Coyotedancer

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

I have a Dark/Bio (Tavaris, on Everlasting) and a Dark/WP (Shonokin, on Torch). I'm a little biased against Dark Armor, honestly. My own Dark/Dark was the only Sentinel build so far that I just completely gave up on... But some people do really love it. Hopefully you'll have better luck with it than I did. XD The great thing about having a thousand character slots? No reason not to try anything that seems interesting!

You're welcome. XD I love Sents, too. Some of the damage sets really need a balance pass (They gave up a little TOO much damage in some cases. o_0), but the AT as a whole is fun. Fire and Dual Pistols are probably the best damage-wise, but my favorites so far are my Darks.

The only one of those specific AT/set combinations I've played myself is the DB/WP Scrap, and that can definitely be some good fun. Back in the Live days on Liberty, I had one named Ashirion. 'Not *quite* as the scary a character as my DB/WP Stalker main... But almost. If I'd thrown the same INF into Ash's build that I had put into Kestrel's, he probably would have been every bit as fierce as she was. Bio is a solid set with an END-friendly mode, so you shouldn't run into any trouble with that Titan Tank. It'll likely spoil you on that Dark Armor fellow, though. DA is a total endurance hog if you try to run all of the toggles. Defenders... I love Defenders. Some are easier to learn than others, but it's hard to really go too far wrong with any of them. Although the people who are more invested in the "meta" of City may try to tell you that Force Field is useless, typically because of the defensive capability a lot of IO set builds can achieve on everyone else's end-game characters, that's not necessarily a universal thing. Lower- and mid-level teams usually won't be as tough as those end-game juggernauts, and so THEY will still absolutely love having you and your bubbles around. Your large area bubble will also be welcomed and valuable on Mothership raids in the War Zone. Not every league has a ton of Incarnates who picked a Clarion Destiny, so *you'll* be the one protecting everyone from the Rikti Magi's stun effects. (Yeah, I have a lot of Defenders in my crew. XD Even though they're all "finished" 50s themselves, with their IO builds and their Incarnate toys and all that, I almost exclusively play them exemplared with mid-level teams. It's just more fun, because your presence as a support type character can make a lot of difference in how that team runs. You CAN still be helpful with end-game teams, mind... No smart group is going to say "Nah. We don't want'ya." to a Kinetic/ or a Time/ or a Dark/.... But most of those groups won't really *need* you the same way the lower level teams might.) I'd also suggest at least trying out a Stalker (think: "sneaky Scrap") and a Sentinel (something like a blaster who trades some damage for a fair bit of toughness).

You would if you were on a team with one of my magi. XD But.. yeah. RP mission teams aren't all that different from not-RPed ones. There are just more puns and cheeky comments.

Don't forget the occasional, seemingly random barfing. I have no clue which buff causes that, but every once in awhile it's "Zone in. Lose your lunch." Which is just terrible, XD

Your luck looks just like mine. XD (Seriously. I have that happen an absolutely statistically unlikely number of times, and that's why I no longer bother buying and opening packs. I not only DON'T "break even" with them, I usually lose my proverbial shirt. It's especially galling when it happens with 25m-a-pop Winters. Which is has. <_<)

What Patti said. Welcome back to the City. XD And yeah... Street is just a fun set.

I think so... There's a post somewhere in that thread that pulled out and listed all of the "None Of" combinations (There weren't many-) for each archetype, if you're curious. At this point, if the devs were to re-run the queries I suspect there would be several Claws/Fire Stalkers at 50. Like I said upthread, some of us took the absence or rarity as a challenge. XD