Crysis

As others have pointed out, almost any toon can farm AE given the right mission and builds. Some people farm for the challenge of surviving, while others farm for speed. I’m in the latter camp. I like farming as a solo activity. I like to PL alts up to around 32 to then play PVE only. I like to try different AE maps with different farming builds to see which one I can clear the fastest. And if your goal is that latter, you really shouldn’t bother with anything other than Spines/Fire or Rad/Fire on a Brute. Using the fire farms like Comic Con that exemp you down to 49 to take on 53’s, you can easily approach more than 150MM/hour influence gain PLUS usually 1-3 purples and countless rare recipe/salvage drops to put you over the 200MM/hour influence mark. And its by no means hard to create a build to do that with Spines/Fire or Rad/Fire either. I have a TW/Bio scrapper and use it in a similar S/L farm for grins and giggles when I am just messing around, but as powerful as it is in PVE, my Spines/Fire can clear a similar fire map almost 4X faster. Yes, the TW/Bio can survive outside the AE very well while the Spines/Fire is gimped beyond all recognition outside of AE, but I have used the Spines/Fire farmer to BUILD and EQUIP the TW/Bio and over 2 dozen other 40-50 level alts as well. Save yourself a lot of theorycrafting if all you want to do is make influence/farm drops the fastest and just build a Spines/Fire brute and be done with it. 5 hours give or take to self-PL it to 50, maybe another 5-10 hours to get it to Veteran lvl 50+22-25 to T4 out the incarnates. Heck, you could even stop at T3’ing them if you prefer, but T4’ing will give you a little more oomph for speedier runs. I continue to hear that Burn is going to get “tweaked” soon as it apparently has been already on the SCORE server, and those changes then roll over to Justin and finally Homecoming. So build it/use it while you can, then use it to build a couple of other AOE heavy alts with easy-to-softcap S/L and/or Fire defense/resists. Then should Burn get nerfed beyond usability for farming, you just dismantle your farmer, strip its enhancements out and move on to the next farming character.

Eh...not really. My first 50 on HC was a Fire/Kin ‘troller, mainly because I knew it would be an effective farmer just using SO’s. Obviously MUCH better with IO’s and Incarnates but I didn’t know (at the time this game relaunched) what kinds of market conditions I’d be facing and thus didn’t want to build a farmer that was going to cost me a billion influence just to use for farming. Had to self-PL soloing many missions of normal content before I got high enough to run PI portal missions. While I was able to then use the Warrior Earth and outdoor Council maps as my primary non-AE arcs, the spawns are still spread out across a fairly large map relative to things like the Asteroid Comic Con map. And since the spawns in portal missions are primarily stationary, you have to travel between each and take them out mostly independent of each other, as opposed to the “stand in one place and pull a dozen spawns to your burn patch” model of AE farms. I guess my point is that even with the double XP fully in place, I can still PL a toon from 1-50 FAR faster using a AE map than I can with standard portal maps....and that’s at half the XP rate of AE farms vs. portal missions. It’s just a far more efficient XP or influence gain per minute model than anything I can do farming regular content.

Not much help here but you’d have to go to the old archived forums from Live days and review all the red letter name posts on changes made to aggro caps, Burn changes and flee logic etc. The fight vs flight logic changed multiple times over the course of the game.

Not the same issue, but GM presence related. We had GM’s show up to watch us TOT’ing in PI as well earlier this week. Immediately after they showed up, multiple users on League reported client crashes, myself included. Was repeatable. We called it out to the GM’s present and they were asking us for some troubleshooting info, but only time using 64-bit client thus far I’ve had repeated client crashes.

Personally, having played both, I find Bots/Time better for both solo and team play. /Traps is no slouch and has always been a strong set, but /Traps in general requires more in the way of positioning and using specific tactics to play well. /Time is good enough on its own to allow you to effectively assist the team even if you don’t summon all your Bots (caves/OCaves, etc. or in iTrials. Not that I recommend that but it can and does happen. Honestly, I still play both of mine well after T4’ing them out. Different enough to enjoy having two.

I've been leveling this build, very much enjoy the tanki-ness of it. But I do have a question. Nowhere in Blazing Blast description does it say it does knockback. I'm not lvl 50 yet so I'm currently slotting it with 5xEntropic Chaos. I don't even see the ability to slot Knockback to Knockdown in it, although perhaps I could do so with Overwhelming Force proc. But is it SUPPOSED to be doing knockBACK because it does it almost 100% of the time.

Everything already said is true. Properly slotted, Sentinels can do some lightweight tanking. I often do on my Fire/Rad. Hit Aim, jump into spawn with Stealth in, Ground Zero+Inferno for the alpha wave attacks and then cleanup. Works really well. Reminds me a little of playing my Plant/Fire Dom.

See my comment three above. I don’t really want to post a link as it’s not kind to our current benefactors. But I gave instructions on how/where to find.

/Rad is a resist based set. It’s not hard to softcap your resists but if you don’t balance this with +Def you take not only the damage (however resisted) but the secondary damage as well. Most damage may be smashing/lethal but as you get into the 40’s and the incarnate stuff you’ll face more Energy and other exotic/uncommon damage types. Try this. Load up on purples, chomp a few when taking on something that currently eats your lunch. If you come out better with your Def pumped up good chance that’s how you need to respec and rebuild. Recharge is also important as that big hammer has ponderously slow animations but you gotta lay the hurt down faster or survive the blows longer to get full use of your damage.

I’m hesitant to post the link because it’s actually about more drama considering the secret server etc and I believe being here on these forums is proof enough that drama is in the past. But allegedly the SCORE server still exists as a kind of Beta server for Justin (smart idea actually if true, I always wondered where the SCORE playerbase ended up), with final release candidates going to Homecoming, and there’s a post indicating both Burn and AE ambush missions are being changed on SCORE leading to eventual changes here on HC as well. If you search COH subreddit for Burn it’s the top post returned. Posted 16 hours ago. Ignore the drama but there’s some interesting info in there.

Billboards or using sides of buildings for ads wouldn’t bother me at all. ThAts what it looks like in the real world and would fit into the game cityscape just fine. I seem to recall Cryptic played with that concept in early years.

Well you may get your wish on the entertainment because reading Reddit posts On my phone right now it sounds like Burn is about to be nerfed as well as AE XP.

Loot boxes don’t bother me. What bothers me is being forced to watch an Arby’s ad to continue playing the game. That breaks the immersion for me entirely.

Or nerf Burn. Again. Or nerf aggro. Again. Or nerf AE rewards. Again. Or just disable AE altogether. Or make everything free from marketplace and disable XP/Influence altogether and just make everyone an instant 50 at character creation. Or maybe, just maybe, tell everyone to quit worrying about their version of fun versus someone else’s and just use the game as a sandbox open to all, and spend what little precious development resources are available on new content/powers instead. GHKS!

While I was being cheeky, my point is that while “everyone” seems to despise the notion of loot boxes, many of the top rated games on MOBILE are solidly built around this business model. And PC gaming, while still strong, isn’t the only type of gaming in town versus console and mobile/tablet gaming. Tencent, a name you’ll likely recognize from the mobile market, had over $7.6B in sales in 2017 and is buying up PC game companies (Blizzard, Activision, etc) and thus controls their revenue models. That’s one company holding almost 10% market share of the entire market. Even COH dabbled in loot boxes during Live via Hero packs. Not exactly the same thing, but for the time, there were entire tomes of FUD being written on Live forums about how they’d ruin the game. Good source of data: https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/

....thus sayeth every Boomer in the USofA about anyone younger than them. Just because you don’t enjoy the meme-laden bullhorn’s doesn’t mean the next generation doesn’t expect it.

Yes I have run with MANY PUG’s both on Live and now on HC. And yes its a common occurrence to play with someone who doesn’t remember to use their Toggles, someone who tries to aggro as a squishy, someone who (once) just stood there because they believed that their Aura would do all the killing (THEY HAD NO AURA). It’s been frustrating, humorous and at times got the whole team wiped when a tanker we recruited ran in to grab aggro, face planted and all of us with him. We found out later he had just left AE moments earlier and had ZERO enhancements slotted at lvl 38. But I’ve also run with SO MANY OTHER PUG’s that birthed some of my greatest in-game memories of all time. The time we went from a party of 8 taking on Tina’s AV arc to just three of us remaining, a mismatched Blaster, Scrapper and Mastermind, and -STILL- managed to drop the remaining AV’s. Tons of inspirations and temp powers and lots of OMGDIDUSEEWHATWEJUSTDID? PUG’s are some of the best parts of this game for me. Like Forrest said....it’s a box of chocolates and you never know what you are going to get. But your “now days there are many more people who PL” doesn’t hold a lot of merit to me. First, not sure how you know that to be a fact? I think the player population is a bit small, and split across several shards (and even different communities, like 4Chan etc). But I don’t think anyone has ever data mined how many toons go from 1-50 in AE/other farms. So that’s not a fact to me. I admit freely to your third point...I ceased to do the 1-25 grind. I PL every alt I have to level 27-32, and then take over from there. But other than my farming toon, and even that I self-PL’d using AE to 50 solo, I enjoy playing the game. To me, Farming is just part of how I choose to find fun.

What’s interesting to me is what the haters tolerate as “fair farming” versus “unfair farming.” Badge earning, BY DESIGN, is a farming activity. Up to and including meters on your status bar about how many more of enemy X you have to kill to earn a badge. Running around zones to pick up arcane plaque locations to earn badges. And doing many things outside the norm of standard play JUST to earn enough of certain kinds of badges to earn an Accolade/Temp power....a form of loot. And it was those same “badge farmers” who complained very loudly about having to (gasp!) enter a PVP zone and endure CONTENT that they didn’t want to JUST to earn certain kinds of rewards, temp powers and/or badges. This whole long-standing argument about “I despise how other play because it doesn’t complement/agree with how I prefer to play” is utter nonsense. It all boils down to self-centeredness. “I can’t find low level teams because everyone is cheating by PL’ing at the AE” is just another way of saying “Why can’t everyone just cater to my desires?” It’s selfish. Back on Live (maybe here too, I’ve not looked at these forums enough) the entire AE “author” community was in an absolute UPROAR over people who would grade their farms anything less than 4/5 stars because they simply didn’t LIKE their farm. They campaigned to get the star system adjusted/removed for anyone who dared to rate their perfect AE mission as anything less than perfect. They even went so far as to blame the farming AE players for it and got a Redname to actually start monitoring what kind of players were rating AE missions, and whether or not they were ‘farmers’ or ‘actual valuable AE content graders.’ It actually led to an active cry for CENSORSHIP of who could/could not rate an AE mission and whether or not the “real” AE authors should be the only voice that mattered. There is zero cap on influence in this game. There is zero time limit applied on leveling speed, minimum or maximum. There is near-limitless levels of “loot” in this game given the recipe system and the badge/accolade award system. There’s absolutely, categorically zero reason to impose limits on preferences for playstyle and/or methods used to level. Want to plug an exploit? Sure, I can agree with that. Want to force me to adapt my definition of “fun” to yours? Nope, this isn’t City of Narcissists.

It’s attitudes like this that make players want to solo. Multiboxing is really only viable for PL ‘ing an alt. You can use some outside apps to allow double instance teaming for duoing a mission, but it’s not common.

I put 4 Mocking Beratements and 1 LOTG in Defensive Sweep on my TW brutes. Works very well.

Would work as a serious grieving tool for mean spirited players. Block a doorway, done.

Topics like this never cease to confuse me. Within all AT’s there are situational advantages that favor one play style vs one mob vs a different play style against a different mob. None of the challenge in this game is unachievable with any AT given enough enhancements, inspirations, buffs/debuffs and/or damage. Maybe it’s faster/more efficient with one particular AT vs another but since no AT is locked out to anyone at this stage I tend to view AT differences as difficulty settings and/or purely subjective preferences. I love dual pistols for the animations and flair. It’s utterly wasteful for DPS calculations but give me a toned cowgirl with a trench coat flapping during Bullet Rain and I don’t care about DPS or whether or not I’m the star on the team. I care about looking cool while killing stuff. When I want to be the star on the team I have other toons I can bring out. Blaster vs Sentinel vs Corrupter vs Dominator vs Defender. All (primarily) ranged toons with different adaptive approaches to same goal. The new version of Blasters are ungodly compared to the old Live versions. Sentinels are interesting and personally I think they represent a good v1 of a new AT. Let’s hope we see more development on them but for now, if I want a Regen Blaster they are the choice. Better can be defined beyond pylon tests. And ultimately it’s the subjective version of Better that matters most until/unless you feel the need for comparison of my happiness to yours. As long as we both are happy with choices, doesn’t matter.

Make sure you’ve set your Options properly. Once Exemplared, you need to choose "Disable Earning XP = Earn XP" and then right below it "XP While Exemplared = Double Influence, No XP" The mechanics of this as I understand it is that in code the "Disable Earning XP = No XP" is basically just giving you influence equivalent to some formula equal to the amount of XP you'd have normally earned but in influence instead whereas the Exemplared Double Influence is coded truly as double influence. So basically....WAI.

^^ Unless I’m mistaken, Field Medic doesn’t cure the interrupt for Aid Self. Just Aid Other.

I don’t understand why people call these “level up” builds since it’s got many purples slotted before 50? You can’t?