momentum will actually drag the enemies along with you. Like I said, works well with CJ. If I have a group that's a bit more spread out than Cyclone can handle typically, I can land on one side of it, begin a short hop over to the other side and at the same time hit Cyclone. If done right, I end up dragging those enemies over to the other side of the group. Call it a Cyclone Jump. 🤪 It's a little dumb fun. I sometimes try to use it to air drop a group of Rikti into the bowl on a Mothership raid. Battle Axe feels a little slow and deliberate but not nearly as bad as Titan Weapons when you run into a slow animation. It's not the wood chipper that Staff Fighting is, but boy does it feel solid. Very "crunchy".

I have no experience with farming but I thought they specifically excluded powers (from the enemies that is) that can deal -DEF debuffs. I see in some S/L guides that enemies are selected to use things like Stone Melee and Dual Blades (and for DB, they exclude Ablating Strike). If you were running a farm that included -DEF debuffs then it might not be a bad test. Cimerora, if you've high enough level to go there, would be another. Just run any random door mission there or start a solo ITF at +4/x8 and see how you fare against a pack of angry sword-wielding Cimeoran Traitors. I can see how DA could be useful in that specific case. If you soft-cap lethal with just Invuln and then add Divine Avalanche on top with even just one slot of LOTG (the DEF/global recharge IO is typical) you can be far enough over the soft-cap that together with Invuln's moderate level of DDR you are safer from Cascade Defense Failure than without it. Still, the cost is taking two low-damage ST attacks when you only need one for your ST rotation.

I tend to point people from the /help channel to these forums for the basic start up guides and money making guides and what-not. There's too much there to easily cover in a chat window in game. I don't think the game needs to hand-hold quite as much as modern games do. The answers are usually rather easily found with a quick Google search "CoH Homecoming (insert topic here)". But you have to know you have something to look for. So it's the stuff that can be easily just not noticed that might need a callout here and there. It serves as a "there's something here you might want to go Google about" kind of pointer. That's good enough for a 20 year old game, I'd say.

What Mid's are we even supposed to be using these days? I downloaded the latest setup file and the first question the installer asked me is if I wanted the Rebirth database or my own custom creation. Do I need to get it from somewhere else for Homecoming?

No, but it does have a few such bells and whistles anyway like a tutorial level and help popups. A flood of new players tends to make us think about what else could be improved.

Hmm... I guess I could reroll my indefinitely postponed Bio/Staff concept. Last time we started Level 1 with no 2xp boost, if I recall. Reunion though is likely to have 2xp still enabled for everyone anyway. So these early levels are gonna flash past.

There are some differences between the real world and video games... or so I hear. I don't disagree that doing research on game mechanics is worthwhile, but @Oklahoman isn't being too outrageous here to suggest maybe a popup message appear the first time you hit an ED limit while enhancing a power or the first time you go over the Rule of Five. Particularly the Rule of Five is so obscure, I would not be surprised if less than half the playerbase even knows about it. I know something like less than half the randos I run into on PuGs even have IOs. And I mean at level 50.

You don't need money. You want money. You want enhancements and enhancements want money. It's okay to want things you don't strictly need. This is a game.

She is biding her time?

To notice the Rule of Five you'd have to take a picture of your character info sheet's list of set bonus names before and after slotting a new set to compare. Heck, even in Mid's you have to open a set bonus summary window to see that you've gone over five somewhere. That's not even getting into the weirdness that you can have *more* than 5x 7.5% recharge because that bonus has two different names.

I imagine it only really competes with those others if you DO go with a proc-monster build. It can otherwise feel like you're swinging a cardboard tube against robots, Longbow/Crey bosses, and really too many other enemies that have high lethal resist.

Don't take Katana for DA. The 15% non-stackable melee/lethal defense buff doesn't make up for this being a T5 attack that does, literally, T1 damage. It is Gambler's Cut with a defense buff. It would be fine if DA *was* the Tier 1 attack in Katana. But it isn't, sadly. You could take GC and then just not slot it, replacing it with DA at level 16 but that costs you a power slot you're now not using. Or you could try using both SotW and DA in your attack chains, but you really don't need *two* fast-charging minor damage attacks. Katana is otherwise a fun set and has some nice IOing capabilities that push it into surprising damage territory if you want to go that way. Invuln is also fine without DA's defense buff, really. But if top damage isn't a priority, consider Staff Fighting. Two cone attacks, both of which are larger than Katana's Flashing Steel, and one of which also carries the same defense buff as DA but is capable of self-stacking. Guarded Spin also comes to you at level 4, not level 16. The PBAoE is also larger and, while hovering, has a much better animation than while on the ground (where it looks more like you're break-dancing). It has longish animations overall though and that tends to limit its damage output. But if you like big AoEs (and I cannot lie) it can be fun and is much faster than Titan Weapons.

Tell that to Regen! 🤪

I wouldn't call that a waste. It's hilarious!

"Which is easier?" may be the wrong question. Yes, it's easy to hit the soft-cap on positional or just S/L defense, it being only 45%. But whether that is worth doing is debatable. I tend to fall on the side of the argument that defense without defense debuff resistance (DDR) is generally worthless. In specific situations like AE farms or teams where you can rely on having defense boosted further by teammates, then having some defense to stack up on is worthwhile. But if you're wanting to be self-sufficient AND be a tanker who is going to attract most/all of the incoming attacks for a team (or solo)... go with a set that has DDR, get it to soft-cap or above, then pile in other layers: resistance, regen, recharge, slow resistance (to protect recharge), etc. This will be tougher than Resistance Armor that tried to add defense only to have it blow away in the wind on a +4/x8 ITF. Resistance Debuffs do exist also, of course, and Resistance Armors with capped (or higher) res are better able to ignore them, but they are far less common than defense debuffs. Anybody hitting you with bullets or blades is usually debuffing defense. Think about how common that is. It works wonders for squishy ranged types to get soft-cap defenses with zero DDR because they're not tanking. And when they try, you often see them doing amazingly well... until they are suddenly dead. 😛 The "why" is called "Cascade Defense Failure" and it's what happens when you don't have DDR. Want to be toughest tank who ever tanked? Take SR, Shield, Invuln, or Stone to the IO shoppe and go nuts. Maybe Ice Armor too but it's less common. That said, I am a super fan of Radiation Armor, but I built everything onto it EXCEPT defense. It has resistance, an absorb shield, and a self-heal so I did everything I could to jack that stuff up as much as possible because even when defense debuffed into the floor, all that stuff is still working. Recharge to make absorb shield and heal refresh faster. Slow resistance to make sure it stays that way. ToHit debuff resistance to make sure I can hit with that heal when I need to. I think it does great, but a super tank build of one of those other sets I mentioned will still be even tougher. I just think they're less fun. 🤪

Two things: 1. Weapon redraw has been reworked globally. You no longer have to rely on power customization "no redraw" options. You basically just draw the weapon the first time you use it, then it reappears in your hand instantly any subsequent time without redrawing the weapon again. Up until a certain timeout where you haven't been using any weapon powers for a while. 2. Axe Melee was reworked on Homecoming not long ago, so you probably want to give it another look.

If you want to add something to this guide, it can be pointed out that Origins are basically only useful for arguing about Origins on the Forums. 😛