Maelwys

If joining random Four Star content runs is your goal; by all means choose one of the specific flavour-of-the-month builds. Whilst that content can be run by almost any toon; it's considerably faster whenever you choose toons/build combinations that go all-in on generating maximum damage output and leave the bulk of the damage mitigation to constantly rotating Defensive Incarnate Clickies. So naturally stuff like Ice/Cold Corruptors are often going to get first dibs; especially if you're PUGing. However personally I'd always choose a Sentinel who was conscientious enough to make a separate dedicated build for 4 Star content over another "meta" DPS who just rocked up with their generic do-everything PVE build. Further Reading: That said... Four Star content is a very niche thing; even assuming you view CoH as one of those games that doesn't really start until after hitting the level cap (and over all the years I've been playing... I can count the number of players I've encountered who hold that view on one hand!)

Personally I definitely found Powerboosted Fortitudes to be worth it back when I was playing an Illusion/Empath Controller on Live. That toon's PB Cycle time was ~29.5s which meant that it could keep a PB'ed Fort on up to four people constantly plus a non-PB'ed fort on the other three; for +31.87% Defense buffage on the squishier folk instead of +18.04%. Plus it affected Group Invisibility too; for another constant +5.26% Defense to everyone. Admittedly I was PUGing quite often so the more mitigation I could throw on everyone the better; and very few players back then were T4'ed up... but I'd still shy away from skipping it if I were to reroll that toon today. The other obvious potential use case is Forcefield. On a Defender a case could definitely be made that the extra +Def from PB is overkill unless they're running Incarnate content. But on a Controller/Corruptor/MM? I've got a (admittedly seldom played!) Demons/FF MM. PB brings her pets' defenses from a constant [17.68%+12.01%+10%=39.69%] to a constant [25.06%+12.01%+10%=47.07%] so technically 2.07% of that is "overkill" on the pets outside of defense debuffs... but any player character teammates would still be sitting at a mere +37.07% defense. Which still leaves some room for the usual culprits like CJ/Maneuvers/+3%DefGlobals and Barrier. I do agree on the "being locked into a particular epic/patron pool" thing though. MMs probably have it easier since Mace Mastery meshes better with other +Def Buffs; but locking Controllers into Energy Mastery and Defenders/Corruptors to Soul (or Energy if you're a total masochist) can be rather annoying...

Homecoming is intentionally low effort and high reward. People aren't here for a grind, they're here for the fun of playing the game. (Sure, PUGs may be quieter about it. But join a SG or hang out on Discord...) That's why it has a comparatively high population. Also the whole NCSoft legitimacy thing, but that's still a relatively recent development. On live you had to grind for Incarnate stuff, IOs were far pricer, and stuff like START and at-will Triple Exp wasn't a thing. There are still grindy servers out there. And some of them even have caked-in Iron Man Mode. But the players here generally aren't the right target audience for that stuff. So to recap: (i) It's been asked for before on multiple occasions. (ii) It didn't go down well then and unsurprisingly nobody has since warmed up to the idea. (iii) This is General Chat. The "Suggestions" subforum is --> thataway.

It would, however, still be a total ghost town. HC already makes it totally possible for you to play in "Iron Man" mode if that's your kink. There are even supergroups committed to the idea. It doesn't need a dedicated server for it. Just watch that honour system.

No.

It has. There is. And it isn't.

It's sorta ironic that folk keep reviving the idea every so often...

I mean... the game isn't balanced around permadeath, it'd make a fair number of powers pointless, and a LOT of the lore would need rewritten... ...but if you want to make those tweaks and then host the result just for poops and giggles?

Last I checked Energy Melee, Fire Melee + Katana were all pretty much within a hair's breadth of each other (with MA hot on their Heels) in terms of raw damage output. Katana's Lethal damage and Energy Melee's Smashing Damage Component are both resisted much more frequently + severely than Fire damage though.

My Tuesday night GM swapped from Roll20 to Foundry VTT shortly before I joined the game* and it's been quite successful so far. Few niggles with recent upgrades temporarily breaking spell macros etc; but the gameplay has been grand + much better environment than roll20. Only 4 of us at present too (sadly our 5th has health issues and probs won't be back for a bit!) but it's a decent number + gives everyone a chance to contribute. *2nd Feb 2021 judging by my session notes. The party had just hit Lv5 and we're currently a bit shy of Lv14. They're taking it SLOOOOOW!

Try "Bless" or "Shield of Faith" instead and if anything gets past tell 'em to take a short rest and use their hit dice to recover like proper adventurers 😛 (Healing Word/Cure Wounds certainly has its place... to pick someone up from unconsciousness. Just don't do that in the initiative order right before the enemy. Heh...)

Condescension notwithstanding; I'm afraid not. To illustrate; I refer you to my earlier post: In scenario (c) you would still SUFFER THE FULL (UNREDUCED) AMOUNT OF DAMAGE. You would just recover from it a bit faster than someone with no Ice Pack. And that is the problem with "healing" in CoX. Healing in this game SUCKS in comparison to proper damage mitigation like Defense and Resistance buffs (and to a lesser extent; +Absorb and +MaxHP) because it does not stop you from dying to big hits of "spike damage". It just stops you from dying to lots of smaller hits of damage that are spread out over a long period of time - "chip damage" - which by its very nature is not going to kill you immediately. Healing can certainly be useful; but it does not reduce the damage someone takes. It is a reactionary recovery measure taken after a non-lethal amount of damage has already been applied to someone's healthbar. Which brings up another problem: often the person damaged will act faster than the "healer" and use their own recovery measures.

Knockback could stop an enemy from getting in range to attack you --> Damage reduced Healing cannot stop an enemy from attacking you or reduce the amount of damage that is deducted from your healthbar --> Damage not reduced Slows could stop an enemy getting an additional attack off before they are defeated --> Damage reduced Tactics (as-in planning; not the pool power!) could stop an enemy getting multiple attacks off before they are defeated --> Damage reduced 100% Agree on the others, but still a big "Nope" on Healing.

But healing does not reduce the negative effects of damage. Reduce [Verb] To make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size. The effect(s) of damage in CoX is to lower the current value on your toon's health bar and/or kill them. "Healing" does not reduce/lessen/negate those effects at all. Healing and Regeneration recover from the effect of damage; they do not reduce it. There are some games out there where healing can provide some actual damage reduction. Some rulesets allow for healing to grant temporary hitpoints (along the lines of what CoH calls "Absorb") or for any form of healing to give a temporary increase in a stat (such as "Constitution" or "Armor Class" or "Sanity" or whatever). But not in CoX. Anyone here who has considered "healing = mitigation" for many years has simply been wrong for many years.

yes it is healing is one of the three basic pillars of mitigation in the game and has been since the beginning you resist the damage you avoid the damage you heal through the damage resistance defense healing Resistance reduces the damage. Defense avoids the damage. Healing restores your hitpoints after you've already taken damage. The first two are mitigation. The last is recovery. Let's try putting this another way... Someone takes a swing at your face. You see the punch coming. Do you: (a) Block it (b) Dodge it (c) Just take it like a chump but put an Ice Pack on afterwards?

That's not farming, that's growing Cress on a Q-Tip. Even a single non-optimized passive ("AFK") farming toon should be making more inf than that without selling any drops... 🙈 That said... there are so many ways to earn decent influence in this game that anyone getting annoyed at ebil marketeers for doing it a little faster/more efficiently is ridiculous. It doesn't cost more than a few days effort to fully purple out a toon even if you just earn merits + swap them for converters/boosters + dump them on the AH at "sell now" prices (you're welcome, flippers!) Smack the idiot upside the head with a trout and move on.

Panacea is a Healing Set, so can't fit in Stamina. It is however the best bang-for-your-buck in Health.

Generally whenever a character is in their "finished" state, I'll always aim for them to have a recovery surplus of at least 2 Endurance/Second (not including Panacea). That tends to give enough leeway on most characters. The exceptions are characters that have zero endurance reduction slotted into their main attacks (e.g. 2x Acc/Dam + 4x Damage Procs) or specific powersets like Battleaxe and claw-focused Arachnos Widows that just plain guzzle endurance.

There's one thing that Archery still has going for it... Rain of Arrows is the only power Sentinels get across all their Primaries (there are one or two such as Ground Zero on their secondaries) that has a target cap higher than 10.

My reading of Carni's log snippet is that it's the Shifting Tides power itself that's contributing damage rather than external IO damage procs (there's a separate line for the Armageddon Proc), I remember testing damage procs within it a few months back and they had a fair chance to kick in on cast and every 10 seconds thereafter, but not for every hit of Cold damage... which roughly corresponded to the predicted 25ft Radius Toggle = ~15.3% activation chance for 3.5PPM procs. I've just performed a very quick + dirty test on Brainstorm to see if anything's changed... with 3x damage procs slotted in Shifting Tides and repeated castings on groups of eight enemies in PI. Twenty applications saw an average of just over three-and-a-half damage proc activations per casting... and 3.5/(8*3) = 0.145833 or 14.6% activation rate; which is close enough to the expected 15.3% for government work. I did see some "wasted" procs kicking in on the dead bodies after the ten second mark which might be inflating the logs a bit (I'm guessing they can't shift its 'Entities Affected' to "Foe (alive)" due to the need for an anchor...) So yeah, whilst you certainly can slot IO damage procs in it; from what I can tell it's not activating them any more regularly than any other 25ft radius toggle.

AFAIK the bulk of the benefit comes from the power's inherent 25% chance for "Rising Tide" Cold damage (which applies to every. single. attack. made on the affected target, regardless of whether it's from a player/pet/pseudopet... 🤩 ) so it's an absolutely crazy source of additional damage on teams or for soloing pet builds (especially MMs) but I haven't noticed it triggering "IO damage procs" particularly well/frequently (e.g. about as much as any other large-radius toggle)?

Fair enough. Just as long as you're aware that the term %damage could easily be misinterpreted as "percentage of additional damage enhancement" rather than "percentage chance for additional damage" by the newbies! 😉 These days I generally try to use "aspect" as a catchall term whenever I'm referring to enhancing one of the base stats of a power; since as far as I'm aware that's how the devs have always referred to it under the hood. (So an Acc/Dam HO buffs both "Accuracy Aspect" and "Damage Aspect", etc). But it's soooo easy to unconsciously slip into unintelligible shorthand and OMGWTFBBQ acronym soup...

Just a thought... but I strongly suspect that using "%damage" as shorthand for "damage procs" might be rather confusing for anyone who doesn't understand all the ins-and-outs of this stuff yet... because it's not procs but instead regular Damage Aspect-boosting Enhancements that affect the damage percentages within the Enhancements display. I think @Carnifax is on the right lines with their recommendation for Ice Blast or Water Blast - both those get lots of Proc opportunities (due to their attack secondary effects allowing the slotting of procs from non-standard IO sets) plus at least one "Rain" power (which work very well with Scourge because they check enemy HP on every tick). Fire Blast also gets a rain power; but its attacks don't get access to any procs outside of the regular Ranged Damage or AoE Damage sets (not that "Blaze" needs any help to deal sky-high damage, but still!) I wholeheartedly agree with this statement! 😁 My own personal observations on Marine's powers: T1 Shoal Rush is a large AoE that can get both accuracy pieces and several %damage. IMO Shoal Rush is by far the most skippable power in Marine Affinity at present; providing you have other opportunities to slot the Achilles' Heel proc. However it's not a bad power by any stretch so if you have room for it, great. T2 Soothing Wave - This just wants Healing aspect enhancement and possibly some Endurance reduction. You can get by with just the base slot if needed; but I typically 2 or 3-slot it. The main thing to remember is that it's a cone heal which does NOT automatically cause you to face towards anything before it triggers. So if you want to use it to heal a particular ally; you'll want to "/face" them first (including "$$face" within your targeting keybind can help here!) T3 Toroidal Bubble is a good mule for useful pieces, and it comes early. I don't think there are many useful procs you can stick in Toroidal. However it's indeed a great place to put the Steadfast and Gladiator's Armor +Def Globals. ED-cap it for +Res and maybe stick a +EndMod in there too if you regularly exemplar low enough to lose access to Power of the Depths. T4 Whitecap is a fun PBAoE attack power that can also take Accuracy/Enurance pieces and many %damage options. As mentioned in my earlier post, Whitecap is absolutely brilliant when procced up. I'd go with: 1x Accuracy (or Acc/EndRed) + 3-4x Damage Procs + 0-1x Force Feedback Proc + Fury of the Gladiator -Res Proc. T5 Tidepool shouldn't be slotted except maybe for Endurance Reduction. Stick with the Base slot and some combination of Endurance and/or Slow. IIRC slotting Accuracy does pretty much nothing. T6 Brine will mesh well with all sources of damage, including Scourge. Brine needs Accuracy; if you have any spare slots then go with buffing its Healing Aspect and Recharge Rate. The main purpose of the power is inflicting -Res; which doesn't stack; but the -MaxHP debuff is a FLAT value (so it'll all but delete most low-rank critters you use it on) and will stack with multiple applications. T7 Shifting Tides is a surprisingly good AoE %damage power (when spawn sizes are increased) Shifting Tides doesn't proc very well since it's a Toggle; so IMO this one is best used for muling some set bonuses unless you really don't need them. T8 and T9 Barrier Reef and Power of the Depths are solid. Barrier Reef wants ED-capped Defense and Healing aspect... but it can also take a LotG +7.5% Global Recharge IO and is an absolutely fantastic place to stick a Panacea Proc (because its effects will apply to every ally buffed by the Reef)... so optimal slotting is something like LotG + Def/EndRed + Def + 2x Heal + Panacea. Power of the Depths just wants ED-capped Healing and Recharge Aspect; so is typically the best place to put a 6-piece Preventive Medicine set.