DSorrow

Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, getting all the passive accolades on an alt isn't a huge effort, but then again it isn't really a challenge either and feels like pretty pointless busywork. I guess one option (although, probably a pain in the ass to implement) would be reduced requirements for repeat badges on alts. For example, Silver Bullet on your first character requires 100 defeats, on the second it's 95 until it caps out at a minimum of let's say 50 or 25. TF / mission badges would probably require a different treatment, but I wouldn't be opposed to having those unlocked account wide after, let's say, 10 characters having the badge. Then again, this might make less fun TFs (Synapse...) difficult to form in the not so distant future as many people no longer need the badge on any character. Some badges, though, like the healing given have pretty good justification to be account wide as they restrict player choice when it comes to making your badge hunter character.

I think having increased XP gains redside would not be a completely problem free solution to the population imbalance. When it comes to picking a side, I genuinely enjoy the hero side content and zones more, plus I prefer heroic/vigilante character concepts to villains. However, because I'm a min/maxer at heart I would play most of my new characters redside if XP rates were noticeably better, but move back to heroside instantly if the rates were rolled back after an influx of redside population. While I can't speak for anyone but myself, I'd imagine a lot of other people feel the same way and then it would be a pick between content you prefer or content with substantially better rewards.

logically extending those numbers to the damage cap (500% for Scrappers, 775% for Brutes) yields 618.75 for Scrappers (averaged crits), 581.25 for Brutes. I had a vague recollection of brutes beating scrappers at their respective damage caps, but I didn't check that and it appears I was wrong.

It is pretty unnecessary as you can run capped S/L/E/F/C resists all the time without Power Surge. For sporadic need of NE/Toxic/Psi resistance you can just use Eye of the Magus and if you consistently need those then insps and teammates are a better source than Power Surge anyway.

Running a Thermal/Sonic with a duo partner and enjoying it. Late game I'm planning to cycle the Nuke and Melt Armor between mobs in addition to Howl to maximize AoE -Res.

Can confirm, I run Hover + CJ on my Corruptor.

According to Paragonwiki, the melee damage scales used for Scrappers and Brutes are 1.125 and 0.750, respectively. Scrappers effectively have an 1.2375 modifier due to Critical Hit (10% chance for double damage). Let's consider a situation where we have an attack that does 100 base damage and look at some different scenarios: Scenario 0% from Enhs 50% from Enhs 95% from Enhs Scrapper, no crits 112.5 168.75 219.4 Scrapper, averaged crits 123.75 185.6 241.3 Brute, no fury 75 112.5 146.25 Brute, 50% Fury (+100% DMG) 150 187.5 221.25 Brute 90% Fury (+180% DMG) 210 257.5 281.75 With a standard 95% enhancement value for damage but no other damage buffs, a Brute starts beating Scrapper average damage at around 60-70% Fury. However, any +DMG buffs from other players such as a Kinetic or from your own /Shield or Build Up benefit Scrappers more than Brutes due to the higher base damage, unless you're buffed enough to reach the damage cap on both at which point the Brute should do more damage. While I haven't done the math, the Scrapper ATOs probably also give a bigger increase in DPS compared to the Brute equivalents, so comparing the two at limits of optimized builds probably slightly goes in the Scrappers favor when solo and slightly in the Brute's for teams. Then there's obviously the playstyle thing: if you can't keep moving as a Brute you'll always lose to Scrappers in damage.

Following this. Also another tip for the first 100k to a million inf I used on my first character on Homecoming: buy SOs from the WW. People seem to list them for very low amounts of inf so I could get a couple of dozen lvl 50-53 SOs for ~500-1000 inf each and sell them to vendors for 10k+ to get a few hundred thousand to kick off crafting.

Some familiar names in this thread. Maybe I'll run into some of you on Torchbearer.

You could also run story arcs over several evenings to grab a bunch of merits at the end. Most of the time it takes ~5 minutes to get a couple of teammates if you toss a "LFM for lvl x missions" and then run your own story arc.

It does, and most teammates will appreciate you using it. Healing is pretty much the worst form of support in CoX. Stack buffs all day and you never need a heal. Between the ice shields, -ToHit from Spectral Terror, slows/-def/-res from Cold and aggro management by PA, your team will be very safe.

[*]Come up with a character concept [*]Figure out what powersets would fit them [*]Spend quite a bit of time in Pines toying with the build to see if I can make up one that seems satisfying to play [*]Spend about as much time in the costume creator to make a fashionable look [*]Name! Give me a name! [*]Load UI files [*]Hop off to an alt and /altinvite [*]Get all the free stuff from P2W, revisit later for the teleporters if I end up liking the character

I’m 90% sure you are serious, but I am somewhat incredulous. I just ran this a couple of days ago, and we had no team wipes, and it took us a little over 2.5 hours. Now there was probably 20 min of breaks, maybe 30. We did fight Babbage, but for every mish that was not a defeat all, we had someone stealth to the end and teleport us to the boss room. There are so many kill all missions...such a slog. Again, not calling you out, just trying to imagine it... I did a Synapse with a random team in just over an hour a week ago. Our team composition was basically 4 brutes and 4 support so we demolished anything in our path quite quickly and on top of that we got very lucky with really small maps on the defeat all missions. I'm also pretty sure we ghosted what we could, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

Mostly the following: I start teams and invite people of pretty much any level to enjoy the XP Answer stuff on the help channel whenever I can Help people with their builds Sometimes I'll toss a Miracle +Recovery or something similar to a teammate who seems to be struggling despite decent slotting, but mostly I like to help people learn skills so that they can earn things rather than give it to them. I believe anyone can 1) earn a lot of inf very easily on the market and 2) make great builds on their own given the right bits of information, so I'd be doing them a disservice in the long term by just providing them with a lump sum (unless it's a relatively small sum of inf for something very specific) or giving them a build rather than discussing how to make a great build or providing feedback.

I'm having a blast with my Ill/Cold if that's worth anything, works pretty nice as a concept too as hypothermia causes hallucinations. Also it's arguably more powerful than Ill/Rad even if it takes some more inf / planning to get perma PA.

Two additional tests: Ill/Cold, now with T3 Spectral Interface (75% chance for damage): 2:15 and 2:12 for 412 and 418 DPS, respectively. TW/Elec, no other changes except a better attack chain of RA>FT>AoD>CD>FT: 3:22 and 3:17 for 318 and 312 DPS, respectively. Used around 8 52-54 Rikti Chief Soldiers to build up fury before starting my time and keeping it maxed during the fight.

IMO, the magic is still definitely there. I've only tried a couple of MMOs since CoX was shut down and all of them failed to grasp me for a multitude of reasons including: playing the fantasy hobo until you get your matching sets at end game, endless busywork collecting squirrel tails for your quest givers, the insane grind required to buy gear and cover repair/travel costs, the huge time commitments required to do end game stuff, endless frustration with RNG... CoX is the only MMO where I'm completely free to do things at my pace and that's what I love most about it. Some weeks I'm really busy or don't feel like playing games, but I don't feel like I'm missing out on progress because I couldn't complete my X weekly things that are the only source of progress. Other weeks I'm totally hyped about a new / maxed out character and spend hours leveling up / doing end-game content. An additional thing I really like about CoX is that every type of content gets you progress at any level: even on a busy week doing a couple of regular missions on my lvl 50 gets me some influence that can eventually be converted into the purple IO I want, whereas on other games if I don't have time to commit for the weekly reset activities, there won't be any progress at all towards anything. Besides those, I like being able to play any type of character I want. Sometimes I want to be a mage, other times I want to be Superman and sometimes I just want to be an undead janitor who commands an army of military grade roombas. In general, CoX is just a very relaxing game to play because most of the content doesn't press you to perform optimally because putting in only 95% isn't enough. Yet, if I do want to challenge myself to the max I can attempt to build characters who are able to solo silly stuff like the ITF or something similar, but it's an important distinction that I'm not required to do that in any of the normal content.

I'd like something done about the various toggles and how they interact with the forms. I've been planning a tri-form WS build and I just see absolutely no point in picking any of the human form toggle shields unless I want to spend a good part of my gameplay reactivating them after form changes.

I run Arctic Fog + Stealth IO on my Ill/Cold for full invisibility.

They are considered set bonuses so you can only have 5x LotG +7.5% but they do stack with other +7.5% Rech bonuses because they have different names. The set bonus quotas work by name rather than bonus size. For example, my Ill/Cold has 5x LotG +Rech and additional +7.5% from Basilisk's Gaze and they all stack up nicely.

Doing an average of 90% isn't the same, but over time doing 95% (i.e. any symmetric distribution with 90% to 100% of listed) of listed damage is the same as missing one out of twenty. The former is probably a pain in the ass to implement so I'd never expect that to replace the miss chance, and the latter I just find personally irritating because my build would have enough accuracy to reach 100% hit rate if the cap didn't exist. Some caps obviously have to exist because things like 95% chance to dodge vs 100% chance is very significant when it comes to balance, but allowing players to do what's essentially 5.3% more damage over time without the hit rate clamp doesn't sound risky when it comes to game balance. Anyway, it's not a huge issue with the game, but I wouldn't mind seeing it changed as it doesn't carry any mathematical significance to game balance and (to me) only exists as a source of annoyance.

While I don't typically slot either, some of my characters end up putting 4 (or more) slots into Brawl to carry a Kinetic Combat or something similar.

Thank you Rumors and DSorrow for the better information. Being away from the game for so long has shown I have a lot to relearn. On my original post (bottom of Page 1) I have updated my response. I added some analysis using proper numbers (hopefully). If you see anything incorrect, I'll happily update it with the right numbers. Well, as it turns out I wasn't 100% correct in my assumptions either (-Res from the same sonic blast does apparently stack) so we're all rediscovering mechanics here.

Same here, I usually bought 30 at a time and typically got around 35 ATOs and 300 merits and a random assortment of boosters and converters. Selling all the ATOs at 9mil+ a piece and then getting converters out of the merits usually netted me around 50-100mil in profit. I stopped doing this though because constantly having to clean up my inventory was pretty irritating to do in addition to all the converting. Then again, I might go back into this for a while to get my two ATO sets once I settle on what my next character is going to be.

To get back on topic, tested with my Ill/Cold for a best result at 166 seconds for 359 DPS (including Benumb). Only a T3 Alpha so far so I expect it to get a bit better once I get my Interface slot unlocked. Phantasm is also notably useless as he wants to hug the Pylon which get him killed within the first half a minute every single time.