Scientist

If you are doing Trapdoor farming in the lava pool, btw, it seems that setting it on +4 difficulty significantly raises the damage the lava does. Lava has levels! 🙂

Is Mids correct with the "extra damage" of 17.81 (slotted for damage for a Defender), meaning it is a complete waste to slot it for damage then? Looks like the only thing worth slotting on it, aside from some End Reduction because it is an End hog, is tohit.

So Shifting Tides in the new Marine Affinity powerset allows slotting of Tohit Buff and Damage sets. It seems to generate a stacking buff for Recharge, Tohit and Damage per foe. Am I correct that any tohit buff enhancing IO would enhance stacking tohit, any damage enhancing IO would enhance the stacking damage, and any recharge, for example in a Damage or Tohit set, would enhance the stacking recharge? Or would recharge in a set only enhance the recharge of the power itself? Trying to figure out how best to slot it in an end game build.

If the defender is just going to be on autofollow, say on a second account, one option I could suggest is a Traps defender. You can put Acid Mortar on autocast, and it will keep dropping and firing off at mobs. The advantage is that the Mortar takes the aggro, not the defender, and it is pretty tough, plus if you get enough recharge going you can double stack them at least part of the time for double the -resist (each Mortar counts as a separate "caster"). Toggle back to that account every couple of minutes to recast FF Generator and Hasten, and you are good to go.

Was looking at working on this with a friend, am I correct that souvenirs will only go to the arc holder, but that EB/AV defeat credit goes to anyone on the team? I'm also not clear how you check these jail cells to see who you are missing?

They listed it (Mirror Image badge) as fixed in todays patch, hopefully so.

Friends and I just ran Citadel with an 8x Tank team, but nobody got this new Issue 27 Page 7 badge, is it bugged?

A group I was with saw this as well, started Stephanie's arc at level 20, +0/x1 difficulty on a 4 person team, but most or all of the lts in the mission in every spawn were +5 to us. We managed to beat them with some deaths, it got a lot easier when the mission holder leveled and they were only +4. This happened in the first Council missions at least.

Gerswin makes some excellent points. I agree that having multiple defenders is a good idea, for two reasons. First is that as he mentions, different defender power sets are more or less ideal for different teams and scenarios. A 5 scrapper team might benefit from a Kin, a 5 blaster team might benefit more from a Cold. Second is that defender power sets play SO differently from each other, that switching between them is like switching entire ATs IMHO. Thus you can get a lot of fun play variety just from the "Defender AT". I think a good defender build emphasizes team support, and ideally includes the entire range from "support of survivability" to "support of kill speed". Some teams need a lot of help with the former, others need the latter (they are tough but low dps). Support of kill speed is part of all defender sets now with the Force Field revamp, but also comes with having a blasting secondary, so don't neglect that. Something else I try to include on all my defender builds is the ability to stealth and recall teams to a location, I consider that team support as well, even the fastest blaster can't kill their way past 15 spawns on 3 floors faster than I can sneak past them if we are speeding missions. Similarly, if someone drops, being able to teleport them to a safe spot to rez makes things more fun for them than lying there for the whole fight and speeds things up by getting a teammate back in action. Speaking of which, bring at least temp power rezzes, I get the day job accolade one too, its faster than messing around with combining insps and hoping someone makes an opening to drop it. The only defender I take Tough/Weave on in general is a Kin, because they have to run into spawns at a pretty dangerous point in the fight to exploit Fulcrum Shift properly, and don't have much in-set defense. For everyone else I rely on the 30% or so ranged defense I can get fairly easily and aggro splitting with the team, along with debuffs. Some defenders like Time, obviously, can get high personal defenses without much sacrifice. In general I'd rather have buffs and debuffs up more often so I use recharge sets, and be able to contribute some decent damage for slow teams, often with procs, which preclude set bonuses. I also like to take Maneuvers or Assault and Tactics, that helps especially to hit in hard content and Defenders get the best bonuses on it. I also have an alt build for my Main, a defender, that includes Tough/Weave for something like a Master Of TF or other hard mode content, though that gets expensive.

For Radiation attacks, my suggestion is to put one in the Rad snipe. The recharge is about right to max the chance of it going off, and it still allows for 5-slotting the Manticore Snipe set, which is one of the few sets with a good recharge bonus AND ranged defense. Put the Manticore proc in and it hits pretty hard, and it cycles within the 10 second Achilles proc duration with some decent global recharge. Hopefully a Sentinal gets the snipe?

Working on a final build for a Cold/Ice defender, and was curious on people's thoughts. A proc build gives the most personal damage by far, and still gets about 65% recharge. I could also go with a recharge focused build to get debuffs like Benumb and Heat Loss up faster, and lose about half my personal damage, or a defense focused build and get up to the regular soft cap for ranged defense, for example, but lose some recharge and about half my personal damage. My expectation is that this character will be on PUGs so can't count on 3-4 other cold corruptors or defenders buffing me, any suggestions on the best direction to take for these hard mode TFs? I have to survive to buff and debuff, and know what I would need to do to go in each of these three directions for a build, but am not sure what is most needed for support.

My speculation is that rather than server lag, someone posted 10 or so of these things at 20M long ago, and the lower sales you were seeing are new ones people recently posted at more reasonable prices. Now that leads to the question of why someone would post 10 at that price, and the possibilities are (1) extra 0 on the posting price side and they were posting a stack at once, which seems a bit unlikely given that is an obscure item to try to mass buy and craft, or (2) "Live" experience. By "Live" experience I'm referring to someone who played on CoH back in its original days, and this was their market niche but they didn't realize the market changes when they started playing on Homecoming. Thus they started off by buying a stack of these recipes and crafting them and posting them for what they used to sell for when decent set IOs cost a lot more on Live. It is not particularly obvious when starting play here how different the market is, the first two strategies I attempted here were abject failures (hint, putting a Rare salvage up for a sale price of over 1M is not likely to result in a sale here. . . 🙂 )

I had that early Tina mission where you have to click 5 glowies and rescue Dr. Calvin. I hunted and hunted for him, couldn't find him, finally called a GM, and Calvin and his spawn were up on a roof. Not the parking garage roof, a normal building fairly near the entrance. The GM and I agreed we had never seen that before.

One point I'll make in favor of Force Field is that you can use PBU (Power Build Up) with it to double the shields defensive strength when you cast them, potentially allowing for fewer support characters and more damage ones on the team. In addition, with the latest revamp, Repulsion Bolt is -20% ST resistance and Force Bomb is -15% AoE resistance, while Damping Bubble gives easily permable team debuff resistance. No -regen in the set, but its at least worth considering on a HM TF. By contrast, to the best of my knowledge, Cold's shields don't benefit from PBU because they have a resistance component, is that correct?

I actually suspect some of the odd common and uncommon salvage price surges and drops are because someone found out about the revival of CoH on Homecoming, came back to the game, and tried to make money the way they used to, say by flipping Luck Charms. It was not at all obvious to me when I first started playing on Homecoming that salvage is now automagically interconverted on the market, making it essentially impossible to pursue this strategy.