hastened

Yeah, I think the Sonic Repulsion is far too end expensive to be worth it with the knockback->knockdown IO. I actually think it is better without it, though still pretty bad. It lets you push enemies away from vulnerable players/targets, which is generally not considered valuable enough to be worth a power but at least could be used strategically in some circumstances. Without the knockback kicking the enemies out of the aura though, its going to suck you dry almost instantly.

I don't recall poison having any particularly strong -regen abilities. Now if SCORE would swap in the poison trap from traps then I'd be all over poison. Ah, you're correct, it looks like I did get the poison trap details mixed up, mistook the -Recovery for -Regen and mentally mixed it with Traps' version. It looks like they get decent -Regen off of Envenom, but nothing overly strong, more in line with Kinetics than Cold or Rad.

So, for the most part, succeeding at missions in City of Heroes is not too difficult. Many missions let you continue trying as much as you want, and a well built team, or even specific well built characters, can succeed in a lot of content pretty easily. Some missions though, are much harder to succeed at than others. I've been running a three hero team of an Invulnerability Tank, Thermal Defender and Forcefield Defender, and for the most part we can do missions on whatever difficulty. So far, we've failed on one mission (three times in a row, actually): Rescue Waylon McCrane. Waylon likes to run up to groups of enemies and shoot them with his bow. +3 Tuatha bosses can haymaker for upwards of 1000 damage and have an AOE slow+defense debuff. An unprotected Waylon who gets aggro from one while stuck in quicksand is going to die in seconds. There are multiple ambushes that get triggered from rescuing him, and from what I can tell can pretty easily overflow the aggro cap. While I can see a few possible strategies that look like they could work, its probably the hardest mission I've encountered yet to actually succeed at with a high difficulty setting on a small team. I'm curious what missions other people may have encountered that they also found difficult to succeed at, as I would not have necessarily thought this would be one of the most difficult ones. Out of the missions you've done, did you find any that you thought were truly hard? If so, which ones?

This is really convincing me I need to run the Night Ward/First Ward content, since I never got to it live. One of the things I love most about CoH is that it isn't afraid to let the players be brokenly overpowered...and it isn't afraid to let its enemies be, either. Its beautiful for a superhero game in a way that a more balanced game never will be. Seriously though, having enemies where planning, positioning and teamwork matter is nice. Having missions that are difficult enough that failure is actually possible is nice.

This seems like it is, in theory, actually ok in some ways. I don't have practical experience, but this is my take just looking at it. Specifically, one of the most important jobs for a defender on a team is to quickly apply as much -Resist as possible to a group to magnify the efforts of the damage dealing teammates. I don't have the game open, so I'm going off city of data's corrupter info and scaling it by 1/0.75, but assuming that's correct the poison defender can apply a 25% debuff while taking no action other than walking near something and a 20% AOE resist debuff on a fast cast and short recharge. That matters a lot when steamrolling, as things are going to die fast with that kind of -Resist being thrown around, and is actually unusually high for a defender set. Most sets get one -30% AOE resist on a relatively high timer. For AV killing, you have access to the secondary effect debuffing like cold has in Benumb, strong -Regen and -65% total -Resist, making you competitive for best in class on AV killing. On the other primary job for a Defender, making sure the team doesn't die, it does not look as good. Weaken looks decent, but its a far cry from Rad's toggles and suffers the same issues all the debuff sets have in that it does nothing against spread out enemies or where you don't open with the debuff. One small single target heal is going to have issues keeping up if you're the sole support in any kind of really dangerous situation. If you don't push too hard or have other defenders to layer defenses, however, this isn't as big a deal. Overall, I'm intrigued. I think I might make one at some point, it seems like a valuable contribution in many common teaming situations.

And then you can be even less than useless on team content, you can be an actual liability. When people come in and post "Well you just don't have to use X" they seem to forget that this is a multiplayer game. If you start making up imaginary rules with no enforcement behind them, whether that's not using incarnate abilities or permadeath, then it's pointless and you might as we ll just go play a solo game. Permadeath is actually really fun though, I played Permadeath in the months leading up to shutdown with the Iron Eagles supergroup. That at least does not change the actual gameplay too much though, other than perhaps giving additional incentives to stay with the team, avoid running off alone and such. Doing no incarnate powers on a team with people doing all incarnate powers does not work nearly as well though, as you're purposefully choosing to contribute far less than you could be, and its going to be significantly noticeable. In either case, you want to find like-minded players to play with who want to use the same self-imposed rules for the best experience. Getting a supergroup of people who purposefully chose to not become incarnates and attempt to run all the incarnate content you're allowed to try anyway could be interesting though. I haven't done any of the iTrials, so I don't know if they're actually locked to only incarnates or not, but they look like they could be quite challenging in an interesting way to attempt without access to incarnate abilities. I would be fascinated to see how many of them could be completed. It makes me wonder if anyone has ever done a Tin Mage Mark II TF without anyone with enhanced Alpha slots?

I went with lower, though I don't really know. I've already seen significant deflation on several items (enhancement converters and rare salvage). Those are the feedstock that go into transmuting random junk into whatever someone wants, which I feel is an indicator of general price decline (or rather, prices moving closer together, with the mean price of a typical high end build dropping). That only really applies to stuff that can be converted from junk though, so I could see PVP, ATO and Winter IOs behaving differently. I also do all my purchasing via buy it now (or sometimes, lowball buy it slowly over time), but tend not to make the IOs myself because I want everything attuned. Due to the limited level ranges, its actually easier to make specific IOs by building them at specific levels (often 10 or 41) to avoid hitting the wrong set during cross set conversion. Those then go on the market to sell to people as attuned IOs, but I don't want them myself because they're level 41 or 10 for me. I did try to buy a LotG from myself by having one character list a level 41 one at 5.5 million (I had just posted 40 of them, so had temporarily depressed the buy-it-now price down to this) while a second one placed a 5.5 million inf attuned version bid, but it didn't fill. I'm not sure if I made a mistake in the process or if you just can't sell to yourself.

I believe it also defaults to being able to select them with shift+number.

Current/revamped Hollows are fun. Old Hollows, I either didn't end up needing to go to, or just don't remember (I did play before the revamp, but not that much and went Kings Row more during that level range I think). I did have a good time soloing the entire arc on my stalker, there's not a lot of kill alls so she could easily do the whole arc without outleveling it. Brought back lots of good memories. I like that it gives another good path into the high teen's. Can do DFB, can run old mission arcs, Hollows, Shauna Stockwell, Posi TF or newspapers at least as all decent paths to get up into the 20 range.

I think that one of FF's biggest problems is that it lacks any form of damage resistance debuffing, -Regen or +Damage. It is the only defender primary that can't meaningfully assist in boosting a team's offensive capabilities at all. The other problem is that Detention Field is situational enough that it is never used. I would probably look at trying to buff Detention Field, though while looking into it, I realized that I don't actually know how it currently works on AVs and stuff. Can AVs resist the untouchable effect? It doesn't look like its listed as something they resist on the purple triangles wiki page, but its such a rarely used effect that I'm not actually sure if it just got ignored or what.

I feel like Sonic doesn't need a fix? I'm not sure forcefields do either, but I can see more of a case for them. I know Sonics aren't that common, but they're probably the second most desirable set behind kinetics if I'm looking to assemble a steamroller. AOE -Res that can be applied every fight is where its at, and they have one of the best powers in the game for that. Forcefields gets about 90% of its mitigation for a standard team from the three main powers, yes. They're probably the three best defensive powers in the game. It is kind of nice that you can get a strong core with so few power picks, since it lets you focus on power pools or blasting if you want to go in that direction, while the rest of the set is still useful if you want to focus on it more. Repulsion Bomb does good work though, both as an AOE and as soft control. Force Bubble is situational, but is really good for soloing, nontraditional teams that don't have any melee characters, or defending objective missions. In any case, if Force Field has a problem, its that the only thing it adds to a team that isn't having problems surviving is one AOE knockdown damage attack. That means that if you're doing something where you're already pretty much never in danger, its not really contributing a whole lot. Its whole design is centered around making the team extremely hard to hurt, and it does that really well at the expense of being the only defender primary with no way to boost the team's offense. Giving it a +Absorb power doesn't really help with this. From what I understand, the cage powers get significant use in PvP, though maybe that's not the case anymore since I don't PvP much and I know there were some pretty big balance changes back in I13 or whatever. I would make sure you don't mess with the PvP use though before you go stripping them out. The dual purpose version would be much more likely to be received positively, I think.

I decided this would be fun, so I did it! I made a sonic/sonic defender, and bootstrapped them to ~6 million off a steadfast prot:knockdown IO into a LotG +7.5% recharge enhancement in about half an hour after getting my starting merits. I did about and hour and a half of DFB while I waited for a few orders to fill, then began manufacturing LotG +7.5% recharge enhancers from level 41 Reactive Defenses recipes, and Steadfast Protection +3% defense from level 10 Impervious Skin recipes. LotG was listed for 6,000,250 and Steadfast Prot was listed for 4,000,250. I continued doing this for an hour and twenty minutes, alternating back and forth. I mixed in a few purchases of already crafted IOs, and screwed up a section where I accidentally bought attuned versions instead of level 10, making it costly to convert to high value resist sets. At the end of the hour and 20 minutes, I took a shower and got ready for bed to let the queue of things finish selling, and when I came back I had a total of 168,504,112 inf. I took screenshots, but I need to figure out how to upload them in some way here. It is getting late, so I'll do that tomorrow.

This whole exercise looks fun, I might try this out and see how long it takes to go from 0-100 million. Always interesting to see how people choose to marketeer. I think I might be able to do it in a few hours if I can bootstrap effectively in the beginning. I've moved to flipping purples recently. Its way slower inf per real time, but extremely fast inf per time spent marketeering. It means I've kind of lost track of the more active market niches though, I'll be interested to see if the niches I used to get the bankroll for purple flipping still work. As for converters, it is nice to be able to make them with merits, but I was making 50-100 million inf per hour actively marketeering, and that chewed through a lot of converters. I would have to be pulling 160-320 merits/hour to match the speed I was making inf, so I found it much more effective to purchase the converters as needed. I'm not very good at speed running things, so the market remains far and away the fastest source of wealth for me.

There is. It's called delete your character after you're defeated the first time. Of course, that relies heavily on the players honesty and what not. Its actually really fun in CoH, since leveling up is slow enough that you feel the loss, but not so slow that it gets absurd. I played in the Iron Eagles permadeath supergroup back on live near shutdown, and my demon/forcefield mastermind's demise while attempting arrest Archon Burkholder and my energy/energy blaster's death to pumicite ambushes in hollows mission are still some of the strongest memories I've got from the original game. Not to mention the death of one of the few fellow eagles near 50 to the weakened Hamidon on the Lady Grey task force with my FF defender Ward of Justice, or the death of two of our companions to the Circle of Thorns ambush in posi part 1 on an all Eagles task force run. There's something about playing for stakes that ups the emotional impact in a way that you just don't get otherwise. No matter how many times I do posi, I'll remember that particular run forever. If you get rezzed by an ally in the mission, do you still perma-death after? We didn't allow any rez powers. If I had written the rules for the SG, I would have personally been fine with self or ally rezzes if they were used immediately on death, since they're kind of a decent chunk of some set's survivability, and due to the long recharge timers it wouldn't remove the threat of permadeath in a really sticky situation since you'll just die again. The SG rules didn't allow it though, and I understand why since dead = dead is really straightforward and otherwise you either trivialize it or end up having to figure out more complicated rules for rezzing. IIRC, Etiquette was generally that if you died in an all Eagles team, you dropped and deleted or removed yourself from the SG immediately. If you were in a pickup group, you would hospital or get rezzed, drop SG then finish the mission or task force, and delete afterwards. I didn't delete my dead eagles, but I also never played them after death. I removed them from the supergroup and kept them in character select as a memorial, which I believe was fairly common.

There is. It's called delete your character after you're defeated the first time. Of course, that relies heavily on the players honesty and what not. Its actually really fun in CoH, since leveling up is slow enough that you feel the loss, but not so slow that it gets absurd. I played in the Iron Eagles permadeath supergroup back on live near shutdown, and my demon/forcefield mastermind's demise while attempting arrest Archon Burkholder and my energy/energy blaster's death to pumicite ambushes in hollows mission are still some of the strongest memories I've got from the original game. Not to mention the death of one of the few fellow eagles near 50 to the weakened Hamidon on the Lady Grey task force with my FF defender Ward of Justice, or the death of two of our companions to the Circle of Thorns ambush in posi part 1 on an all Eagles task force run. There's something about playing for stakes that ups the emotional impact in a way that you just don't get otherwise. No matter how many times I do posi, I'll remember that particular run forever.

Depends on what we're doing. Anything trying to get there with smashing, lethal or fire damage in places where the tank can easily cluster them? Yeah, they're probably not going to break the passive regen on the tank. Heavy psychic or toxic damage will bring the heals out in full force, as will very large groups of things with defense debuffs, devouring earth +ATK emanators, that Rularuu thing with the stupidly high +to hit, probably some other circumstances I'm forgetting since its been so long. The nice thing about heals is that they're almost universally applicable, while the other mitigations have holes of varying sizes. We've continued playing this trio, and are currently running at +3/x8 at level 33. Contrary to my expectations going in, the heals actually get a lot of work out. The Tank and Thermal are both fully IOed with spare-no-expense attuned enhancements, while the FF def is currently running a few uncommon sets and standard level 25 IOs. The Tank is effectively invulnerable in almost all situations at this point as long as both sets of shields are on her; she's died once to cascade defense failure from Shivans, and has been forced to retreat a few times in certain circumstances, but is unkillable in most normal situations. There are enough enemies to routinely get a few that overflow from the tank's aggro cap or that fail to cluster, and the FF defender at ~28% defense and ~35% resistance is not even close to durable enough to go up against multiple +3s without healing, especially if a boss gets involved. For that matter, just soft-capped defense on the Thermal is also insufficient without some healing in these cases. Also, enemies with significant scatter built into their AI will fly around and apply pressure to the defenders, any time we get an ambush or multiple spawn aggro things overflow the tanker aggro cap significantly and stuff goes crazy, defense debuffs are still problematic, etc. There is actually significant demand for the healing still in many, though not all missions. We've been doing missions together, where we all take the same mission and choose to complete on success. We hit our first failed mission just the other day; rescue Waylon McCrane. We've saved Twinshot, Fusionette and Doc Delilah (the first time I've ever seen her survive that mission, actually), though we were running at +1/x8 at that point. The combination of multi ambush waves overflowing the tanker aggro cap, Waylon's blastery lack of durability and Fusionette style insistence on running headlong into anything he can find to aggro, and bosses that come with both AOE defense debuffs and melee attacks that can 1 shot either defender through the resist shields has made his rescue mission extremely challenging (I got haymakered for 1008. I did not realize bosses could hit that hard in the mid 30's). Since we failed, the other two people did not get an option to complete, so we tried again on +2/x8 with more planning. We didn't die this time, but Waylon still did on ambush wave 2 when I was forced to split my healing attention between keeping the FF defender up and Waylon up, and he got himself in the middle of an ambush wave outside of the dispersion field and got shredded. We're going to get a chance to try again since we want to clear the third person's copy of the mission, and I have some plans in mind for how we can tweak our positioning and performance to have a better shot at rescuing him, but its going to be dicey. And you know, I really love that there are things that can stress even a trio this durable to need to use all of its skills to succeed.

It is easy to actively marketeer now thanks to the readily available enhancement converters, where you can just make a million+ inf a minute whenever by clicking a bunch of times and interacting with the auction house. The fastest inf per unit time invested is still going to be flipping to provide price stabilization though, I think; that makes time you're not playing work for you. Personally, on live I had a marketeer character who did all of the flipping and whatnot because I wanted to be able to afford anything, and I could. I'm in the same position here, and while it is a little bit easier and faster just because a fully IOed out build is 10 times cheaper here than live, it doesn't really impact how I play. The thing is, City has never really been about loot. It didn't even have an endgame for a large portion of its life, the primary focus was on making lots of different characters concepts, trying out lots of power set combos, build options and/or engaging in a bunch of different story arcs. It just didn't develop a loot oriented culture, and thus it is still works as a game if everyone gets everything for free in a way that, say, everquest just wouldn't.

What I find weird is how the crafted Miracle unique sells for half what the recipe sells for. Miracle was also super weird. I have to imagine there's a good chance it has settled down now, but when I went to buy one for a character, I found a bunch of 10 and 15 million inf bids in the recent history. The buy-it-now price on the other crafted IOs in the set was around 2.5 million, so I bought one and converted it for personal use. Then I did a few buy at 2.5 million, convert to Rec and put up for 5 million, and a few did sell for 15 million before the price was brought down.

I think I am also coming to that conclusion. I noted that based on the prices of the other LotG pieces, the in set conversion step was netting under a million in average profit, while the Reactive Defense->LotG conversion step was almost 2 million for far less clicking, so I started just doing that and putting up whatever LotG pieces come out.

Yeah, they're super high demand. I'm just surprised more people have not stepped up to meet that demand. I was making one LotG +7.5% per minute for an hour straight at a 3 million inf markup, and they sold almost as fast as I could put them up.

This behavior is also increasing the supply of certain desirable recipes significantly because of constrained conversion in lower or higher brackets. For example, a level 30 Impervious Skin enhancement will cross set convert to any defense set IO. A level 10 one, however, cross set converts only to Steadfast Protection. People want Steadfast Protection +Def IOs, and you only need an average of 8 enhancement converters to turn any level Impervious Skin someone puts up into a Steadfast Protection +Def IO. Since its about 1 million inf and 20 seconds of clicking to do that transformation, it puts upward pressure on the Impervious Skin IO prices and downward pressure on the Steadfast Protection Defense IO price.

Yeah, I think I'm currently pulling about 100 million inf an hour from marketeering, which seems like it would be at least in line with a high end farming build if not faster. Since most non-purple leveling slots are averaging sub 5 million, its like 3 minutes of marketeering per level to fully outfit a character, with a few hours maybe at 50 to get them fully decked out. I continue to be amazed at the pricing resilience of LotG despite how relatively cheap and easy it is to make them.

Is very true that the market is its own thing, and not everyone is going to want to play in it. My wife doesn't like marketing or build planning, so she lets me handle those aspects so she can get to the smashing and being heroic. Personally, I don't really like the shopping aspect, I more tolerate. I do like the build planning and fitting all the different pieces together, however. I actually like the changes homecoming made vs. live quite a bit in this regard, since while I marketeered on live too so I could have whatever I wanted in terms of enhancements, it was a lot more work to, say, outfit a permadom. Here, you can get the inf for it in an hour of time spread over a day or two, while on live it took probably ten times as long at least.

An accurate DPS meter for CoH would be amusing in a number of ways, since you would need to count the +Damage from the ludicrously strong buffs/debuffs the game has to the player who applied them. I suspect you would get a lot of "Why is this Kin/Sonic defender out-dpsing the entire rest of the team?" type of questions. Or maybe not, given how many people ask for Kins specifically I think they've got a pretty good idea of who brings what to the table. I think people might be surprised by some combos like sonic/sonic defs though, I'm not sure people realize how strong -Res is in the same way they realize how strong Fulcrum Shift is. Also, I would love to see a healing meter that included deflections/resisted damage/misses due to debuffs.

There are a lot of easy ways to make money in the Auction House, so for all my characters who make it past level 10 or so I first plan out an approximate level 50 build in Pine's, then fill all my slots with attuned enhancements based on that plan, usually starting with ATOs since they can be slotted at 10 and most builds want one or both sets. I usually don't worry about specific slot ordering, just power ordering and final number of slots in each power, then as I level up I put slots towards the final configuration based on what I feel needs the most boost at any given time. I then buy the 2 new attuned enhancements I need. Remember, endurance reducers only matter if you have endurance problems, accuracy caps quickly if you have any source of +ToHit, and recharge only matters if it can affect the % uptime of a higher damage per activation second power in your chain. +Damage is almost always good though, which makes 3x enhancers for that not a bad rule of thumb if you don't want to number crunch it out. If you do want to number crunch it out, you will usually want to be building based on set bonuses, not enhancement values, so it becomes a lot less relevant.