Clave Dark 5

I know how that feels. At times I'll pass on playing the more active ATs (Blasters and Dominators for me mostly) in favour of something less demanding. On the flipside of that the other day I went onto a Brute instead and the adrenaline rush of chasing that fury bar really perked me up. Yeah, I know that feeling. One of my first new toons was a scrapper and I quite easily fell prey to scrapperlock pretty quickly. But I haven't logged in with him in like two weeks. I do have a claws stalker though which is also rather unplayed, but did get me into the mindset. Really, what I've found is I'll have fun no matter which one I log in with, so maybe I just need to push myself with the melee folk a bit more, when I'm not so tired.

The Clave Dark 5 Foundation is currently studying ways to prevent poverty for players named Clave Dark 5. I'm sure I could compose many good policy papers with that sort of dosh. :)

Fair point. I was never much a fan of the lore behind it, but I did play it some when it was first introduced because it offered flavor variation to the usual red/blue early levels (and it looked very nice!). It was also dang hard, I know I died much more over there, which sort of kept me away. I have yet to check it out again since rebirth.

Very interesting, thanks for taking the time to look at this and post your results for us.

Gotcha. Maybe the new forum software they want to shift us to can handle picture-posting better.

Thanks for this! It's a silly question, but as someone who has yet to achieve an Incarnate pet, do we get to recolor these at all?

My only 50 so far under Homecoming is a Beam Rifle/Rad, so I'll tell you a bit about my experience in hopes it helps you out. Note I'm no big number cruncher, so some may may find my choices wildly nutzo for playing anything "but the best." I like the Beam Rifle a lot, it's just plain fun for me, I like the concept. The disintegrate function makes you feel like a God Amongst Mortals when it lands and spreads, as any good AoE should. I find this pairs well with a Corr as a double-function Scourge; the chance for Scourge kicks in when a foe's HP gets to 50% and below, and goes up the further down they are, so you really cut short their life of taking potshots at you, and adding more damage to that just rushes that a bit more. Rad has good debuffs for slapping on foes and I've had good luck on teams fighting AVs with mine. The heal is nice and I have more than once been the defacto healer (so much so that I've also taken Heal Other from the Medicine Pool). The biggest drawback I've seen for both of these power-sets is the timing it takes to set up the affects with the Rad debuffs and the Disintegrate. I usually team (come to think of it, I don't think I've soloed with her yet) and there have been times the teams has been rolling too quickly and spreading the damage all around for me to set up all the buffs or to get the disintegrate going before my chosen target has already died. It's a terrible curse to have a team doing so well, I tell you...

Seconded. We really need a good wiki. I mean, we can always pop in here and ask something for the nth time and wait for the reply, but having a database we could all check at our pleasure would be great.

I've only REcreated two from the old days, both later in my run on the game, out of the dozen or so alts I've made so far. The troller is somewhere in the 30s, and being a healer I don't play him too much. I mean, he does damage and other things, but I feel like I'm a harried MM trying to keep all my pets from dying! The other is my first new 50 and Corr, and is also the first time I've ever started messing about with Incarnate stuff as well. And so far she's the one I feel like playing past 50, it hasn't gotten old yet. In the old days my stalker was my main, although I had a lot of alts, but for some reason these days I seem to shy away from melee, not sure why. Maybe because I spend about half my life super tired these days (shift work), and adding in that "chasing down every target by foot" layer on top of everything else feels like too much work.

I almost named my TW/Elec tanker with the jack-o-lantern head "Piezoelectric Jack" for much the same reason, and also used those crystals for his costume. Rather than look up how to spell "piezoelectric" however, and in a nod to "super-cool bad name" urges, I ended up going with "Terminal Jack." The spines on your costume work really well for your theme.

Funny, I had my first villain PUG on Indom last night too, but not the OP's team. It also went really well and flying into those maps (especially Aeon City in Cap) brought back the memories, as redside used to be my home. I've run PUGs before and know I can do it again, but I'm having to slowly come back to remembering everything about it; the biggest Thing I Still Forgot How To Do is adjust difficulty levels.

https://imgur.com/a/GqwSMNp Like this? It's really supposed to look like this?

OK, thanks, good to know. I still can't recall how badly the "everyone says their lines as soon as you hit the map" broke this arc, but I never did finish it, so that must have been something.

I know, I know! I had some of my builds in there too, sigh.

Just what the title says. I have some mobs that I'd like to give Arcane Bolt to.

The thing to keep in mind about these possible XP bonuses or merit increases or whatever would be that these are "nudges," small treats to get some people to taker a look, whereas currently they are not. Some economist (I think) wrote a book about how a government can encourage people to do something; they can make it law, YOU WILL PLAY REDSIDE AS OFTEN AS YOU DO BLUE OR ELSE, or they can encourage people, nudge them to consider acting a desired way.* And it's easier to reverse or adjust nudges if they're not working out. *Even tho no one here is trying to get people to stay to make more money for the company anymore, we all want players to stay so we have others to play with, right? Having a whopping amount of content sitting unplayed is then something we players should desire other players to spend time with, see?

I'm still fuzzy on how that whole system worked, but it sounds like a good idea to me. So if I set my toons as Vig, do I show up on local map searches ("Search For Players" option under the team tab) for whatever side I happen to be on? How about on the other side?

The concept that you do the things you wish to do encapsulates all those factors. In other words, given freedom of choice, it's a reasonable assumption that you're ultimately going to choose based on whichever of a manifold of factors presents itself most strongly. If you're deliberately making a decision to play one thing instead of another, even though the second option offers better opportunity for some facet of gameplay (e.g. grouping), then the determinant in making that choice was that you were willing to sacrifice what you're losing in order to get something of greater value to you personally. Is that not how at least some decision-making works? You minimize the loss, or maximize the gain, based on personal preference. And in this case you can do BOTH-- the mechanic is already in place for you to play to whatever your preferred style at any time. You can play one way today, and a completely different way tomorrow, if that's your fancy. Then it's a pointless thing to assume because of course it works that way. Yes. I read your assumption as the player is making an unfettered choice, "I wanna play hero!" free to go wherever without having to concern themselves with other factors that may leave them going "well, blue side is where everyone is, sooo...."

Fourth... ted..? Fifthththtuh-ted. This should also apply to clicking on doors to go in, like at the university campus door to the crafting room.

Any chance to repost them here for people who aren't Discord users, or who might be at work and don't know their Discord info? Not that that applies to me in anyway, of course...

I had a lot of guides I had printed out that sat around collecting dust until I finally recycled them all about six months ago. Talk about bad timing!

It may be unpopular of me to say so, but you don't need to get binds to play. I ran a few to 50 before shut-down without them, and I'm doing OK on one now sans binds. Checking into them and thinking about running them and planning to memorize where they are and blah blah blah, it just felt like too much homework. Especially since you don't want to solo AVs or anything nuts, you should be OK without them. Now here comes everyone to tell me I'm gimping my MMs. :)

Why assume that? Why not assume there are a number of factors guiding their choices such as wanting to play where everyone else is playing, for example. Another interesting point I see being used here is "red side has always been lower pop" which is true, but that never stopped me from PUGing until near close when it seemed most everyone was only playing their 50s; PUGing now is nigh impossible, at least at the hours I tend to play (Late because of shift work)*. The pop was low, but not like this. The other side of that is "OK, so it's always been low, why not work to fix that?" Why leave it "broken" that way? *Coincidentally, when that pop shift happened near closing, I finally had to give up and create some heroes to play, just so I had the chance to PUG or team.

Preach it. Back in the day, I used to see posts saying the Scrapper inherent was bad because it couldn't be planned for or strategized around. But to me it's always been a fun surprise when CRITICAL pops up. People also complained that crits are "wasted" on foes with little life remaining (strangely, I don't remember anyone saying that about Scourge), but that's just an opportunity to shout "Boo yah! How do you like THAT?!?" at the monitor. I actually feel that way about scourge. On most foes it doesn't seem to trigger until it'd be dead anyway and it does feel wasted to me. Elite bosses and Archvillians being the exception of course, on those it is wonderful. I do like crits more than scourge myself. IIRC, Scourge chances kicks in when the foe is at 50% of hit points or less, so yes, it is more likely to pop up when the foe is near death because you're killing him harder! Sometimes it would have been enough anyway, other times you just shaved some seconds off the battle, which allows steamrolling and to rob that foe of taking another shot at you or someone else on your team.

I was pondering the ski badges just the other day, as I have recently taken a TP on one of my toons. Are they any TP "cheats"? :D