Shin Magmus

You're the hero all true warriors strive to be, Snarky. I repeated the first mish of Virgil Tarikoss TF to get some of my defeat badges from that Legacy Chain enemy group.

That's a really nice box.

I agree with MAN-JOE, we should be providing comments that contain helpful hostility instead of unhelpful hostility. Oh, we did offer build advice, tactical advice, strategic advice, and factual data about the EB powers and AI... well that seems pretty helpful. Luminara's breakdowns of the EB attack patterns are bulletproof; all the advice is there for our friend Ultimo to solo defeat the Halloween EBs.

Sure! I make self-use Spreadsheets when doing testing, like when I cloned a build using no temps/epics/pool attacks and slotted analogous blasts similarly across both sets, in order to fairly compare Psychic Blast (a set that was recently buffed by the HC dev team) with Seismic Blast (a set that has never been buffed and desperately needs it). Here it is:

Pass your builds back and forth in real time on Homecoming's official Discord, in either at-build-general or the specific channel for your AT, to get actually good advice and not get bogged down with some of the... questionable builds on the forums.

I'd make a Poison/Fire Defender, maximally proc out Envenom, Weaken, and Poison Trap (Trap needs 70% acc slotting), then take as much passive automatic support as you can like full Leadership and just go nuts. In terms of keeping up with the team and killifying everything, while also just noticeably helping your teammates murderize faster, this is one of the best options you can pick. The "fastest" sets are the ones that either have more toggle/passive support and damage going on, or that can buff teammates out of combat (using the time spent when jumping between groups) to therefore focus on attacking. Examples of very slow sets include Traps and Trick Arrow: which will not be able to use even half of their powers on a fast team. For fast sets, you want both a high impact toggle that's always contributing, and a high impact debuff you can throw onto the group (or really even just the bosses in the group) every fight. Examples of fast sets include Poison (toggle debuff + AoE -res click debuff), Cold Dominmation (4m shields + toggle buff + AoE -res click debuff), and Sonic Resonance (4m shields + toggle buff + AoE -res toggle debuff + single target -res click debuff). One thing to consider is that really fast teams might not let your powers fully recharge between fights, so powers like Sonic's Disruption Field and Poison's Venomous Gas (but also short CDs on Weaken/Envenom) mean that those powersets will always bring their debuff even when your team is blitzing. Conversely, some other good sets may have to "skip a fight" because Sleet or Tar Patch haven't recharged yet. For the actual blasting set, as long as you avoid picking something overtly bad like troll Energy Blast, or set-up based (slow) like Storm Blast / Beam Rifle, then you can throw your AoE attacks out and keep up with the team. There's plenty of good enough sets for this, although the best results will still be Fire Blast, Ice Blast, Assault Rifle, and Water Blast. You can also make Psychic Blast and Seismic Blast work (even though Meteor is absolutely terrible) because they have a 16 target AoE which accepts KB sets, meaning you can slot the Force Feedback proc into Upthrust and Psionic Tornado. That FFB proc is a big deal in AoEs because it's statistically very likely to go off when used against max targets. Extreme bonus recharge speed will accelerate your gameplay and ensure that the whole "powers not being recharged" thing from the first paragraph happens less often. As for AT, your obvious choices are basically only Defender or Corruptor. The other ATs that can used ranged attacks are often loaded with powers that heavily incentivize being in melee: Controllers, Dominators, HEATs, and VEATs. There are specific 100% ranged attack builds on some of those ATs that can still be decent, but they are generally always worse than using proc'd out Seismic Smash for example. A 100% pure ranged Huntsman (gun attacks) or Crab Spider is the main viable option here for going fast and having a good AoE -res click debuff in Venom Grenade. Finally there's Sentinels which are a slap-in-the-face of an AT and are 100% reliant upon taking Melee attacks at level 35 to even get decent DPS. Sentinels heavily crutch on Melee attacks / Hecatomb even more than Blasters do.

It's like Goldilocks and the three EBs! Just right!

Also, for the record it is impossible for a Bots MM to have to fight any single target of this power level for 15 minutes unless you specifically didn't take a bunch of important powers. Bots -Regen was moved to the personal attacks, each of which inflict a stacking -200% Regen: totaling -600% if you take them all. For reference, the best Support powerset debuffs are typically only -500% (Traps is double this), so that's a lot. Even just spamming one of those attacks would halt the EB's passive Regen, turning the fight into a winnable battle of attrition where he can't heal. You also should have access to Shock and Discharge, increasing your total -Regen to a staggering -725%. On that note, Elec Affinity is widely known to be S-Tier on MMs as you can make your pets practically immortal just by spamming the main 2 defensive powers (Heal and Absorb) while keeping everything in Faraday Cage range. MM's are notoriously weak to KB and reliant on Clarion Destiny to fix it (at lv50), but Elec Affinity MMs can use the awesome might of Faraday Cage to completely remove that weakness as early as level 16: nice! Basically you had the ideal AT to solo tanky single target enemies, and 2 mostly ideal powersets to do that, and yet you still lost. Since this defies explanation, can you post your build?

This is a fun forum.

Well the Elite Bosses aren't a problem for any of my characters; I just tested a fight against a few. Here you go, I recorded one on my MM to have a fair comparison: Ultimo... why do you even play CoH? I want to know honestly, why do you play a game where all you do is ask for the game to be nerfed and enemies to be made easier, just to accommodate the absolute lowest level of player skill and knowledge... ad infinitum? I can't really say anything that hasn't already been said in this thread and your other threads. You make the weakest builds possible for your characters, then play as poorly as possible (stubbornly refusing all advice), and then complain on the forums when you don't win. In a team scenario this wouldn't preclude you from winning, so you also only solo; You are the architect of your own demise. If you want to be a solo player you have to be willing to learn and improve, and if you don't want to learn and improve then you need to team up with others.

Most people lack the awareness to even know how good or bad they truly are at something. Being rude has always been about intent. When I'm rude, it's because I am intending to be rude. The person on your team who doesn't know what enhancements are isn't intending to be rude, so no.

The power you're thinking of is Death Coil.

Flutter flutter, onward young moth. Y'know antennae like that might be difficult for the engine just because the model would have an insanely high polygon count. The best approximation you could get would be a flat 2d texture that has transparency simulating the gaps between the hairs, but that illusion stops working once particle FX appear behind the object.

Pop some inspirations, overpower them and win anyways even as a solo player? That's about all the advice I can give you.

I am specifically describing what will happen if the devs add an actual "carrot on a stick", a big delicious one worth a significant amount of inf, to leading content. I mentioned the reasons why that won't work, and the exact events that would happen right here on the forums if they rolled something out in Open Beta. It would get rolled back and/or turned into a pointless badge to preemptively prevent the situation I'm describing from becoming commonplace.

You guys can 1-star reviewbomb me as a Team Leader to make yourselves feel better if you want.

...the scenario was that at least one person would start their own team and then you'd be competing for the same pool of joining players actually: as in, fighting over a limited resource. I don't need to "imagine" what 2 team leaders trying to form the same thing at the same time looks like in LFG, because I've seen it.

This post, on this very forum, already covered the topic succinctly, from September 5th so not even fully 1 month ago. My main point about adding a tangible reward/incentive like this is that you can never hit the sweet spot where it's big enough to matter to people but small enough that it doesn't cause infighting, team-sniping, and forum drama. Remember that the teensy tiny reward for the "use lots of different ATs" Diveristy Bonus was 1 extra Prismatic Aether, and that got obliterated in favor of a one-time badge: Variety Act. That's exactly what fate would befall rewards for leading teams. My exact words were thus: "However, the immediate result of that would be people fighting over who gets to lead the TF/SF now that there's a good enough reward, and a sociological inevitability of this would be a team splitting in half because 2 people both demanded the "leader reward". These 2 teams would then be competing for the same player pool and poaching players from each other. I can literally see 5 moves ahead and see exactly where this leads."

I fully expect Broadsword to get touched up at some point, just like Battle Axe was. Would I prefer if buffs to the weak powersets were a higher priority than pumping out weird underpowered new sets that often end up very unpopular after the honeymoon phase wears off (as least Marine Affinity is good)? Yes, of course. But since we can't control what sets get picked for buffs, we just have to wait and hope that Broadsword will one day become not-trash in the same vein as Battle Axe, Trick Arrow, FF, etc. Oh hey, this post about Broadsword vs Katana looks relevant...

This all looks pretty rad honestly. I've never been much of a multiboxer, since I tend to get my ass kicked even in 1-on-1 boxing matches. I don't know how you guys can multibox!

Group Fly could be re-coded to call 1 of 2 different powers, in the same way that Titan Weapons calls either the slow power or the fast power (these are not the same, although they both share enhancements from your build) depending on whether or not you have momentum. But that's a lot of work.

But not also as a Gold!!! Title above their heads.

Jasper, please stop spam replying to every comment on this thread. Nobody wants to debate you. Please just chill out; perhaps make your own thread to discuss what you think Empathy's identity is or the woes you have with the community, and have that separate discussion there. I will elevate the issue if you make me.

It's not just a decent solution... it would put equivalent "power" in the hands of both the Group Slow Fly Party and the Player Agency Party; it would make the conflict symmetrical. If that were to happen, the unanimous response to someone using Group Slow Fly would be to tell them "go to Null the Gull and change that to only affect yourself and your pets". Spoiler alert: it's probably impossible though without making a new power within the Flight pool, that from the ground up is coded differently to only affect those entities. The way Null the Gull works is that he grants you a power after talking to him, but this power is passive and invisible; it blocks Group Fly but only because it's on your character. The reciprocal Null the Gull option would have to like grant the user an aura that dynamically grants this power to everyone in range as if they had talked to Null themselves, with the ability to discriminate against the user's pets. I'm not sure that can be done.

Unfortunately, the overall playerbase will keep doing the same things they are doing regardless of changes to rewards. People will do content that is easy to play and easy to join, and avoid content that takes more thought or effort. People will also default to what is familiar to them regardless of reward output. - Example 1: MSRs give 33% of the reward merits they used to pre-nerf and are painfully slow and repetitive besides. The time-to-reward ratio is objectively higher on a bunch of random TFs when speedran, and only the most extreme outliers of reward efficiency (TinPex) achieve similar or higher popularity. - Example 2: Aeon SF gives a random reward table with one of the most lucrative items in the entire game, as well as having fundamentally very profitable consistent reward when ran on Advanced Mode. Yet ASF is extremely underplayed, with very few speed ASFs ever being ran, and most people not engaging with the content at all (filling a ASF as the one leading is so fucking slow). The content is "new", "different", and "requires more effort" than the lowest-common-denominator stuff that is more popular.