Scientist

What makes a Crab great is having a full AoE damage chain that ALSO has AoE resistance debuffs. That means even things like Incarnate AoEs will do more damage. If you are fighting white con, bring a fire blaster. If you are fighting large numbers of tough foes, having a "blaster" who can't be mezzed and has good built in resistances and defenses lets you survive fighting things that might drop the blaster. The blaster will do more damage in the first 5 seconds of the fight, the Crab lets the team do more damage in a 20 or 30 second fight because of the AoE resistance debuffs, which stack if you take Mako for another debuff, and just having a ruthless chain of AoEs to fire off.

Correct, I actually used that for stealth on my first villain character, because you couldn't get a Runspeed stealth IO for love or money redside before the markets got merged, and you could, occasionally, buy the TP stealth IO. Two minutes of stealth, re-teleport to reapply to stealth a mission. SOOO fun. . .

Sounds like you beat her after a respec, but yes, Calystix is a beast. I'd been rolling through content on my Bots/Traps till I got to her too. One key I found on her and some other hard hitting mobs was to hit "stay" on my pets as I ran in, and run past her so she would be facing me, not them, for the cones. Then I had to keep the aggro of her and her adds. Make sure the pets are close enough to provide bodyguard damage reduction for you, and fortunately bots are ranged so they will still contribute full damage parked back 10' or so. This is a classic tanking strategy, of course, face the really nasty mobs away from your pets, um, teammates. . . 🙂

I tend to have only a couple of characters I am leveling at any one time, so that I can focus on doing IO sets on the way up, which powers I like enough to keep in a final respec, and so on. When I get to 50 I keep going to unlock all their incarnate powers and get at least a T3 in each of them. During that time, though, if there is a need on a team for one of my existing 50s, I am happy to use them and rediscover what I liked about them. The leveling is a mix of soloing and teaming, no AE, that is boring, but sometimes a PI team, which is practically powerleveling. I've level locked a couple of characters in Praetoria to do "all the side switching", before they got out and resumed normal leveling, so I don't mind doing that. I spend a fair amount of time these days finishing setting up all my 50s (unlocking all the useful accolades, opening all the openable TFs, and so on). I like low level play (some powersets exemp much better than others), and I like high level play. To those that say high level play is too easy, I've yet to see a successful Master's run in a Trial, though I've only been on a couple of attempts due to limited evening play time. To those that say low level play is too boring, its not as bad when you have full level 50 IO sets, since at least powers are recharging briskly and doing decent damage, and I'm normally doing low level play to help out a team, which makes it much more interesting. My general goal is to have a character that can fill any hole any team is struggling with at any level, which is why I want them twinked out with everything unlocked. I now have that, with 15 level 50s, so any new alt will be ones my friends talked me into because they have all KINDS of concepts floating around in their heads, darn them. 🙂

A key is that if you DON'T debuff AVs, it can be pretty hard to take them down with one characters damage, and I've seen a team of 3 or 4 almost stall out on them if they aren't pretty well maximized for damage output or carry temp powers like Envenomed Dagger. Whereas a scrapper, brute, or tank plus single debuffing defender, like radiation or cold, can very comfortably take down an AV. A well built debuffer can do it solo, and probably faster than a solo melee, but you need pretty good defenses.

I figured teaming will be needed for a lot of the trial and some TF badges, and I've noticed whenever I've joined a team that was working on anything badge related my rad/rad defender badger seems to be the only support character. That experience makes me put in a word for a debuffing character to speed up teams with AVs and GMs, and also fortunately a rad defender exemps very well, all your key powers come by level 10 if you build right. I agree with a previous statement that I'd only use a MM if I planned to solo a lot, I like MMs but even I agree they are a pain to speed run a lot of missions (run to end, summon and buff pets, defeat boss or room, dismiss, next mission, run to end, summon pets, buff, etc.). I also don't love running them on larger teams, even I get problems figuring out what is going on. Great for soloing normal missions if you aren't in a hurry, get interrupted often, and/or want to be able to solo EBs and maybe AVs.

The place I've used them is in Swift, the Stamina inherent, because then it boosts both your Run and your Fly speed. Swift doesn't take sets. This is only for characters who have Hover or Fly, though, who can benefit by it, otherwise a Run Speed common IO is fine. Its a small benefit, but for the true min-maxer/ebil marketeer, why not?

What will make this tricky is that some "board transit" missions are different than others. During the Market Crash TF, for example, there is a board transit mission that won't offer an option to enter from the Oro portal in Oroborous, which will work for other "board transit" missions. You actually have to get to a tram somewhere.

I definitely start putting sets on characters by 20-25 range, and what makes it even more economical is that some sets like Positron's Blast and Decimation that work on a lot of characters but are likely to get swapped out in an end game build can go in the base bin to go on another leveling character. I have Posi Blast sets that have been on 3-4 characters now. Kinetic Combat is another example if you run a lot of melee, good Smash/lethal defense with 4 slots, handy at low levels when you don't have many slots. One other note on the Stupefy set, which got dissed a bit above, it is one of the rare sets that has both a very decent recharge bonus (6.25%) AND ranged defense (3.75% I think) in the same set. Most other sets only do one or the other. My main complaint with it is that getting the defense requires slotting a knockback proc, and I'm not a fan of unreliable knockback.

Can you get another Summon Amy power if you use up the first 5 charges by running the Katie TF again? I never dared to use all mine up to find out. I actually think the Shivan Shard mission is easier solo or duo, on a larger team each teammate has to wait for the meteors to recharge before they can siphon them. You do want stealth to fly over the meteors and siphon them without being seen by the spawned Shivans (with enough stealth, sometimes they don't even spawn), and if your damage is low, take the turrets down to low hit points and finish them all at once. They don't regenerate.

Do either Combat Teleport or Fold Space take any sets other than the travel ones, out of curiosity? And does Fold Space take recharge? Seems like that would be another handy one for a Stone tank, move the mobs to you, but only using it every 2 minutes is kind of slow.

What are the coordinates of the Atlas, Khallisti and Destroyed Galaxy buildings?

Have only done the villain arc so far, but I'd agree it was lots of fun on a team. There is really a lot of nuance (and humor) in both the dialogue from talking to NPCs, which teammates don't get to read, and even conversations between them you have to have NPC chat on to see, though, so I suggest doing it solo at least once to see all that. On someone sturdy, some of those fights are no joke. . .

Is there any particular reason to choose Resistance or Loyalist as your last choice on exiting Praetoria, for later purposes? Underground base access, dialogue in the Mr. G arc, etc.? Or does it pretty much wipe all that away when you pick Hero or Villain, and reassign it if you do Oro?

If you start a Strike Force underleveled, then level up during it, it still locks you down at the lower level, even if you log off and back on the next day, swap leaders, etc. Found this duoing Mistral with a friend, man I wish we'd gotten Shivans before fighting that +3 ArchMage Archus with +3 Succubi at the end who should have only been +2. . .

As a note, while heals may not break stealth, and back on Retail a dev confirmed that while healing could cause aggro in the game engine but they never set in a factor for that, spawns do have a "group AI" that will cause some of them to target anyone on a team, whether or not they are stealthed. Mob aggro is independent of stealth (just ask stalkers re: ambushes). In addition to individual mob aggro generated from attacking them, there is spawn aggro where some can come after you even if you have never targeted any enemy or come in view of any of them. I've got a friend who mained an Emp, so he saw that a lot.

The other point I've seen made about the VEATs in particular is that you only need one of each, since you can do multiple builds with them and cover literally every power and role that way. For a Defender, or a Blaster, or a Tank, you may want half a dozen of each, because the powersets play so differently and there are so many powerset choices.

I agree that this data is fine as is, as it helps people choose between options. If you know your plan from the start is to PL your blaster to 50, IO them out with defensive sets and incarnates, and THEN start playing them, you know you probably want to do Fire, because you have safety covered elsewhere. A player with that plan probably doesn't need data sets that cover every possible variation, from using a purple insp to pool powers and incarnates. If you know your plan is to role-play your blaster through content solo, living off what drops along the way, maybe pick a set like Dark that ranks high in safety.

Note that some of this choice will depend on whether you plan to solo. Sonic has great -res in its attacks, but to "compensate" the actual damage of the attacks is lower than most others, so it is very slow soloing. It also has very little AoE, though its nuke is great. With the addition of -resistance procs from Invention sets, the question of which attack set provides the best support is a much more complex one. Dual Pistols and Beam Rifle start becoming good competitors to Sonic attack because they each have a -resist attack in their sets AND the ability to slot some other procs, and more base damage to boot. There are a lot of discussions in the Defender forum about this, while it is long, the "Proc Monster" thread covers a lot of these ideas.

Nice idea, I'm definitely willing to cut any team leader a lot of slack because they are doing a lot of work behind the scenes keeping the team going. I love support characters though, of my 10 level 50s I have 1 stalker and 1 blaster, and 7 characters with a support primary or secondary. The remaining level 50 is a tank, who I also run as support. In fact the tank is my go-to for at least half of the "I need help with this mission" requests. I will say that every support powerset I run has some form of inflicting either -resist (see summer's comment earlier) or +team damage (i.e. kin) to speed up teams, though, as those are the main useful things for high level content, and I really try to work in -regen as well because AVs can be significant speed bumps depending on team makup. I ran a /FF controller back in the day, and have no desire to repeat that powerset, when I remade the controller on HC he was /Time, much more interesting and useful and still fit the character concept. I have also noticed significant differences in team performance when they have 1 or 2 "support" characters and when they don't, at least in moderately hard content, as Sir Myshkin said.

The nice feature of doing this, especially if you jump in a little before the pets in BG mode when solo, is that any initial AoE strikes go to you instead of the pets, so you take minimal damage and the pets take none. You being attacked makes all the pets attack, so you don't need to worry about them standing around. I agree that on teams you may not want to use BG mode as much, I'll often do a bit of a mix with the pets, leave a few in BG mode but others on aggressive. Especially if there is a good tank on the team, the pets can just go idle since nobody is attacking you or them.

One tip for playing on teams, Acid Mortar has a significantly longer attack range than aggro range. You can see this by setting it up out of aggro range, then run into a spawn while stealthed, and only then will it start launching its projectiles. You can often use this on faster teams by setting it up PAST the spawn the team is fighting, like 1/3 of the way between that spawn and the next spawn. Then you attack the first spawn, the Mortar only attacks that spawn, until the first spawn is dead and you turn and attack the second spawn. At that point the mortar starts shooting at the second spawn. That way, you get 2 spawns per mortar, and you are likely to have it recharged before hitting a third spawn. Just get used to the distances it activates at so you don't accidently aggro the second spawn before you intend to. Also it is nice to run back to the rest of the team after setting it up if there are mezzers around, so your FF Generator will protect the other squishies from getting mezzed.

I do like keeping one or two of each common and uncommon salvage in the base, just because sometimes you get that drop that is worth crafting on the fly and posting on the market (a Thunderstrike, or Red Fortune, etc.). You can't access the AH from inside a base, so it saves having to exit, buy it, and reenter. 2 bins is enough for that, and I use leftover space to drop in converters from various characters who accumulate them to pass to the character who does the converting/marketing.

An interesting note in regards this is that I believe they are not affected by the purple patch from what I read long ago, i.e. a level 54 AV still gets the full -20% res from an Achilles, because they are not +4 to themselves, and they are "casting" it on themself.

I use Discord with RL friends, one has a channel setup, but I've never seen anyone else using it in CoH. That said, I've joined maybe 2 iTrials since Homecoming, as I'm not usually on evenings when they run. I could imagine it being very helpful for badge runs, where you really want to coordinate everyone. Other than badge runs, I don't know of any content in CoH, that can't be handled without voice if people are marginally patient.