Redlynne

Did it on live. Hated it. Trick Arrow does next to nothing to help keep your Ninjas alive. The ONLY way you can keep them alive is Tankerminding. If nothing attacks them, then there's less chance of them getting one-shotted (not a zero chance, just less of a chance).

Hey, if there's "room" among the power picks to take the Medicine pool, go ahead and take it! But if there isn't ... if it's Medicine pool picks versus primary/secondary pool picks (and you can't have/fit everything you want into one build) ... it might be best to simply cut the Medicine pool out depending on what powers you think are most important for you to have in the build. Now, that said, this might be a situation where using an alternate build ... with and without the Medicine pool ... might be a good idea, rather than just having ONE build (with or without it).

Because YOU are trying to ruin OUR game to serve YOUR power trip/fantasy at OUR expense. The solution to letting you do that without ruining OUR game is for you to ... /em drum roll please ... launch your own servers where you can do what you want. No one is stopping you but you from launching your own server where there's no aggro cap and you can herd entire maps. There's a reason why the aggro cap was put in place. You don't agree with that reason (or even want to lend it credence). Fine. Go set up your own server(s) where you can have your way. You'll still be allowed to play here, and post here ... but we'll still have the aggro cap in place because WE KNOW what happens without it. We were THERE. We SAW. I for one remember seeing people herding ALL OF PEREZ PARK. Your team would be waiting in one corner of the map ... and then suddenly you would see in the distance this SEA OF HUMANITY come POURING over every available bit of landscape ... hundreds (if not thousands!) of aggroed mobs, all chasing after the one aggro magnet, pulling them all the way across the map. It looked like a storm surge (of inhumanity) cresting over every available bit of terrain. It was INSANE. It was STUPID. And the ultimate expression of it was someone with a Fire Aura diving into a dumpster so a conga line of aggro could pour in and DIE SUICIDE IN A FIRE. This is not up for debate. There is no discussion to be had on this point. It happened. And if you take away the aggro cap, it will happen again. You don't even need 20/20 hindsight to figure that one out. So ... if you're determined to cling to your power trip/fantasy, there's an easy way to achieve your goal. Launch your own server(s) and make it happen. If you're unwilling to do that ... that's on YOU ... not on US. Have a nice day. 😀 Oh and ... in case that wasn't clear enough for you ... /jranger

Frozen Fists "does more damage" thanks to the Bruising debuff effect.

I'm always amused by seeing how other people (mis)spell my name. A capital L in the middle for the lowercase l ... Dropping the letter e off the end ... And just in case there's any questions, it's supposed to be pronounced/spoke as if you were saying "Red Line" ... but since that spelling (or any of the variations on it) weren't available in Issue 2 when I started (and I didn't want to resort to l33t sp34k to get the name I wanted) I settled upon Redlynne as a distinctive alternative spelling. And ... it's been messing people up ever since. My bad. Great ... yet ANOTHER project I'm going to have to explore now ... 😅

You're going to need to ... compress ... those ambitions a tad there. You only get 24 power picks to choose from. If you take: Flight (Hover + Fly) = 2 Fighting (Kick, Tough, Weave) = 3 Medicine (Aid Other, Aid Self) = 2 Electrical Mastery (unspecified) = 2-3 powers You've already "used up" as many as 10(!) of your 24 power picks, leaving you only 14 more to choose from ... meaning you're going to need to DROP 4 powers out of your primary and secondary powersets. That's ... not necessarily wise ... depending on what you're wanting to do with your build. To be honest with you, I'd ditch BOTH the Flight pool AND the Fighting pool (so 5 power picks reclaimed) in exchange for the Sorcery pool so as to get Mystic Flight (a Fly+Teleport power all in one!) and then reach for Rune of Protection in Sorcery as both a "break free power" and a place to slot the Resist set IOs that add +3% Defense vs All. You'd only need to choose between Spirit Ward (1 slot wonder power) or Arcane Bolt (Force Feedback proc ready power) as your pre-req gateway to get to Rune of Protection ... for only 3 power picks instead of 5 ... and you'd still have "room" left over to take Enflame, if you wanted to squeeze that into your build plan. The Medicine Pool is ... nice to have ... but that's all, it's not NEEDED/necessary to have as a Blaster. If you're facing power pick pressures like I'm anticipating you will, this would be the second thing I'd cut after "compressing" the Flight+Fighting pools down into using the Sorcery pool instead. So if you save 1-2 power picks by switching from Flight+Fighting into Sorcery and drop the Medicine pool you will have saved yourself 3-4 power picks ... which would then be enough to let you take 17-18 powers from your primary and secondary powersets, if you're wanting to "take all of those" that you can. When you can't have it all, you have to pick and choose ... wisely ...

Kinetics ... suffers ... on Masterminds, simply because a lot of what it does isn't "useful enough" for how Masterminds work. Kinetics doesn't "do" a whole lot for you in terms of survival of your Pets, leaving them somewhat lacking in support, relative to other options. A substantial part of this is the fact that a lot (not all, granted, but a lot) of Kinetics relies on either speeding up allies (making them "go faster") while slowing down enemies (making them "go slower") while buffing yourself and debuffing them. The disconnect comes into play with Masterminds since your Pets get absolutely NOTHING out of recharge buffing, which Kinetics does a lot of. The real dividing line with Kinetics then becomes ... melee versus ranged ... or "near versus far" engagement patterns. While Kinetics can be played "from afar" you'll lose out on a lot of what it can do for you (Transfusion, Transference, Fulcrum Shift, etc.), because if you're engaging from far away there are Kinetics effects that happen "away from you" that you won't be gaining any advantage from. Conversely, if you're playing Kinetics "up close" as a Mastermind, you'll need to have Pets that can substantially support themselves (presumably with Def/Res Pet Aura IOs slotted into powers) and/or cast buffs on themselves to cover this gap in support from your secondary, since Kinetics does next to nothing in this regard. In this case, I'd argue STRONGLY AGAINST ever trying Ninjas for this, simply because they are far too wimptacular on Defense to protect themselves from their own rapid fire stupidity (and they "fold" like pre-creased origami rice paper, in other words, "hurriedly"). As mentioned above, you might be able to get away with Beast/Kinetics, whereas I'd have absolutely no hopes at all for Ninja/Kinetics, since the Ninjas are just far too flimsy without support from your secondary powerset (and I mean A LOT of support!). Beasts at least buff each other such that with enough slotting you'd be able to push their Defenses towards the softcap, while Ninjas would just be looking at a yawning chasm named FAILURE. Bots, Demons and Thugs would make for peculiar alternatives, but you would have to get used to playing them "close, rather than far" in order to get the most out of Kinetics with them. Mercs would probably be about as bad of a mix with Kinetics as Ninjas. Of course, if you want play something REALLY different ... you could always go Illusion/Kinetics as a Controller, and have a lot more success with the combo than any Mastermind could with Kinetics.

The biggest reason for those failures (I'm thinking) is because they all bound you, hand and foot, to playing THEIR characters in THEIR IP ... rather than letting you play your OWN characters that you create and identify with from scratch. Oh look, another Spiderman clone ... yay ... /logoff

Warning to all other Mac users who wind up clean loading Island Rum and CoH client after today's update. When everything was previously packaged as being in the Show Package Contents styled CoH module, I needed to do a very specific bit of programming in all of my bindloadfiles that called other bindloadfiles when using a binds folder to keep them all neatly organized in. /bindloadfile "C:/Program Files/coh/binds/filename.txt" Following today's Island Rum update that forced me to delete and clean load Island Rum and the CoH client, resulting in a new file structure, my bindloadfile calls broke. The updated path to get those bindloadfiles working again for me became: /bindloadfile "./binds/filename.txt" Fortunately I only have ONE bindloadfile that calls other bindloadfiles to be loaded (for my Mastermind Pet Controls, of course), so in my case a simple Find/Replace in a single .txt file was sufficient to overcome this change in the file structure used by the new Mac client for CoH. Hope this helps anyone else who faces similar problems with their bindloadfiles on their installs.

Basically build an attack chain that takes ~10s to animate all of the attacks RELIABLY and just work from there. I was able to do this with Martial Arts for Tankers, which really wants to be running a ~10s attack rotation loop, where a complete "loop" of using each attack ONCE per rotation times out like this (sequencing order can be varied as desired): Thunder Kick (1.056s) (10s -Resist debuff) Storm Kick (1.056s) (10s +Defense buff) Cobra Strike (1.848s) Crippling Axe Kick (1.848s) Dragon's Tail (1.716s) Eagle's Claw (2.772s) = 10.296s total arcanatime used for animations Work out something like that for Titan Weapons where you can "routinely" use Momentum for part of the ~10s rotation time and you'll be set for using Defensive Sweep on a "just in time" basis every 10s (or so) to refresh the Bruising debuff.

I'm going to say ... TACTICS ... so long as you're slotting the Gaussian's Fire Control Build Up proc into it (and if you're doing that, you might as well get the whole set if you've got the slots to spare for it). Why? Because Focused Accuracy applies to You Only™ ... while Tactics applies to everyone within a 60ft radius around you. This means that a Build Up proc has "more chances to proc" every 10 seconds for every teammate around you. Research on this topic revealed the following: Do you like the idea of getting a 41.5% chance for "free"(?) Build Up proc every 10 seconds in a team while running Tactics? I do ... but then not everyone does. If you're solo, you're looking at a loss of Defense from Maneuvers relative to what you could get from Weave. If you're on a team with one other PC with Maneuvers you've got the same Defense you'd get from Weave ... AND ... you're also sharing all of that Defense with your entire team! So ... the permutations are: Solo = Weave is better than Maneuvers Team with 2+ Maneuvers = (better than) Weave for everyone on the Team And if you've got Maneuvers yourself ... you only need 1 other teammate who has Maneuvers to compliment your Maneuvers power, making it a lot more likely that there will be 2 PCs on the team with Maneuvers. Think of it this way. If 2 PCs on a team have Weave, only those 2 PCs are benefiting from Weave ... and everyone else gets nothing. If 2 PCs on a team have Maneuvers, then everyone on that team is getting "Weave-ish" levels of Defense buffed. If all 8 PCs on a team have Maneuvers, then everyone on that team is getting somewhere above 4x Weave levels of Defense combined. So really, the only time when Maneuvers is an "inferior" choice for you is when you're on a team where you're the only one with Maneuvers ... whereas any time you're on a team where You Plus One both have Maneuvers, you're doing "better than Weave" in that team ... and if you've got Maneuvers yourself, that means you only need One More™ besides yourself to achieve that level of increased performance (which honestly isn't that impossible to achieve). In fact, the only "real" downside to reaching for Maneuvers instead of Weave is that you won't have Tough to slot resistance set IOs into (for the two +3% Defense IOs) ... but then I personally prefer to reach for Rune of Protection in the Sorcery pool for that instead of Tough, since the Sorcery Pool gives access to Mystic Flight, Arcane Bolt (Force Feedback proc ready ranged attack!), Spirit Ward and Enflame(!) into the bargain, rather than trying to make do with pretty much everything in the Fighting Pool that you aren't going to "need" because you're a Scrapper who doesn't "need" Boxing+Kick+Cross Punch to have an effective melee attack (go figure, eh?). Of course, Your Mileage May Vary ...

In a word ... NO. Reason for that is that NC$oft would have needed to curate all that data since the shutdown ... and they had absolutely no financial advantage to do so (and plenty of financial incentives to just wipe the drives and repurpose the hardware for other projects). The odds of NC$oft still having the original server databases is Limit --> 0 type integrals using calculus stuff.

When you're in the tailor, check the alternate animations for the power.

Because War Witch ... ... is War Witch ... ... and the (nigh constant) slurping of her drink is something that the original dev team at Paragon Studios put in as an inside joke/dig at the developer due to her ... shall we say ... "drinking habits" ... in the office.

Agreed. I'd also add in the thought that Nature Affinity/Sonic would also qualify, particularly if you want to have a more "visible" effect for your powers bard songs than what Empathy or Time would necessarily provide.

Sonic/Pain Domination/Soul Mastery Corruptor The Summon Mistress power brings your backup singer on stage ...

... you have a mute button on your volume, don't you? Or failing that, you can turn your volume down while training, right? I mean, how hard is it to turn a knob on a dial? This entire topic, courtesy of the OP, reeks of selfish entitlement. It's the equivalent of the tech support complaint that goes like this ... Multiple "solutions" to the problem have already been offered, and each was rejected in turn ... because ... "fix the world, not me" ...? Um ...

You're welcome to launch your own server(s) where that is true ...

/em points and laughs

She's not the only Trainer on the server ...? There are like ... others ... who don't slurp their drinks ...

Uh ... stand farther away from her ... so you aren't listening to her constantly slurping her drink? Pocket D is bigger than just 50 square feet of space you know ...

Ideally it would be something that could be used for data scraping (ala Philotic Knight's efforts) to power a web based hero builder ... but that's some serious pie in the sky stuff.

Almost all powers in the game "root" the character avatar, immobilizing them, while the animation plays. The proper interpretation of the "take away the chance to be interrupted" clause would not be "making it impossible for anything to interrupt the cast" but rather to instead be that OUTSIDE influences (like damage) wouldn't interrupt. You can always interrupt yourself, of course (by moving). Hope that helps you.