Go0gleplex

Clowns! Gotta have Clowns! Elemental Spirits (non-daemonic), Bugs, and humanoid golems. 😄 If they did an Air master - Powers: Vacuum, Wind blades/lance, Implosion, and Air Hammer/Ball are musts IMO.

Not affected me at all other than being happy seeing more toons on Torch when I log on rather than a near ghost town. :)

Don't discount foreign languages for names as well. I had a KM/EA Brute named Mass Meister since Mass Master was unavailable. Fire Bolt taken...go German with Feuerblitz. Sounds just as cool. Or you can get a misdirect such as Leech using Japanese becomes Hiru (close to Hero) Just don't use Welsh...I'm Welsh descent and not even I can pronounce much of the language. LOL

I've never had any issues with timed missions, Veles included. Most of them I don't even hit the halfway mark before completing...and that's going solo. I'd simply like to see a LOT more variety in villains throughout the zones rather than focus groups by level band. It's not like the bad guys are lacking numbers. 😉

Exactly. Coordinate. Communicate. Take a couple seconds before blasting into a tough fight to get everyone lined out about who's expected to do what. Things go a helluva lot smoother in my experience. (and not just in CoH/V) :)

Yes, tankers have an inherent aggro but it is limited to pretty much those in melee range. My original toon, Obsidiman, was an Inv/SS tank before the nerfs and I specialized being at the center of 20-30 mob dust ups. Taunt had to be spammed to keep the mobs at the fringes of that dog pile focused on me...just punching would let about half or more aggro on the squishies which is a failure as a Tank. With the now standard (nerfs) defense levels, it's pretty much suicide sinking in to more than ten mobs unless your healer is on the ball, but Taunt is still necessary to reign in the fringe mobs where the inherent aggro is weak to keep them off the squishies which is the whole point of being a Tank...in fact it was pretty much THE signature power of the Tank outside of the high defense. The reason Taunt has a range to it is also for the purpose of drawing the loose mob aggro back onto the Tank before they can reach the squishies...if the walking cuisinarts (scrappers) haven't shredded them by then.

I dunno. Given I play solo, taunt is pretty much very low on my priority list for powers. I think I have only one brute with it and I almost never use it. Now...if in a team, yeah, Taunt is an essential.

I'm sitting on a pillow...no names. 😉 Seriously though, some folks have a LOT (scores to hundreds) of alts and if running groups, get them to 50 fast so those are legit protected and wouldn't free up anyhow. I've got about 20 toons myself that I rotate playing and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. Several times I've had to come up with different names than I first thought up though, just part of the inventive thought process.

Yeah. The grandstanding...preemptively attacking (and drawing aggro down on everyone needlessly)...rushing ahead to hit the bosses while everyone is getting stomped by ticked off minions...and so forth back in the old days is why I am pretty much strictly solo these days. It wasn't limited to just the PUG TFs but any PUG mission group it seemed...and I already have a short fuse for stupid. Ignorant I can deal with. Stupid however; Just nope! Feed 'em to the xenos and good riddance to bad rubbish I say. I had a couple good teammates towards the last couple years playing but RL got in the way and we lost touch sadly. If you can find a good set of teammates it does make things funner, wilder, and easier in the long run but one idiot with bean curds for brains is all it takes to curdle the milk as it were.

The found the "I" in Team though. It was hidden in the A.... (refer to meme) :P

I've stopped and killed the dropped bombs and as soon as I've killed one, the Rikti start teleporting in on my location within a minute or so. Done this on St. Martial, Port Oakes, & Skyway City so far.

I've been running a Storm/Time blaster for a while now solo. Time has temporal healing-continuous heal over time which is really really handy once you get it. It also has a couple close powers that can make mobs at melee range seriously regret their life choices.

Anything and everything I can to avoid Kings Row and the endless Skull missions unless I'm feeling a bit M other than to get the exploration badges. Once I'm done with Atlas, I'll usually go to the Hollows, then Steel. That is if I'm not just running gold side til 20-30. I tend to avoid or limit my stay at Port Oakes as well due to the absolute boredom (few mission contacts other than the Radio) when running Red side...and Grave's missions are simply unappealing to me. Talos and IP are both rather monotonous as well. Being solo, no Task Force runs for me.

I solo exclusively...with many different arch types so I can say this with confidence; ALL arch types are survivable if you play smart rather than like a murder hobo laying waste to everything as soon as it's sighted. Some power combos make it a bit more challenging but out of about 30 toons over the last year plus I've only made maybe a dozen hospital visits between all of them. 😉

If by early content you mean; go to contact, get mission, go to mission entrance and blow thru per mission objectives, return to contact; rinse repeat with adding powers and enhancements as you level up...then yes. Granted it goes much faster if you're part of a team with larger groups of mobs to deal with than it does solo. But there is story-like content in with the clues, contact mission briefs/debriefs, and other things. One of the fun things for me personally is exploring the different zones though to be honest, red side and gold side are the only ones that seem like proper cities...more gold side than red even. That said, no reason to feel bad if you can't get enthused. Everyone has switches that flip for different reasons.

The traffic issues in P-town (heck, Oregon over all) are way too easy for me to get on a rant about. Suffice to say a LOT of issues related to sight and stop distances, approach grades, access management, and drainage/grading are ignored along with an overly optimistic view of driver psychology to get traffic to slow down. Think those skinny streets are bad for regular cars, EMS vehicles have it even worse and now they're all about adding bike lanes all over on already overly crowded substandard width streets. Combine all those ignored factors and it's no wonder why they have so many fatalities among bikes, peds, and vehicles.

Nice to see the Troll is alive and well...and still as shallow as a mud puddle.

I've been solo running Major Holocaust; a Fire/Rad Brute in the gold/red side on Triumph and he's been an absolute engine of destruction thru his career so far.

That's because you have everyone in city hall BUT the engineers designing the stupid things for bikes and pedestrians instead of the cars they're meant for. (road designer for nearly 40 yrs...ODOT = Oregon Department Obstructing Traffic. PBOT = Portland Bureau of Twits) The centerline strip should be a double yellow. The wide shoulder beyond the fog line stripe is likely due to the intersection being built to accommodate a future right turn lane or second lane for future development needs. The area looks like it's a business park or light industrial zone. Still, it's a major lawsuit waiting to happen for reasons that are non-relevant to the OP. :) That Swindon Traffic Circle looks to have been designed for two way traffic for some absurd reason. The number of collision points is terrifying. lol

Multi Pass is another name that should be avoided (insert free to ride jokes here). The hero guarding the bank should be named Access Denied.

I've been having some fun with an Ice/Time Blaster and Beam/EA Sentinel lately. Finding both highly effective.

How in the heck does someone get wiped in Praetoria? Did he aggro multiple groups or something? (oO) I play solo and have taken some pretty weak toons there and I might wipe once, maybe twice...usually in Neutropolis by the slums or reactors. I find Praetoria easier than blue and red zones personally even with all the psi attacks. (prefer dealing with those over the Vahz and CoT). But yeah, the highlights are amusing. Only thing that comes to mind there is 'what was the person thinking?' for most of 'em...'cause they sound more like bad choices than something wrong with the game. The tutorials and starter zones are there for a reason after all...simple common sense. Gotta agree with Doc Scorp.

I use the synonym trick as well pretty often or translate to a different language than english (who says all the heroes/villains come from english speaking countries after all?). I avoid the L33T stuff and things that would've given my grammar teacher a stroke. Ended up with some fairly good names too I'd like to think.

Fly for range attack users. Being out of melee range as much as possible leads to much better survival chances. Jump for melee most of the time though I may take Super Speed for a change of pace despite it making elevated destinations somewhat of a challenge to reach.

Yeah. I agree. At low levels the contacts really don't link up...a lot of the MI to CD seems to rely on Dr. Graves missions or you get stuck doing a lot of newspaper stuff to get introduced to contacts. And there really doesn't seem to be that many of those. At least in my experience so far. But...back to OP topic: I'm in the red zone about 50% of the time I'm playing, though I pretty much stick to solo though willing to help out if I have time. On Excelsior General Killerwatt or Cerebral Scarab are causing mayhem while on Torchbearer Major Holocaust is tearing up St. Martial while Fusillade has just started busting heads in Cap au Diable.