Heraclea

Got this character to level 50 today. Overall, I am disappointed, but only slightly. Movement speed is not all that useful in CoX, and on some maps (Council catwalks, caves, Oranbega) it is a liability. Super Speed is a limited travel power, though Combat Jumping makes it more palatable. The character does not really feel like she is outpacing her enemies. I think Kinetic Combat is better than its reputation. The t9 attack one shots most even level minions. The AoEs are nothing to write home about, though. It does not really have good synergy with Radiation Defense. That's a resistance and regen set that, like most of the others, relies on click powers for buffs and heals. The t9 of Kinetic Melee has a long animation, long enough that mobs are often dead in team play when it finally fires. Worse, your self heal and regen buff may be caught in animation lag. Too much of the set's damage is offloaded into the t9. Kinetic Combat would probably do better on a set and forget defense set like Willpower. For building a speedster here, the obvious choices don't seem to work well.

Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys - Smoke on the Water

Melee generally had been in a bad place for a couple years of the old game. Too much of the newer content was specifically designed to bypass defense sets: - sending hordes of floating mobs immune to knockdown to spam psi attacks from range, - draining endurance, - giving all the minions kinetic debuffs, - using unresisted mez like Confuse, or - just giving Holds to every mob to the extent that even a tanker would be quickly overwhelmed. If you want to run this stuff, don't team. It's all solo only at +0/1. More mobs is bad. Having a team just makes it unplayable for whoever is taking point. The nature of the new material is probably the chief reason why I didn't play much for a couple years before shutdown. I could see the writing on the wall when the Trapdoor mission was made impossible to finish on a tanker. The message of the late added content seemed to be Shut Up and Play Your Controller. The EM nerf was just salt in the wound at that point. And Imperial Defense Forces are as tiresome at 50 as Longbow and Arachnos were redside. This is why melee ATs generally do not need nerfs. Melee DPS needs to be competitive with blasters at minimum. But if anybody really wants to test Titan Weapons on a scrapper or brute, make Invulnerability your test defense kit rather than Willpower. Willpower has too much sustain built in to show what TW is actually balanced around. Playing TW requires build choices you might not ordinarily make to overcome its inherent difficulty.

I will be late tomorrow if I am able to get on at all, alas.

It wasn't until last week that I got a brute to 50; two tankers were 1 and 3 for me. I do have a controller at 50, a recreation of one of my characters from the old game, but I find the AT fussy and difficult to play. Most of the newer content seems to favor or require them. Other than brute, all of the old redside ATs are well behind. Surprised to see MMs so low, since it seems to me there's at least one on every team any more. My highest here is 12. I don't enjoy the AT; too many things to keep track of.

RIP Ric Ocasek.

Job one is to get as much recharge as possible into Ablative Carapace, DNA Siphon, and Parasitic Aura. Hasten is a definite yes for you, and Spiritual alpha is also a good idea. Take something that adds a little defense, like Combat Jumping, to mule a Luck of the Gambler recharge IO.

Rosanne Cash - Motherless Children

Archery is quite appropriate to Amazons generally. Greek mythology locates the major Amazon homeland to the northeast of the Black Sea, Ukraine, Russia, and Georgia, part of a large area they generally called Scythia. This was the home of the Kurgan people, an archaeological culture that most scholars believe were the original speakers of Indo-European languages. They are so called from their 'kurgan' burial mounds. Archaeologists have recently discovered that among the honored dead given warrior burials in them with chariots and weapons, around a quarter of them were women. (Until recently, no one thought to check the skeletons; they assumed anyone buried with a sword, crown, and a chariot was male.) So there just might have been a bit of truth in the mythology: women apparently fought in wars and held leadership positions in those societies. At any rate, Scythians were famous for their archery skills, and especially with the technique of shooting from a moving chariot. Now we need the HC team to give us chariots as a travel power. (And earlier mythographers like Robert Graves and Marija Gimbutas got it bass-ackward. They usually portray Indo-Europeans as patriarchal conquerors who conquered and imposed male dominance on a paradise of women's equality.) I would go with the compound bow the CC calls the 'Mongolian' one, I think, as the most appropriate weapon for a warrior from the Eurasian steppes.

I need to make a similarly tricked out version of my Bio/Spines.

My purely subjective impressions from playing on Pineapple solo. Damage is a bit better but hardly excessive. I made an uber Heraclea with the same powers. This one has all the ATOs, six tier 4 incarnate powers, and so forth. Hitting multiple mobs with Shadow Maul was slightly easier - on Live I treat it as a single target attack that occasionally gets lucky. It still benefits from corner pulling. I wouldn't notice endurance improvements because Heraclea on Live has Conserve Power, Physical Protection, one of every Recovery unique, and two Performance Shifters. Damage did not seem all that larger. and hardly seemed excessive. Clearing mobs on theRoman wall was not noticeably faster when Judgment was down. Still did not have the effective damage throughput to beat down Imperious, who appeared as an enemy in an AE story I played.

Melee sets generally have been slowly written out of the game since the days of Going Rogue at least. This is why the serious proposal on Test now is to buff Tanker damage and AoE performance across the board. The fact that one melee set makes it possible for those who take it on a DPS class can do maybe two thirds the damage of a blaster with a lot less sustainability, does not mean that it is overpowered; it means that the rest ought to be raised to its level. Scrappers already bring too little to team play. Don't shut them out of their core function.

If anything suggested by this ever makes it into the live game, for the love of God let us share incarnate salvage, currencies, and crafted abilities, at least on an account wide basis. Removing all the IOs from a retired character to redistribute to others is one thing. At least this game is not like others, where all the gear of an unplayable character turns into vendor trash. But all the grinding done for their incarnate stuff is simply lost time and effort. Please don't let all that go to waste.

It seems odd, but probably the #1 factor that puts me off trying certain sets is powers named in Japanese rather than English. You wonder whether embarrassing mistakes in grammar or usage are there. It makes it hard to know from the list what the powers do.

Eddie Money - Two Tickets to Paradise RIP Eddie Money, 1949 - 2019

It will be a sad day for me if I have to strip and delete my TW/WP scrapper. But she's sitting on IOs my other characters could use, and will never be played again. I may try and start over on a different set of servers. I'm for a blanket ban on this sort of busybody thread. Bad enough when it's the PvP crowd.

When I was levelling Heraclea I joined a mission team. They were running Night Ward missions, against enemies that looked like evil constables among others. I got held, confused, and held some more. On a tanker. We finished the mission. I found an excuse and left the team. I have not set foot in the zone again except to get characters into Cimerora, and once when I mistakenly took a Belladonna Vetrano arc. Not a good use of my time. And definitely not fun.

The biggest problem with click mez protection is all the -recharge flying around from the early game (Vahzilok, Council) to the late game. It's fine to say you can use it as an emergency escape when mezzed, but what if it isn't up?

The happy return of our game is something that may be snatched from under us any second. While I get to play it this summer, I want my characters to get to their full potential. Given this stark fact, 'too easy' progression is a meaningless expression.