Coyotedancer

To Scir's credit, after the whole Malleus incident he actually admits that, in retrospect, it really was a bad idea... I remember when I read that bit while I was running the arcs with Grey Kestrel I could just imagine her shaking her head and saying, "I *tried* to tell you that, Im. That kind of thing just never ends well." But then, my head-canon for her is that she DIDN'T actually stop that ritual because Daos told her to. She can't stand the guy. No. Kes stepped in and put an end to it because friends don't let friends essentially commit karmic suicide. Even if that makes said-friends mope and grump about it afterwards. XD

They're most excellent cats... Or dogs wearing cat costumes... I swear Mei thinks she's a dog. Anyway, said-cat in somewhat-less-fluffy "summer skinny-mode". (She adds about 30% MOAR HAIR every winter. XD)

'Not gonna be all spoilery... BUT... After you've run through Laura's arc once? Go to Ouro and run it again. And keep an eye out for something you didn't come across the first time around. ^_^

Ah, bashing good old "Maggot the Buttless" and his friends.... XD

As it happens... she is. More fluff than an alpaca ranch. Tail the size of the Titanic. All RIGHT THERE. XD

Yep. My red-siders (Who are all rogues-) tend to go with Scir as a patron. As for others... That list of VT's is good. I'd also add Hardcase, though. Everyone likes beating up freaky little Wailers.

Duos and small teams are great fun. 8-member smash-fest can be, too... But sometimes I find myself just wanting to run on my own, without any pressure to "keep up" and the freedom to AFK when-ever I like. (Or when Mei insists it's "play with cat"-time. <_<) One of the things that I love the most about the City is that solo play is possible for almost everything in the game.

I'm in the "only 50, but feels older" camp... especially at the moment, while I'm moving around like a geriatric ground sloth. ('Slipped backwards going down the stairs while carrying a pile of flattened boxes to the recycling bin. 'Slammed into the stairway handrail hard enough to crack a rib. OOOOWWWWWWW. 'Supposed to be careful how I move now, and not allowed to pick up anything heavier than my cat. Which is a pain in the rear. And my side. *shakes tiny fist* >_<)

Not to mention it being kind-of a dick move... Common salvage's seed price is just stupid. It's "common", after all.

Control Troll has one out there somewhere that involves level 1 EB/AV farm animals... There's some definite silliness and humor involved. XD .... Darned if I can remember the arc number or its actual title, though. Hopefully someone will come along who does. It was a decent way to get to 22 on your own, even with a squishy.

To be honest, I'm not seeing the problem either... I use Shockwave routinely on both of my farming brutes and it's anything but a small, "only hits one goon" effect. o_0

Now 'm imagining building a Street Justice Brute with a farming build... I do NOT need another expensive "project brute". I seriously do not. 😝

Exactly. I skip the low-level parts of the game because, for me, that's NOT the fun part. I want to get on to the bits that *are* fun.... But then, I'm one of those people who actually enjoys the farming side of that, too... I suspect the whole idea of there being people who farm because they honestly enjoy doing it probably blows Phil's mind. XD

I did a weird "concept build" thing with my human-only PB, Bahir. Mostly-ranged perma-lightform. Basically? I made a Photonic Sentinel. The Fabulous Flying Fuzzball of Fury. XD He's actually quite a lot of fun to play and I have yet to catch any grief from team-mates about not having the Forms.

Yep. There are all SORTS of ways to play this game and none of them are "right" or "wrong". They're just our preferences. As I've said in other threads, I've burned out hard on the low level game. It'll be a rainy day in the Shard before I ever want to see Mercy Island or Faultline again. So, I toss my newbie characters into a quick round of demon-bashing with the fire farmer I have on my secondary account. That gets them into the 30's, where they can have their common IOs and where the game content actually starts to feel like fun to me. I usually run them the rest of the way to 50 the traditional way... but not always. Sometimes I get impatient and take them ship-raiding, or toss them into a PI smash-fest. Sometimes I'll send them back into AE with Harry for another round of City of Farmville. In any case, I've been at this game long enough (and have had an absolutely ludicrous-enough number of alts in the process... o_O ) to know perfectly well how the characters I build work, no matter which path they took to 50. Just because a character of mine "grew up" bashing cosplayers with Harry on an AE farm map doesn't mean I'm a novice at playing them. And, for what it's worth... Once my gang do get to 50, that doesn't mean I exclusively play them in high level content. My defenders and corruptors spend most of their time exemped, running with teams in the mid-levels. Because UNLIKE level 50+ smash-fest groups, those 30-and-40-somethings actually have some *need* for support characters. I've been known to run my non-support characters that way, too. If you play on Everlasting and have teamed with some crazy Oranbegan, you may even have met one of them. XD

Not to mention that there are people playing the game who have accessibility/coordination issues. (A friend who's recently returned to the game has RA, for instance. It affects her hands and sometimes makes navigation around the maps a lot more difficult for her than it is for most of us-) Missions with short timers on objectives like that are likely to just be hell for them. It may not be a thing that impacts the majority, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be kept in mind.

Bill is wise.

Clones. She has clones.

Pick up enough movement speed set bonuses and you'll end up zipping around like a colorful spandex mozzie. XD All on its own without those bonuses it's still pretty slow, though. A Flight Speed enhancement in Swift ought to apply to it IIRC. (I stick to Run Speed in mine-)

What Ironblade said. There are a lot of different approaches to leveling these days. Personally, I've burned out hard on the low level parts of the game. I would rather never make another alt than see the Hollows or Mercy Island again. I have a much-beloved fire farming Brute named Harry my secondary account, though, and I can dual-box... So, when I make a new character I tend to toss them into a AE map for a round of Angry Cosplayer-bashing. That gets the newbie to about 30, which is where the game starts to be fun for me again, and earns some seed money that my farmer can toss them to build their common IOs. From there? I level them normally, "old school" style, either soloing or with PUG-and-friends teams. Call it a hybrid approach. Part speed-leveling and part not.

Exactly. There's nothing stopping you from doing it the "old fashioned" way if you really want to... It's just not a requirement anymore. Heck, if you really like the idea, you could do it on ANY mission with number-in-your-team-or-less glowies. I could see that being a fun way to end a 'glowie hunt' mission. CLear the map, send everyone to their glowie, count it down and *cue music* Mission Complete! XD

Forced teaming for regular mission content (Which is exactly what those multi-click missions were-) was a poor idea from the start. Seeing it kicked to the curb was a Good Thing in this mostly-soloist's opinion. I'd lobby hard against the return of mechanics of that sort.

Nope. The last time it happened I was zoning in to Ouro from Crey's Folly on a WP Stalker who had been running solo. And let me tell you, watching my little black cat spit up hairballs all over the entry portal was both hilarious and disgusting. XD

Mostly, it just wasn't much fun to play... Constant endurance issues were definitely a part of that, especially given Dark's relatively low damage. The character was a solo, so dependent on being able to knock everything over by himself, and sometimes he just... couldn't. He'd be completely out of END before even half of a small group of goons were dealt with. And then I'd either have to retreat to hit Rest, or risk defensive toggles going down. I also had to do a lot of "toggle switching", to keep ONLY the ones I really needed for any particular goons' specific attack types running. There was just no way I could afford to keep them all up all the time, which isn't an issue I've had with any other armor set. A Cardio Alpha and an END-focused IO set build would eventually have helped there, but leveling the character was such a slog that I couldn't even imagine actually getting him to that point. Running with teams would have lessened some of those issues, but Sents are usually great soloists. It bugged me that THAT particular one wasn't really capable of it in any reasonable way. ETA: I'm not a power-gamer by any means, and I poke fun at the more meta-focused gang a fair bit, but I "grew up" in the City running with a pack of crazy badgers and speed-runners, and I picked up some of their habits. I'm still no build- or mechanics-expert, but I do like a solidly put together character and occasionally tinker with high-end builds. I'm just as likely to do something completely off-the-wall, though. Like my human-only perma-Light Form "Photonic Sentinel" Peacebringer (Bahir, on Everlasting). Who is just... all kinds of utterly silly. XD

There should be "save" and "load" buttons at the bottom of the Options menu that take care of the keymapping, UI scale and that lot. For your Chat preferences... Set up everything the way you like on one character, and use the command /chatsave After that, you ought to be able to use /chatload on new characters to get the same set-up. ETA: Just for the sheer heck of it... here's a list of all the slash commands. Some of them can really be useful. https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Slash_Commands