Adeon Hawkwood

So one useful tip as a mastermind is to create a bind or macro that puts all pets into Passive & Follow modes. This will make them all stop attacking and run back to you which can be useful if they get a bit out of control. There's a bit in the MM forum about setting up pet binds, the main thing is to find a set that works for you.

That would have been during the Boss Farms part of the AE craze. Basically people figured out how to have missions spawn nothing but bosses and it turns out that if you can fight 10-20 bosses as a group the rewards:time ratio goes a bit crazy. Once those were nerfed people mostly went back to regular content, there was still AE farming going on of course but it wasn't as popular or as rewarding.

I agree with that. The older TFs are annoying in general but Synapse and the original Positron were the worst. The exemplering changes helped a bit but as you say the fact that Synapse was nothing but Clockwork made it horrible even after those changes. The main reason I keep an empowerment station in my base was to let me get the Endurance Drain Resistance and Increase Recovery buffs for running Synapse, it was still agrind but it helped counter all of the clockwork draining my endurance. All of the Shadow Shard Task Forces were pretty bad. It's a pity because the zones themselves were beautiful (and relatively quick to traverse if you used the geysers).

Someone made a version of Pine's that fixes those issues: https://score.savecoh.com/index.php/topic,541.msg2271.html

There's one form of aggro management you forget which is simply buffing defense or debuffing enemies to the point that they can't actually hurt the team rendering aggro management superfluous. I used to do that with my Time/Electric Defender. Drain their Endurance so they can't attack and if they do attack it misses anyway. Plus they're all moving to slow to get away.

Don't worry, losing patrol XP due to debt will count for the debt badges.

For Assault Rifle the critical powers you want are Burst, Slug, Buckshot, Flamethrower and Full Auto, you want to grab all five, no question. As for the other powers, M30 is an extra AoE, it's nice to have but if you're going to skip an AoE it's the most skippable. Sniper Rifle is great for filling in your single target attack chain if you can get the fast-snipe, the problem is that except for Devices blasters getting this up all the time requires you to overslot Tactics and add a Kismet proc which you may not want to do, so Sniper Rifle is debatable. Ignite is another option for single target damage, the main issue with that is that the cast time is really long and you really need an immobilize to keep the target stationary which Temporal Manipulation doesn't have. Bean Bag is a pretty standard blast set mez, but Time Stop is better so I'd take that instead if you want a single target mez. For Temporal Manipulation I've not played the set so I'm just going off numbers but here's my thoughts. Temporal Healing and Time Lord are essential, the first is your sustain power so it's a large chunk of your survivability while the second is a free 20% recharge so what's not to like? Chronos is just a Build Up clone so it's good for buffing your Flamethrower and Full Auto. Assault Rifle is short on single target damage so it's probably worth picking up at least one of the melee attacks to help out there, I'd lean towards Future Pain since it hits harder and has some control but Ageing Touch is also fine. End of Time is probably skippable, it's not bad but Assault Rifle already has a lot of AoE damage so you don't really need more. Time Shift is nice, not many blasters get AoE mez abilities, it's actually an argument in favor of Bean Bag since you can AoE mez the minions and then stack Bean Bag on the boss to mez him. Time Stop is a pretty standard blaster mez, it's slightly better thna most though, especially when combined with Time Wall.

So in addition to what other's have said I will add that simply adding a market cap doesn't work. If you put a cap on prices and that cap is under the natural market price then people simply sell in face to face transactions. This was seen a lot back on the live servers with the Gladiator's Armor global IO since it initially sold for more than the market cap of 2billion inf. In the long run having a market cap actually hurts players since off-market transactions decrease transparency and make it harder to shop around. Additionally off-market transactions mean that the 10% market fee doesn't get paid which contributes to inflation. As other's have noted the admins have seeded the salvage market with an infinite supply at fixed prices which is an effective way to implement a soft price ceiling. They've also decreased merit costs which should increase supply overall.

You're missing the point. The equivalent powers in Dual Pistols and Bio Armor each take up a power slot so those sets only have 8 regular powers instead of 9. So if a swap power were added to Archery it would be necessary to take out one of the existing powers to make room (probably Aim since that's the power that was swapped out in Dual Pistols). Personally I think Archery is fine where it is. Yes, only doing lethal damage can be a pain but it's a pain that almost every other weapon based set struggles with as well. The big advantage of Archery (and Assault Rifle) is that they have a really really good T9 power. Even with I25 removing the crash on other nukes the weapon sets still get much faster recharge on thier T9s letting them be used more often.

I think it's about 45min or so but I haven't really timed it. One word of advice, you're limited to a four person team and have to fight a lot of AVs so you do need either decent damage dealing or someone who can halt an AVs regeneration (Radiation Emission or Traps are good there). I had one team where we had mostly support characters (and a sentinel) and were barely scratching the AV. I ended up swapping my Defender for my Blaster and the whole thing went a lot more smoothly.

Or do the Summer Blockbuster Event. The enhancements from that are selling for a decent price. From an overall economic viewpoint I would advise against increasing inf gains since in the long run that just causes inflation. The price of things in the market is essentially determined by the ratio of inf to stuff. If you increase the amount of inf in the economy without also increasing the amount of stuff (i.e. recipe drops) then prices will start to rise. The original game had an economy that was actually relatively stable. Prices were somewhat high relative to native earning potential but they only really jumped up when new methods of farming were introduced (like AE) or when new items were introduced. We're not dealing with the same stockpile of inf so prices in general should be a bit lower but we'll have to wait for the economy to settle a bit more to see where things really end up. The admins have put in an infinite supply of fixed cost salvage which will also double as a minor inf sink so we should avoid inflation there but of course that means more inf will be spent on recipes so overall prices may not change that much.

So, is anyone else from the old market forum around? We must surely continue our ebil mission of ensuring that poor innocent heroes cannot afford the enhancements that they need *maniacal laughter*.

Actually the level restriction for Ouroboros was removed on the servers so you can get it as soon as you want. For the most part there aren't a ton of things to worry about level-wise since you can always do them through Ouroboros later. The one thing that is level locked are the Safeguard/Mayhem missions. You have to be in a specific level range to do them and get the temporary power and exploration badge that each of them awards. That being said you can get the badges later but doing requires finding someone who is int he correct level range and joining them on the mission. Other than that a few milestones: Level 12: Dual-Origin enhancements become available Level 20: Tip missions become available, these are a decent source of reward merits and allow you access to an alignment-specific power Level 22: Single-Origin enhancements become available (personally I start slotting generic IOs at this this level, they have a 32% enhancement so are slightly weaker than even level SOs but you don't have to keep replacing them as you level either) Level 35: The Rikti War Zone and Cimerora become available. These zone go from 35-50 and are popular end game content

Not exactly, the P2W vendor sells a few different 30minute jetpacka. The Jetpack Vendors sell Raptor packs with a full 2hour duration. So it's more convineient.

I wanted to get a Raptor Pack so I went to visit the Jetpack Vendors in the Shadow Shard. I checked with the vendors in both Cascade Archipelago and The Chantry and they appear to be broken (the one in FBZ was replaced by a P2W vendor). Basically when I clicked on them the shop interface doesn't come up I tried both left clicking and doing "right click -> chat" but neither option worked.

You're thinking of the Gladiator's Armor global. Hecatomb and Armageddon were on the higher end of the purple sets but even so they were more like 200million inf per piece. The Gladiator's Armor global was the one that hovered around 2billion inf although it had dropped to more like 1.7billion by the time the game shut down due to the increased supply from alignment merits (the Shield Wall global was the second highest but that was close to 1billion inf IIRC).

One suggestion I'd make is to replace the Blessing of the Zephyr KB Protection in Hover with the Kismet +6% to Hit. 8 points of knockback protection isn't that useful, most enemies have knockback that is less than 4 so a single KB protection IO is sufficient for most situations. Putting in a kismet +6% IO means that you'll be able to fast-cast Moonbeam without having to rely on one of your buildup procs triggering. To be honest you can probably also afford to lose the Winter's Gift IO in Hover, it's not awful but it's kind of situational, especially on a Defender that isn't specifically designed for tanking. I'd also slot Fortitude for Defense over To Hit but that's something of a personal preference. That being said I'm not sure if Hamidon Enhancements are available on the server but if they ever are Membrane Exposures are perfect for Fortitude. Three of them will cap it for Defense, To Hit and Recharge which can let you move some slots elsewhere. I'd slot both Dark Blast and Tenebrous Tentacles for Damage (and maybe move some slots form them into Nightfall), your overall damage is really light, remember sometimes the best defense is a good offense. It's worth adding Blackstar. Even if you don't really slot it up the huge To Hit penalty can basically disable an entire group.

So according to the wiki (which I believe is still correct) only 25% of the damage done by a confused critter counts when calculating rewards. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Confuse_(Status_Effect) So for example lets say an enemy has 200 HP, you deal 100 damage and a confused critter deals the remaining 100. For XP purposes 75% of the damage the critter does is ignored meaning that you receive XP as if you had done 100 damage to a critter with 125 HP (instead of 200). So you will receive 80% of the normal XP rewards.

Their Defense buffs are at 75% effectiveness compared to Defenders.

Regarding power set choice. There are definitely power sets that are better or worse than others but for the most part people don't really care that much. Due to the way the game was built team composition tends to be incredibly casual, support characters are incredibly strong in a team environment so once you stack a couple of them up the rest of the team composition is pretty much irrelevant, just need some warm bodies (in fact the strongest teams in the game are composed entirely of support characters). Power set choice matters a bit more for soloing, but even there you can solo content with pretty much any character it's just that certain sets will let you do it faster and/or push the difficulty higher. If you want to solo AVs (for example) then you'll probably want to consult the Scrapper or Controller forums on a good build but for general purpose play you're better off just finding a powerset that feels good to you. Roleplaying isn't mandatory, engage with it at a level that works for you. For example, I tend to write bios for my characters but rarely actually roleplay in game. Making characters that are knockoffs of other media was banned in the original game (since the developers were concerned about getting in legal trouble) but since this server is technically illegal in the first place the organizers aren't as concerned about it. Also as a side note, since you're coming from WoW. Please do not refer to Defenders (or other support characters) as healers. Unlike WoW healing is the weakest form of damage mitigation and support characters bring a LOT more to the table than that so calling them healers tends to irritate people.

Or just make a Defender/Corruptor. If you pick one of the tankier sets (Time and Traps are good examples) you're probably as tough as a lot of sentinels and have more team support as well.

The majority of raids were basically just pugged. There were some groups that did speed raids (or similar) but they were organized around global channels as much as they were around super groups. Personally I just had a supergroup base as a convenient place to store salvage and enhancements and pass them between my characters.

Regarding slotting those first two powers Frankenslotting can work wonderfully. If you mix dual and triple aspect IOs from a bunch of different sets you can easily get good all round stats for these powers. I normally do this with IOs around level 30 so I can do it early enough to be useful while leveling but late enough to be slightly higher stats on the IOs. For example suppose you slotted your hold like this: (A) Essence of Curare - Accuracy/Hold/Recharge (3) Paralytic - Accuracy/Hold/Recharge (3) Maelstrom's Fury - Damage/Endurance/Recharge (5) Maelstrom's Fury - Damage/Endurance (5) Ruin - Damage/Endurance (7) Damage Increase IO With all IOs at level 30 that gives you: 34.8% Accuracy 91.99% Damage 60.9% Endurance Reduction 52.2% Recharge Reduction 34.8% Hold duration So basically you get a standard attack slotting of 3xDam, 1xAcc, 1xEnd, 1xRech plus a bonus of 1xHold, 1x End and 0.5xRech. You can tweak the selection and relative stats to suit your preferences, this is just a quick example.

Good Fortitude target selection is very dependent on team composition and the enemy group you're fighting. If your tanker or melee characters are struggling then yeah fort them up (for example if you an an Invulnerability Tanker versus a Psionic group then he'll probably want Fortitude). But if they're fine and/or you have other support characters giving them defense (such as a force fielder) then giving Fort to a Blaster so he can go nuts with the AoE is more useful. Heck if you give a Blaster Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost he can probably just solo the map.

Yep, this is pretty much my attitude. I'm enjoying being able to play CoX again but if it goes away I'll survive. I'm not super interested in setting up a personal server, the appeal of CoX to me was always in the fact that it was a multiplayer game, I'm not really interested in a solo-only version.