Tahliah

/this Mids is a great resource, so be sure to check it out. And welcome to the game! 🙂

Well, Snarky, you just know I'm going to chime in with a pitch for an Ice blaster. 😛 Ice does excellent ST damage, particularly proc'd and setted out (pay attention not just to dmg but also, obviously, to acc and rech). Also, and this is very controversial apparently, but I like to run DWD in my Blizzard, great -tohit yet still does devastating damage. The freeze rays also do an incredible amount of damage, even if they don't actually hold the target (as they wouldn't on really hard targets like AVs, but they hold PPs, Carnie Mistresses, and non-AV Fake Nems very well, stopping them from activating their various untouchable powers, plus the freeze rays would be ticking over damage regardless; I have freeze ray in my attack chain for very hard targets for this reason--and because it recharges and casts quickly). While I would run ice with ice (more good -tohit and -rech debuffs there), it doesn't meet your requirement for -RES and / or -REGEN (though if you guys are creating a specialized team, you might consider assigning more of that to a defender or troll type?). Also, just get a huge stack of envenomed dagger and use them. I don't leave home without it! All that being said, time seems a reasonable choice in this instance (it doesn't require melee range for the most part) and since a blaster is not going to provide the primary debuffs for any team, /time would be an added bonus. (But /ice would be better! 😛)

Ha! I wouldn't take it personally, particularly on teams where chat is limited to a few bits of banter or explicit instructions from the team/league leaders. And it could just be a coincidence, too, in that your chat posted just as the team is ambushed or starts engaging the AV, etc. By the time that is over, whatever you said may not be relevant anymore. Chat dies down (even in groups who always run together night after night) for all kinds of reasons, rarely because of anything anyone said (unless it's one of the whiny, "but WHHHHHYYYYYYY is this speed TF not clearing maps?????? I neeeeeeeedsssssss XP!," then yeah, no one will answer or chat about anything else because it's fun to let that whiny stuff sit there for everyone to read over and over while pointing and laughing).

I don't think this is necessarily a bad philosophy, though it's presented kind of matter of factly. I mean a speed (not so much a max diff) TF requires that the player know the ropes because they have to know where to go and what to skip, etc. But yeah, on an all or almost all PUG tf, I'm happy to help players (to the point that I've literally gone with them to NW to get the badge for an ITF). Being nice is not only nice but it's pretty karmic. I can't tell you how many times people have dropped what they were doing to help me out just because years earlier I had gone out of my way to help them and now they are some kind of uber player who is happy to help me when I need it.

Yeah, no. I have been on the receiving end of UA from a random player back on live (not on HC so far), and it's insulting as hell and way out of line. Why do you have Ice Sword and not Frozen Fists (or whatever that power's called)? Frozen Fists is way betterer, and you should have it. In fact, you should have both so you can do better in melee . . . on your range toon, because I play a blapper and you should, too. Blah blah blah. I don't think I even answered the person and was very happy when that ITF ended and I never had to deal with that person again. Yes, I actually remember the exact tf we were on, though I can't recall the specific complaint about my build, though it was pretty much this ridiculous; this was back when the ITF was first introduced so everyone and their brother was running them over and over trying to figure out how best to beat it (remember when we puzzled and struggled over separating and defeating the Nictus one at a time? LOL, good times!). Anyway, even if you roll the best MM in the entire Paragonverse, keep your opinions to yourself unless explicitly asked. And people will ask if they see you are running a great AT build well. This, I get much more of, than that one time at ITF camp when I got hey, your build sucks because at level 35, you don't have the powers I would have selected at level 35. This is pretty much a good rule for your life, too, because no matter how well-intentioned, offering UA is always a bad idea. It alienates people, makes them double down on whatever stupid you think you are pointing out, and generally makes you seem like a busybody know-it-all. (See what I did there? How's that UA working out for ya? 😉)

I think this is true. I don't play the market since I don't have much interest in it, but when I get something good, I will look long enough at the market to figure out if the recipe is worth crafting and then selling as is or converting to "the" enh in the given set. I have no idea how you guys makes billions, I think the most I ever had at one time on my main was 500M, but I use her inf (and merits) to build up other alts, including buying them Team Transporter, etc., so that's no surprise (I spend it as fast as I get it, in other words). Even though I don't have billions, I do make it a point to email a few million to random people in chat who say that they don't have enough inf for whatever they need or if they are asking basic questions about the game (and thus seem like new players who might appreciate a few million inf in seed money). Shrug. What's the big deal? I can get that back on a TF or two (including selling whatever goodies drop). No one I actually "know" in-game needs inf, but if they did, I would just give it to them (in the tens of millions if they needed it). It's just inf, we can earn/make more. I think this is probably another reason I will never amass billions; I love to give it away! Particularly during the holidays when @Marine Xposts his challenge, but just whenever I see an opportunity is also good. Okay, I'm getting way off topic here, I think. But I just wanted to point out that not everyone is interested in playing the market or even in casually selling/creating/converting for better things to sell. It's kind of time-consuming (especially at first when you don't know what things go for in the market), and a lot of players have limited time to spend in the game and would rather run content than wile away their two hours researching/acquiring salvage/crafting/etc. I get that. I have to be in the mood to do it, too, . . . or really really need that super shiny set on one of my alts (NAO). Heh.

Ill/kin does all that, but it's a troll. So just pick any defender options (it really doesn't matter given your parameters since they will all have some type of rez, though think about how you want to heal-kins and dark miss, emp/pain doesn't, etc.) and slot your sprint with Celerity stealth (you won't be invis, but you will be stealthy enough to get by most stuff). Then pick up leadership, speed (for Hasten), and TP (or as someone mentioned, just buy the TP teammates power from the P2W vendor, this is not an ideal option since it has a cooldown time). You can also get the day job rez, not great but decent in a pinch if your main rez is down. You can also get a minimal targetted heal via Day Jobs (again, not ideal, but good in a pinch if your heal missed or you about to lose someone).

I must be obtuse because I don't get this at all. If I'm on and see a global friend I want to run with or chat with, I just send a tell. They then respond that they are on a tf or yay! let's run [whatever] . If I get back an AFK msg, I just think, gee, they must be . . .erm , AFK. If I'm in my base doing a respec or doing some building, I'll just ignore tells because I'm busy doing something else. Most people get that, particularly when I finish and send back a tell saying I was doing a respec or building a new moat. Is this some kind of RP thing? That's the only reason I can imagine that sending someone ON YOUR GLOBAL FRIENDS LIST a tell would be considered even remotely rude or intrusive. If you don't hear back, just go on about your business (constantly sending tells to the same person who is not answering you would be rude and intrusive even to non-RPers.). Also, your friends (and you) can just "hide" if they (or you) don't want to be bothered. I don't see any need to add this . . . mostly because I just don't get it.

It really would be a blast! Imagine inner-tubing around in Praet! Or dodging sharks in the Wards. So fun!

I duo with a tank on my main, and we rock everything we try (with one sad exception, which we had to redo to beat). My toon is an ice/ice/ice blaster, so he does his tanky job, and I do mine. Mission (or TF/SF) accomplished. That said, we've been running together forever (including years back on live), so part of that is just that we know how we think and play. Given that, I think the suggestions of anything with rad or poison is good. Any debuff is good, but you still have to be able to kill them once they are debuffed (assuming you don't want to spend ages doing a single tf/sf). For this reason, I wouldn't pick a defender (even though I run quite a few of them) to duo with a tank simply because their damage output is sad, as is a tank's, so that's taking the really long way, in my opinion (YMMV, of course). So it kind of depends on what you want to do and how quickly you want to do it.

I don't dislike power creep for the simple reason that I don't bother to provide 99.9% of my characters with a decent (i.e. well-slotted with sets, procs, etc.); therefore, I don't experience power creep at all. 😛 But I do like having one alt that I feel fantastic running, a super hero with super powers that makes me super happy. Is she over-powered? Not to me, she's not. She's the exact power level that I poured hours and hours scouring set bonuses and untold amount of influence and merits (and thankless slogging to get both) to build. She is a labor of love, but she didn't roll off the showroom floor that way. I would love some tricked out only content to run her in. Heck, she may totally suck, but I can't know that given our current options. She's better than a DO'd toon, but then so are pretty much all of my alts sporting IO's, so that's not really saying much.

I agree that "kitted out" is personal, but if we are talking about content for kitted out characters, there has to be some baseline for the devs to go by in creating such content, no?

This is an excellent question and provides food for thought. Off the top of my head, a kitted out build would require at least four sets to five (a lot of people don't get all six). This would necessarily exclude the Numi/Miracle/PS/LOTG/etc. procs most people get unless they are used in tandem with at least four others from that set in that power. Of course that would hurt frankenslotters, so that may not be a good measure (I do frankslot on my main, but only on a few powers, but I imagine that there are frankenslotters who do it on most if not all powers). Back to the drawing board. What about scaling diff for these "kitted out" missions not on SOs but on standard IOs, not sets? It's not ideal, but it would make things a bit better in terms of challenge and fun. Or to keep the original idea, how about a requirement of all IO's, including both standard and sets, but with X percentage being composed of two or more set pieces? /just tossing out ideas here

Wow, I read the OP and then this, and I have to say that it all kind of "clicked" for me (not the market/game economy part, that's right over my head). One of the things that I have struggled to understand is the ability to change the level/number of baddies. It's supposed to make things more challenging, but it really doesn't on tricked out alts. It just makes it take longer, which is not fun or hard and gets boring very quickly (on the other side, if you are on a "real" lvl 8, doing Posi at 4/8 is just stupid (IMO, YMMV). There really should be content specific not just to incarnates but to kitted out builds up to and including the incarnate level. I've seen incarnates (heck, I've run incarnates) that have minimal sets/procs/etc., and they do just as well as kitted out toons. There should be content for elite/super/expensive/tricked out/uber/whatever we call it builds. That would be the challenge that just adding more minions or upping the level +4 does not accomplish but may have tried to but cannot while still making it doable by those slotted solely with SOs. If a toon can manage whatever diff on an SO-only alt, then it's obviously going to be a (quite boring) walk in the park for a kitted out alt. Personally, I don't trick out all my alts, not even most of them. Exactly one of them at this point, actually. But I would love to have content to run that is designed for kitted out alts. Honestly, I would be more inclined to kit more out if that were the case (possibly helping the market in some way I don't get?)! As is, there doesn't seem much point in making an "uber" alt that is never going to be genuinely challenged. But . . . I can hear people wailing that no content should "require" a super build. Sigh.

I think we all do this differently. Back on live, I would study other builds and then use mids, spending hours tweaking this and that for my main, but I would just flop sets into random powers for all other toons based on what was happening (or not) . Most of them, obviously, needed recovery at low levels, so I'd find sets (or procs/etc.) that let me get a recovery bonus with the minimal investment (say at two, or three from a set). This went on the whole time live was up and running, though I think I might have loaded my plant troll in mids now that I think about it. I was (and still am) kind of focused on one build, one main, so all the others just get whatever I slapped in to help with this or that weakness. Then after COH/V went dark and Homecoming emerged from the darkness to brighten my world once more, I rebuilt my main, and this time, I didn't use mids (it wasn't really ready at first anyway); I went from memory and then had to make adjustments for new powers and sets. In the end it was trial and error (and a ton of respecs) to get the exact build I love (though I am thinking about some possible changes, thank goodness for unslotters !). I don't spreadsheet (it hurts my brain), but I do jot stuff down on this old-fashioned thing called paper, using an antique writing device called a pen. In this way I note what set bonuses go with which sets and in which powers I can place them. This archaic method also helps me with respecs since I can never remember how many slots I need for what or why. I have never followed another person's build exactly, but I did get ideas from them back on live. I've found that powers I love are not always beloved by everyone who runs whatever AT, and I don't care. I run what works best for me and my play style, which gets tricky because my main is my badger, as well, so she is built to both solo and team, which makes slotting and setting her tricky. And so fun!

@Shenanigunner(or anyone), do you know the correct window name for the incarnate window (where you equip, create, etc. incarnate powers?). I have tried everything I can think of to get it to embiggen so I can read it comfortably, to no avail. I have the powerlist itself big enough, but neither combat abilities nor incarnate powers have a window name, so I am at a loss as to how to scale them.

So apparently, you have already narrowed your choices to melee. Can't help you there since my main is an ice/ice/ice blaster . . . but meets all of your listed criteria. One thing that seems a constant in this (and, really, every) game is that melee players can't do range and vice versa. I certainly run the world's worst scrapper and once ran a tank that saw a purse-snatcher in AP and ran away. Heh. But I love my trolls, blasters, defenders, and MMs, and not one of them ever runs away from a purse snatcher (or anything else!).

This was my thought, as well. TT makes, for example, Dr. Q. doable in far less than the bazillion hours it took on live (when you had to literally plan ahead and let everyone know to free up their whole day to run it for the badge). This is a good thing, a GREAT thing. My other note is that Crey are not devastating foes for some ATs, even with their new buffs. My ice/ice/ice blaster cuts through them like butter, including when scaled down for Manti . . . but has run into problems with Carnies and CoT (particularly at lower levels). Do we change all the merit rewards because some ATs can handle some baddies better than others? I don't think that's a good path to take. /just my two cents! That and $6 will get you a gallon of gas or a pound of chicken this summer.

Well, there is no impact (unless I'm on my main, and then I get kind of happy because yay, closer to my next death badge), but I'm not sure what your underlying question is. Are you suggesting that deaths should "mean something" like a serious (multi-level) debit? On live there was this awesome SG that lived by the motto, "dead means dead." If your toon died, you had to delete it (or later, just remove it from the SG). That was a serious consequence to dying, and it really made game-play interesting (for obvious reason, with attention focused on survival first, sort of like on MO runs, where teams function differently because the goal has been complicated by the need for every single member to survive.). Back to the original question: The only time I really bum about deaths is a team wipe. That's not fun. It's not fun at all. Not because we "lose" anything, per se, but because it is horrifying that an entire team is wiped out. Then we all regroup, have a quick chat (gee, maybe we shouldn't reenter the battle one at a time? heh). As a badger, I'd love a "So Ashamed I Could DIE" badge for being part of a team wipe. That would make me happy. Happy's an impact, right?

Honestly, I can't stand to run on +4/x8 on my main; it's not "harder," it just takes longer and gets boring as heck really really fast. Sitting there smashing my attack chain over and over and over while nothing touches me is . . . not hard. I tend to start watching whatever's on tv and not really even paying attention because it's just click, click, click, click over and over. And over. This may occasionally result in my main's demise, but I'm pretty good with that (she still needs death badges), and besides, who the heck cares when the whole thing is so boring that I can't stay interested in it, anyway? I also can't stand to run +4/x8 on lowbies (I literally LOL when I see someone LFG a Posi 1 at +4/x8); this is just an absolute waste of time, assuming, since it's LFG, that the majority of the team will actually be level 8ish and running on red enhancements either from the start or from two minutes into the first mission. Masochism has its place, of course, and I think it's great that people want to do this and CAN (i.e. have that option if it's their cup of tea). But omg, not me. I think that the sweet spot for +4/x8 is the terrible 30s and 40s, when you have your toon kind of built, slotted with IO's, maybe even a few sets/procs by that point, and need the xp to hit 50. Other than that, it just makes zero sense to me to run at that setting. Obviously, YMMV.

There are build guides you can check out in the MM forum, not sure if there is one specifically for Demon/Electric, though. I tend to be a trial and error type of player, not a guide follower, so you may consider just taking every power that comes up and then respecing out of the ones that don't work for you. With all the respecs we get (plus the ability to unslot), this is kind of a fun way to learn your powers and construct your own great build . . . that you can then share with others! /just a thought

I'm definitely not an MM guru, but I love to run them! I typically just run them solo since they can annoy teams unless you have your pet control binds saved and upload for every new MM (which gets tricky because, for example, my favorite means of shutting my demons up is to have them /em protest and some pets--like beasts--can't do that) . . . and remember to upload them. :P I've been having SO much fun with my beasts/nature that it's ridiculous. The set combo is pure awesomeness, and it's one of the few MM combos I've tried that don't require constant resummoning at early-ish levels because nature keeps your pets alive, dealing damage, and thriving even before you get to slotting them out with sets/procs/etc. Their survivability only increases with levels and slotting (of course). I have a bots/ff, but like you, I find it kind of boring. Again, though, love that I don't have to resummon during a mish. She's only lvl 20, so it may get better later on. I only still play her because I love that toon's costume/concept. Imagine! Hee!

Good to know. When I first saw the thread, I thought this would be a great idea and was going to suggest sticking one in Ouro [or even in our sg bases] too so we can change alignment there and then just port to the RI/Paragon/whatever, and better would be if we can select Null options the same we can change difficulty. But I guess that's not possible. Oh well, it was a nice, shiny thought while it lasted. To be honest, though, I would probably still make the trip to Pocket D for Null stuff (I tend to not like the running speed part of Speed Boost and I cannot stand that popup tray for Afterburner so change this on all my toons, as well as disabling Group Fly), but that stuff is not something I need to do in seconds like switching sides to join a team (I so hate to keep teams waiting while I zone to PD, change alignment, then head to the mission, and I don't have mission tp on all that many toons, so it can take a while depending on the level). Anyway, now I am just rambling (as usual!). tldr; ty Apparition! (heh)

In addition to @biostem's suggestion, you can get super duper white shiny glowy white skin if you choose the spectrum costume option. You'll be so white we will all need to wear shades. :P

Well, I'd stick with my main, an ice/ice blaster. And I'd probably play very very very infrequently.