ZemX

Are you serious? Easily half the Posi 1s I've ever run, somebody aggroes the doors to City Hall ambush before the team is ready for it. The worst of these, the whole team ended up being spawn camped at the zone entrance on the way back from the hospital. And that's just one example. Veteran or not, some people just don't bother to be careful when they play. Maybe they don't think it's fun. Maybe they are high when they play. I don't know. And by the way... it's not entirely a complaint either. It's what makes PuGs interesting. The other people on the team often don't do things the way you'd do them or even in a way you might consider "optimal". I have certainly been on PuGs that ran like clockwork too. Not saying that doesn't happen.

Really? I find those other people perfectly capable of creating non-optimized aggro without the need for pets. They're called "Pick Up Groups" 🤪

In retrospect though, not very surprising. I'm seeing the same thing on my Rad/Rad defender who uses Rad Infection vs. the Kat/Nin scrapper relying on defense toggles. The scrap is doing better now he has Divine Avalanche to really amp up his melee defense but he's also in Praetoria where entire maps of all-ranged clockwork are unimpressed by near soft-capped melee defense. The rad/rad has always taken longer to finish each fight but between RI and Radiant Aura, often finishes that fight near full health. The only thing I've run into that's alarmingly dropped her health is Hellion Damned's and their fire blasts. And for them, it's usually enough to pop a small purple and lean a little harder on the self heal. Drains more end but I can stay out of the danger zone and finish the fight. Rad Infection, if I can manage to get and keep everyone else inside of it, might as well be a 31.25% def(ALL) toggle that I got at level 1. Scrapper can't touch that.

Okay yeah, I'll admit I find most pets annoying. And I don't think MM fans need to react to that as some kind of insult or other. I like what I like and I don't like what I don't like. I don't get in anyone's face about it in game. MMs for me are in the category of audio/visual noise. There's just too much of them there. Certain overbearing non-MM powersets also tick me off in the same way. I love the powers... but hate the VFX. Like Electrical Affinity. I LOVE what it does. I hate that it looks like I'm constantly being electrocuted by a teammate with the attendant and constant white-noise of "bzzzzzzzt...." going off every two seconds. Stormies... yeah, you are godly and I, at the same time, hate hurricanes and lightning storms. I don't want to turn off all visual affects to alleviate that either. And like I said, I don't act like a jerk about it in game. I grit my teeth and deal with it. But I usually excuse myself sooner than I normally would on a team with multiple MMs or overbearing VFX.

There is this great quote from Dafoe that I remember seeing in some interview he did a long time ago but can never manage to turn it up in a search these days. Interviewer asked him about his long career of playing bad guys and some good guys and the question was something like "Which do you prefer playing? Good guys or bad guys?" His answer, probably paraphrasing here: "Good guys. Bad guys. It doesn't matter. Everyone thinks they're righteous." Whenever I do play a villain in this game, I always think of this quote and try to imagine why they think it's okay to do the things they do, even if it's something I wouldn't in reality agree with. Why do they think they are righteous? I do get a chuckle out of the idea that playing redside in this game could possibly have an effect on one's behavior, though, or say anything at all about their actual real-world character. I think what research HAS shown, that I've heard of at least, is that it is actually competitive games (whether video games or real world sports), rather than good vs. evil or even violence in games, that have a much greater effect on aggression and mood. You will find far more toxicity in online competitive multiplayer games than you ever will on anything related to City of Heroes, which is rarely played in a direct player-vs-player competitive fashion.

It doesn't make sense because it is literally made up nonsense by you. EVERY contact in the Rogue Isles (including all three starting contacts in Mercy) explains what's in it for you when they ask you to run a mission. I mean you actually rob banks if you play redside and here you are saying you don't get paid as a villain? Are you really being serious with that one? I just ran a delightful little arc where I seized a cloning facility and then put it to work making a clone army of myself. Now, you could say that didn't totally work out in the end but hey... that's sort of the life of a villain too in the comics ain't it? If any of our diabolical schemes actually ever did work well enough to take over the world, there'd be nothing left for us to do, now would there? It does if you have misapplied that research. If your assumptions are "horsecrap", then so are your conclusions no matter what the research says. And your assumption that roleplaying is a large motivator for general attitudes in this game is entirely unsupported by any evidence. The vast majority of teams you see advertised in this game (even on the unofficial roleplaying server) have nothing to do with roleplaying. Thus the topic of this thread, which has to do with difficulty finding teams redside, has nothing (or at least very little) to do with roleplaying.

Not to you, you mean. I thought it was hilarious.

Which is why I wouldn't bother with stealth stacking even if it DID work on Rikti Drones. It's not worth the extra power slot to deal with something that's that rare and not really a big inconvenience anyway.

Would you spend one merit on an EndMod SO? 😈

The only potentially weird thing I do is take Provoke on my Stalkers (if I can fit it). And it's actually kind of practical since it helps keep foes from running away from me and also is useful on teams keeping stuff off of others if there is no or not enough tanking/control on the team already. But it seems thematically weird because it's sort of the opposite of sneaky, I guess. I skip Placate and I take Provoke. 🤪

I tend to agree. I only got my Iron Challenger up to about 21 or so but he had millions on hand from selling converters. Always enough for SOs at the least and even a few IOs by then. On the other hand, doing @Ukase's "Drop Challenge" is brutal. It's clear you can't get enough enhancements just using drops. At least not in the first 20 or so levels probably. Not without stopping XP strictly to farm dropped enhancements. The problem is most of what you get is either not for your origin or it's not a type that's useful to that particular character (like a hold enhancement on someone with no hold powers yet) . And some types seem almost never to drop too, like EndMod enhancements. I think if you go long enough to get enough IO recipe drops (and the salvage and inf to craft them) it eventually solves that problem but it's a slog definitely. So yeah I would think allowing buying enhancements at vendors and use of the upgrade button on the enhancement window is a good idea. Unlike Ukase's challenge, I would allow use of the Merit Vendor. Just no AH at all. If you earned the merits you can use them and anything you can get from them at the Merit Vendor. You just can't sell it on the AH. So no converters for cash or rolling IOs into high demand ones for making money.

No, I get the part about inheritance. What I mean is... when you referred to the Iron Challenge rules you said "drops only" which can be interpreted to mean you can't buy things at vendors or on the AH. i.e. You can only use drops from defeated enemies. The only use for influence would be crafting dropped IO recipes using dropped salvage. In other words: Are you thinking about restricting vendor or auction house usage? What about the merit vendor?

Sounds cool but can you clarify "drops only"? @Chainz's rules basically just amounted to "self funded". You weren't limited to just using dropped enhancements. You could buy at vendors or, if you wanted to, sell converters or converted IOs on the market for cash.

You assume incorrectly. Scrappers are quite common on teams.

Assault is their secondary powerset. Same is true of Defenders. You can't really talk about AT balance in isolation. You said they should do more damage, essentially, because damage is one of the things they do. Not really an argument. Outside of Controllers, EVERY AT has at least one of their powersets devoted primarily to doing damage. And comparing damage and support is a bit of apples and oranges. How much damage nerf is it worth if an AT has strong controls? Not easy to answer, but somewhere between an AT whose primary purpose is damage and an at whose primary purpose is support probably.

Well, you were right about the incendiary part at least. I had some words to say that were sort of blunt, but instead I'll just let these two comments from your OP sit next to one another for awhile.

For someone who claims to have been banned for this, it's a curious way to characterize your own actions. "Boot them if they do not conform to your demands simply because you are the team leader"? This is how I would expect the jerk who got kicked from the team to describe it, because what really happened was that you formed the team advertised as "no speed" and therefore everyone joining it is implicitly agreeing to these rules. It's not one person forcing their "demands" on the team. It's the team, collectively, agreeing to play a particular way. Then it's one jerk deciding to go back on their own word and subject everyone else on the team to something THEY didn't agree to. And you're defending the jerk.

So... to put it another way: Damage is NOT their whole thing?

I haven't played the challenge for a few days. The early levels are pretty discouraging. But I created a Kat/Nin Scrapper last week and got him to around 8 I think in Praetoria. I did not notice any better drops. At least not yet anyway. The drops were definitely not always my origin whether they were street sweeping or in mission and a couple SO rewards ended up being the wrong origin as well. He might currently be doing even slightly worse than my Rad/Rad Redside Defender. Ninjitsu on Scrappers, unlike Stalkers, has a +End click power. But yeah, Staff/Bio should have no endurance issues either with the added recovery of bio and the endurance discount stance of Staff. I'm a huge fan of Staff Fighting myself but I went with Katana for much the same reason as I did Rad Blast on the Defender, for the -def debuffs to alleviate poor accuracy slotting. Also Katana has 1.05x base accuracy. It's not a lot, but it helps with that initial hit and then the def debuffs take over. Also, Kat has the +def for melee/lethal attack. Staff has it as an AoE cone, but it' slightly weaker and longer recharge. Not as easily stackable. Still good though. Staff has way better AoE than Kat which is why I normally prefer it to Katana/Ninja Blade.

You're not wrong, but Ukase's not allowing auto update so even if he had a DO to replace it with he wouldn't as then he has to hope another drops in the next three levels or that something better comes along. It's not worth worrying about the ~2% difference in strength. He crafted that level 10 IO from a dropped recipe using dropped salvage and now he doesn't have to worry about that slot going red. He can wait to replace it with another common IO recipe that's better later on. It will be a 20 or 25 probably either a common or set IO depending on what drops. Not a DO. I have to say, this challenge is brutal even without the permadeath. It looks like Ukase's turned the corner a bit on enhancements though by 20 with the IO recipe drops. That's huge in something like this because if he's shown anything with this it's that standard origin invention drops are unable to keep up with leveling. The RNG is a killer. The drop rate is already slow, but the drop rate of usable enhancements by a given player is miniscule. From what I saw, it was usual to fill an enhancement tray tab with drops and get maybe 0-2 enhancements matching player origin and then be lucky if even one of them was a type you could use. I trashed many tech slow, stun, range, etc. enhancements that my tech defender just didn't have powers to use or, as in the case of range, didn't really need more than I needed even the paltry inf I could get selling it. It's not how it was intended to be played, of course. The idea was that unusable enhancements would be vendored for cash and then usable enhancements bought with the proceeds. But it's interesting to see how badly broken the drops are if you had to rely on them. Origin-based enhancements weren't the original devs' best idea.

I just picked my main toon to be my "badger". I don't think it's build so much as desire to play that character. It's going to take a lot of time, so make it one of your most favorite-to-play characters, I'd say. Not that I am anywhere near all the badges. Don't know if I ever will be. But I'm about halfway there. Is this a comment on mortality? 🤪 Otherwise, I kind of just view badging as something to do when I'm not doing anything else. I don't plan rigorously, but I'll try to be aware of badge opportunities too. I downloaded a badge popmenu so I can quickly consult what I have or don't have and it certainly makes locating explorations or plaques dead easy.

Yeah, this wouldn't go anywhere. You can just look around at various kinds of challenges people are doing and see they aren't being done by very many people. A handful each really. We just tried this recently with an SO-only challenge and got only a few people interested so far. Speaking of which, you go most of the way back to a classic feel of the game just by doing that: Skip IO sets. You don't need a new server. No other single thing really changed the game as much as that did since probably Enhancement Diversification. It not only put some things ED took away back in play (e.g. Perma-Hasten) but it allowed ATs to get things their powersets couldn't normally provide such as mez protection, soft-capped defenses, resistance, regen/recovery, etc. What you find if you stick to SOs and play only with others on SOs is that you rely more on each other. The main problem we face is not having enough people doing it to really get that old balance back. To see if the game really is "balanced around SOs" like people keep saying it is.

The OP asked about difficulty and it hadn't really been addressed yet. I have to say, I think the "redside is more difficult" thing is generally overstated too. I think newer content is generally more challenging than older and to the extent redside is newer, it may have a few slightly more challenging missions. But I don't think it holds a candle to Goldside for troublesome enemies and many, many ambushes. But even then, pick some newer arcs Red or Blueside and you can find similarly challenging missions. It's clear the devs' approach to missions changed over time. For the better, I think. Still, I wouldn't worry overly much about difficulty redside. Certainly starting out I haven't had any real difficulty compared to blue. And as noted, it's easy enough to change sides later on.

I know this one can be done by anybody but aren't there some "talk to"s in TFs that can only be done by the team lead? Or am I imagining things?

So if read this correctly, if the answer to both is "yes".... you go make a cup of coffee?