ParaBruce

Yes, please do!

First thought: your friend is bringing enough defense for everyone. ("Did you bring enough for everyone?" "Well, yes, actually.") So for your primary, look at resistance boosting and debuffing. Sonic/Dual Pistols might be fun.

Yes, exactly this, and put much better than I would have this morning. Thanks, @swordchucks.

Having complained about one change, I want to enthusiastically praise another: the slider to change the size of name text is really, really welcome on these bad eyes of mine. Thank you!

I have to agree with others unhappy about the 50-character cap, most especially for the RWZ. I'm in there fairly regularly on one character or another for missions and task forces, and do not like either the thought that two friends and I could impinge on a mothership raid or that a mothership raid could lock out one of my friends or me if we're in a trio. It's not uncommon for people who just hit 50 and are unlocking their alpha slot to get at least one person's help in fighting Captain Holt and all that, and of course there are task forces coming in and out as well. A reasonable fall-back would be letting raid leaders start recruiting and be able to spin up a new instance all their own. But I would really prefer having the larger cap back.

Thank you so much for adding borderless full-screen windowing as an option! It's my favorite way to play any details-rich computer game. But I've got a problem. I don't know the technical terms, but I know there are terms for the priority given to each window from front-most to hind-most. CoH apparently sets itself to a very, very high priority. While I'm in this mode, the only things I can see when I tab to any other program are that program's menu bar and the dock down at the bottom. Everything else is hidden. I wondered if new windows might be given higher priority and thus show up on top of the game, but nope, they get buried too. Is this a thing to fix in the code, on my iMac's settings, or both?

It's taken me 5 tries to get a /time MM to feel as enjoyable as bots/FF. I did, finally, and will write up a post about it after some incarnate progress, but even so, bots/FF is just such mellow fun.

@Force ReduxJohnson is right! Rarum! Sorry, overcome by a Blazing Saddles moment. He is right, though. Just please make the /Cold shields as visually minimal as you can.

Not that I know of but there are builds in this forum you can compare.

But not so much with gun drones and force field bots and mines, which are part of the /Traps experience. 🙂

It's simpler than it looks, @Mansome, for routine use. 🙂 The overwhelming majority of the time, I'm going 0, 6 (all, passive) when I've just summoned a bunch of pets and want to give them their upgrades, or 0, 5 (all, defensive) when I'm moving around and want them to follow, or 0, 4, 7 (all, aggressive, attack) when I've got them pointed at a target. Maybe 0, 9 (all, goto) when I want to park them somewhere when I'm crafting at the university, generally followed by my macro for "/petsayall <em PopDance>" because I'm very serious and earnest and don't do silly things in game. What's nice is that all the fine control is right there at my fingertips, for those (for me) rare times it really matters to me. I love knowing that I can peel off specific pets for particular tasks at any time, and that it's easy to do - when it's panic time, the simpler the better. By the way, for Mac users: if you take the stock /Applications/coh installation and a binds folder in it - /Applications/coh/binds , that is - the path to use with bindloadfile is: z:/Applications/coh/binds/abindingname.txt

The not-dying-so-often thing is very important, and very hard for some people to grasp. I do not mean that as an insult, either. When there's anything that you're comfortable with and simply not bothered by, it can be really hard to really identify with or understand the emotions of people who find it difficult, painful, unwelcome, frustrating, whatever. (This is why people who aren't targeted by an ethnic or other slur are generally terrible and judging whether and how much of a problem it is for those who are the targets.) We all have limits to our emotional imagination, and have to listen to others. You can find multiple posts throughout these forums where I have to go "oh, okay, I just didn't think about it, but now I understand why that's a big deal, thanks". The classic blaster tradeoff of power versus fragility always worked great for some people, was tolerable for others, and was not acceptable for still others. For those of us in that last group, the sentinel tradeoff is just what we were wanting. Continuing to operate, even at a lower moment-by-moment levels of power, feels really, really good to some of us, while the interruptions of getting defeated, razzing, firing up toggles, and all of that loom large as distracting, unwanted nuisances, much more so than they feel to some of our fellow players.

For me, the #1 thing is a stronger orientation in both offense and defense toward ranged play. I never liked the extent to which melee range was required for a bunch of blaster powers. The sentinel versions of power sets feel good to me. I like both offensive and defensive opportunity. Both do a hefty -resistance debuff to targets, which is always, always in order. The offensive damage boost is likewise never out of order. And it turns out that defensive opportunity followed by AOEs can charge up a depleted endurance bar amazingly fast. I get annoyed with lack of endurance, and having a quick replenishment almost on tap makes me happy and feel more confidence. I like the extent to which sentinel secondaries fold in mez protections and such, too.

Huh. OK, Pale_Enchantress, noted. (Working on a query to Cipher about ones that got overlooked.)

As someone noted above, every single archetype forum has some version of this thread. 🙂 (Since, really, it doesn't take a full team/task force of incarnates to deal with anything.)

No, Mercenaries/Traps is actually #18 - pretty darned popular. It's Beast Mastery/Traps that's not being seen.

You troublemaker. 🙂

One of the developers did a fascinating thread of data and graphs looking at how often each and every combo of primary and secondary power set for each archetype has been played so far. That thread has links to breakdowns for each archetype at level 2-31, 31-49, and 50, at readers' request. I took the level 50 masterminds info and threw it into a simple spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xiOSCAaI0jiEhqd4B_SIWPtCWkHvhYYZLQ_h4ILmjFk/edit?usp=sharing A total of 103 combos have made it to 50 at least once. Random observations ensue. The following combos have never yet made it to 50 even once: Beast Mastery/Traps Necromancy/Trick Arrow Ninjas/Time Manipulation Thugs/Cold Domination So there are your opportunities to make your mark on Mastermind Homecoming history! First secondary to be paired with every primary: Empathy, from Robotics/Empathy (#25) to Necromancy/Empathy (#68). Second secondary to do it: Force Fields, from Robotics/Force Fields (#1) to Ninja/Force Fields (#85). First primary to be paired with every secondary: Robotics, from Robotics/Force Fields (#1) to Robotics/Poison (#84). Yes, /Poison is less popular than /Trick Arrow (#78) for Robotics. Second primary to do it: Mercenaries. No, seriously. From Mercenaries/Traps (#18), no, really, to Mercenaries/Trick Arrow (#101). Robotics/Trick Arrow (#78) is the most popular Trick Arrow pairing, followed by Ninja/Trick Arrow (#80).

I'd have to go back and do this again for "tried at all", but here's a spreadsheet transcribing the info about sentinel primaries and secondaries at level 50: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rCBSKg8oL260CUsH-uhbKnKll_DCAutMPmHKDEKW9eg/edit?usp=sharing The following combos have never made it to 50: Archery/Energy Aura Archery/Ice Armor Archery/Invulnerability Assault Rifle/Ice Armor Assault Rifle/Radiation Aura Energy Blast/Ice Armor Energy Blast/Ninjitsu Water Blast/Energy Aura And here's the matching info for masterminds (with the X and Y axes swapped for my viewing convenience): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xiOSCAaI0jiEhqd4B_SIWPtCWkHvhYYZLQ_h4ILmjFk/edit?usp=sharing The never-yet-to-50 combos for masterminds are: Beast Mastery/Traps Necromancy/Trick Arrow Ninjas/Time Manipulation Thugs/Cold Domination

I'm curious about this as well!

I pulled together a simple spreadsheet with the level 50 results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rCBSKg8oL260CUsH-uhbKnKll_DCAutMPmHKDEKW9eg/edit?usp=sharing Here are the combos nobody's yet gotten to 50: Archery/Energy Aura Archery/Ice Armor Archery/Invulnerability Assault Rifle/Ice Armor Assault Rifle/Radiation Aura Energy Blast/Ice Armor Energy Blast/Ninjitsu So if you want to make your mark, there are your targets. 🙂 Random notes while transcribing: Archery shows up for the first time at #46 (Archery/Ninjitsu), Assault Rifle at #54 (Assault Rifle/Willpower). Those are the bottom of the barrel as far as primaries go. Regeneration is the first secondary to be represented paired with every primary, from ice Blast/Regeneration at #4 to Archery/regeneration at #90. Willpower is the second, from Dual Pistols/Willpower at #7 to Archery/Willpower at #100. Those are the only two secondaries to do so in the top 100, too (and there are no primaries with all secondary pairings represented in the top 100). Of all things, Psychic Blast becomes the first primary with complete secondary coverage, from Psychic Blast/Regeneration at #19 to Psychic Blast/Invulnerability at #128. Wasn't expecting that. Fire Blast is the second, from Fire Blast/Fiery Aura at #1 to Fire Blast/Dark Armor at #129.

There was a thread about this in the Defenders forum just recently. Some important points: #1. Essentially nobody has perfect defenses while leveling, and by no means everyone at 50 has them. Lots of people at 50 have a hodgepodge of SOs and random SOs with no planning or set bonuses at all. Others have plans in progress. The huge majority of characters do take damage at inconvenient times. Healing remains helpful, alongside the defense and resistance help from support that makes it needed less often. #2. Empathy doesn't just heal. Clear Mind is one of the best anti-mez powers I'm aware of in the game. #3. Empathy doesn't just heal. Regeneration Aura and Recovery Aura are great for, again, nearly everyone. The fraction of characters who simply don't need any help with regeneration or, in particular, recovery is quite a small one. #4. Empathy doesn't just heal. As noted above, there are people who don't need any help with their defenses, but not all that many. And even they are likely to want some to-hit and damage help, because, well, okay, there must be people who don't want a better chance to hit and aren't interested in doing more damage, but I'll bet it's a really, really small fraction of the player base. So Fortitude is pretty much always welcome.

Yup. One of my high-priority rules for myself and bits of advice for others is: "Say a bit more than you feel inclined to in the first round." I've been part of a ton of tedious arguments over the years where people were having rival definition wars, without being clear about what they meant. I was part of an unproductive exchange about a particular Defender power set just this week. If one of the participants had been willing to say "I'm talking about whether it's useful in the context of fully planned, generally expensive builds that make full use of IO sets and procs" rather than "that's not endgame, you don't know what you're talking about, I'm going to insist my definition of endgame is self-evidently correct", it could have moved on to something useful much more quickly. Likewise, "I can't get through this doorway right here, because pets and people have it completely blocked" is much more likely to get results than a grunt or angry fuming in silence. Say something like that, clarify more if people need it, and give them some time to act on it, and very often the problem gets resolved. @Lines, right on about waiting it out. 🙂

Oh, wow, thank you, @Rylas. I love reading this kind of thing, so much. Data porn! 😄 The more I read these, the more fascinated I get. It is with no sense of insult toward any of the game's various sub-communities that I boggle at how much level 50 play out there diverges from prevailing discussion in here. Doesn't make either the overall trends or preferences here invalid, at all; just makes them divergent.

@Papaschtroumpf: The KB->KD in Overwhelming Force is unique, but Sudden Acceleration's isn't. Have some today! Share some with friends! Hand it out like tracts!