Call Me Awesome

Slide up a couple forums to the Tools, Utilities & Downloads then go to Mid's Hero Designer.

Always was referred to as Weekly Task Force by all I knew which abbreviates to WTF.

Shards and that entire Shard based tree are relics of the original Incarnate implementation. When the other Incarnate powers were introduced for some reason the Dev's introduced an entirely new system for creating them. Having two completely separate systems of Incarnate salvage is pointless and confusing. All Shard related drops should be converted to Thread drops and Shards should be removed from the game. Threads are a relatively abundant resource that can be used to create ANY Incarnate power. Using Shards it will take a minimum of 4 weeks as I recall to craft a T4 Alpha... you needed to run the Weekly TF to get the salvage for a T3 and you needed two T3's to combine with a salvage piece made from two WTF drops... thus you had to run 4 Weekly TF's for the salvage needed to craft a T4 Alpha. Oh, and the Shard salvage from the WTF only dropped the first time you ran the WTF, try again next week for the second piece.

Every other mission I can think of in a TF with a time limit simply advances to the next mission if you fail. The Lady Gray mission where you're supposed to lead out the two idiots? Let them run into battle and get killed, it's much faster and you go on to the next one.

Ok, so fail the mission and go on. Really I absolutely DESPISE "kill x number of y" missions in the first place and worthless grays on top of that?

Better still would be to completely drop all the Gray hunts, they're worthless and only serve to waste time and pad the TF length. Replacing all of them with an extra door mission or two would greatly improve the TF.

By default I tend to grab Mystic Flight on most characters; yes it's a little slower than SS/SJ but it offers more control and really, the speed issue is seldom important. Most of the time Fly (or Mystic Flight) will get you to the mission door nearly as fast as if not faster than SS/SJ characters. Outside of having to get from one end of IP to the other the speed difference isn't enough to matter. Does it really matter if it takes you another 10 seconds to get there? Likely you'll be waiting on some of your team anyway and nothing else comes close to the mobility of Fly. If you're masochistic enough to go to the Shadow Shard other travel powers aren't very effective... not a major issue since most players avoid that zone. The few exceptions are typically Tankers with CJ/SJ as the travel power and that's more of a flavor thing than anything else. Flying is simply much more convenient than any other travel power. I had very few characters with SS at Shutdown and none here on Homecoming; the only reason I'd get it is to stack with a stealth power. I had it on my Dark/Dark Defender (Shadowfall + SS = Invis) and my Plant/Storm Controller (Steamy Mist + SS) on Live. The SS/SJ combination is problematic because it uses two of your four power pools; quite a few builds may not have an extra pool to devote to it. Back on Live over the course of the game I tried every travel power and eventually settled on Fly for the majority. A Granite Tanker is the only character with TP and only used it for combat mobility... I had Fly for the actual Travel power... thanks to the -speed/-jump of Rooted or Granite you're almost forced into TP in combat. Since IO's became a thing and near Granite levels of toughness became possible on more mobile powersets I don't see any point in Stone Armor anymore so TP goes back into the abyss from whence it came.

Well, that's a Wild Scrapper statement if ever I heard one 🤣

That's what I was trying to recall. I knew there were restrictions on it and didn't want the OP getting in trouble out of ignorance.

Might need to uninstall/reinstall then, sounds like something's corrupted.

I feel your pain, Gortak, my BS/Regen was level 25 when the nerf hit. Parry was always a godsend for him though, all the way to 50.

Does it die faster than Rommy? Since it's the first one he eats to Rez that would seem to be the way to choose.

Hmm, that lets out using Hotfeet/Rain/Cages/Bonfire/Hurricane on a spawn which was my first thought, the damage and debuffage working like the tried and true Hotfeet/Choking Cloud/Cages/Bonfire of a Fire/Rad. Oh, I seem to remember seeing something about immobilize no longer eliminating KD? Is that correct or will I be avoiding Cages?

You are correct, I'd forgotten about QR... and I shouldn't have since I had a BS/Regen scrapper back in the day. Unfortunately he had to grow up after the IH nerf.

I'd said that I'd written off /Storm since I'd disliked the set on Live with a Plant/Storm but with the KB-KD procs I'm starting to reconsider and I had a question for you folks. I notice that Freezing Rain will take a LOT of procs and it's relatively low damage so do I go with a Damage set, a Debuff set or just toss 6 procs in it? I'm debating on 4 damage procs and 2 -res procs. Also, what's the effect of the KB-KD proc in Hurricane? Do they flop like with a proc'd Bonfire or do they get pushed away? Another thing that occurs to me, if I have multiple KD effects like Bonfire & Hurricane will they stack and change back to KB? I'm still playing around with the build in Mid's and debating on rolling it up, it does look like I can get some significant defenses and mitigation in it. I thought I'd settled the question on my next 'troller with Fire/Rad... now I'm wondering again.

Actually you needed THREE power pics to get Stamina. It was an accepted tax at the time that you got Hurdle or Swift and Health by 18 so you could get Stamina at 20. Offhand I can't think of a single powerset combination in any AT (other than a tri-form Keldian since pool powers didn't work in the forms) that didn't need Stamina in order to function. Some were worse than others but everyone had to have it. In my opinion making Fitness inherent is the single greatest QoL change the game ever had. The worst changes? The Global Defense Nerf of issue 5 that cut defenses and resistances by a huge margin. It was followed by Enhancement Diversification (ED) where once you reached the equivalent of 3 SO's worth of enhancement in a power adding more was pointless. Those two great nerfs reduced protection by at least half and cut damage by 40% or more. It took more than 5 years before IO's appeared and we recovered some of the lost ability. I still think those nerfs were the worst blunders the Dev team ever made. Yes, it allowed IO's and set bonuses to build up high levels of effectiveness but that didn't happen for years afterwards. One interesting thing, Inf was of limited use prior to IO's, by the time you hit the 30's you were making more inf than you were spending on SO's and there really wasn't anything else to spend it on other than passing it down to your alts... which was a fairly complex job at the time. You needed a trusted friend to be the middleman and you could only trade 99,999 inf at a time so you spent several minutes transferring to your friend, then you switched to your alt and your friend spent several minutes transferring back to you. After my first character got into the 40's I never had problems always having up to date enhancements on all characters.

Pair that up with Elec/Shield and you have up to 4 high damage, large AOE attacks; three of which will crit. (Lightning Rod/Shield Charge/Fire Ball/Thunder Strike). I call it a spawn killer.

You still get stuck eating the AOE auto hit negative damage from the other Nictus though, and the Regen/Healing Nictus needs to hit you in order to heal Rommy so it won't be very effective. I've found that first AOE damage Nictus to be the most dangerous, once it's down melee characters have a much easier time with Rommy. I've found the best trick is to have everyone close have good defense so the healer is irrelevant.

You're the exception to the rule then. It's a weaker version of Taunt that Tanks and Brutes have... relatively few other characters ever play the aggro magnet role. I assume you had everything solid in your build and a free pool so you had a slot to devote to an edge case? I don't look on Presence as a bad pool per se, it's just generally redundant.

It was a different game in the beginning and progression was considerably slower. My first 50 took around 250 hours of playtime and was a bit faster than average for the time. Tanks had no aggro cap and generally MUCH higher defenses and damage than today so they were able to herd up hundreds of enemies into a nice tight bunch and survive doing it... then kill them all quickly. Blasters had no target cap and were able to eradicate that herd of hundreds of mobs with one Nuke. Controllers were able to permanently lock down that entire herd so they were harmless while the rest of the team killed them. Defenders buffs and debuffs were much stronger then as well. Scrappers were basically the wild animals they are today with better defenses and better damage. None of the other AT's existed yet... although Keldians were starting to appear with issue 3 (and you had to have a level 50 character to unlock the AT). Endurance was generally more of an issue than it is today, builds were tighter because everyone needed the trinity of Hurdle/Health/Stamina by level 20. The XP gain required from the mid 30's to 45 or so tended to bog down and it wasn't uncommon to run out of missions and have to rely on running teammate's arcs to gain XP... or simply power leveling. Task forces did not exemplar players so you needed to be in the level range of a TF to run it... or be exempted by one of your lower level teammates and if they or you DC'd then you were kicked from the TF. All that aside, this was a unique game environment with a great player base; and that player base was more than anything responsible for the game's success. There were relatively few young players; most were in the 25-60 age range and most were friendly and fun to be with. Yes, you had the occasional idiot as always but they were more noticed since they were so rare. Inexperience was very common and lots of players made lots of mistakes but few were trying to cause problems. Also there were very few elitist players and as long as your build choices didn't negatively impact the team nobody really cared. Sure, we'd give advice if you asked but we didn't generally volunteer it unless it was a major issue like a level 40 who was always out of end and hadn't taken the Fitness pool. If you pulled a bonehead and caused problems we'd ask you not to do it again and tell you why it was a bonehead and caused problems without carrying on about it. If it was a continuing issue then we might have to reluctantly resort to /kick, but that was rare. The one that really stands out to me was once we had a SG team with one PuG player who was an idiot, constantly pulling aggro and endangering the rest of us. Then he starts hollering that we had to invite his buddy and since the team was full we'd have to kick someone to make room. So we did, just as he yells "Not Me!" We joked about that for years, and the team lead made himself an Axe tanker named Hatchet Man in honor of the occasion.

Thanks, I just remembered there was something about it and didn't want the OP to get in trouble. Most of the Code of Conduct boils down to "Don't be a dick".

Yes, it really is. Just how much of the player base has done that? I stand by my statement, it's a griefing tool outside of specialized static teams. If you're going to use it then let the team know and tell them to talk to Null about it. I've played since long before the bird was introduced, I knew it was there and some of it's abilities but I was not aware of that. I was unaware of the Group Fly thing and I'll wager most of the player base is likewise unaware of it. Want to know another solution to the GF griefer? /kick. Much easier on the entire team. If it's the team lead? /quit.

The biggest problem with Solo Rommy is that auto hit Nictus... fortunately he eats it first so after that it's much easier. You'll want as much negative resistance as you can get while that thing's up, fortunately your defenses work on the other Nictus. Try taking him to the roof behind him so you won't have to deal with the Roman reinforcements to make things easier... getting defense debuffed in that fight sucks. Pack oranges and greens to handle the first round. Remember, all the damage from Rommy and the Nictus is Negative or Lethal so plan accordingly.

I really like the Fire Melee set, both on Stalkers and Tankers. My Fire/Regen is a pretty solid combination with soft capped S/L defenses (Thanks Kinetic Combat) and massive Regeneration I very rarely have to worry about dying. With that said it's not as good as my Elec/Shield Stalker... partially due to the limits of Regeneration in the current game and partially due to just how well those two sets work together.

In my experience nothing FEELS stronger than Stone Melee, it hits like a truck (both the mob and, unfortunately, your blue bar). Having never played SS I can't comment from experience but I have played WITH lots of SS tankers and I tend to agree with you on it's feel, if only from a secondhand perspective. That said, there's a reason Fire is looked at as the high damage secondary; it doesn't have any secondary effects so it gets more damage and it will naturally kill faster. I'm not at all surprised you find it's faster than SS, not only does it have the bonus damage but it also has a less resisted damage type.