ZemX

Did... you think I said Gold isn't harder than blue? I'm not sure what to make of this. I was just commenting on WHY some missions are harder than others. It's because they are newer. The devs made things progressively more difficult as they went, probably in response to hearing people complain about how easy the game was over the years. New content is new enemies AND new missions.

Then you need more practice. 😈

It's actually really interesting. I think the more commonly held belief that gold is harder than red is harder than blue is really just "newer content is harder". The devs making the missions simply refined their craft as they went. They created more interesting enemies and more difficult missions because people were all the time saying how boring easy everything was.

Yeah, but the same applies to Fighting's Tough/Weave. Defensive minded ATs are a little better than offensive ones with these buffs. Support classes are even better, of course, with Defenders being kings. It's better to look at how they are different. As you've noted, Leadership is AoE. But the big difference is really that Fighting has Tough and Leadership doesn't. Weave is slightly better personal defense than Maneuvers, but it's not a team buff either. But that resistance to smash/lethal is nice. You'll want to decide if that's worth more than a few minor team buffs that might stack with others. If your job on a team is offense, but you're not likely to get a lot of aggro... maybe go Leadership. It also provides +dmg and +tohit, which Fighting does not. If on the other hand you may reasonably get a fair amount of aggro, Tough... is nice. You can't do damage if you're dead or spending time patching yourself up instead of attacking. There's no one answer. But I'd look at it in those qualitative terms first before worrying over the buff modifiers.

Two years and all you have to do is log in once to any server to restart the clock? Seems pretty reasonable to me for a game nobody has to pay for.

Meh. I wouldn't have wanted my Live toons back if I could have them. I enjoy playing the game, not getting to the end of it. My characters are in my head and I rather enjoy re-creating and playing them from Level 1 again. I have their builds saved in Mid's and their costume files. That's not absolutely necessary, but it helps. If I ever have to start over somewhere else, I won't be too broken up at having to start over. I'll just be glad I can.

Short? It's a 100ft radius and it can hit 16 targets. It's the fastest way to take a scattered mob and bunch it up for AoE obliteration. That said... it's like Knockback sometimes. Some people know how to use it on a team. Some don't. And some embody the phrase, "When all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail." Sometimes it just isn't necessary. I've seen people take an already fairly bunched up spawn and just move it to their location for no good reason, screwing a few of their teammates out of AoEs already in progress. It's a great tool though if you are smart how you use it on a team. Solo, I imagine it's quite good. I usually can't find the room for it because I'm not much a fan of Teleport for travel.

Don't forget to watch the right amount of Television!

I'm not keeping a log or anything, but what has worked passably well for me is just keeping the hcwiki page for each villain zone I am working up in a browser. The page for each zone lists contacts, including unlockable contacts, and their ranges. One thing to be aware of: Sometimes the level range listed for a given contact spans several story arcs which each have their own limited level ranges. This is the case for Dr. Graves in Mercy, for example. He's listed as 5-19 on the Mercy Island page but clicking over to his own page reveals his three arcs are 5-9, 10-14, and 15-19. If you miss his 5-9 arc, you end up having to do all three in Flashback... which is what happened to me. Lesson learned. Anyway, for example: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Mercy_Island Looking at this you know to do Kalinda and Burke first, stopping XP at 4 if necessary. Then Kuzmin, stopping at 7 (by the way, the followup choice here is either/or. Recommend FireWire while you're leveling and then Webber in flashback to avoid a certain issue with a contact disappearing later... but this is the only situation I ran into redside like that). While it's possible to finish an arc once you've started it, even if you exceed its level range, resist that temptation unless you know it's the last arc of the last contact in that level range. I missed Billy Heck's second arc in Port Oakes this way and had to Flashback it as well. You can occasionally check your progress in Ouroboros to note if any arcs are not complete. This covers just the story arcs and not the side missions. Each contact often has some series of side missions that are little more than Newspaper-ish style one-offs. I still do them, but they're a bit of a chore for no real payoff in story/lore, so if you know from the wiki that you've done the story arcs, and none of the one-off missions have a badge, they are pretty skippable. This is another good guide but it only lists arcs the author thought of as worthwhile. Still... worth looking at for the zone progression at least and hints about where to pause XP. Also gives a nice macro button for toggling XP.

There might be a couple things you can't do now with IOs that you could do back then with pre-ED slotted SOs but on the whole I think we're hilariously more powerful now than back then. I don't know how people can still, with a straight face, manage to complain about ED. But in game, the old "debate" occasionally kicks up, and people start cursing Positron's name again somehow.

The one that the Talos do that annoys the shit out of me is... I don't know what it is. I call it.. "fill my entire camera view with a cascade of dirt" power. I don't think there's another power in the game that completely obscures the whole screen when it is fired at you. But that one does.

Seconded. I would go minimal on dark armor effects to avoid obscuring costume and add some purple to the primary attacks. Should look wicked spinning around and slashing in combat. Build Up and Savage Leap even give you some growls to go with the visuals.

Oh, I remember those guys. Rangers? The ones with the arm blades? At least those were the ones who seemed to give me the most trouble. Lot of people say redside or goldside is harder but the real reason is just that newer content tends to be more difficult than older content. Some of the newer arcs blueside can kick your ass too.

Thing to keep in mind with Staff is that there isn't, currently anyway, a "no-redraw" option. This makes active secondaries less attractive because it means you'll be putting away and redrawing that weapon a lot. Theoretically all weapon animations were supposed to have been normalized so that whether you were drawing-then-attacking or just attacking with the weapon already out, the animation time was the same... but I am not sure that was ever done for Staff Fighting, which came quite towards the end of the game on Live. SR is pretty attractive then because the only thing that will cause redraw is Practiced Brawler. No other click-activated powers in the set. It's also nice when paired with Staff's Guarded Spin (+def to melee/lethal) because it stacks up melee defense. You can then focus more on ranged/AoE def bonuses while enjoying early soft-capped melee defense while leveling. Same is true for Ninjitsu, although it also has a click-heal and some other click powers (if you take them). Pairing with a typed-defense secondary means stacking up lethal defense with Guarded Spin... which is less protective than melee positional defense. Then again, if you do want to pair it with a hybrid resist set like Rad Armor, that can work too since with a little melee def bonus in IO sets added to Guarded Spin you can easily soft-cap melee while enjoying the good resist/regen/recovery the secondary gives you.

It has several effects. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=brute_defense.radiation_armor.radiation_therapy&at=brute Notice there are two lines for endurance (self only) and two lines for heal (self only). Look over on the right and you see different icons. The smaller effect stacks up to ten times. The larger "replaces existing effect", which is a fancy way of saying it only happens once. The larger one is the only thing you see if you hit nothing. The smaller effects stack up for each enemy you hit. There's also damage and debuff that happens on all enemies hit by the power. So it's really nice it has a base 3.0 accuracy. ETA: Actually, the other thing to notice is that the power hits YOU in addition to enemies. That's why you get the one heal/end effect if you hit nobody. Because you never hit nobody. You always hit at least yourself since self is autohit on this power. It's also why the target limit is 11, not 10. It's so you can hit yourself and then 10 other enemies. All the effects listed have to have a condition preventing damage and debuff from affecting you (!target.isFriend?) It's weird... but it works.

It's never NOT thematic for an assassin to stab someone in the back. It might make even MORE sense when that someone is being distracted by one of your teammates. In a practical sense, Hidden AS is still a great opener. The whole reason Hide comes with such a large suppressible AoE defense bonus is precisely to help you land a Hidden AS while stuff is exploding around you. Hidden AS has other benefits such as the tohit debuff and chance to terrorize, both of which can help you land the strike after AS, which thanks to the ATO has a good chance of being another crit. People who are only comparing DPA between quick and hidden AS are missing that most of Hidden AS's animation time can be done before the fight starts. It even gives you a do-over if you miss, leaving you hidden and still able to do a normal Hide crit with your next best attack. On a team, it's still a good idea to try to reach the spawn a couple seconds early to get set up and started on that AS though. AoE defense, no matter how good, is no guarantee you won't be hit by splash and interrupted. I do this on teams all the time and most of the time I have chewed through a boss in just a few hits and have moved on to something else before the rest of the team has managed to defeat the rest of the spawn. If I hadn't, everyone would have to focus on the boss last. That's the thing I keep reminding people on: AoE steamrollers kill minions first, LTs second, and bosses last. A good team has a balance of people doing AoE and people doing ST on the harder targets. They meet in the middle and the spawn is down faster because of it.

Yeah it's a temp travel power. There are a few expensive ones like that that mostly just look cool. I don't think they are any faster than the simple Jet Pack you can get for 5000/half-hour but I think they are permanent for the price (1 mil). But you can't fight from them. While using them you are in "Only Affect Self" mode. With a Jet Pack, you can fight in the air (albeit you get very slow movement while you do) Pretty sure it was a joke too. Definitely do not spend your first mil on a rocket board. 🤪 ... Unless you want to.

I gather they are saying such a build WOULD be within the rules, not that your build was like that. It's a knock against the Pylon test. But the Pylon test is only supposed to be a test of raw DPS. It's not even necessarily supposed to be about survival. It's allowed to have external survival buffs as long as they don't buff anything that affects damage performance. Presumably it's even allowed to have a pocket tank taunting the pylon so you can be built solely for damage. All these conditions are usually mentioned when people post times so the times can have the proper context. Some might think it's lame to have someone else protecting them from the pylon, but it's actually good information. Knowing where the upper limit is for DPS means you know how much damage you're trading for survivability when you build for that instead.

People don't hate knockback for the sake of hating knockback. They hate it when it negatively affects them. And that's almost never a controller. If all your stuff is ranged and/or large area, it doesn't bother you as much when foes are knocked around a bit. When the range on most of your powers is more like 7ft... it's a different story. But it also doesn't pay to complain about it in game. It's never well received. If someone is knocking things away from a melee toon I am playing, I just pick a different target. If everything is getting knocked around or repelled or tractor-beamed or whatever... I may even just move on to the next spawn. I'm not chasing shit around like a cat following a laser pointer. You knock it? You bought it. I think that's fair. And most of the time, the KBers are fine with it too.

Exemplaring is really TOO good, IMO. You end up being way more powerful than someone at that level normally and it's mostly because of the way set bonuses can still be effective even if the power they are slotted in is disabled by exemplaring. Even without that, you would still have the advantage of fully slotted powers and the sets that are in active powers, to say nothing of the five extra levels worth of powers.

I've done this twice, so far. Once after I joined HC and once again doing the "Ironman/Woman Challenge". That second one was a little harder since it also outlawed all P2W but by this point I had self-funding down well enough to be comfortable. My first toon, I think I got to about the late teens before I bothered to read any "how to make money" guides and realized I was sitting on a fortune in merits already just from solo story arcs. The only difference now with having rich(er) alts is that I get some of the nicer procs and things earlier. That's about it. Once you know how to make money on the market, the game really doesn't have TOs or DOs anymore. You can be in SOs from level 1 to whenever you decide to start on IOs. Even starting from nothing.

I think a lot of people don't realize how big this is. You can get a total of +10 end from two accolade powers. That sounds unimpressive if you don't know that most endurance recovery in this game works as a percentage of max. So you're not just adding 10 extra points of end to your bar. You're adding 10% to most every other power or proc you have that gives you back endurance. Some "drain/transfer" type attacks don't work this way, but most other stuff does. Even Panacea's proc ticks give you a %end rather than an absolute amount. So 10 more end points to max means 10% more end from Panacea, Miraacle, Numina, Stamina, Physical Perfection, Quick Recovery, Ninjitsu's +End clicky, Blaster Sustains, etc. etc. It's well worth what you have to go through to get them. Speaking of Panacea: I think Panacea's proc isn't counted here because it's a periodic chance of +%end rather than a boost to Recovery stat. So you might mentally add about 0.375 end/sec to the number shown here if you have it slotted (and have 100 max end... 0.412/sec if you have both accolades).

Oh... there was a "bit", yes. 😂

Not any options I'd call "good". Have you already three slotted Health with Panacea, Miracle, and Numina? Put one Perf-Shifter proc in Stamina and maybe a Perf Shifter: EndMod alongside it?

I have floating trays that never move. I play in full screen mode. But I have seen them move after switching to windowed mode and back.