Scientist

To be fair, Time is a fairly late blooming set, and only leveling it to the 30s may not be enough. If you want to exemp below about 30, I think Rad, Storm and Dark are more effective, and playing up through the 30s, Time may not have enough slots yet in its late powers to see the effectiveness.

One thing which may not be obvious with Homecoming compared to previous CoH is that now you can gain salvage (threads) needed to make Incarnate powers and get "XPs" towards unlocking Incarnate tiers from doing lower level content as well. Thus you can take your "end game" character and exemp down to a team doing radio missions in Steel Canyon, or run level 15 arcs in Oro, and actually still improve your level 50's incarnate powers. That makes end game the whole game. 🙂

I hadn't actually analyzed them as carefully as that, and based on what you posted I actually swapped the Huntsman ST attacks back in for the backpack ones. Yes, there is redraw, but I normally do an AoE cycle, then SS/Burst/SS, and back to AoEs, so it isn't that bad. I still like the Arctic Breath, though, for boosting team AoE damage. I bring the Crab to teams that need more AoE damage, especially if I know I may have to be fairly self sufficient with surviving the resulting aggro, otherwise I may bring someone else who fills some other missing role. School of Sharks only gets used if I need to immob groups on a particular team, fairly rare, and I didn't even take Spirit Shark. As Omega-202 said, a Crab is more about the marathon than the sprint for damage dealing, and in this case I was targeting a marathon spawn melter, who still had enough debuffs to help a lot with AVs. I could easily see making some of the other choices mentioned in this thread, though, if I soloed a lot, or wanted to use this character on every single team.

Something you didn't mention is the ability to load new keybinds on the fly to rotate through different chunks of text to make a dialogue from only repeated presses of a particular key. Like this, where you press shift + o to start it off, where there is a 1 in the first pets name and a 2 in the second pets name (like the default for bots); petorate1.txt shift+o "petsay_name 1 Say has it occurred to you that our master treats us as expendable?$$petsay_name 1 <em lecture>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate2.txt" petorate2.txt shift+o "petsay_name 2 Nonsense, he treats us just as well as his teammates!$$petsay_name 2 <em research>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate3.txt" petorate3.txt shift+o "petsay_name 1 Ummm OK, I feel much better now. . .$$petsay_name 1 <em fancybow>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate1.txt" You can make as long a dialogue as you want and only occupy one key on your keyboard to rotate through it, by making additional petorate keybind files, each one you trigger loads the next line in the dialogue. There may be a slight lag if your hard drive is slow to load the keybind files, but that is fine when you aren't in combat, like waiting for that teammate to train up. I think I had another dialogue I wrote for my Bots MM where they were conspiring to revolt against me, until they saw me watching them. . . What I pity I mainly use my MM these days for soloing, the best IMHO for that since they can solo ANYTHING, and pets will defend you from those stupid ambushes that sometimes happen while you are trying to read NPC dialogue.

One other thing to consider, Storm gets its signature debuffs significantly earlier than Time, if you are going to exemp for low level content a lot I'd consider Storm. Storm also has more of a learning curve to use effectively, whereas you can usually fire any Time power in any situation and not be TOO wrong.

I've run a couple of Storms to 50, and don't think the Medicine pool is worth it. If you play Storm right, not much is hitting you, so you can rely on keeping a few green insps around. If you solo a lot, I'd worry more about being mezzed, THAT's when you tend to die as a squishy. Insps is the only answer to that problem, until you get high enough level to really keep all the foes flopping around. I would suggest taking and slotting Hurricane, that helps a lot with "defense", but be judicious in its use, it is hard on the blue bar. You will also want knockback to knockdown converters in a lot of powers, unless your AoE Immob takes care of that.

I joined a level 25 brute with my recently 50 fire/time corruptor, and was just having a great time blowing stuff up in his missions (he even turned it up to x6 at my suggestion), and he apologized for being so squishy at one point after dropping, saying he made the mistake of getting leveled in AE so he didn't have Inf for enhancements. I sent him a trade invite to give him some Inf, but he turned it down, saying he wanted to earn it himself. I had to respect that attitude.

It was not, however, fixed on all TFs, a friend and I started Ice Mistral redside, leveled from 37 to 38 during the TF, and were still pinned at 37. That final AV is no joke fighting +3, with ambush spawns, we had 24 deaths between us when we finally pulled it off, and leaned heavily on temp powers and team insps. I would suggest if you want to solo everything in the game and be able to read the content and such, consider a bots/traps MM. Excellent at fighting AVs if you take Provoke, there are virtually no enemies that really give me a hard time (Malta? So what if a Sapper saps one robot?). Back on retail I beat dozens of AVs redside with just SOs and the tiny handfull of IOs you could get redside early on, before the markets were merged. A MM is also nice because of the occasional mission where an ambush jumps you while you are talking to an NPC or reading mission text or something, and you can just let the pets handle the problem. 🙂 Stalkers are often recommended, but hostage lead-out missions are a pain with them because you have to turn off hide.

Also remember there was "less to do" then. Fewer task forces, and they were harder to run in part because you had to have specific sidekicking setups, no incarnate content, no IOs, so not a lot of reason to keep running max level characters once they were max level, no red side or Praetoria. Hunting around for badges and easter eggs was something to do other than street sweeping. That is one reason heroside content is much more thoroughly documented on the wiki than villianside content, people had time to do it.

A friend and I recently duoed Praetoria following the "switch alignments every time" guide so we could see as many arcs as possible, and after that we went redside because there was no possible way we could consider those characters heroes. We then looked for any arcs that involved (1) betrayal, or (2) Praetoria, and (3) anything with duplicates or clones since we were now presumably sharing Primal earth with our Primal "duplicates". We think the Praetorian storytelling is better than redside, which is better than blueside, but it definitely doesn't fit for every character concept, and won't fit a lot of players in a superhero game. Regarding Phipps, I've had characters who ran all his missions, and ones who deliberately failed the most egregious one, depending on the character, but I hate to miss any content, so I really had to do both on SOMEBODY.

The Night Ward/First Ward content is also not bad, and there are also a couple of redside arcs that actually change dialogue and even things you find in the missions based on having done Praetorian content. In particular the Dean McArthur/Leonard/Mr. G sequence is fun, and the Mr. G part references both your Praetorian contact with him (assuming you did him in Praetoria) and the earlier two arcs. Especially check out everything in the intro mission to him. The Wiki doesn't show all of that, by the way. A friend and I set up a dedicated duo to do Praetoria, and followed the "switch sides every time" guide in the Guides section of the forum to see as much as possible. I agree the stories are good, and we had time to read them, but we also had to spend about 80% of our time with XPs turned off to do it all, which isn't everyone's cup of tea. Then again, how many characters do you need to rush to 50? 🙂

If, for example, Tanks got an extra shield like a MM or Defender gets, it would give them ridiculous levels of protection, so the idea behind the epic and patron pools is to give various ATs things they don't normally get. Thus a Controller gets a self shield, a Tanker gets some crowd control, and so on.

I have a friend whose pets all die when he levels in a mission. We've been trying to pin down whether it is just in a TF, or regular missions as well, but in any case I've never seen this on my MM. Is there a system for when this happens?

While I had a scrapper on live, and I think she was good at what she did, I never got much into the AT, same with blasters. I tended to favor "team multiplier" characters, who had a wide variety of responses for different situations, and scrappers and blasters really only had "hit it harder" as a solution. Brute was even more so, I think that was one of the few ATs I never got to 50. Tanks were fine, they are good team effectiveness multipliers. My favorite was defenders, I think I had as many of those at 50 as all other characters. :) I liked playing my bots/traps MM when I was tired of teams that didn't cooperate properly with my toggle debuff defenders, the pets obeyed so much better. . . :)

Whereas every character I have except the tank (doesn't need it) and the stalker (ditto, for obvious reasons) has Superspeed plus the Stealth IO in Sprint for full inviso. 🙂 I did see a build where someone on Live, where it was probably 500M+ Inf, five slotted Brawl with purples for the recharge bonus.

It actually took 4 days once? Longest I heard of before they got their month's expenses and shut it off was under an hour. Their expenses are like $5-6k/month, so it fills pretty fast.

Yes, that part we weren't as surprised by as it locking both of us at our starting level despite leveling up during the TF. I thought in the old, long Positron days we had taken characters in below the max TF level, and leveled them during it, and had it get easier because we were allowed to increase during the TF.

So they don't adjust to your actual level on each mission as you progress, like regular content, and they ALSO lock at max level for the SF? We hadn't noticed that for TFs, but I don't know if we ran one underlevel. Darn, guess we'll be stuck duoing a +3 AV with ambush spawns, those Succubi in the ambushes hit pretty hard. . . 😛

So a friend and I started duoing this at level 37, and were kind of annoyed that the mobs were 40, but figured that the "classic" TFs and SFs may have been set to not spawn at your level. While running it, about half way in, we both dinged 38. It is still locking us at 37, so we are kind of struggling against the AV in the last mission. Any idea what is going on?

Regarding this section; "One of the changes Homecoming implemented was automatically unlocking the Incarnate system once you train up to level 50—no Mender Ramiel arc completion required (though you certainly can still do it if you want to see the story play out). Once you train, you’ll immediately start earning Incarnate XP—and not just from special Incarnate content, either, but from ordinary adventuring. The first batch of Incarnate XP will go toward unlocking your Alpha slot, and it unlocks pretty quickly—do a Task Force of any reasonable length, or even just get in a Rikti Mothership raid, and you’ll almost certainly have it unlocked by the time you’re done. And the other slots will follow that—a little more slowly, but keep adventuring and they’ll be done before you know it." Note that completing Mender Ramiel's arc immediately unlocks your Alpha slot, so that further content you run goes towards unlocking higher incarnate powers. That could be handy if you are a natural soloer and don't want to wait to run a TF or set of radio missions. If you are going to bother with it, then, run it right after reaching 50. Most of his missions are fairly easy to solo, but the Honoree one is rather challenging, and many people ask for help with it.

A friend and I recently made characters to run in Praetoria, following the "change sides every time" guide in the Guides section. When we finally got out (have to turn off XPs for about 80% of it to do all the arcs), we had to go redside, because both sides in Praetoria are arguably more villianous than most of the actual Villian story arcs. Sure, in Sharkshead, you help someone get revenge on an old foe and he pays you. In Praetoria you do things like nerve gas a police station to incite the populace against the Resistance, and that's when you are a Loyalist, if I recall properly. Our characters now look for the most cynical, destructive things we can do in Rogue Isles. And when we are lucky we find a mission with lots of ambushes, just like home, sigh. . . 🙂

I was on a Posi 1 a couple of weeks ago on my 50 that ultimately failed. The leader had been running it on +2 difficulty, this being his first TF, and after half a dozen attempts and team wipes to beat our dopplegangers in the last mission the team gave up. We tried having everyone log out and back in to reset it during play, but between one or two afks and lack of coordination couldn't get everyone to log out long enough (and we weren't sure how long that was) to get it set back down to +0. Myself and the one other person with a 50, who wasn't on that alt but rather a lowbie tank, even tried buying temp powers at the P2W vendor, but it wasn't enough. Ditto trying to get people to use insps, I dropped in under 15 seconds even with 50%+ defenses. I didn't quit it, and went in a day later and finished it solo, because the difficulty had reset back down to +0, and it was set for one player. So there is definitely an option if people want higher difficulty, but I don't suggest setting the floor any higher.

I had trapped 42, defeated 53, and hadn't gotten it, after reading this I just defeated up to 100. That got me the Pirate badge, and finished the BiB accolade for me. Confirmed it is now just a defeat, you do not need to trap them, which makes it a lot easier if you are a character without a taunt because it was fairly hard to lead them over there to the glowing "portal" things on the ground without killing them once you were leveled past it. If you are trying to collect the badge for trapping them, and don't have a taunt, one trick is to take an Oro mission to drop down to a lower level so you don't insta-kill them, or immediately flee because you are too high level. Warning, when you have trapped 10 or so, a bunch spawn around you, and they are a mix of lts and bosses and are +2 or so to the ones you have been trapping, so you can actually die using this technique. . .

Ice is also pretty good for proc slotting, but this would become a very complex exercise, as you tend to lose recharge and defense by slotting a lot of procs. How do you value doing more damage in your procced out Cosmic Burst, but at the cost of a worse cycle time for Neutron Bomb? Or vice versa? Epics could also matter a lot, my Rad/Rad defender gets as much damage from procced Dominate as from her snipe, even with 2 procs in the snipe, no other "real" ST rad attacks compare.

My main was a rad/rad defender back in the day, and was my first to 50 on Homecoming. I find it a great combo, because you can stand in your own debuffs and fire off your AoEs. Cones with the toggle debuffs can be a pain, because some mobs run out of the debuffs to get to you. A rad defender is also one of the best support characters in the game when you are exemping down for low level content like a Posi TF, I try to make sure I have inviso + Recall Friend even down there. I did not particularly worry about capping defenses, only 33.8% ranged, but if you are in your own debuffs against anything but AVs Radiation Infection has their tohit floored. Against AVs I team, or use a small purple to soft cap. The focus was getting the combination of Accelerate Metabolism and Hasten perma (needs about 75% global recharge), and having a wide variety of team support powers. At times I've used debuffs on one spawn, EM Pulse on another, and Mass Hypnosis on a third when the team was getting overwhelmed. At low levels on harder content, I may run Choking Cloud for additional mitigation, in Radiation Infection it can get most of a spawn held pretty quickly, and keep them that way. If you have Accelerate Metabolism perma, you should never run out of End on a team, I sometimes forget to turn off Superspeed and Sprint while fighting. 🙂 I took Psychic Mastery because I can proc up Dominate to be another snipe level attack, and I've prevented additional spawns from wiping the team with Mass Hypnosis. That can also work for clicking glowies when stealthing if a spawn is too close. If you really want self defenses, you have to drop some team support powers to get Weave in the fighting pool, or sacrifice a fair amount of recharge to get defense. Once I have Clarion T3 for perma mezz protection, though, this character can handle pretty tough content, if I took Aim + Atomic Blast probably even more. This build could potentially be improved with some of the new IO sets, there is a EndMod one that provides both some recharge and ranged defense, and Artillery, a targeted AoE one, gives very good ranged defense. http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/download.php?uc=1486&c=702&a=1404&f=HEX&dc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