Lazarillo

Give me a reason to take Thunder Kick without feeling like I'm having to sacrifice effectiveness. That's all I ask, really.

Number Six's arc was intended to be Praetoria's last hurrah, more or less. People were burned out of the setting so they just kinda nuked it. I think Marchand/Mr. G are supposed to take place afterwards to show what the "survivors" are up to in Primal, but I might have that backwards. Kallisti Wharf was meant to kick off a wholly new story arc facing Battalion. Tyrant himself would've had a part to play during that arc, but I don't think there were any other solid plans related to the fate of Praetoria that they spoke of for that story arc.

For me, it was definitely Defenders. Especially when I was starting out and mostly solo (heck, even as time went on...I swear, the teaming on HC is better than it ever was on the original servers, for whatever reason, it's great), as well as just being in my early days of CoH, when I progressed characters very slowly, the low damage and often middling effects of the low tier support powers meant the AT just started way too behind the curve for me to every be able to appreciate playing them. I think I finally started to appreciate playing one more when Time Manipulation rolled and I was able to run a Time/Rad who played more like a Tank (and ended up being my "main" for most of the original game's last year or so). I've also developed a real love for a Pain/Sonic Defender that I was able to make on HC thanks to some proliferation, who is pretty freakin' amazing.

I wonder if you could simulate that on the defense side, at least, with, say, a noncombat pet and something like Energy Aura? And for offense, I believe that was in one of the never-completed Origin pools. If HC decides to touch on those some more like they did with Force of Will, maybe the opportunity will arise.

I didn't start playing CoH until i5 (the day it was released, in fact, though that was simply coincidence), but the first character I ever played, and the one I'd had my eye on trying for some time before that thanks to the big old 100-page online game manual that showed all the powers, was a Fire/Ice Tanker. It just looked like such a cool concept, not to mention how all the guides talked about it being a really strong build (little did I know, my first day being i5...). I didn't actually end up playing him very much he never even cracked 40 back in the day. I did rebuild him for Homecoming, and he...kinda stalled again, right around the same spot. I'm not sure why I have so much trouble getting him over that hump.

I've done a few like this, actually. My Fire/Fire Blaster became a Fire/Atomic, in part 'cause I didn't like the constant tick-indicator from Cauterizing Aura and in part because his arch-nemesis (who gave him his powers) was radiation based, so it seemed apt. Speaking of said arch-nemesis, he's a Brute now, instead of a Corruptor. One of my very first villains was a Mind/Thorns Dominator with the gimmick that the "Mind" part was provided by the decorative panda shoulderpiece (a possessed doll) and the "Thorns" were provided by the "main" body being a robot. Switched to Mind/Dark with the body being a witch instead so the poor panda doesn't get impaled every time his partner uses her powers. And then there's my main, who I "unrebooted". On the old servers, I mained a Claws/Invulnerability Scrapper for many years. However, I didn't really like some of the changes that came with the animation upgrades, so I changed to Dual Blades/Invulnerability and more or less kept the character that way until the game ended. When the game came back, I remade the character as Claws/Inulnverability again. And then changed again and switched to Willpower. And then decided on both. WP's the Primal character, Invuln's the Praetorian.

It's maybe not so great, but I feel like any power that is situationally useful without having to toss any enhancement slots on it is potentially Worth It.

Bear in mind also that you can only have a limited number of open story arcs. Check for the book icon on any of your old remaining contacts...if you're at the cap (which IIRC, is 5), Crimson will never give you his arc until you go back and finish one of the open ones.

In fairness, this is because there really isn't any sort of legitimate reason you're going back and forth from building to building, outside of "the old devs needed to think up a trial, so they decided to just put all the awful ideas still left after Keyes in one place".

It's not simply that it breaks Hide, it's that it breaks Hide while not giving the benefit normally associated with breaking Hide (that is, a Critical hit), and it's not like Stalkers need the gap-closer since they can just jump in normally while Hidden.

I recall reading (though it's been so long that I've no idea of a source, I'm afraid), that Praetoria's arcs were originally conceptualized as late game content, then changed to be new starting zones, which is why the difficulty can be pretty murderous to low-level characters. Of course then, in a double twist, the Resistance who were never properly scaled down from 40+ stuff got scaled back up in some of the late game arcs, and they're just relentless when you do get to higher levels.

Derp, sorry. I feel like it's still worth making a selling point, though and not just as a small aside in an attack chain layout, though.

One other nice thing about Kinetic Melee on a Stalker (unless HC changed it; I haven't tried the set since the game came back) is that Burst always deals a Critical Hit when Hidden, unlike most Stalker AoEs. This means you're packing a consistently usable area attack about on-par in terms of damage as a Corruptor nuke (albeit with a much smaller radius). Not exactly to be sneezed at.

The Sentinel version, FWIW, in my experience does show the tick if it heals you...just not when you're at full health. Actually, this, to my mind, would probably be the ideal answer (though it might still not work for Panacea or Absorb, which is where more of the annoying little persistent numbering shows up...hopefully those could be coded the same way). At least then it would just be mixed in with all the other combat numbers. Though the difference of opinion is why I think just a "numbers on/numbers off" toggle through the options menu or Null might also be a decent solution.

So there are a bunch of powers (and even one IO) that constantly give a teensy amount of health or Absorb rating every few seconds: things like Soothing Aura, several of the Blaster sustains, and the aforementioned IO from the Panacea set. Probably a few others that I'm forgetting right off the top of my head. And it's annoying to just always have that little number appearing above my characters' heads. Is there any way it might be possible to hide those, at least when out of battle? Or at least make it an option (heck, I wouldn't mind if it were an all-or-nothing thing with visible numbers entirely, if that made it easier to make it optional, at least).

Honestly, no, probably not. It's probably not exactly "working as intended" that you can use bind trickery to pull this sort of thing off. But that being broken is probably not an excuse to break things further.

I'mma gotta /jranger this. The number of auto-powers wasn't low because there weren't as many powers to make auto, they were low because there were plenty of powers to make auto, and that's not what the game was designed for. If you really gotta do it, there are bind file setups for that.

So as per topic. My build at 50 is already pretty solid. I'm trying to decide between three potential options, and I'm curious what others might think: Option 1 - Musculature - Duh, it's moar damej. The Defense Debuff is not unwelcome on slash, but more likely I'd go Radial for a little extra endurance and because I think the Run speed bonuses might even let me swap out of my travel power. Option 2 - Cardiac - More Endurance would let me run Focused Accuracy pretty much always, which is nice but probably excessive compared to Musculature if I'm being honest. The Resistance bonus is rather nice because it'd bump my build up to the cap on Smashing/Lethal from its current position of about 70%, which in practice means about 20% less damage. And actually...for Claws, I feel like Range is kinda nice to boost Focus and Shockwave. So there's a wide range of benefits. Option 3 - Intuition - I'm actually leaning most towards this, but I'm not sure how well it'd work in practice. No, wait, really! The Radial path has the damage (and Def Debuff) from Musculature, and the Range from Cardiac, but at the sacrifice of any Endurance bonuses. Still, unless I run Focused Accuracy all the time, I'm not sure I need it. It's a weird little combination that could almost work, I feel like, though I'd not get any real benefit from it until I hit the Rare tier (but I expect that won't take long, by the same token). I don't focus on any one type of content, so I'm not, like, building with farming (or anything else) in mind, or the like, I've just found this to be a pretty talented generalist, and want to continue that reasonable "general" aspect.

In endgame content, I could kinda write off +4 being an accident. For an on-level group starting a Synapse? Honestly, if I zoned into that first mission and saw a see of purple with no advance warning, I'm not so sure I'd feel guilty dropping right there and then. But I'm always the type that with TFs or similar, I start low and figure I can scale the difficulty up if things are getting too steamroll-y. Somehow, I've managed to avoid the infamous +4 Synapses that I seem to hear about a lot but haven't experienced since the game came back (I do think it happened to me once way back in the day, though).

The difference is that EM already has 5 other attacks that do the job of "single target hit". It doesn't need another. Stun needs something that only it can do, and is weak because it animates so slowly. Moving it to the fastest hit of the set gives it a reason to be used, particularly if the Magnitude of the stun is upped so that you can even knock a boss out of the fight effectively, without having to rely on stacking many attacks and/or the RNG factor. Giving ET the current "Stun" animation moves its DPA higher than anything Brutes can get except for Freezing Touch (which is a DoT), and the self damage is already negligible as a "cost", so I feel like it's a fair trade off. Reverting it completely makes it more than triple the DPA of any non-Freezing Touch hit. There's no way that's a realistic expectation without some sort of drawback.

I feel like an attack that fast with a high-ish-but-manageable-Recharge is probably a little...excessive if it can be loaded out with procs, which defeats the purpose of trying to make it more useful as a mitigation tool while also (total 😛 )focusing on it as such a tool. Without a damage component it loses access to any damage procs at least, which is my thought in this suggestion. Disorient sets get Knockback, Immobilize, and ToHit Debuff procs, which, at least, maintains the "vision" I'm thinking for the power.

Step 1: Swap the Energy Punch animation. Use, say, the Bitter Ice Blast animation instead (see Vanden's avatar on this forum for how awesome that would look as a melee power). Step 2: Swap Stun's animation for the current Energy Punch animation. Increase to Mag. 4(?). Remove damage component, making it into a quick, heavy disabler that can't be turned into a proc monster. Step 3: Swap Energy Transfer's animation for the current Stun animation. Increase the self-damage component to compensate for its insane DPA. Step 4: Swap Total Focus's animation for the current Energy Transfer animation, so it'll look like an actual "Total Focus". Don't do anything else with it. Step 5 if you're feeling nice: Make Whirling Hands an AoE with hits that are small AoEs, like Beam Rifle's Refractor Beam for Sentinels. Voila, Energy Melee is peachy.

I'd always thought this was a neat idea, but was, like, "yeah, but how would the blasts work", and then you come around with your Vorpal shadows idea, and frick-frack it's perfect. CANIHAZPLZPLZPLZ?

Your version is not all that different from my own ideas. To me, I think the idea of utilizing "phantom" Psychic damage would be thematically appropriate for most of the pets' powers (if not all, even), and I think the sort of chaotic feel of "Illusion" should mean that all the pets should have the ability to Confuse enemies baked into at least one of their attacks. The way I'd break the powers down: t1: Spectral Wounds - Low damage attack. More or less same as the controller version. t2: Phantom Army - They'd have to be changed to take damage. Like the original decoys, they might use random animations but be functionally the same. Mostly melee with a default ranged attack for just in case (a la Ninjas) t3: Blind - Mid damage attack. Swap the Hold to a Sleep or a Stun, lest it be a little too strong, though, I suspect. t4: Typical first upgrade t5: Flash - PBAoE, like with Blind, change the Hold to a Sleep or Stun, add a small amount of damage to give it parity with other MM sets. t6: Phantasm - For bit of a "special" mechanic here, the second Phantasm would still be an invincible decoy, but its "life" would be tied to the first Phantasm. Ranged focus. t7: Group Invisibility - Long duration click power that Hides and grants defense to the MM and all pets. Pets attacking from Hidden status would do no extra damage, but their first hits would be able to apply a low magnitude Confuse. t8: Spectral Terror - Same general look, but is mobile and can fly around now, and has both damage and controlling powers. Ranged focus. t9: Typical second upgrade

Honestly, I'd like to see "No Redraw" be fixed to be less janky before it was added in as an option in more places. Right now "no redraw" just means no animation plays at all when the weapon appears. It gives an awkward, twitchy sort of look to the weapon sets that ruins the feel. Make it work right before expanding the unfinished product.