Konru

There are two specific powers I know of that are good for sapping. In the Electric Control set (Dominatiors and Controllers) there is Conductive Aura. Out of the box it drains 10 endurance every 2 seconds PBAoE and accepts endurance modification enhancements. Which means you can be draining 18 to 20 endurance every 2 seconds properly enhanced. Since it's a toggle, it is very good at keeping an enemy drained once they're drained. The second is Short Circuit from the Electric Blast set. (That means Blasters, Defenders, Corruptors and Sentinels can use it.) Out of the box, it does 35 endurance damage on a 20s cooldown PBAoE. It also accepts endurance mod, which can push it up to draining 64-70 endurance per hit. In addition it accepts recharge, so you can fire it off every 11-8 seconds with depending on your investment in recharge enhancement and the Hasten power. In comparison, everything else I've discovered is either too weak, or too slow. For example Electric Armor's Power Sink has a good 40 base endurance drain, but a recharge of 60 seconds. Electric Armor's Lightning Field drains endurance every 2 seconds, but has a base 3 endurance damage, making it significantly slower than Conductive Aura. The ranged crowd also can get Power Sink from Mu Mastery, but this version has only a base 35 endurance damage and a 120s recharge. It doesn't seem that your archetype's base stats will affect endurance drain or recovery from powers, so your choice of Archetype should match your preferences. Defenders, Corruptors, and Controllers can do very well surviving until the enemy is drained using a Radiation, Dark Miasma, or Time defense set. Blasters and Dominators will be at higher risk in the beginning of a fight, but relatively safe once the opponents are properly drained. I don't have a full build for you, but this should help a bit get started on one.

There is a weakness to relying on accuracy enhancements. Accuracy multipliers happen after the base hit chance, to-hit modifiers, and defense modifiers are totaled up. So while the net result still tends to remain positive, defense bonuses and to-hit penalties tend to get multiplied as well. Using sky raiders as an example, Your base 39% to-hit will drop to 15% if just one NPC force field generator drops into the area. Even with a 2.0X accuracy multiplier, that gets to 30%. Two generators get dropped in the area in as low as +2 over your level and suddenly it is the enemy who is defense capped with the same result as a defense-capped player. Everybody misses constantly even with high accuracy. That's most likely to happen only if you run an instanced vs. Sky Raider mission with a large team. But when it does happen, your team's attackers are probably going to need to use their Aim power or pop inspirations to continue to fight, or somehow get creative in luring the opponents away from the generators. I'm sure you Incarnates are thinking you'll never see another Sky Raider again outside of an Oroboros flashback. But, I'm not sure the Sky Raiders are the only ones to worry about. Smoke Grenades and Dark based opponents seem to be rare, but present at any level and are quite capable of messing with your to-hit negatively. Tactics and other +to-hit powers are strong counters because they work before that accuracy multiplier. In my Sky Raider example above. That 15% to-hit inside the force bubble becomes a 25% to hit with one ally with a properly slotted Tactics. And if you have a 2X accuracy, that becomes 50%, which is a lot more workable than 30% without help. Three or four Tactics users on the team and these defense generators and to-hit debuff attacks just aren't threatening. Setting the mission difficulty to 0 or -1 also renders these defense and to-hit debuff attacks nearly useless because the base to-hit is just that high. Although fighting +3 or +4 does pay out significantly better rewards if you are able to efficiently. There are alternatives to Tactics out there. But they seem to be tied to specific power sets, while Tactics is available to everyone. Accuracy enhancements do help, but do not feel like a true alternative to Tactics to me.

From what I see, stalkers do have more critical-hit opportunities than scrappers, but partially pay for that by doing 10% less base damage. All stalkers have Hide, Placate, and some form of Assassin attack. Scrappers get Confront. Which means the stalker version of their attack and defense power sets has to sacrifice something in order to fit these Stalker specific powers in. For example, a Martial Arts Stalker wouldn't have access to Dragon's Tail while scrappers do. An Electric Armor stalker doesn't have Lightning Field, which scrappers, brutes, and tankers do. It does feel like when the lost power is a passive defense of resistance, some of that gets added back into a toggle defense or resistance to compensate. But when added up, scrappers are still a slight bit sturdier when it happens. Finally, scrappers have a taunt skill native, so they can act as a backup tank if desired. If the stalker wants to act as a backup tank he is going to need to dip into the Presence power pool, which is less than ideal. Stalkers to seem to be better at single target DPS. But it's the scrappers that are better if your team needs AoE or a backup tank.

Leadership itself is a weird set in that the effects are mostly small, but stack with your teammate's Leadership (and other) powers easily. So a whole team running Leadership can see some significant results. Of the first powers, I think Maneuvers is probably the better of the two if you have to make a choice. The defense bonus is bigger than it appears if you keep in mind it only takes 45% to cap an enemy's to-hit (not counting +to-hit powers or -def attacks). And while Maneuvers itself isn't going to cap anybody's defense, having 4 or 8 people running it significantly helps. Also, it accepts Defense IO sets, so you can get a few nifty special effects if you want. Assault is very popular, but not as useful as one might think. It only accepts Recharge and Endurance Reduction enhancements. So putting slots into it is a waste. But that does make it a good choice if you need the next level's enhancement slots to further improve one or two of your earlier powers. It's +damage adds to the enhancement value instead of being a true multiplier. So if you have 84% damage buff from having two IOs, for example, then with one Assault it becomes 94%, two assaults 104% (approx, since some archetypes are better or worse at buffing powers). It's really small unless you have a full team running Assault. Tactics may be somewhere between useless and priceless depending on what you're doing. That catch is that the default to-hit an even level opponent is 75%. A SO accuracy will push this beyond the to-hit cap. So at this level, tactics is a waste of endurance. The catch is, fighting above your level significantly drops your base accuracy, down to 39% at +4, or 30% at +5. Since tactics adds to accuracy before the multiplier kicks in, each person running tactics on the team will allow the team to keep that max accuracy at higher levels. So it becomes something essential to have for the "hard mode" crowd. Vengeance and Victory Rush I just haven't had much time to play with. Vengeance gives some wicked buffs, but requires a teammate to be defeated before you can activate it, which is something you really should be avoiding when possible. Victory Rush is mostly good to quickly get endurance for the next fight if your team doesn't have time (or doesn't want to take the time) to properly rest. But the long cooldown means you can't use it all the time unless you set a rotation with other teammates with the power. I would consider the most skippabe to be Vengeance. On the opposite end, Tactics is almost a must-have, and Maneuvers is probably the best (if less popular) way to unlock it. If you can afford it, having a set of Maneuvers, Assault, and Tactics, and forming a Supergroup with other leadership minded individuals is a great idea.

Just, wow. The base to-hit-you of anything you should be fighting in your level range, outside of PvP, is 50%. I think we all know that. So if the caps weren't there 50% defense means complete immunity. 100% resist, if the caps weren't there also would mean complete immunity. So as things work out, 1% defense is about equal in strength to 2% resist. Except when combined. There is something of a bad multiplier that happens when you have both. Defense is all or nothing, if the dice roll in your favor the attack is completely nullified, otherwise you take the whole attack. Resistance reduces the damage you take when you take damage. When an attack hits, resistance shaves a percentage off that damage. So if you had 30% defense or 60% resistance you would only be taking 40% of the damage aimed at you. But if you had half and half, 15% defense and 30% resistance at the same time, you'll be taking a bit more. 15% defense allows 70% of attacks through, then 30% resist allows 70% of damage through, so you'll be taking (.7*.7=.49) 49% of damage as opposed to the 40% of a pure defense or pure resistance build. So is it better to take defense or resist? It's actually complicated. But the short answer is that it is better to strengthen whichever your armor powers provide to the cap before worrying too much about the other. A Ninjutsu character probably should max defense before worrying about resist. An Invulnerable character should probably focus on resist before defense. The one exception I would make is with the minor power-pool defenses like Maneuvers, Combat Jumping, and Hover, as there are no resist versions of these powers. When the choice is to have or have not, why not get it if you can afford it?

Rad/Electric was one of my original and favorite characters on the live server, too. So of course I'm rebuilding her on Homecoming. It's only going slowly because I've got 3 or 4 alts, and a story-focused playstyle. I find Radiation is just a strong set regardless of what it's paired with. On the Defender, Radiation Infection has a 31% to-hit debuff out of the box. That can get up to 48% with enhancement, which is enough alone to cap the enemy at the 5% to-hit level before accuracy multipliers are applied. I do use Maneuvers and Combat Jumping, but solely as insurance against resistant enemies (and anything that manages to wander outside the anchor zone). Enervating Field is a 30% resistance and 25% damage debuff. Combined with Accelerate Metabolism and Hasten, our DPS output is almost blaster level. Sonic is popular pair with Radiation because the attacks give an extra 20% resistance debuff which really pushes the DPS past basic blaster levels. But we chose electric for a reason. I have my Short Circuit power with 2 IO Endurance Mod enhancements. So each time I fire a short circuit blast every opponent in the area loses a little more than 50 endurace. Bosses are running on empty after two hits. While I do find elite bosses are still high-risk, getting detoggled due to a lucky stun or hold hit is a lot less likely to be painful when said elite boss doesn't have the endurance to follow through before I can get my hastened toggles back up. Yeah, I'm having fun with this.

Haha, yes. I've done that a few times myself. But honestly, I do consider myself one of those people who just can't skip that one or two paragraphs in the story. I'm terrible as a team leader most of the time since people are always waiting for me to finish reading. The default difficulty is also rather ironically very close to the original difficulty settings. If you turn story bosses and archvillains on then you have the difficulty that the game originally came with (ignoring the newer inherent powers). But back then as long as you were solo, you wouldn't even see a boss unless it was part of the story. Scrappers did solo better than the other original 4 archetypes, but that just meant they were faster to progress more than being easier. Here are some of my impressions of the archetypes as they are currently implemented. Tankers: 70% of base damage of a scrapper, but more powerful defense sets and better HP to make up for it. The inherent that gives a 20% resist debuff to the target of the first attack in the secondary power set does help a lot, bumping damage to 80% to 84% of a scrapper. It only loses in comparison to scrappers solo because of the slower kill times. At the same time, they are actually safer than scrappers. Fire/Spines tankers actually were very infamous for a while as powerleveler builds who can gather up lots of mobs at a time and just burn them all down at once. Effectively making up for their "low" DPS by taking on more opponent at once safely. Other power sets can also do something similar if you look for the right powers. Defenders: Your mileage may vary, a lot. They have only 60% of a blaster's base damage and that +30% solo bonus doesn't help as much as it sounds. It adds to the enhancement value instead of actually multiplying damage like the tanker does. Some of the defender power sets are infamous for only affecting allies without doing much for the defender herself. However only a couple of the defender sets actually have powers that work like that. PBAoE healing and buffing powers fully help the defender, and anything that debuffs the enemy helps the defender as much as anyone else. Kinetics best power is an ally-only power but the rest of the powers can buff the defender to blaster levels of DPS while buffing her team just as much. Radiation is also famous for doing insane things like soloing proper archvillains because of a combination of damage, recharge, and endurance recovery buffing, accuracy, recharge and resistance debuffing, PBAoE healing, and even a way to keep the archvillain's insane regeneration turned of mostly. It requires Hasten to work fully, but it feels overpowered. Other sets will probably feel slow. But most of them are also pretty safe, too. Blasters: Soloing is as fast as scrappers, but more dangerous because they don't have any proper defense, resistance, or healing. But they do have the advantage of range. Hover can be a blaster's best friend sometimes as they can stay out of range of the ground-bound melee types (which hit hard) and only worry about the ranged attacks. It's a high risk but also high reward playstyle. Controllers: Primary set is a control set, secondary set is a defense set. This means that they fall into the slow but safe category, but may actually be the slowest out there without relying on very specific mechanics. Even though it was one of the original five, the Controller (along with Mastermind) eventually got locked behind the paywall. I presume because it wasn't really beginner friendly and the Devs wanted to cut down on complaints. Brutes and Stalkers: Both are close enough to scrappers in power to be interchangeable. Stalker powers actively shed aggro instead of drawing aggro, which becomes a real pain when your current mission is to escort a berserk NPC to the target or exit. But that's just play style and hardly a drop in the XP faucet. Corruptor: Practically the same as a defender. If it isn't Kinetics, Radiation, Sonic, or Poison, a corruptor will solo slightly faster and riskier than a defender, but the differences are really small. Dominator: The base damage of the dominator is only second to the scrapper and blasters, in spite what the character creation stat graphic says. With no defense, they can feel like nerfed blasters when facing an Elite Boss or Archvillain. But fighting lots of minions and lieutenants does make soloing fast and safe as they have the ability to actually kill stuff quickly while it's locked down. Mastermind: The mastermind by herself is like a defender with a defense set slightly worse than what controllers and corruptors get. But the catch here is that the mastermind is never alone. Right from the start they can pull out their own team of pets and can replace any losses every 2 minutes or faster. So the mastermind with their entourage of pets can actually be safer than a tanker while better than a blaster at DPS at the same time. It is not newbie friendly. But it is overpowered once you learn to manage the pets. Some choices are better at soloing than others. But I haven't really found anything that absolutely can't solo unless you are trying to solo the really tough stuff that wasn't meant to be soloed to begin with. Regardless, there is enough soloable and solo-friendly content to get you to the end of the game just fine. With the sheer quantity of low and mid level content, City of Heroes is the only game of it's type that allows you turn off XP gain and where people have good reason to do so.

Odd. It has been my understanding that the little book only means that a story mission is currently available. If you haven't run a mission for the contact then it probably means that the contact is set to give you the first story mission directly instead of making you run through a set of possibly random missions before introducing his story. Not that you actually started something. There is no way that I know of to turn the "book" off except to do the mission set or outlevel the content (which I imagine isn't happening to a level 50 contact). But you can consider it the same as a web site tagging "hot," "featured," or whatever on what they want you to look at. The book means there is more story here. If you aren't interested then just ignore it.

City of Heroes uses a rather clever system to adjust difficulty according to your needs. While there are city and hazard locations shared by everyone in that particular area, most of the hunting you do happens in instanced "mission" areas that are shared by only you and your team. That means by you alone if you don't have a team. The size of enemy groups and the frequency of big guys like lieutenants and bosses are determined by the size of your group when the mission area is created. Also, when solo you can actually choose to make yourself worth 2 or more heroes if you feel like what spawns for a solo player isn't challenging enough. You can also control within a reasonable range what level your opponents are compared to your hero. You can decide if you want to fight bosses as actual bosses or nerfed to lieutenants solo. You can also decide to nerf archvillains to simply elite-bosses solo. The default settings are just one notch away from the easiest settings. You fight even to your level, usually 3 minions or 1 lieutenant and 1 minion, who in total aren't likely to have more HP and DPS than you do. So soloing almost everything might even be easier than trying to get a team to help you. Mostly teaming up doesn't usually make things easier, but does give you slightly more rewards. However, big teams are still really easy most of the time. But there is still a catch in that "almost." Elite bosses are very rare, but won't get nerfed by the difficulty system, and Archvillains won't get nerfed below Elite Boss levels. So some archetype and power combinations may have no choice but to seek help if they want to complete that particular mission. But the good news is that unless you're the type that just can't skip the occasional paragraph of story, you can simply auto-complete or drop that mission and so something else for a while without any real penalties. (Auto-complete is a feature that allows you to complete a mission that you otherwise can't or don't want to do properly once every few days.) All added up, soloing anything to level 50 and beyond isn't that hard. Some archetype and power combinations can do it easier or quicker than others, but all of them can get the job done. Builds only become "good" or "bad" when you start comparing them to others.

My first serious character, and the one that I got closest to level 50 on the original game was a Radiation/Electric Defender. Why I didn't go Corruptor instead was actually rather simple. When City of Villains was originally released, I actually did try to make a Corruptor version of my character but was not happy with it. The Defender version of Radiation Infection has a base 30% to-hit debuff. After SO or level 25 IO enhancements, that comes out to 48% debuff, which hits the "defense" cap without debuff resistance. The Corruptor version starts at 25% to-hit debuff. So after the same SO or IO enhancements, I get pretty much 39% to-hit debuff before resistance. That pretty much doubles the chance I get hit in exchange for a net 9% DPS increase plus possible scourge crits. (17% more base damage, but you lose 5% each from the damage buff of Accelerate Metabolism and resistance debuff of Enervating Field.) I did not find it a good trade, so I went back to being a Defender and went Mastermind Robots/Dark for the Redside content. Mind you, this was all before 'Going Rogue,' so taking my Defender Redside wasn't an option for a long time.

Not quite, from what I read of that article on Paragon Wiki. From even level to level +5, critters have a base 50% chance to hit which defense subtracts from and +to-hit skills adds to. (Enemies that use +to-hit skills like Tactics are extremely rare, however.) That means a Mastermind's minions will be capped with 45% defense as long as they are fighting critters between even and +3 levels to the Mastermind. Minions level-2 with critter level+4 means the gap is 6 levels, with starts adding accuracy. Instead there is an accuracy multiplier that is added to lieutenants, bosses, and greater from a base X1.0, a 0.1 gets added each level up until it hits X1.5 at level+5. Since this multiplier is applied as the last step in the calculation, the 45% cap rule still holds. For example a level+4 (relative to its target) minion attacking a defense capped you or your pet has a base 50%, - 45% defense leaving it at 5%, then multiplied by 1.4 for a final to-hit chance of 7%. Lieutenants and bosses also aren't really levels above minions, but get an additional multiplier based on their status of lieutenant (1.15) or boss (1.3). So in worst case that level+4 boss would only have a 8.5% chance to hit. A Giant Monster which effectively ignores level differences and has a 1.5 accuracy would have that cap at 7.5%. If I am reading that correctly. Also do be careful that there are some critter attacks that can debuff defense. So going beyond 45% will give you some extra room to stay capped when an enemy does land one of these attacks on you.

There are 5 archetypes that came with the original City of Heroes, 5 more archetypes that came with City of Villains, and 4 Epic Archetypes that were added to be unlocked by having a high-level character. Scrapper is pretty solo-friendly. But the original hero archetypes were team oriented. Almost "holy trinity," except pure healing was replaced to an extent with buffing and debuffing support. Tankers shield the entire team and do so by drawing aggro with everything they do. Defenders provide buffing and debuffing support. Blasters and Scrappers do the DPS. Controllers lock down enemies so everything isn't attacking at once. Both Defenders and Controllers heal, if they took healing powers. But between the Tanker's defense and resistance, the Defender's defense and resistance buffing, and the Controllers locking down enemies, the team can clear most content without taking more than trivial damage. Of course, there were some trinity-breaking combinations that just sorta worked really well. Originally the 5 red-side archetypes were built more "me first." Brutes mimic Tankers but they are more damage-focused than defense focused, and lack some of the taunting ability of Tanker. They only taunt the targets they hit automatically rather than everyone in the area. Corrupters mimic Defenders, but trade some support power for base damage power. Dominators mimic Controllers, but trade secondary support for secondary damage powers. Stalkers are almost identical to Scrappers, except have stealth built in and prefer to actively shed aggro. Masterminds are their own team rolled into a single package. A for why tanker for any other reason than high-end tank play? Well, low-end tank play would be it. Tankers get their defense much earlier than Brutes. Lower level Brutes are pretty much Scrappers with a built-in aggro draw and a need to take attacks to a certain extent to build enough fury to deal decent damage. Of course, aggro matters little to solo play. Who are you taking the aggro from or who is to take aggro from you? Brutes will need to use their Taunt and Provoke powers more than Tankers will to truly act as a tank a high levels. But they should be able to get the job done just fine. Regarding specifically Invulnerability and Super Strength. Invulnerability is just a solid but boring set. It gets the job done, but doesn't help at much with your DPS output or control like other sets can. Super Strength's knock-back can actually be annoying to other teammates that want everyone together for their big AoE attacks. But it might also help you stay alive longer by keeping enemies on the floor instead of attacking you. It's a double-edged sword on a Brute who wants to be taking those attacks. But neither are actually all that bad.

The announcement here: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,1551.0.html It's a small note at the end of the post. "For those wondering: Vigilantes and Resistance-Aligned Praetorians are tracked as Heroes, Rogues and Loyalist-Aligned Praetorians are tracked as Villains." I would assume that it keeps track as people play, but there is nothing specifically stating that.

Since mentioning it was an option on a different thread, I have been experimenting with Fighting on a Thugs/Dark mastermind to see how bad it really is. So far I've taken it to level 20. At level 20, unenhanced, here is how my powers have performed vs. Longbow minions in Architect Enertaiment's test mode: Boxing: 4.42 end, 2.5 recharge, 1.07 cast, 12.33 dmg, 3.45 dps, 2.79 dpe. Kick: 4.94 end, 3.0 recharge, 1.83 cast, 13.63 dmg, 2.82 dps, 2.76 dpe. Cross Punch: 10.66 end, 8.0 recharge, 1.67 cast, 20.62 dmg, 2.13 dps, 1.93 dpe. Pistols: 6.50 end, 3.0 recharge, 1.20 cast, 12.48 dmg, 2.96 dps, 1.92 dpe. Dual Wield: 8.58 end, 6.0 recharge, 1.20 cast, 2*8.23 dmg, 2.29 dps 1.92 dpe. Empty Clips: 18.98 end, 8.0 recharge, 1.83 cast, 3*3.28 dmg, 1.11 dps, 0.52 dpe. Damage numbers were read from the combat log and not the tooltip since it appears Longbow minions have a tiny bit of smashing and lethal resistance. But from how it appears, the fighting pool set is totally worth it for masterminds. I replaced the three pistol attacks with all three fighting attacks (and used a second build to test the pistol attacks). So the 30% bonus damage is in effect. I also get a 35% stun chance with boxing, 40% knockdown chance with kick, and both a 20% stun and 40% knockdown with cross punch. So what I lack in range I make up for in extra damage and control. But do keep in mind a lot of a mastermind's dps output still comes from the minions. I am tempted to also try this out with some brand of controller and see what happens. The thing with most DPS building is that you boil down to attack chains instead of just using single attacks. 4 seconds between each basic control attack means there is more than enough time to fit a boxing and kick combo between each of your immobilize attacks, for a lot of extra damage while endurance lasts. Also, controllers have an inherent Containment power that increases damage to controlled targets. Fighting looks like it might be a good way to use this feature well.

Hero side 36 ft west of the Atlas Park marker. Villain side 246 NW of the Mercy marker. It's in the hospital area. Praetorian side the T4V (Transact 4 Victory) 81 ft away from Magistarium Marker. If you have shops displayed, they literally show up on the map as P2W Vendor (or T4V Vendor), so you should be able to track one down easily. Homecoming's version doesn't have any form of real money trade whatsoever. So these vendors seem to have been placed to allow you access to various bonuses you would have gotten through various paid methods on the official server, like pre-order bonuses and the Paragon Market. These items are now sold for Inf instead of Paragon Points. Actually, most of the old Paragon Market unlocks are now given to you for free without any prompts or hoops, so there isn't much left to see except the temporary powers you used to be able to buy with real money. But the free Ninja (or Beast) run and Jump (or Steam) pack are must have items. Also you can get one prestige enhancement of your choice right from level 1 or 2 that can really help out the early levels. There is no actual pay to win shenanigans happening (anymore). It's it literally just the name of the vendor.

One of the more annoying things about the mission system is that it seems past level 15 missions are often in the next zone or at least a mile away from your current position. Without a travel power this gets annoying very fast. Fortunately there is the free ninja or beast run and the free jump or steam pack to help that out early, and flight packs seem to be cheap enough to be usable. But overall travel powers are too useful not to take one. I also seem to recall that if you choose to take all your primary and secondary powers, there is going to be a gap at level 24 and a second gap at level 30 where you will have no choice but to pick up a power from the power pool. So, you can get two power-pool powers without having to give up something else. You just need to decide what you want when.

It isn't pretty, but I can think of one potential option for melee + pets. There is a whole 'Fighting' power pool that provides a boxing style punch, a basic kick attack, and a melee AoE fist swing, with each power also buffing the other two and your basic brawl power. So if you wanted to create a scrapper mastermind, you can pick a minion set, pick the minion as your first power, then ignore the primary direct attack powers and pick up the Fighting power set when you have the opportunity to. The minion will need to carry you through the first couple of levels, but after that it should be lots of fun.