Yomo Kimyata

I need to get a KM to incarnate to really judge, but from my experience so far: I play with the sound off, because listening to the same sound thousands of times get old. Unless it's the first few notes of Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" which is pure gold for eternity. I'd love it if *every* sound had a bunch of variants and got randomly assigned each time, but that's a nutso wish. I understand that the slow animations are to compensate for the higher damage, but the animations are so *needlessly* long. Take any of the spin animations for staff, for example. They take a long time, but they are justifiable because, well, you are spinning and that needfully takes time. Sky Splitter, in contrast, has no real purpose to be so long except to dampen down the DPA. I feel like the entire KM set has needlessly long animations. I personally would prefer shorter animations and lower damage for the same DPA. Maybe more later this week as I level some alts higher.

I'd be very surprised if a tank was rejected from an endgame group for being a tank v. a brute or a scrapper. In fact, the only real distinction if I were making a team is that I'd want to know if the tank wanted to take point and/or used taunt. And if not, no big deal. I've tanked with MMs and corruptors when the tanker on the team didn't want to take point. By 50, and especially with incarnates, I don't see a lot of difference in ATs. Just about any well built melee character can plow through +4/x8 solo, IMO, so as far as I'm concerned, I just want my teammates to be good company. Or Rikti monkeys. They are fun.

It's the lyrics from the beginning of "Ice, Ice Baby"...

Stop, collaborate, and listen.

I just made a villain named Ignorance of the Law, and it felt appropriate to make her a Savage Melee/Willpower brute. I'm having a more difficult time coming up with an AT and power sets for my other new villain, Extended Warranty (sadly Extended Vehicle Warranty is too long...). Obviously a robot of some sort.

I have a handful of alts that run variations on this. I wanted to see how easy it was to get OMG LEET builds (answer: easy) without using all the tools that HC has provided. I documented a bit of a "no buy" build a while back, but got bored (more with the build than the concept) once proof of concept was established:

I spent December mostly giving funds away. I'm really hoping that the devs will read the whole economy thread and put in a large-scale inf sink, but I'm not optimistic. Instead we will get more tricks like whoever either bought or took off offer over 1k lotg proc today. I prefer my market shenanigans to be less quixotic. At this point, making inf is just muscle memory or providing supply in under-supplied markets. I don't think I'm anywhere near a trillion, and I don't expect to get there in calendar 2021.

Any official word on this? @Faultline?

I can confirm that I just bought a pack at 10mm but did not buy a pack at 9.999mm. I don't know if that's because they didn't change the seeded price or if people are offering previously purchased packs at 10mm.

I will say, this is inspiring me to set a much smaller goal. I am currently on a rad/bio brute that I'm enjoying playing post-50. I think I would eventually like to accomplish all lvl 50 redside missions on him at max, and although I dislike the Ouro interface, it does give me a convenient check-off list. If I can keep my attention on that, then *maybe* I could *consider* something more comprehensive, but I suspect that OP has a lot more sticktoitiveness than I do.w

I have the same problem, and I cannot access any epic powers other than the first two. I'm trying this at full screen.

I haven't been a part of a Hami raid on HC for a bunch of reasons. The main one is that it doesn't seem like fun. Back in the day, it was a real time commitment, and a social one as well. Now, I don't tend to have large fixed blocks of time to commit to this game at this point, so blocking out 60 minutes for 55 minutes of organization and 5 minutes of action seems like a bad tradeoff for me. I'm not a badger, so the only relevant rewards are HOs, and I can buy all I want on the AH. It also sounds like (based purely on reading other people's posts) a trivial accomplishment. I'd much rather do something slow and challenging than fast and (IMO) cheesy. But I'm kind of post-reward at this point in HC. I think it would be cool to solo Hami, and I do not doubt that it will happen at some point.

This sounds needlessly tedious to me, but many things I do are probably needlessly tedious to others, so... I prefer melee to ranged, and there are so many ambushes redside that I would probably go melee. And then, I would want stealth for making tedious missions shorter. AoE for defeat all missions, good ST for bosses/EBs/AVs. Maybe a staff/bio stalker. I've got a lot of experience with those two sets and I actually enjoy them.

This is so interesting to read what other people do, and stuff like this almost always leads to my playing around with new ideas. When I started HC, I would 2-slot health (miracle proc and Numina proc) and 2-slot stamina (perf shifter proc and end mod) but now I usually use base slotting (panacea and perf shifter proc) and make up endurance other places.

I'd change the reward structure on everything in terms of merits. My understanding is that through data mining, the devs wanted to give rewards based on how long it took the speed runners to do it. So we get rewards for Eden, a timed 4 hour mission, that are 7 merits because it is *possible* to run it really quickly. If you do it in ten minutes or you take the full 4 hours, you get seven merits. I don't even know how to do it in ten minutes, but it really used to be an enjoyable few hours. But now it's pointless because the reward is seven merits. I advocate making a range of times and rewards for each TF based on time taken. If you want to solo Synapse over a week, you get the max. If your team wants to defeat all in the Yin TF and take an hour, you get the max. If your team speed runs, you get the min. This partially solves the "defeat all" missions that people seem to really hate (I have no idea why) because you get more merits the longer you take, to an extent. This, of course, will cheese off the speed runners. So be it.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

This came up a while back, and I got the name on Reunion (taken on all others). I seem to recall I made him an Energy/Energy blaster slotted for knockback...

Great post overall, but I for one am definitely saying to 4-5 slot all your attacks first. There aren't that many serious threats until you get into your 30s, imo, and attacks are where it's at.

Don't worry, you'll make it up in volume...

RE: merits blue side, it is well worth doing the entire Hollows arc and even more well worth doing the entire Faultline arc. You not only get merits from the story arcs but you also get a significant bonus from doing all of them. My general path for solo blue side play at double xp/no inf is; 1-2: outbreak 2-6: starter Atlas missions 6-9: Kings Row, get the radio from a detective, run three radio missions, save Atlas bank 9-12: get Hollows contact, run first two arcs (finish Frostfire) 13-14: do steel canyon radio missions, save KR bank. freeze xp at 14 back to Hollows, run Julius arc and Talshak arc. auto complete the Atta mission (it’s fun, but you will out level if you are not careful. Turn back on xp for rescue Sam Wilmott mission and ding 15. Get 20 merit bonus for all Hollows missions. 15-18: back toSteel Canyon. Combination of radio missions and safeguard (think that’s Skyway bank) and then Montague missions until he sends you back to Atlas to get the Lost Cure. 19+: Faultine! Start with Temblor, Penny, Doc Delilah (unlocks Ouro portal at 20),agent G. Use cure lost liberally in Pennys missions (but not on mission bosses or else some missions cannot be completed. Particularly the ones who guard Pennys dad. Four quick arcs and again a bonus for all Faultline missions. at this point I’m usually around 24 or so and I will branch out. As you can tell I like the safeguard missions, so i might freeze xp if I’m too close to 25.

It all depends on how much scratch you have. I like to slot as early as 7, but if I was hurting on inf I'd wait until 12 or 22. I think the best investment to make on a new character is the Kismet 6% to hit, which goes for about 3-5mm, and you can slot it in a defense power at lvl 7. Given that, I generally advocate 1x accuracy, 1x end red, 2x damage (or mez), 1x rech red, 1x damage in that order.

You get Malta red side.

Some people really want to build it themselves, old school. I’ve done that on a few characters. Using converters is much easier and cost effective, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

Awesome, very helpful! Cold/AR is another defender that was untouched in the March list (mine is languishing in his 40s) but is much more enjoyable to play. I went with WOs instead of procs for three reasons: the odds of triggering are too low for my tastes; more fire/cold res and slow and mez resist are nice (I may swap out the kismet accuracy for the Winters gift slow resist); if I go with musculature then lots of “wasted” damage ED gets ignored. I may be the only one who really likes Beanbag. If I’m going against a hard boss, I can put him away for a bit with two shots. (I actually used Sonic Cage while leveling as well...). But yeah, it’s skippable. You are dead on with Dark, and I’m probably better off with Bonfire/Fire Shield/Melt Armor but then I lose an endurance tool. Hmmm. I’m a recharge junkie, but you’re right, it really only helps with Liquify and epic pool powers. I could drop Hasten completely and throw some FF +recharges in some of the bullet powers, but not sure what to replace it with. Maybe Weaken Resolve? More -res would be nice to assist the lethal damage. I actually don’t have tough activated in that build; purely a mule power! thanks!