Tiresias

I feel like the best option is to be tracking Light Form and be ready to fire off a heal as soon as it drops. In general, I'm standing by with Essence Boost, which has a 92s recharge on my build, so it lines up perfectly with Light Form's crash. I actually find it harder to deal with the Endurance crash than the HP crash if I am facing enemies that End drain me.

Hey guys! Thanks for the advice. We played some Radio missions tonight for fun and found that leaving the party size option alone but raising the difficulty to 2 worked well. Toggling the AV/EB option didn't seem to do anything for the Radio Missions. My friends enjoyed things more, mostly because I was actually taking damage, so the Defender and Dominator felt like they were being useful with their defensive, healing, and CC effects. Thanks for helping me work through this issue! I know a little more about the fundamental systems now too.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "difficulty level". The missions aren't offering us "hard mode" or "mythic levels" or anything that I'm familiar with from other MMOs. We just go into the missions, be they normal door missions, Strikes or Task Forces, and beat things up. It seems like the number of enemies scales with the people we have, as when we are short a person the pulls seem smaller, but I'm not controlling that in any way, I believe.

Hey again, Infinitum! You helped me with a Shield/Sword build last week, and I've been playing it with my friends recently and have gotten the most insane complaint from them about it: They feel like I'm making the content too easy. I'm not even joking about it. The Defender says that I never need any healing and he's not sure if his debuffs are doing anything of material important (he's playing Drk/Ice). The Dominator says that it doesn't matter if she CCs any enemies because they don't do any damage either me or anyone else. The only person who seems to be having any fun is the Elec/Elec Blaster who can run around with impunity and blow everything up. Do you have any suggestions on what I can tell them to do in this situation? I don't want to make the build worse just because, and I have a feeling that things will change once we get to level 40+ (we are in the mid-30s now). What is the best thing a Defender and Dominator can do in a party with a self-sufficient tank that doesn't really need any external support and that has a "blapper" running around annihilating everything in a couple of hits? Are there any skills the Def and Dom should at least be practicing for harder content while things are pretty safe now? What do YOU, as an experienced tank, like to see a Def or Dom doing in tougher content? I'd just like to find a way to make things fun for them before they ask me to reroll to a Scrapper!

Thank you for putting together this event! What you guys have done here is literally unprecedented! I hope that your trailblazing opens the way for CoH and many other MMOs that were lost well before their time to enjoy a new life with new communities!

Well, my Tanker is set up to play in a team of people who have been friends for a long time, so it hasn't been an issue so far. We played WoW in the old days when you HAD to let the tank and crowd controllers go first before you opened up with damage or you would just rip aggro and die. My friends still play that way; I don't even have to ask. They just know to wait until the count of 5 after I start a large pull to ensure anything that isn't a minion is hard-locked on me. We also have a Dominator, so anything that breaks loose is quickly CC'ed. Like I said, my opinion my change at higher levels or if we start grouping with randoms a lot, but right now I've never found myself wanting for a taunt. It feels like a very "Specific Use Case" power, like having certain Sorcery powers can be valuable to Defenders and Controllers.

Now, I'm only level 25, but I haven't found the need for it yet. Maybe this changes later, but if it does, I'll just drop the travel power from the build (Super Speed) and pick it up. My friends can wait a few extra seconds for me to arrive at the mission if I'm going to be the one getting punched in the face for them!

Thank you for the reply! I've been playing the Shield Tanker for the last couple of weeks with my friends and she's 20 now. We ended up going with a "Silver Age Superheroes" theme, so she's dressed in Roman-style armor akin to some of Wonder Woman's old costumes (she used a sword and shield a lot in her old comics!). The build works well, and I'm surprised at how durable it is even at low levels, especially with a Rad/Dark defender debuffing everything like crazy.

Just like anything else, it depends on how you build you Defender. My Rad/Dark/Soul Defender is some of the most fun I have in this game, permanently running Accelerate Metabolism and Hasten to spam out abilities while flooring enemy to-hit, defense, damage, and resistances. If you consider that everyone on my team is benefiting from being permanently AM'ed while nuking down a target suffering from Enervating Field's -30% Resistance while I also run the best Leadership buffs in the game... Well I consider all of that extra damage to be MINE because it wouldn't be there without me. I've always considered buff/debuff Defenders to be the way to go, because most people build in so much personal defense and sustain through IO sets. I believe my best group contribution is in uplifting team damage and accuracy while spoiling enemy defense and resistance. My blasts are there to provide secondary effects, and I tend to prefer Dark because I love all the additional conical control effects the set provides that allows me to help shape the battlefield. If I wanted to stand in one place and blast out big numbers via a damage rotation, I'd be playing a Blaster.

Yikes! I hope that you son had a speedy recovery. Children are surprisingly resilient, unlike old people like me. There's no rush on anything. I'm just enjoying playing the tank casually. I also started up a few alts to get a "feel" for how some of the other sets work: a Dual Blades / Bio, an Invul / Martial Arts, a Super Reflexes / Katana, and a Radiation / Super Strength. I'm casually playing these to about level 20 while waiting for my friends because I don't want the "main"t to get ahead of them. I'm just slotting vendor SOs in the alts for now, as it's basically free to do so.

Thank you for writing this up for me! I really appreciate it. I have a few questions as I get started: I see that you didn't take taunt. Is that typical for Tankers? I don't honestly know if taunting is even important. Do I need to have Fly as a travel power? My concept was a "Natural" origin -- just a grizzled old soldier Legionnaire from ancient times thrown through a time warp into the modern era. So he would have Super Speed, and Combat Jumping makes sense (I know it's not really a "travel power", but still...), but him flying feels a bit... off to me. When should I use Parry if my Melee positional defense is softcapped? Does going over the softcap help in some way? Finally... can you possibly explain "Attuned Enhancements" to me like I'm 5 years old? Or your grandfather? I Googled it, read explanations on both the Homecoming forums AND Reddit, and I swear that I'm more confused than I was when I started. I started leveling the character tonight, but didn't have much time so I only got to level 4. I'm going to run some DFB with my friends this weekend.

Hey, you take all the time you need! I'm the one asking for help, and I'm more than grateful for the assistance that you have already provided.

I appreciate the assistance, but don't give me all the answers. Perhaps point me in the right direction of sets to consider, or show me how to identify gaps in the power sets that I need to search out ways to fill. Worth noting: I have basically no idea how to make use of pool powers, including epic pools, on a tanker. I don't know if it's worth it to grab things like Combat Jumping/Hover/Tough/Weave or if I should pick up Leadership since I will be in a party much of the time or what!

Okay, I got home from work and benchmarked a few tanker set combinations that appealed to me entirely off of looks using SR or Shield and I gotta say that -- while I recognize that it's probably pretty cliche -- Sword Defense and Broadsword is what I would like to do if you think it's a good pairing for a beginner. The Broadsword set looks pretty easy to understand (I'm not 100% sure how Parry works, in that I don't know if multiple applications stack), as it seems to have a lot of super-basic attacks that debuff enemy defense, making it easier for my friends to hit their targets even in their non-optimized builds. I like that the Shield Defense "ultimate" doesn't have a massive crash like some of the other sets; it just looks like a really solid emergency button with the downside of losing Endurance at the end of it. I know that I need to be careful when it's ending or I can end up dropping my toggles, but that seems easier to deal with than, say, the crash from Invul. I hope I'm thinking about this all the right way, in that I'm trying to pick some pretty basic sets so I can focus on leading the group. I can work up to more advanced active sets later, like you suggest. So... presuming I'm heading in the right direction, what is the right way to go about planning a build from the very first level? I know very likely need to get every power in Shield Defense, but I'm thinking I don't need every attack in Broadsword -- except I don't know what separated a "good attack" from a "bad attack".

I have about 50 million from the recent event (I leveled a Peacebringer and a Warshade and got their Incarnates fully unlocked). I'm really new; I started playing about two months ago, and seriously only a month ago. I'll be honest: I have no interest in "fire farming" or anything else that is similar; I'd prefer to play the game itself to earn influence, as opposed to jumping in an Architect mission designed to simply feed my character experience and Inf while I watch Netflix. I don't favor any particular sets, but I think I'd enjoy a more active defense set. I know some of the defense sets are rather "set it and forget it" with a few emergency buttons (like Invul), but I think something like Bio Armor or Radiation would feel better to me, especially since it has some debuffs. I know there are also sets that let you directly protect your teammates, like Shield Defense, which seems pretty attractive to me. I just don't know how useful it would be since my friends tend to play ranged characters almost exclusively.

Alright, perhaps you can get me started based on this use case: I would like to tank for a small group -- between 1 to 3 other people depending on who is available to get on and play on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I would like to do more than just stand there and get punched in the face, but it doesn't necessarily have to be all damage; I want to help my friends feel powerful by protecting their characters and providing them with buffs or debuffing enemies while they drop the enemies. We aren't looking to run +4/x8 (did I get that right?) or anything nuts like that, just strikes and task forces and participate in events. So here's the challenge: I'll be tanking content for 4 people (maybe more) but I can't really count on my friends to "support" me as they aren't... amazing at the game yet -- and may never be as they aren't hardcore players. They just want to have fun, and I want to enable that for them while learning how to build characters so I can personally run pinnacle content one day.

I do! It's... overwhelming. I understand the very basics of game mechanics: Resistance vs. Defense, defense caps, crowd control MAG defense vs. CC resistance, healing vs. shielding, etc. A lot of that stuff makes sense to me because I've played other MMOs. But where my noodle gets baked is in the SHEER NUMBER of IO sets and how they interact. Also, I know for some ATs cooldown reduction is more important than raw numbers because of how they function. I don't know how to deal with powers that have massive "crashes", how to patch "holes" in sets that don't have good DDR or don't provide any Psi defense, as an example. I also know that you can just slap every IO set into any power; the power has to be able to "accept" the set, so sometimes you need "mule" powers, which means you have to sacrifice powers from your main ATs to pick up pool powers... Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Hi Infinitum! I'm new to CoH (well, I played for a bit in 2006, but that was forever ago) and have been enjoying Tankers and Defenders since picking the game up. Can you point me towards something that explains how to build characters? I'd love an overview of how to pick IO sets, general concepts that are important to Tankers (and possibly Defenders), etc. In other words, I see you giving a lot of people builds, which is fine for the vast majority of people, but I would prefer to learn how to fish instead of just being given the fish, if you know what I mean. I'm sure all this information is out there, but because I'm not overly familiar with game terminology and resources, I'd don't even know what to search for; blindly browsing forums is not being very helpful.

Every time I try to play my Fire/Fire/Fire Blaster I find myself feeling like I lack for options beyond blow up the world and end right back up on my Dark/Ice/Dark Defender again, grateful for the complete overage of options in combat (and ludicrous number of things to manage). Strangely enough, I enjoy my Ice/Ice/Dark Blaster more than any other Blaster build. It feels like playing a Controller but with actual damage.

Some of us like the theme. I have a D&D campaign setting where an individual's race means nothing in terms of personality; there are lawful good demons and chaotic evil angels to be found everywhere. In keeping with that, I have a lot of characters that take after fantasy tropes, including nephilim (angel/demon hybrids), orcs, werewolves, liches, etc. I also have characters that look like government agents (my Controllers and Dominators), some in environmental suit-type mechs (including one that looks like the Doomslayer), and a few characters with "plainclothes" costumes, like my Peacebringer, who wears a sweater vest and a plaid skirt. In other words, the people playing angels or demons may just have that one character among many with that theme.

As someone who recently returned, I LOVE the change. The camera functions like you would expect it to from playing other tab-target MMOs. ...And that's probably why the change was made: to accommodate new and returning players. The vast majority of people will find camera "snapback" disorienting, and for your character to not move in the direction the camera is pointing when you press "W" to be annoying -- just like I did before the recent change.

On Excelsior in just the past week: Winterdark for my Miasma/Ice Defender Sharptalon for my Pistols/Time Manip Blaster Seizures for my Elec/Elec Controller (that one REALLY surprised me) Weirding for my Illusion/Darkness Controller (another one that REALLY surprised me what with Dune being all the rage these days)

Keep in mind that it's a "chase" item with a pity system attached (the MAs). Even if you don't get a direct drop, you can still collect enough pity items to get them over a long period of time.

Champions Online is a truly fantastic game that would benefit from a "Homecoming"-like server where a group of passionate people are running the game in a similar way. I remember how much I enjoyed playing until the pivot to free-to-play (it may have been one of the first, if not THE FIRST, buy+sub game to make a F2P conversion). For a long time you could pay a monthly sub to keep playing the game as originally intended, but that wasn't making enough money so the sub went away. This resulted in my many, many freeform characters being stranded, unable to be played unless I paid $15 PER CHARACTER to continue to play them. That was utterly unacceptable to me, so I haven't played the game since. While the storyline was pretty simple, the gameplay was spectacular. In many ways it played like City of Heroes but with the system updates you would expect from a game 5-ish years newer. If you have never played the game it's like worth checking it out, but I wouldn't get too heavily invested in it. Frankly, CoH has a better endgame on the Homecoming servers.

I do have a signature character: a Dark Miasma / Ice Blast Defender that is a replica of the first CoH character I played way back in the original game. My primary alt is a Radiation Emission / Radiation Blast Defender that is a replica of my main alt from the original game. Both are optimized for group play and designed to turn large packs of enemies into sitting ducks, but the DM/IB Defender does a better job of it thanks to all the slowing effects from Ice Blast. Still, they are two different themes: the DM/IB is a female Nephalim (half demon, half angel) with a magic origin, while the RE/RB is a male mecha with a science origin. Sometimes I'm in the mood to roleplay one or the other. When the group just needs me to blow stuff up, I play my "GD Peacebringer", which is a build you can read about on the Kheldian board.