hastened

You really have to build for +Def or be a defense based set to soft cap, and there's several other valuable avenues people might be optimizing towards (+Recharge being the most common, I would expect). You help a lot with people in that situation. Even with softcapped people, forcefields help a lot in dealing with cascade defense failure. You need to be way over the softcap if you go up against a pack of Rad blasting enemies, for example, unless you have very strong defense debuff resist, and forcefields help with that a lot. They're also useful for dealing with some +ToHit, though you need massive overkill in some cases due to the size of certain buffs (one of my favorite memories on my one of my previous forcefield defenders was playing with another forcefield defender and a super reflexes scrapper against the devouring earth. They dropped one of the +100 To Hit emanators....and the SR scrapper popped a purple and remained soft capped.) Also, Forcefield defenders have the second best team Toxic resist buff behind Sonic Resonance, effective team immunity to endurance drain, full team status resistance vs. the major non-sleep effects without needing to spend half their time casting single target short duration buffs and the big bubble gives both some of the strongest psi defense buffs available to help cover non-positional psi effects. They cover pretty much all the protective bases except truly untyped or autohit damage, while a lot of the other shielding sets have holes that don't show up often but hurt a lot when they do. Repulsion Field was always strong but situational, but I feel like there's a lot of potential there with the Knockback->Knockdown IO to just make it really strong most of the time instead. Force Bubble remains also very strong but situational. I really like forcefields overall, I'm in a static trio playing a Thermal/Ice defender with a FF/Rad defender and an invulnerability tank, and it is pretty glorious.

I think EQ was made more friendly to solo as it "modernized", but this is incredibly far from the truth from the base game. I say this as someone whose last live City of Heroes character was a Forcefield/Fire defender who hit 50 in the Permadeath Iron Eagles supergroup while running normal missions and task forces, and as someone whose main on project 1999 is currently a level 59 rogue, there is no comparison at all between the soloing abilities of these two characters. /Rad is going to be very slightly worse than /Fire for soloing, but not really that bad. Forcefield is actually super strong and safe because it is relatively easy to softcap ranged and AOE defense between the big bubble and inventions, and hover+Force Bubble gives you the tools to prevent almost anything from closing to melee, with very few exceptions (and the exceptions make it interesting!). Additionally, you have mez protection against everything really bad except sleep, and your defenses are not active which means you can get ambushed or miss enemies without catastrophic failure. Ward of Justice wasn't a solo powerhouse, but he did solo at 0x4 when he hit SOs, and +1x6 by the time he fully fleshed out in his late 40's, both of which were challenging in a good way. By contrast, my level 59 rogue has low tier raid gear, so is actually technically able to solo for XP, barely. She can kill a level 40 caster easily due to having good resists. It will take about 2 minutes, she'll drop to half life (or about 20% if starting from the 70% bind wounds HP cap), then needs another 2 minutes of binding wounds to recover from there. You can't just find unlimited amounts of solo candidate NPCs though, so soloing like this would probably involve camping a 6:40 minute spawn. Due to the green half xp mod, she would "only" need to do this 1200 times or so to get through level 59...I'm not really interested in holding down a camp for 130 hours for this. Recently, I found a quest killing the shardwing courier in western wastes, where the turnin reward is about 1.5% of level 59, or like 3 hours of killing aforementioned green caster. Its a level 50 warrior though, so I can solo it with great care and preparation via a combination of root/slow poison, root net consumables and bandages for mid-fight recovery. It takes 5 minutes for the fight, and ~40 minutes of running for the turnin, but it is at least more interesting and still like 3 times faster than grinding a single green spawn point. The courier itself is only up a few times a week though, I don't really know what the spawn time on it is but it looks to be a few days at least. EQ is....different than CoH. Like, a lot. I love them both for very different reasons, but the assertion that its hard to solo things in CoH by comparison to EQ is crazy. I could solo a FF/Rad defender to 50 twice faster than I could solo from 59 to 60 on a Rogue.

I had significant issues with the writing and graphical style in Champions. It just could not take itself seriously, so I couldn't either. I did buy a lifetime sub, which was a good deal for them since I played about 4 months total, 3 around launch and 1 in 2013 to see if it had improved. I thought the combat gameplay was fine, probably on par or slightly better than CoH in a number of ways, but there were a lot of issues surrounding the rest of the game. I do remember teaming up with a friend I played city of heroes with who also got Champions around launch, and discovering that we weren't auto level adjusted to each other and had issues sharing our missions. That was a hugely negative impressions, I don't know how you screw that up. Same friend is back for CoH here though, its been great running stuff together (and sharing our missions)!

Thermal gives better +To Hit, is situational on whether its contributing a little bit more or a little bit less to team damage, and has equivalently strong -Regen and -Resist for AV killing. It gives much worse damage mitigation outside of edge cases involving stacking with Resist based armor sets, but that is balanced by a stronger heal and having its damage mitigation always work, while Rad will have problems if things get scattered outside of it its toggle AOE. Thermal also comes online way later than Radiation, as Rad gets almost all its key stuff by level 12, while Thermal doesn't get its -Res power until 32.

There are certain Uncommon IOs in certain ranges that are 100% guaranteed a conversion to a Rare IO, because there are exactly two sets of that particular type in that particular range—an uncommon and a rare. At that point, it's not a matter of "rolling the dice" to get a rare IO. The only dice-roll is a question of which rare IO it converts into—and it's only 100K to 150K to convert it again if it turns out to be something that doesn't sell well. I don't think it will ever become economical, by comparison to that, to craft rares directly instead. Yes, but a lot of the time you want specific IO sets, not just generic rares, so you can do a transform into something that sells well where there is a guaranteed or at least very likely guaranteed transformation path due to the levels of the recipes in question. That will continue to provide a point to rare crafting. Also, if there are certain uncommon recipes that fill the same need as a rare ones in this way, people will buy up the uncommon recipes until they're enough more expensive that it is equally cost effective to build the rare IO. It has been my experience that this is the case with Red Fortune and Reactive Defenses, for example. They're both good for the same main thing (tranform to LotG +7.5% recharge), but one is uncommon and one is rare. So the uncommon one is selling for around a million, and the rares are selling fro 100k-500k.

I do think this is a rather fascinating question, especially 4 vs. 8. Basically, you want to do the following: --Cap Damage --Cap -Resist --Don't die --Maximize AOE damage potential with sets and high AT base modifiers. It is interesting because defenders contribute most strongly to 1 and 2, and a pretty large amount to number 3 as well. Number 4 is best with blasters, brutes or scrappers though, and number 3 gets maximized by having a brute or tank due to the higher resist cap. With no repeat Archetypes, I would say Controller, Brute, Defender and Corrupter. Run a Sonic/Sonic Defender+Sonic/Sonic Corrupter, Fire/Kin controller, Fire/Fire Brute. Everyone takes the full leadership pool. The brute provides an anchor for the two disruption fields, the Kin boosts damage, and everyone just AOEs all over everything. The brute should be running at the Resist cap more or less across the board. Stuff will usually be running at around a ~-80% resist debuff from 2x Howl and 2x disruption field, but when you go to kill an AV or any target that lives more than 2 or 3 seconds, you'll hit -200% for an effective 3x multiplier to the team's damage. Expanding to a full team of 8 and duplicating up ATs, I would add a Sonic/Cold Corrupter to help out with +defense, -Regen and get the rest of the way to the -Res cap vs. AVs, then 3 Sonic/Whatever blasters. You should floor the -Resist of a single target within ~5 seconds or so with this team while fulcrum shifting to the damage cap, at which point the Blasters will be nuking for 5000 damage with dreadful wail before level adjustments. Pretty much everything will just turn into a puddle of goo in seconds.

Note, there are specific instances where crafting rares can still be significantly valuable as part of an overall plan. Specifically, I found that people are buying all the Red Fortune recipes, probably to use as feed stock to turn into LotG +7.5% enhancements. However, there are a ton of lesser used reactive defenses up for basically nothing because they need rare salvage to craft. Level 41 reactive defense enhancements have a 50/50 shot of transforming into LotG per 2 enhancement converters. All the LotG pieces slowly sell for 3-4 million and can be transformed into a LotG +7.5% recharge for an average cost of 2 million in converters that will sell very quickly for 6 million. There are a few other spots like this where you can take advantage of recipe availability differences in a particular band created by people avoiding the 700k charge incurred by needing rare salvage.

I haven't looked at finding scale flipping opportunities yet, but I'm not actually sure I need to. Stuff just doesn't really cost very much, and I can make 30 or 40 million an hour pretty easily in a number of niches with only moderate starting bankroll. I've been converting level 41 Reactive Armor into LotG global recharge enhancements, it costs about 3 million inf and about 45 seconds of clicking on average to build one, and usually sells immediately for 6 million or more. The market for them is insane too, I built 40 of them in one session and I could barely keep up with the rate they were being bought.

The thing I find most important about City of Heroes that seems to be missing in many other MMOs is the difficulty adjustment. City of Heroes is not a well balanced game. That would be a significant problem, as it could only appeal to either very casual gamers who don't really want to ever be challenged or would drive those people away....except that they let you pick your own difficulty. And that makes all the difference in the world. And yes, it is relatively easy to hit the point where you can solo +4/x8 missions....if you pick the enemies. It is much, much harder to hit the point where you can solo +4/x8 across the entire spectrum of mission types the game can throw at you. There is enough of a performance ceiling to provide everyone with the amount of challenge they like for fun, and that's an amazing feature that is totally missing from many other MMOs. CoH lets everyone play together, at an appropriate challenge level regardless of personal skill or preference, in an environment that is supportive of multiple different play styles. It really is pretty much everything for everyone.

You could just proliferate the ranged damage sets to tanks if you want a defense primary/ranged secondary. Its not like that would be overpowered, you would probably actually have to slightly buff the tanker ranged damage coefficient slightly to make it not just clearly worse than the melee sets in pretty much every way. There is probably a good sweet spot there to enable high defense ranged attacker concepts without messing with game balance or being awful. That was my suggestion when asked for what I would have liked to see added or changed to CoH when I interviewed at Paragon, actually. They seemed mildly receptive to the idea at the time.

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.

The Trio I'm currently playing with my wife and friend is a Force Field Defender, Thermal Defender and Invulnerability Tank. We're low level still, but it is already pretty amazing, and is going to get dumb once everyone's powers fully come on line. I'm taking the heals, because there's 5 different axis on which to passively mitigate damage (Res, Def, Healing, -Damage and -Recharge), and they all stack multiplicatively. Healing is the only axis with linear scaling, which makes it worse in general than the other 5 that all have strongly non-linear mitigation until capping, but it is also the one with the fewest holes, the only one with no cap, the only one that doesn't need to be used if it isn't needed and the only one which can be retroactively applied to damage that has already occurred. Building out our team's mitigation along that axis ends up making the team several multiples more durable, as it repairs damage which must first be filtered through forcefields and fire shields. All that being said, I fully agree with the core message that it is critically important that an empath use their buffs and secondary percisely because of the multiplicative strength of different forms of mitigation. Fortitude alone nearly doubles the effectiveness of every other +HP based power empaths get while tacking on an effective offense boost.

I have seen a few references to some type of setting or power than can be used to turn of the +movement speed aspect of speed boost, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it. Does anyone know if that is a thing that can be done, and if so how to do it?