chigiabelo

A long time ago during Live, The Diary of Jane by Breaking Benjamin was a favorite song of mine, so I named a stalker I made Diarrhea Jane.

A very long time ago during the original game I posted in the suggestion threads about an idea I had for post 50 content: the ability to form squads composed of your alts and a UI to switch between them at will while playing as well as control other squad members in a manner similar to Masterminds. My idea was for every character you level up to 50 you gain the option to add them to a squad of up to 8 characters that may include other players' squad members. The game UI would need to be modified to allow you to switch between your squad members at will, replacing all the previous character's tray assignments/macros/etc. with the next one's. Squad members not under direct control would act like AI pets but you would have some control over them via the Mastermind type UI. The whole point of this was to introduce whole new ways to play and you could literally play the same mission so many different ways depending on the order in which you switch between your squad members.

Some ideas get shot down not because they're crazy, but because some folks have an agenda, they want certain things implemented before others, and if your idea diverts developer attention away from that agenda, they'll poopoo it. The good news is that devs (both in this game and others) will know a good and implementable idea when they see one. I can think of a few ideas that, while I can't be certain I was the first to suggest them on the original forums, I (1) hadn't seen anyone else bring them up before me, (2) I got flamed for suggesting most of them when and most importantly (3) they got implemented either in CoH or Champions. Examples of things I requested that others did not think were such good ideas are the ability to hide from your friends (i.e., appear offline), a mission editor (AE), and Personal Arch Enemies (a version of which was implemented in Champions, pretty much the way I would have wanted it too). Here's something I always wanted: squads made up of your other characters and the ability to switch between them in the UI. Basically, I think with today's more powerful processors and cheaper, larger amounts of RAM, it should be possible for the client to instantly switch between characters, allowing you to play more than one. My idea was that once you got 2 characters to the level cap, you'd unlock squads, i.e., the ability to play special missions designed for much larger teams composed of one or more players bringing two or more of their Level 50+ alts and switching between them at will while playing. Characters that are not under your immediate control would automatically begin using AI to fulfill their roles, but be somewhat controllable using Mastermind-type commands. You could literally play the same mission different ways just by changing the order in which you switch between your characters.

If you are a solo player, have you considered just running your own server and changing the leveling rate to whatever suits you? The files are out there and even on an 8GB PC, you can run the server AND the game client, and change just one line in a config file so that your characters level at 1.5x/2x/3.5x ... literally, whatever speed you want. I have one at home set to 5x and it's a blast. Though I'll be honest, since Homecoming came up, I've preferred to play online. I kinda wonder why some of the entities running public servers haven't experimented with servers that have custom leveling rates, just to see if the public has a preference. If it were me, I'd offer a server with 3.5x leveling speed with some conditions: limited to a certain number of players, if you move a character to that server you can't move it back to a regular server, the gain in XP should be offset by loss of something like inf probably, and the economy would be separate from the regular servers. Oh, and it would be called Kiddie League. Then the devs could datamine it to see if it leads to people quitting the game sooner or sticking around longer.

The day is still young and some of us aren't liquored up and pissed off enough yet. Give it time ...

S'funny ... I've never seen that acronym before, but instantly knew what it meant.

This brings up (to me, at least) the thought that perhaps the whole time sink thing needs to be rethought a bit given the different circumstances we are in. In a subscription pay-2-play game, I get it, you need to keep people busy and suck up their time. Crafting, traveling from zone to zone and a whole other bunch of things accomplish some of that as does combat, badge hunting, etc. But the way things are now, is it really that necessary? Surely they could consider streamlining some of these things so we can keep doing what we really enjoy doing.

Multi-boxing is possible on PC's that fairly ordinary by today's standards, so if you have 8GB+ of RAM you should have no trouble playing 2, 3, possibly more accounts simultaneously and alt-tabbing between the accounts. If you are intent on PL'ing yourself, it might be a good idea to create farming toons (usually a brute, but with the upcoming tanker changes, possibly one of those too) on your main account and at least one other account. Leveling a brute that is destined to be a farmer is fairly easy (check out the guides on these forums) and before they even reach 50 they can already start farming lightly and sometimes even AFK. After I got my first MM to 50, i created another account and lightly PL'd a brute to his late 20's. At that point, I let the brute take over and level himself and PL another brute on a 3rd account. At some point, the first brute could handle +1/x6 afk, i.e., I would enter the farming missions with both brutes and just leave them there and come back 1/2 hour later and most everything in the mish was dead. As soon as both brutes hit 50, I alternated getting them their incarnate abilities while PL'ing a 3rd brute, this time on my main account, to 50. So now I have 3 farmers (Spines/Bio, Fire/Fire and Spines/Fire) and one of them just PL'd a defender on my second account to 50 also. All in the span of a month and I now use the farmers to afk farm influence. I'll use them to PL only to recreate my old alts from Live while I play new AT's that I haven't had the pleasure to try out yet. By year's end I hope to have recreated all my favorite alts from the old days while I've created all new concept characters from the newer powersets.

There are simply some people who have to live in a world where people are like them and do the things they do and for the same reasons they do them. It's the root motivation of all prejudice/bigotry/racism. It's not just this game; it's like that on virtually every forum I've been a participant in. Here's an example: 25 years ago I took up skiboarding. Skiboards look like small snowboards, about 3 feet long and maybe 5-6 inches wide and you wear one each foot, used with regular ski boots or hard snowboard boots. They were very popular with the inline skater crowd. I went on a snowsports forum online where skiers and snowboarders were, as usual, bashing each other. As soon as I mentioned skiboarding, I immediately started getting flamed.

Different strokes for different folks ... I like AE farming for influence and stuff, keeps my less capable alts well fed. I also enjoy PL-ing friends and will sometimes randomly offer to PL a stranger and top them off with some inf and rare recipes.

Hmmmmm, hobbies ... playing electric guitar, collecting electric guitars, collecting tube guitar amps, building tube guitar amps, guitar building/modding, electronics in general, shooting sports, skiing, kayaking, boating, RC airplanes, 3d modeling and printing, Arduino and coding in general.

Strangely enough, I've found some of the farming missions in AE to be a good source of incarnate shards. I spend a couple of hours there PL'ing another character in an S/L farm and had 28 shards at the end of the exercise.

You need to go to Icon on hero side and see the cosmetic surgeon.

Excellent guide!

I think once you've been around the block a few times, it's acceptable to find shortcuts past the early levels. Gaming AE is one of them. In my case, once I got to 50 and Incarnated my Mastermind, I created two other accounts, a brute in each one, and began using the MM in AE to PL them. The first one I would leave at the mission door and run one of the S/L Comic Con farms. I realized that depending on your difficulty settings, you could take a character from 1 to anywhere from 14 to almost 20, I think it was, in your first pass of the outdoor mission, if you had XP rewards set to double (P2W). Once the first brute, a Spines/Bio, was old enough to earn his keep, I slotted him up for defense and resistance and let him follow along the MM while the second brute, a Fire/Fire, waited at the door. The brute was excellent at keeping aggro off the MM and pets and allowed me to play at higher difficulty while all I had to do was spam a heal his way every now and then. The first brute hit 50 within 10 days of casual play but at some point before that, was already able to farm a bit while AFK, so I pretty much let him level himself in the space missions. The second brute followed shortly after and is currently leveling AFK as I type this and will hit 50 tonight. When both are incarnated, they'll be used mostly for farming influence.

I was playing around in GM mode on my server and made a character omnipotent, that's when they get all the primaries, secondaries and pool sets of their AT. One of the things I saw was Force of Will.

I had a hell of a time finding a reliable source of incarnate shards for my alpha and had given up on that, preferring to go the incarnate thread route instead, but I recently found that I get a heck of a lot of Incarnate Shard drops from the Comic Con farming missions in AE. One afternoon, I got 28.

The Kick and Boxing, I didn't slotting or using because they were single target and melee, though there may be useful secondary effects. If I was a /kin I might go with all melee attacks, but I find range, particularly range with knockdown, useful because I try to keep runners from aggroing nearby spawns. The binds thing ... I suppose it depends on your peferred playstyle, but one of the things I like most about MMs is that you can have many complex playstyle choices. For example, you can have binds set up so you can send 3 pets left and 3 pets right while you pull down the center, or you can send two left and two right while keeping 2 with you for some added protection. You can sacrifice one by having it run around, directing it to certain points, aggroing mobs and leading them to a chokepoint where the rest of the pets wait to ambush and you hover overhead. I use a Razer Tartarus programmable keypad for my left hand, so I can have my most often used binds literally under my fingers, but there are other ways to command pets. An extra power tray can hold macro buttons and those can easily be accessed via the mouse. At minimum, you should have a way of directing them to a spot where they are passive or aggressive (goto passive and goto aggressive). I've also recently found that I can take a little $7 Arduino board, hook it up the PC via USB and program it to send keystrokes triggered by any type of switch such as a button or a footswitch, so i'll be experimenting with that and CoH a bit. I've been farming AE with my MM to level up another MM and a Brute on a second account and I'd like for my PL'd slaves to be able to do more than just suck up XP in the AE farms. I think I could trigger a complex series of events with a footswitch. I'm very new at this farming thing and am not min/maxed, but so far I have the other MM and brute each at level 25 with only about 3 and half hours of play each.

I compared Crosspunch to several attacks on a test MM I built on Justin. Level 35 all attacks slotted with 1ACC 3DM SO's. Using unslotted Brawl as the baseline, against an evel level Crey Infiltrator, Crosspunch did 9.02 times the damage of unslotted brawl on average (about 81.5 damage). Against that same mob, Arcane bolt did 9.49 times unslotted brawl (though against other mobs, I'v seen CP do slightly better than Arcane Bolt). None of my primary attacks did better than that, usually scoring between 5.02 and 8.86 time unslotted brawl. Spring Attack did 8.3, Flurry 6.4, etc. I've played several MMs to 50 now and the best advice I can give as to playstyle is (1) binds and macros let you set up and position the pets for more effective battles, (2) against minions and LTs, let the pets scatter and do what they do but against hard hitting targets, focus them because it removes the bigger threats more quickly and keeps them grouped for buffs and heals, (3) don't ignore your survivability so add +res, +def, +HP wherever you can because between that and your pets' hitpoints you can tank for short periods.

I've no experience with Mercs or Nature, but have recently leveled a Beasts/Thermal and have almost T4'd all my incarnate slots. I've been on the fence about respecing out of my primary attacks, at least some of them because right now, even though I do use them in my attack chain, and they server as mules for some IO set bonuses, they do such pitiful damage. If Hero Stats is to be believed, the bulk of my damage comes from my Judgement nuke, Explosive Blast from my Epic pool (not bad considering it's slotted for knockback/down), Nemesis Staff and Blackwand. I tend to build for playstyle and concept first, but I don't think I would skip all my attacks. Ranged attacks are always useful for pulling, secondary effects such as KB/KD can help extend survivability a bit, AOEs (if you can get them) do decent aggregate damage, and the primaries help flesh out the character, thematically. Getting Tough and Weave and various +Res and +Def bonuses and +health passives do really make a huge difference in survivability.

There are fairly inexpensive gaming mice now that have a mini numpad under your thumb. Like the Utechsmart which retails for $30 or less.

There are numerous comparisons between the powersets on this forum already. I'll just add that that in my opinion, the best MM you can make is the one you enjoy playing, no matter what anyone else thinks. My Beasts/Thermal is at Veteran Level 15 now with 2 incarnate slots T4'd and the rest T3'd plus the 4 passive accolades and he was always a blast to play, moreso now.

The first time I played that mission before shutdown was with my defender and he was not terribly well built. I did find that pulling the first couple of them and killing them quickly was the key for me.

Triggering some events are a simple GM command. From the Ourowiki: So it should be easy for them to do at least some of these.

Ditto. I got my 2nd purple today while casually playing a mish that was conning +1 to me. Only one boss and I think my drop came off an LT. No sooner had I posted this when I had a purple drop! Then I had another one today!