MHertz

"Patience, yeah, yeah. How long will that take?" —Ed Gruberman

How about: Only use trains, ferries and zone gates for zone travel Must train only in Peregrine Island That won’t add a tremendous amount of difficulty once you reach your first travel power, but it would almost certainly require that you take one; that way you can’t use that power choice for something else.

Brute: easiest to play, most expensive to equip, least likely to learn about the game’s enemies. Brutes have good survivability, and with all of their status protection and built-in damage bonuses, they can fly through content. The flip side of that is that Defense and Resist enhancements tend to be among the most expensive (Damage and Healing are tops), and with your lovely status protection shielding you, you won’t even notice that certain enemies have stuns, holds, confuses or immobilizes until the late game bad guys roll around. Sentinels: on par with Brutes from an expense and learning standpoint, and not as powerful. The least expensive to equip are probably Controllers, but they aren’t easy to solo. However, as with playing any squishy type (Blaster, Defender, Corruptor, Dominator) you do learn a lot about what the enemies can do. Any archetype can make money on the auction house if you do a small amount of research.

Every archetype plays a little differently and you have to get used to its limitations. I'd say you're going about it the right way — by trying them. It's too easy in this game to hop on a team, zoom past 10 levels, and the realize you have no idea to play the archetype or the power set you've chosen against the enemies you're now facing. Being on a team, even a poorly slapped-together one, doesn't teach you much about solo tactics, and being on a good team will cover up a lot of your mistakes. First: different archetypes have different target priorities. As a Tanker you can afford to charge at the boss and let the minions fall by the wayside due to your AOEs. Your high durability and status protection means you're in no danger from the little guys while you whittle down the big guy. Switching from Tanker to anything else, you might say, "Gosh, I didn't know those guys had Stun. Huh. Who knew?" You never felt it. As a Brute, you have similar durability, but you're on this non-stop crusade of smashing everything in your path without rest, to make best use of Fury. Not all archetypes play like those, and wearing your Brute hat on a Blaster will get you crushed. As a Blaster, you might want to cut down the number of minions early, from a safe distance, before taking on the boss. Or maybe you want to focus on a lieutenant with mez powers (like in the Lost) or a summoner (as in the Banished Pantheon) or AOE knockdown (Ruin Mages in the COT), because you can't fight those as easily. You'll also learn which bad guys need 3 hits, and which you can eliminate in 2 or 1, and which ones you want to keep out of melee range. You'll learn when to switch targets. ("Let's see, I'll immobilize that guy, move over here, blast this guy, oops this one's getting too close but I have some punches ready to go. Now back to the immobilized one...") As a Scrapper (as with a Brute) your defenses mature later, but you get critical hits, so you have to figure out the best way to make use of them. Both power sets have some soft control powers in a few things, like -Def or -ToHit or Slow, so figure out where to apply those. You just have to think more, is all. Some of it also comes down to your build. As a Blaster, yes, you could take Boxing/Tough/Weave plus Combat Jumping to give yourself a sliver of defense. But maybe you're better off taking an extra high-damage melee attack for anybody that gets in your face. "Dead" is the best status effect you can bestow on an enemy, and Blasters do it better than anybody. Back in the day, people used to use all kinds of tactics to take on enemies: sniping from far away, pulling a small group of enemies, herding them into a small space with a Tanker ... now the teams just steamroll everything, and you don't learn good tactical approaches for solo in that environment.

What are you thinking, maybe Steam/Thermal or Steam/Cold? Maybe make a Steam/Empathy and call him Spa-der Man.

This is all doom, most likely, or maybe it isn’t, but I’m certain it’s one or the other! Or maybe both or neither. In any case, it is news. All we need now is someone who understands the old animation systems and can start making new power sets. Plus a total upgrade of all of everything. Plus I could use an iice cream bar. You know, the usual.

I don’t know about pseudorandom; maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. I figured it was some kind of hash or algorithm that could be calculated to maintain consistency without having to have the character online. If players were allowed to set their own colors, I fear you’d end up with a huge proportion of players going for Evil Blood Red Super Darkity Evil Maroon color.

I like the feature where individual names are assigned different colors in the chat. It helps keep things sorted and draw the eye toward people whose colors you recognize. It would be wonderful if we could preview the color of the name in the character creator / rename window, so we can make adjustments if there's a specific color we're shooting for.

I used to be a voice actor like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.

Debt is the game's way of telling you to be more careful. That's about it. It does slow down your XP gain, although you still make money (unless you have 2xp turned on). So it's also the game's way of telling you to spend more money on your build, I guess.

No, it wouldn’t make me want to PVP. The question is, why would it make PVP any more fun for anybody? As it stands, there is a community of people who like to PVP, and who have a modicum of skill. I’ve heard PVP described on this thread as more exciting combat against more engaging enemies. Am I wrong, or does this idea propose to water down the experience? “I love PVP because it’s such a dynamic challenge! Let’s make it better by luring in some clueless and unenthusiastic loot-hunters!” I think not. Besides, if the devs wanted prisms to be easier to get, all they have to do is tweak some drop rates. But as far as I know, they don’t want them to be super-available. If there were to be any loot, it wouldn’t be that.

Here are some silly names I thought of for characters I will never actually make: A rodent with ice powers: Mousicle A canine in a suit with fire powers: who works for the FBI: Fox Smolder A chicken with psionics: Professor Eggs

There’s an easy compromise. Charge by the letter. Different rates for different channels. HELP: free. GENERAL: first 100 characters free, then 10 inf/letter. LFG: free, but 10,000,000 for each letter in the word FARM. LOCAL: Free when your speaking range is set below a certain threshold. BROADCAST: Your character is deleted.

I’ll do you one better. Why are you?

Stan and Lou, obviously.