DSorrow

This, definitely. For brutes it seems to me that there are only 3 actual choices when it comes to APPs/PPPs. Need endurance or lack slots? Energy Mastery. More AoE? Mu Mastery. Want an additional ST attack that's actually good, plus an AoE? Soul Mastery. Everything else is just poor attempts at these at best. I like character concepts, but I'm an engineer to the soul so if one option is just significantly better than the other, I'm having a hard time picking the sub par thing even if it would make more sense concept wise. I don't mind slight differences, like Gloom being a bit more powerful than something like Fire Blast due to being a DoT, but currently Mu and Soul Mastery are just miles better at any of the other Blast + Targeted AoE epics.

It's a bug in Pines. I have perma PA with 0.5-1 second overlap on Homecoming, but according to Pines there should be a two second gap. I checked by manual calculation and including Agility, I get what actual gameplay gives me and excluding it I get what Pines has.

This is something I didn't really consider as I was in a bit of a hurry when I replied. The Critical Strikes proc is definitely best put into a ST attack if at all possible. For example, put that into a ST attack currently housing Touch of Death and then get the same melee bonus (+ some recharge) from a set of Obliteration in the AoE. Maybe Obliteration in SD, 5/6 Scrapper's Strike + the -Res in FSC and Critical Strikes in the ST attack that currently has Touch of Death?

I would switch those, also from Scrapper's Strike switch the Dam/Rech with Acc/Dam, you'll still be capped for both Dam and Rech but have better acc.

Having just leveled up a Rad Melee, I'd say it's also very straight forward. I treat Contamination as an occasional bonus rather than playing around it and it usually works just fine. Basically it just allows me to jump into a mob, hit Atom Smasher and start wailing on the boss, then lieutenants and finally finish off all minions in one Atom Smasher because they're typically very much softened up by the initial Atom Smasher and any Contamination from bosses and LTs. All this goes to say that it's nowhere near as involved as combos or Momentum and more akin to Criticals.

At low to mid levels, any enemies that excessively debuff recharge, ToHit or Endurance. These are all pretty trivial issues to solve at 50 with liberal use of IOs and inspirations (the tray of 20 really helps). However, even with IOs I still dislike enemies that summon boat loads of minions/pets so that tanking is effectively impossible because of aggro caps (looking at you, Lamp people in Night Ward). As for missions and maps, mostly defeat all missions and the intricate multi-layer caves that are a pain to navigate. Having said that, a lot of the Praetorian enemy groups are a pain in the ass before 50. I don't mind fighting them too much, but many of them seem to be tuned for IO'd out 50s rather than 20s with generic enhancements. Currently playing a 35 duo with a friend that's planned to be synergistic (Defender + Brute) and even only at +1/x4 Night Ward goons sometimes come very close to whooping our asses when we can effortlessly clear vanilla enemies at +2/x8. The challenge is fun when I'm playing with an experienced friend, but I probably wouldn't do that content with a bunch of randoms until 50.

My bad, I meant Devastating Blow. For some reason I thought of Devastating Strike when I wrote the post. This was my only run so far, but I'll probably run some more when I have time to do so. I'm also still debating between the different Ageless versions: extra DDR would be nice, but I'm not yet 100% sure if the +End without +Rec is enough to sustain me indefinitely, as I had to drop Tough/Grant Cover for this run and still eat a blue insp or two. EDIT: Did 3 more tests, all of them in the 4:05 to 4:10 range for a pretty consistent ~280 DPS. With these runs I opted out of Tough/GC straight from the get go, went as close to using AD every 120 seconds as possible and used Fusion pretty much every time it was up. I'd say the latter two explain the DPS difference to my previous runs, especially Fusion. On the first run I always waited until the beginning of the chain to activate it whereas in these runs I didn't start a new chain when there was less than a second to go until Fusion. After these tests I'm pretty convinced that the full end every 2 mins from Ageless should be enough to sustain me.

Major shockwaves? More like major hyperbole, in my opinion. I play 100% PvE in this game mostly with extremely optimized builds and I can't even recall ever being knocked back. KB is already basically eliminated with 1 -KB IO you can slot in a variety of powers, and even on tanky ATs with 0 inherent protection, 2 KB IOs will cover you in more than 99% of the content. Sure, getting to spend that one or two slots on something else would be nice, but I really don't get what you mean by major shockwaves. While I don't have any PvP experience at all, it sounds like adjusting KB mechanics would be a better solution. That said, the proposed solution sounds very effortless to implement and the PvE implications would be minimal.

PLing/farming has existed all the way throughout my CoX history. I remember the massive herds in hazard zones, dumpster diving in Dreck farms, the fire/kin controllers, people looking for bridges to level up even faster and finally AE. Most people I played with back in the day (a semi hardcore crew) had a fire/kin or something similar to farm/PL with, I even had two - one on each of my accounts so I could PL myself. I haven't yet farmed, PLed (unless you count the 1-2 runs of DFB per character) or made a farming character on Homecoming, but that's only down to a couple of reasons that might change: I have more than enough inf through WW I don't feel a pressing need to have dozens of lvl 50s, with my nowadays more limited playtime I'm lucky my current 4 see the daylight often enough I'm also trying to focus on playing ATs/powersets I didn't play back then, so it's nice to take the "slow" route to 50 (~15 hours with DXP) and try out the powers as I go Finally, I just find repeating the same mission over and over extremely boring - wonder why I don't like Synapse TF... Anyways, if WW suddenly choked up or I rolled a character I'm extremely familiar with, I don't think it's a ludicrous idea that I'd jump into a farm. I do find a bit of a shame if PLing is all a new player ever learns about the game, but then again if running a fire farm is enjoyable to someone, why should I try to stop them from doing it?

I'd take taunt on brutes if the build has space for it, but it's not something I'd force in there at the cost of damage or survivability. My TW/Elec has taunt, but he's built as a damage/tank hybrid and I didn't feel like I had to give up anything to have taunt.

Got my Rad/SD Scrapper up to 50 yesterday and his T3 Musculature + all IOs slotted today and got 4:36 for 267 DPS. I imagine with degenerative, T4 Musc, passive Assault Hybrid and any AAO padding should take it past 300 easily. Attack chain I'm using is DB -> RS -> Siphon -> RS. EDIT: Wanted to add some slotting: DB hosts 5 Hecatomb + Achilles proc, RS has full Critical Strikes, Siphon has the superior winter melee set. PvP -Res in Irradiated Ground.

I had one on my Ill/Cold in Blind and I often had 2 or 3 up whenever I was spamming holds but I ended up dropping the proc from the build because it didn't seem to add too much.

I just don't find it as engaging, really. The atmosphere of the zones isn't something I'm a fan of either, but mostly it's the lack of grand villainy: in most of the story lines I'm just running errands for another villain rather than building up my personal story. The same structure that works for heroes (NPC A has problem with villain group B, I investigate and deal with it) just doesn't fit what I'd like to do as a villain.

I'm a bit biased due to having several billions of inf at my disposal, but I buy attuned versions of all the IO sets I have in my planned level 50 build and slot them as I level up. Purples and such that I can only slot at 50 I substitute with random cheap set IOs. On my first character I just slotted lvl 25 generic IOs until 50, but looking back I probably could have saved a bit of inf and had more effect by replacing some of those with dirt cheap IO sets.

45% isn't a universal soft cap, it just happens to be the most common one. For a bunch of enemies in stuff like Incarnate content it's 59%, and something else applicable for any enemy groups that have +ToHit (Nemesis vengeance, for example).

I'd expect them to be relatively unchanged. My expectation is that things will move towards an equilibrium where: 50-60 merits roughly equal one hour of efficient influence farming Very rare items will then have a roughly equal price in merits and inf For other items, market prices will be determined by the going rate of some high demand items such as LotG +Rech, lower demand items will see a price gap that is relative to the amount of average conversions required to make it into a high ticket item All prices will include a premium up to the cost of an enhancement catalyst for the free attunement the market gives us Things could end up differently, but this is what I'd expect to see and pretty much where we are now. Very rare items like purples will maybe see a bit of an uptick in price as we get more 50s and demand increases.

Why not just make it a TP Foe with 10ft range, no LoS requirement and 5min recharge or something similar, plus a 5 second immunity for the target? Can't really imagine how that could be abused.

No for a free auto-level button but I wouldn't mind seeing one with a hefty inf cost associated, let's say 500 million or something. Basically the inf cost should accomplish two main things: Work as an inf sink, obviously Keep it such that the fastest way to level up (besides PLing) is to play the character itself, not get inf on your 50 Basically this is a high-end convenience service (it saves you time) so it should be expensive, otherwise the low levels will be very unpopulated which is a bad thing for obvious reasons. Depending on the cost I might or might not use the service, probably the latter, though, because leveling up with DXP on takes around 15 hours to 50 and I actually enjoy the leveling up phase. I have no idea what kind of inf/hour a good farmer makes, but I'd guess that since we have people getting to 50 in 2 hours by PLing and I can get to 50 in 15 hours by running TFs, 500 million might even be a tad too low.

CoH minimum requirements: CPU: Pentium 3 or Athlon equivalent. CPU SPEED: 800 MHz. RAM: 256 MB. OS: Microsoft® Windows® XP/Vista/7. VIDEO CARD: 32MB Direct3D Card (GeForce 2+/Radeon 8500+/Intel 845G+) TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 32 MB. DIRECTX VERSION: 9.0 (included) FREE DISK SPACE: 2 GB. Pretty safe to say it will run on a potato if you haven't taken a bite out of it. To contribute some on this topic: I started playing online games on my own when I was 9 or 10. While it's worth noting that English isn't my native language so I barely understood a word back then which probably insulated me from some things for a year or two until I learned, I can only recall one nasty experience from my younger days when it comes to gaming. That one singular experience was dealt with easily by using the ignore function in that game, as my parents had fortunately checked the game I was playing and told me what to do in situations like that even if they didn't directly supervise my playing. Other than that, I learned a lot by gaming: a new language, teamplay, dealing with all sorts of different people, communication with language barriers, optimizing/applied mathematics, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Most of all, I had a great time exploring worlds and playing these games with and without my RL friends. The only thing I can imagine that would've made this experience better was to play with my folks, but unfortunately their generation wasn't exactly the one to go for video games besides the odd racing game my dad would sometimes try. Definitely let your kid play, but create a good environment to do it (you know your kid so you know what limits and freedoms are applicable). My experience in games probably shaped a lot in my life as my work is currently optimizing processes (who knows if I had ever discovered I enjoy this without min/maxing things in games), not to mention the benefits of leading teams/raids/dungeons regularly as a rather introverted person. What will your kid will discover in games: art, story-telling, min/max engineering or maybe something else equally interesting to them? To echo some of the other posters here, definitely set up a new account for your kid. At some point in the future when you have the opportunity to get a second PC, it'll be awesome to be able to play together instead of continuing to share an account or starting from scratch.

My vote goes for an Ill/Cold, I just soloed ITF on mine the other day.

Ill/Cold is great for soloing pretty much anything if you are ok with spending a lot of inf on it. I'm running one that can demonstrably solo Lusca and ITF.

In the spirit of keeping things going, here's my +1/x8 solo ITF finish: EDIT: The image embed won't co-operate with me for whatever reason, so here's a link to the screenshot. For those wondering about the final time, I didn't actually sit that long in front of my monitor but actually I did the TF over two days in 3 sessions, for a total of 2.5 hours. The time could be faster, but I didn't have any strats lined up before I went in so I took things slow and experimented with different stuff. Actual death count wasn't 0 but 1 which happened mostly because I hadn't thought up a strategy for Romulus Nictus and he ended up slapping me for that mistake. Anyways, a solo MoITF would definitely be possible. Because the whole run took a while and I didn't record all of it as it would be 1) a pretty boring thing to watch completely and 2) to save HDD space, here's a highlight reel of the AVs, things that I expected to be tricky and stuff that actually ended up being tricky. First mission was pretty easy, I rescued the sybils mostly with confuse because it's funny and I didn't want to deal with whole rooms at a time to speed things up at least a bit. I expected the Nictus ambush at the end to be difficult, but turns out . Second mission wasn't anything special. Some more confuse abuse and . Third mission had the second thing I expected to be difficult: the Phalanx, but and were pushovers, but that's to be expected of any regular AV. Fourth mission netted me my first and only death as I realized I didn't have the DPS to take on Romulus due to being unable to control what my PA are attacking. But once again, and my strategy developed on the fly: keep Confuse stacked on Rommy to get that sweet Romulus August DPS for 20 seconds every 1 minute or so, Benumb on whichever Nictus Essence has the least HP and let Romulus whittle them down with the help of PA and Sleet. Most of his attacks appear to be cones / AoEs and because the Nictus stack up, he often damaged all of them pretty equally and after the first kill, he got the . Without his friends, . Because I (ab)used Confuse so much during this run, . Then again, I couldn't resist All in all, a pretty fun challenge that didn't take too long to finish. MoITF is definitely possible, but I doubt I'll try that as with my current (very unoptimized) strats I had a couple of very close calls with Rommy and I'd hate to have the run end because of that. What next?

I remember hearing about that as well. Regardless of whether the two procs stack or not in this specific case, I did fit an achilles into my irradiated ground during my testing. I hadn't initially done it thinking they wouldn't stack. Respec on my Rad/DA today while test is down, grabbed an extra Achilles Heel and parked up next to a Pylon with Power Analyzer open with the IG patch going. Gave a good 20/s to see a consistent pattern and then tossed Contaminated Strike on auto with another Achilles. Only ever got one active stack, and which-ever was the most recent successful trigger was what stayed "on top." Given that, though, it was pretty much Irradiated Ground dropping both procs consistently. A few instances where it dropped for five seconds, and then both -20% procs reapplied again. Whether that's just a stacking issue with Power Analyzer, or what, the Pylon never went below -12%, I'm going to assume it still considers IG as "Me" and only applies the one source. With how consistent IG was though (watched it for six minutes), I think its a safe call to rely on that for both and use that sixth slot in CS for some other proc. I have a vague memory about the -Res procs not stacking even across several players, but I could be wrong about that.

Back on the official and forums we had a thread for Stupid Scrapper Tricks, i.e. seemingly impossible self imposed challenges that couldn't stop some scrapper champions. I haven't yet leveled a scrapper up to 50, but I do have a kitted out Controller and as I've just started my holiday I felt like taking on my first solo challenge on the Homecoming servers. I'm hoping I won't be the only one to do this stuff on Controllers, so I decided to create a thread for showing off our collective madness. So, here's me starting the thread Some notes on this particular challenge: Overall it was easier than I remembered, I did this once back in the day Biggest challenge seemed to be getting it done solo - some well-intending heroes tried to help me and thus forced me to disengage, wait for them to leave and the tentacle to regenerate The run is no insps/temp powers/deaths, but as the video is cut down to parts I'd guess the last part isn't technically 100% validated The video quality is kind of garbage thanks to my equally garbage editing skills, so apologies for that While I don't have a self heal, Panacea proc was my MVP and brought me back up to 100% more than once. Then again, there weren't really any close calls thanks to my soft capped S/L/Ranged def. You might notice in the video that my PA isn't quite perma, but that should be fixed once I get my T4 Alpha. Also, my attack chain isn't gapless but this isn't strictly speaking a GM soloing build but rather something I call a team force multiplier restricted slightly by the character concept, and for the same reasons I have Spectral Interface rather than Reactive/Degenerative which would be better for this kind of stuff. Next up, maybe solo ITF? Anyways, that's enough about that - I'm looking forward to your contributions!

Did the exact same thing on my first main (Kat/Inv Scrapper) for the exact same reason. Fortunately a fellow player convinced me to grab it in my 30s.