Yomo Kimyata

This is both wise and true. Unfortunately, CoH has always been a two-tiered game: first character; then all subsequent characters (since the needs v. inf/goods flow shifts disproportionately at higher levels). Your first character will always require strategic allocation of resources, and although I enjoy that part of the game, most people do not. The trick for me has been to help people help themselves rather than to reward leeches or exploiters, and I think I've come up with a pretty good system. It's ironic that the NCSoft thing happened when it did, since my involvement in this game is almost over. I currently spend significantly more time giving inf away than I do actually playing the game, and as it becomes a "chore" I'm trying to think of ways to help that require less personal involvement. Also, at first I thought the goats were using straws to suck blood from the white pilgrim's head.

Both are very viable. In CoH, ice tends to be correlated with control and safety, while fire is about damage. Fire Melee with Ice Armor will give you lots of damage from your offense with lots of safety from your defense. Ice Melee with Fire Armor will also give you lots of damage with lots of safety, but now your safety comes much more from your offense (Ice Slick) and your damage comes more from your defense (Burn). Fire/Ice is a simpler build. Ice/Fire is, in my opinion, ridiculously fun once you get into the reversal of where you get your safety and damage from.

I feel like Snarky is the kind of vampire that wears crocs, has a cape made out of old pairs of jorts, and drinks blood out of a hat like this:

If only there were some thread that described this in some detailed manner! Oh well.

I wanted to come back to these. Experienced has become a very useful power for me if I am looking to level a character quickly. Patrol XP, which you usually gain from being logged off in a spot that does not otherwise award you credit for a Day Job power, basically gives you a 50% (I think) bonus in xp until it is used up. This manifests as one or more blue bubbles in the circle around your level in the progress bar section. As you gain accelerated xp, the blue bubble are replaced with purple bubbles until your Patrol XP is used up. The max amount of Patrol XP you can have is ten bubbles, which is the equivalent of one level. the Experienced power I use as a booster for a character that I'm playing frequently. Each usage gives you five bars of Patrol xp, and generally I'll have used those up by the time the power recharges, so you can be functionally be consistently earning xp at an accelerated pace. This stacks somehow with the xp boosters from the P2W vendor, so it's fast leveling. Note: make sure that you have only five or fewer bars of Patrol XP before clicking this power or you'll waste some of it. Also note that this works on veteran levels as well. If you are using Empyrean Merits to build out your incarnate powers, this will help you gain them through the leveling process more quickly. ===== Windfall also works well in a post-50 environment. From the pop-up: "Claiming this reward will immediately increase your Influence gain by +25%. Also, this power grants the user a greater chance at earning Medium and Large Inspirations, provided the user is either a VIP or has the appropriate Reward Level for these Inspirations to drop in the first place. Additionally while this power is active, the user will have drop rates for Invention Salvage, Recipes, Very Rare Recipes, Rare Boss Recipes, Incarnate Shards (if level 50 w/ Alpha Slot unlocked) and Incarnate Threads (if level 50 and in an Incarnate Trial) increased by 50%. NOTE: Salvage and Recipe drops require the player to either be VIP, have Reward Level 7 or own an Invention License. Incarnate Shard and Incarnate Thread drops require the user to be a VIP subscriber. These effects last for 1 hour. You cannot claim a Windfall power while another is already active. Do you wish to continue?" Clearly, this text is from Live when this was a P2P option. It raises some questions that I am not bothering to find out, like "What happens when you use Windfall and you have an XP booster in effect?". I suspect that Windfall will help your drops even on items that you may have disabled (like Medium Inspirations) and that will help you get badges like Picky Eater more quickly. I also suspect that it increases drop rates of Enhancement Converters. ===== Revive is a much better power than I initially gave it credit for. It's a full resurrection that does not leave you stunned at all, so you can rez in a group, pop some purples and greens, and get right back into action. And since it is always available in your Character Items menu, you can draw on it even when you are in a mission. This can save you a lot of time and effort over going to the hospital.

Totally up to you and what you consider to be end game content. Energy is much more survivable at a relatively low cost in terms of inf and knowledge, which is one of the reasons I like to use fire! One thing against Energy in my books is the defensive power that makes my costume difficult to see; I didn't hit that Random button in the character creator to not see what it looks like! My lvl 50 axe/energy scrapper is extremely powerful and I use him to run solo AV Carnival arcs at +4/x8 without a sweat or even much strategy. My axe/fire is still in progress, but I anticipate it will take a lot more thought and effort, which I enjoy, and should do a bunch more damage. Note: Axe Cyclone followed by Burn should be illegal it's so satisfying.

I am not going to vote yea on anything that calls for MORE rewards.

No, but that was the only thing that made sense to me for that tradeoff. I clearly disagree -- -to hit resistance is incredibly valuable, and in order to fit in that power you needed to make balance choices. No longer -- now it's pretty much free. It wasn't OP before, imo. Now it certainly is, imo.

I'm not able to log onto beta at this point in time, but one change that seems very overpowered is the drop in endurance cost for Focused Accuracy/Targeting Drone. Is this because you have removed the -to hit resistance? If so, then I can understand the balancing act, but otherwise it's just incredibly overpowered.

The revamped battle axe is definitely a top performer, and should work well with all secondaries. Energy Aura will be a lot easier for general play than Fire, but Fire will ultimately be a higher damage dealer.

Of course, everything depends, but I've got a system that generally works pretty well for me which involves soloing quickly and I can generally justify it economically and in a role playing fashion as well. Lvl 1: Do the Breakout tutorial redside, pick up the exploration badge, choose Kalinda as my contact. Lvl 2: Level up with Arbiter Richard, kill one enemy (usually a RIP) which will give me enough inf to post the two large inspirations that I got during the tutorial for my initial seed money. Visit Kalinda, and on the way to the mission visit the P2W agent. Pick up Inner Inspiration, Athletic Run, 8 hours of double xp booster -- all free. Pick up Reveal (10k) and a 30minute jetpack (5k). Finish up Kalinda's arc for your first merits, and this generally dings me to level 5. Lvl 5: Visit all exploration badges in Mercy Island for 5 merits and the Long Range Teleporter (the jetpack is useful). Go to Pocket D, pick up both exploration badges to unlock Pocket D as a location. Go to Null the Gull and make all adjustments I want, and switch to hero alignment. Go to Atlas and visit all exploration badges for 5 more merits. Go to Kings Row, get a radio from a detective, pick up one exploration badge to unlock Kings Row (usually Wentworth History buff). I'll also generally start trading salvage at this point to try to build up inf for SOs and such. Run three radio missions, run Atlas Safeguard mission. This will generally get me to level 7 or 8, and I'll usually have enough inf at this point to buy SOs. Lvl 8: Use the Find Contact button to teleport to David Wincott in the Hollows. Run his arc and Flux's arc for merits and punk Frostfire usually at level 12 or so. Lvl 12: Use Find Contact to teleport to Montague in Steel Canyon, do one mission for him, run three radio missions and then Kings Row Safeguard pre-15. Then finish up Montague's Steel missions, go to Atlas and unlock the Cure Lost power. This generally gets me to 17. Lvl 17: Use find contact to teleport to Angry Young Man and start up the Faultline arcs.

In terms of how much actual inf you can carry on a given character, it is 2bn (2*10^9 or 2,000,000,000). If you want to hold more than that, it won't let you claim it. It's a little annoying that if you want to hold exactly 2bn, you have to orchestrate it because it won't let you partially claim something (like if you had 1.9bn and you tried to claim 200mm, it won't let you claim it, as opposed to being able to claim half of it and hitting the ceiling and leaving 100mm left to be claimed.) You can email inf to yourself (or others) and the maximum you can hold there is 999,999,999 inf per email. I'm told that you can have 100 emails, but it has always been a buggy system and I have seen lots of emails just disappear, so I generally don't store things there long term. You can also store inf in the form of bids on the /AH, which is where most of my inf is kept. There are plenty of non-existent items, but you always run the risk that the devs re-introduce these items!

9 or ten figures!

Two of the best characters ever created! And the cats. Don't forget about the cats.

Don't mind at all. Once I figured out converters (I think I was long gone from Live by the time they came along) I was logging on for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening on about 4-7 marketing characters. From late 2019 to 2021, I once estimated I was netting about 2bn inf a day from various niches. But you needed to do it everyday, and there was enough demand to sell everything twice a day. I retired all of those marketers long ago, but every single character I make now generally self-funds. And that's a few hundred.

I went that direction as well:

I challenge you to play an homage to Julia Child. My work is done here.

Could be, rabbit. Could be.

People mentioned the xp boosters from the P2W vendor. When you change your difficulty, increase size of mob over level of mob. You'll level quicker at +1/x8 than you will at +3/x3. Somewhere in the wiki there is probably a formula for it. Don't sleep on patrol xp. When you stay logged off for awhile and aren't earning a different day job badge, you will get up to 10 bars of patrol xp, which is colored light blue on your progress bar. When that is in effect, you earn experience (I think it's) 50% more quickly, and it does stack with the xp boosters, although I don't know if that is additively or multiplicatively. It is significantly faster. Patrol xp seems like a niche case, but there is a temporary power called Experienced which grants 5 bars of patrol xp per use. The devs periodically give that power out to players who log in during a specific time frame. More relevantly, you can get this power as a drop from opening Hero/Villain/Rogue/Vigilante packs and Winter Packs. According to Bopper, you can expect to get one to drop for about every four packs you open. Alternatively, you can open thousands of packs and let them build up. Interestingly, this power works on veteran levels, so if you are looking to fast track your incarnate status through the use of empyrian merits earned through leveling, this is a great power to use. Match it up with the Windfall power (also a pack drop) for added goodies.

You can still be invincible, but it's BS. Here I've got it 6-slotted with defense SOs and I only get a few % to my defense instead of the 120% that it promises!

For the title of tankiest, I'd want something that is at or near melee defense soft cap, at or near tanker resist hard caps, and has some sort of ability to heal on command. The problem I have with something like SR (and this is a personal problem, to be sure) is that even at soft caps, at least 5% of those attacks are going to get through and if you are constantly in the thick of it, those add up. Defense debuff resistance is also important, but you are generally only going to get that in defense-oriented protection sets or through incarnates. I'd think that my personal best would be something like radiation armor and either staff or titan weapons. The offensive sets have enhanceable and stackable melee defense powers, and I don't think you would have too hard a time making bulletproof builds. The downside is no DDR. Invulnerability would cover that, but it's just not as fun or as busy a set!

Maybe you should make a stone or fire controller and change the power appearances so they look like ice.

Personally, I prefer "ridonkulous", "terriblistic", and "completely non-existent return policy".

I've been winding things down for a long time and doing some cleaning up, including tallying some things up. As you may know, the kiosks blueside list a bunch of lifetime character stats, including some marketing stats. I don't think these stats are available redside or goldside. Over the last few months, I kept records of all characters on my main account, with the exception of 15 characters that were either still goldside and I hadn't brought/didn't want to bring them through or were redside and low enough level that I didn't want to spend the time bringing them to Pocket D and switching them to Rogue and checking their stats. Since April 2019: I have sold on the /AH a total of 478,203 enhancements, 2,131 inspirations, 6,221 recipes, and 1,155,880 pieces of salvage. I have no idea how many items I have vendored, but it's going to be a bunch. I'm going out on a limb here and saying that if you have ever bought an enhancement on the /AH from 2019 to 2023, the odds are rather good that you have bought something from me at some point! Happy hunting!

No matter what, your first character isn't going to be particularly self-funding until you get into your upper 30s. I'd suggest something that can use SO (single origin enhancements, available from most vendors) and be effective, like a broadsword/willpower brute. As you learn more, you can dip into IOs (invention origin enhancements, which provide set bonuses and other yummy stuff) and try more exotic characters. Also consider if you want to solo or team. I'm happy to give you, or anyone, start-up capital. Look for my "Salmagundi" thread in this forum.