Sovera

I've done most of them while leveling . 0x6 on Posi 1 and 2 depending on the build. Some tackle it at 0x8 just fine. From Synapse onwards it's +1x8. I don't bring temp powers or summons into it and usually just use the insps that drop once I'm past Posi 1 and 2 which require medium purples to counter the incredible amount of debuffing involved. Posi 1 and 2 is one of the worst to tackle due to exemplaring stealing so many bonuses. But the vhaz doing exotic toxic damage, radiation bosses who do -defense, the CoT bosses who do -def, a +def bubble AND -ToHit, plus the ghosts doing -ToHit are simply amazing as game design. Basically at a level when we are the weakest is when we have the hardest enemies 😄 If done at (close to) level appropriate we are also slot starved which does not help. Fighting 8 versions of myself never gets old, but, never try to do it on Radiation Armor since the NPCs will spawn with Radiation Emission instead. Suddenly, 8x Enervating Field. Boom. Even with a tray full of medium purples andoranges i had to suicide a number of times to eventually whittle their numbers one by one. Posi 2's boss is nothing special and just needs to be whittled down. After Posi Synapse is a joke. We leave hard hitting exotic toxic damage and a ton of crucial debuffing to bland energy and smash with -endurance debuffing. Oh noes. I seldom solo this one nowadays since it takes way way way too long. Some builds don't even have access to AoEs which is a strict no no when doing kill alls. I ignore Babbage (who spawns as a true GM) and the boss is simple even on Fire Armor that has no psi resists. A simple medium purple is usually enough to keep me safe since it just hits slowly and mixes attacks with simple smash punches. Yin is just more of the same but with the Super Stunners crippling meleers since we need to kill but when we kill them they explode in a massively large -recovery debuff. Recovery Serum and blues are needed. By Yin most builds have access to their AoE and/or Build-up (level 28) which makes the game much easier as things can be burst down. The AV doing -def radiation attacks + the ton of adds spawning with it can kill most characters who are not prepared to substantially buff themselves with purples. By Yin I found that there is no more challenge to be found in soloing TFs since it becomes rinse and repeat. I would rather duo them since it is still a bit more interesting than steam rolling in a full team. Moonfire is also bland. Vampires will stack -tohit but Build-up will punch through. There is a -ton- of -recharge when we fight the annoying creeps who refuse to come to melee range and need to be picked one by one. But it's more annoying than hard since they are minions. Citadel is 100% easy mode. Council are bags of XP for a reason. Manticore I seldom solo since PPs entering T9 is a drag in kill alls. It can be worked around by keeping them agroed and moving to the next group. The double AV whammy at the end can be difficult to get past and Hopkins is a bag of resists that takes a long time to whittle. Numina I have only soloed a couple of times since the hunts are annoying (and this was back when we had full base access at all times). Despite being tagged as a GM Jurassic is more like an AV. ITF I did a couple of times just to join the cool kid club, +4x8 normal mode and +4x8 with enemies buffed. All of this has been done either on Scrappers or Tankers which are CoH's easy mode. Kudos to all of you crazy people doing it on Blasters and such!

It does. Pretty much the second I got Devastating Blow I had a seamless attack chains of Devastating, Radioactive Smash, Siphon, Smash. Before that I had gaps and nothing to use other than P2W attacks. Later on Devastating, Smash, Siphon, repeat.

I am leveling this combo. The build is nothing new or original but if someone is interested in this combo they can come across it if they search the boards. I have leveled Radiation Melee a few times based on two things: Irradiated Ground and Radiation Siphon. This time I was looking at the different AoEs available and 'remembered' how Rad Melee is one of the two sets which has two PbAoEs instead of a cone. The animations are pretty terrible looking and very slow, but I find this more acceptable on a Scrapper since the set is pretty crunchy and it feels good to use and take chunks off bosses. Irradiated Ground also passively and appreciably increases ST damage. It was common to have endurance woes and just wait a few seconds for it to tick and kill mobs. Usually I would slot both -res into it but this time I decided to ignore that approach and go full on damage procs instead. This power is one of the main appeals of the set. We hit the boss and in the meanwhile things are dying around us at the same time. During leveling I added an Overwhelming Force instead of the purple damage proc. It ticks often and adds some breathing room. The healing is RNG-ish but more so in the lower levels. Once we open Atom Smasher there is enough Contaminated to go around so the healing is a constant. Energy Aura is the most well rounded thing available for Scrappers IMO. Easily softcapped defenses, reasonable resists, no damage aura but the +recharge aura is nice too, and it also boasts of reasonable DDR and some small endurance debuff resists as well. It sins for being pretty endurance heavy and relying on spaming Energy Drain every pack. Which would be more palatable if it was a quicker animation. Even as low as Posi 1 I had 35% defenses (with amplifiers) which made running it at x8 pretty easy with moderate inspiration use. Despite slotting all three uniques into Health + adding the extra slot to Stamina in the very early levels this did very little to alleviate endurance problems. I even added a few frankenslotted IOs in my attacks to help but regardless I had to level spamming Recovery Serums. Even Energize was unable to truly help and it was only when Energy Drain helped that I could let the smoking Recovery Serums finally cool off. It does feel good to have those rare one shots of a boss with BU + Gaussian although they only happened in the low levels up to Yin. But even fighting PPs the constant knockdowns and stacking stuns between Devastating and Atom has killed them before they could do much. Overall the build felt strong. I did not feel squishy as I did leveling a Bio and Rad Armor scrapper in the past weeks, the healing keeps on happening and is noticeable even without healing slots. Jumping into a pack, BU, Devastating a boss and fishing for a crit proc, then immediately do Atom Smasher leads to lots of dead minions while Irradiated finishes them off as I take the boss(es) out. I still don't like the animations, but the combo is good.

I am currently leveling a Rad/Ea and have placed it in Devastating. Devastating being the heavy hitter it would make sense to increase its power, but I looked at it and decided to instead increase the damage of Radioactive Smash and Radiation Siphon since Devasting already does pretty good damage by itself. I find I'm fine with running into a pack. BU, Devasting empowered by BU + Gaussian. The super long animations involved give time for mobs to wake up, alpha, then run to me. Then I segue straight away into Atom Smasher for BU + Gaussian + crit buff AoE goodness. Or for ST it should empower Radioactive Smash and Radiation Siphon.

It's a bit late, but, I agree if the dev team has their mind set they should come out and say it straight out rather than let things progress for pages and pages. I don't take RoP, never did. Saw I could alternate it etc etc, but didn't like the Sorcery pool. So I have no beef in this, no vested interested either way. But. Jimmy, I've said this in the other thread and I'll repeat it. All this constant effort achieves one thing and is add things to the pile that players never take other than on a lark. What is the point of saying we have 150 power picks then only 20 are actually useful and actually picked by the population? Is there really a need to reduce it to 19 powers?

This has just happened to me. Eventually it had to happen since Edit is so close to Delete and there is no confirmation dialogue.

Well, it's back to jump packs to the rest of us who don't squander slots in travel powers. Just like with the new pools it's a lot of time, lots of code hours, lots of talking and testing, for, what? What net gain? Oh, if you're not carefully weighting whether to add another 0.20 EPS or a damage proc you can add that slot to Fly to reach a mission faster for the 5% of the time spent not fighting things. Lord, how can we go from one thumbs up patch to this? No, I get it, It's our turn to be a vocal minority. *water sprays Jimmy* No, bad patch, bad! Away with it!

Yes, WotLK had all those commodities. But not back in TBC. Nowadays my WoW leveling experience is questing while LFG is running in the background, do dungeons, continue question where I left off.

This is not what you've asked, but consider Sprint and Athletic Running. You can obtain the last one for free from the P2W. You can save SS for outdoors and Athletic Running for indoors.

For what's worth I'd like the changes to be reverted as well. It's nice and good to say we can slot our travel powers to go faster, but in practice who has the slots to spare for this? This doesn't even work anymore since we can't alternate jump packs and we need AB to break the flight cap. But, if this change goes through it may bring back the jump packs.

The special mechanic is none of that (though they are cool ideas). What it does is apply a -HP debuff. If you monitor your HP you'll see it going from 2.5k max to 2k, 1.8k, 1.5k... Eventually 500 hitpoints. At that point it's suicide to be around the boss. The trick is to run around and break line of sight until the debuff expires and our HP recovers to max.

StJ has better animations but worse everything else. Worse AoE, clunkier ST rotation. You name it. Dem gorgeous animations though.... MA also has a nice fat 10% defense bonus to all on defensive ATs such as Tanker and Brutes. This allows for some silly things like softcapping defense while hardcapping resistances, while also doing some pretty good early damage such the combo in my signature. Scrapper is a different beast but you have three attacks that come to the front: Storm Kick is a good filler, animates blazingly fast and gets extra crit chances. I would dump your 50% chance of crit there. Crane Kick is a good and reliable source of Force Feedback procs as well as soft CC with the knockdowns. But it needs an Overwhelming proc or Sudden Acceleration ASAP. The FF proc accelerates the build but this is not a concern for you since you have no cooldowns in Super Reflexes. Crippling Axe Kick has a low enough cooldown you can proc the attack to heck and back. If you want you can also slot a -res proc in there though I found those to be of little use outside of pylon tests (where they shine). With all three you can do CaK, Storm Kick, Crane Kick. Repeat. At lower levels of recharge CaK, Storm Kick, Crane Kick, Storm Kick. As much as Scrappers turn into smashers later on do try Fire Armor/Martial Arts on a Tanker and have a higher and steadier (sturdier too) performance at all levels and not just later in the character's career.

There is no better teaming than this game. My experience with online games started with Diablo, the original. I loved the new experience of chat rooms, but no teaming to be had. It was random solo. Then I moved to NWN, the original. Being heavily DnD based there were hefty XP penalties for teaming so I gravitated to paladin/clerics that could heal themselves and would run around killing things until max level. Then I tried Guild Wars, the original, and the PvP aspect of the game and the lack of PvE (no DLCs yet at the time) meant I only played it for a short while. We did team there as the NPCs were unreliable but I only played it for a month. I'll go backwards and skip CoH to mention the game I played after that, which was WoW. TBC had just launched. Coming from CoH it was jarring. We don't team? A tank has to whittle mobs and does not tank until max level (no LFG tool at the time so we had to spam the chat for team members (not even server wide chat, we had the habit of moving to different capital cities and spam chat in unison) dungeons weren't run until max level unless after twink gear). A healer needs to whack things on their own until max level and does not heal until then? Everything is solo until max level and THEN we are suddenly in a world of grouping up. Okay, but we can team then, right? Well, yeah, if you have a tank. Queue in 20-30 minutes 'Group looking for a tank for Shadow Labyrinth!' and waiting, waiting, waiting. The Benny Hill track playing if we got a tank but the healer got tired of waiting and left and we start the chat spam again. Now backtracking to CoH which I played before WoW. Starting a tank? You're tanking since level one. Healer? Same. Teaming? Incentives to group up ensured people -wanted- to team since level 1. The lack of holy trinity meant groups would go. Only 4 people instead of 8? Just get more people while playing. Imagine trying to run a WoW/FF dungeon with half a team! But with the dynamic difficulty of CoH the mobs are adjusted to the number of team members so the four are not hindered or smeared by a static difficulty level meant for max team (and trinity). Your friend made a new alt? You can exemplar down and play with them, or they can sidekick up and play with you. In WoW it was common that I kept playing and outlevel my girlfriend or brother. So not only would I have done the quests (so no reward in going back) but the XP penalty grew stiffer for both if I teamed with them to help them do the quests. There is a reason this game this game is still so popular and it's not all just to be placed at the feet of being of the super hero genre.

Not the 'worst' of anything, but annoying regardless. I set up a +4 Market Crash and pay no attention to who I recruit (that part was my bad, I usually check the vet levels of everyone and adjust difficulty). We go in. Everything is dying at a good clip. No team deaths. We reach the last boss and I warn to ignore the constantly spawning adds and focus the boss while dropping AoEs to whittle said adds. Start fighting. No progress on the boss. People start sighing that we didn't have enough incarnates for a +4. Keep fighting. No progress. People are hitting adds instead of the boss. I'm doing a self challenge of not transfering IOs or inf so the character is squishy though I had my +1 level. Because of this my defense is porous and I'm taking too many -HP hits. I run around to lose the debuff. Team eventually dies. I die. More sighing. I tell everyone to leave the map and buy purples while I would go to Pocket D to buy envenomed daggers. I return. I ask if people bought purples as I said while I went and returned. One person quits. Another person quits. ... We argue about how the game is too easy but at the first whiff of difficulty (our first obstacle in an easy run) and people start longing for their Council runs.

I'll say Savage Melee if you want number of AoEs. I'm leveling one atm and it has a nice bursty AoE with BU, the teleport attack (which is WIDE) and then the PbAoE (which with full stacks is WIDE as well). This alone tends to kill minions (It does rely on having BU). But if able to fit the cone in the build you might find yourself just chaining AoEs when you add Fire Armor to it as well. Paired with Fire Armor it's easy to spend time just dropping PbAoEs. The ST isn't all that great since it relies on T1 and T2 because Hemorrhage is never recommended. I haven't pylon tested it yet but don't expect much. That said it's role is really to teleport to a pack and hit everyone even scattered. Claws isn't as good in terms of chaining things together as Scrappers. Although we get more damage per use because of longer recharges it introduces gaps that Scrappers don't have. A Scrapper can do Follow up, Spin, Shockwave through infinity with no pauses and that simply blends a pack of mobs. A Tanker is forced to Follow-up, Spin, Shockwave, and then gap. Probably Slash since all procced out it's the strongest attack it gets. if anything I'd recommend this one. Strong ST, exemplars well, Spin hits for about twice the damage of all other PbAoEs with no hit on animation times. Pair it with Fire Armor and Shockwave helping with safety by constant knockdowns and you get yourself a blender. Radiation Melee is great for AoE. Not only do you get the inherent mechanic of the set where hitting mobs contaminated will do small damage to others near it but Irradiated Ground with six damage and -res procs will melt things passively while the player just focuses on killing a boss. Atom smasher can even be ignored if tight on slots. Considering the set comes with a built-in heal there is a reason this is one of the most popular farming sets. The single target isn't great and the animations are slow. Elec melee lives on through nostalgia. It has nothing really interesting due to the slowness of its animations and horrible single target. People mistake the number of AoEs for performance which is not the case. Staff is the same as above. Looks cool, has lots of AoE, people mistake it for performance. It does not perform well. Pretty bad single target damage. Spines is another one like Elec Melee. The number of AoEs masks the -very- slow animations and low damage. Spine Burst, for example, takes 3.1 seconds to go off and is unable to kill the little gears that pop out of killing Clockwork bosses. An honorable mention to Martial Arts. Only one AoE but it animates fast and has room for a Force Feedback proc which speeds the build and provides soft CC. Paired with Fire Armor it allows dropping more Burns. I would not pick it without Fire Armor as the low damage of its AoE means killing packs of enemies is like watching paint dry. But the pairing with Fire Armor melts. All the other sets are just more of the same. One PbAoE, one cone, invariably the PbAoE does less than half the damage of Spin. My recommendation is probably Claws. When Spin does twice the damage of other PbAoEs it's like having two AoEs. If you take Fire Armor you can do Spin + Burn this as low as Posi 1. The ST is good which is more than other AoE sets can say and this is a consideration since once all minions are dead the boss still needs to be killed.

Welp, my congratulations to everyone who kept on whining despite repeated repeated repeated tests and math demonstrations that we had it good. Now we can all be annoyed. Equality.

If/when we finally move away from pylons I have a feeling there will be a shake up on how we perceive ATs and the damage they can dish out. Stalkers will go down with AVs running around, which we might say it is unfair since in a team there will be -someone- who is capable of grabbing agro and preventing this. But it's still a consideration. The -res procs will start be worth less as per my testing a few weeks back. This will narrow a lot the gap between the 'best' sets who are lauded as biggo damage... because they can fit all the -res procs and the pylon tests love these. Same applies with secondaries. Bio tests great, but only partly because of the +damage. The -res aura also plays on that and it pads the results in ways not necessarily reflecting real gameplay.

I noticed something odd as well. my accuracy went up from slotting BU. But none of the bonuses gave accuracy? And I clicked and unclicked the little yellow button. But if I switch to the alternate empty slotting the accuracy goes down in 3%. Weird.

10x yes.

Reinstating the less problematic animations into the menu as official emotes would be lovely. And I say this as someone who doesn't even use any of them or has.

They are talking relative speeds, Infinitum. Don't nitpick when it was re-explained a post later. I GET what Qi is trying to say. I'm saying I too have a long experience with the game and it's not -that- common we are more than 30 seconds away from an objective (which we now reach sooner than before since we fly faster than before). 20 seconds is acceptable to me when this happens.

If you don't want to test and don't care about the numbers others have posted then I must bow out of this conversation. I don't know how often you are not within 30 seconds of a mission which, btw, is something testing would have told us.

Did you test this? Actually test this? People have tested and posted above. You can continue giving your opinion on your feelings or you can test and come back and say they were finks who distorted the truth to suit their bias. -I- did not go and test. I'm basing myself on what people have posted here. 20 seconds slower on a distance long enough for Afterburner to not cover it. 'Unacceptably slow' is not how 20 seconds looks like. But this is subjective. To me it just is not. I am not, repeat, not being flippant. I honestly want you to come with numbers that prove your point and counter what others have said.

It's been a long time so don't quote me, but I vaguely recall rumblings about their buffs not being needed. On soft squishy targets like council run at +1 I can imagine this was so. I made a friend recently who only plays healers and had rolled their empath and was ready to engage the game in the traditional manner. I gently coaxed them towards Kinetics instead pointing out that they would get to heal as they wanted to do, but that later on when heals aren't as needed they would still buff the team and make everyone happy by their presence. As far as I can tell they are still perfectly happy when I ask them. They heal when needed just the way they wanted to but they notice how their buffing accelerates things to the point they mentioned how they barely have time to attack themselves. I tell them that's a sign you're doing a great job. The reason I don't like murder balls (and tend to solo/duo things) is how often we are scrambling trying to find a target as things die around us. If I see a boss at half HP and most of the screen clear I know the team is converging like a frenzy of sharks. What is even the point in joining up and trying to squeeze in a hit? So I leapfrog ahead once the pack of mobs is half dead.

In my own experience (but please take this with a grain of salt since what I am about to say is subjective and not math) heals and shields don't help (much) against DDR. Strider above mentions how 'so many heals won't be overkill' and that's one thing I've experienced myself: when the DDR nation attacks heals don't do enough. Or much. Speaking strictly as as Tanker I can quote my usual ITF experience: I jump in, I start killing things fast as Fire Armor does. But, if for whatever reason, I take too long, or get some unlucky misses, or don't have BU up, or a second group joins, then I will go from being at most-of-my-defense and 100% HP to -30% -40% defense and my HP plummeting in seconds. At this point two things can happen: 1) - I have already killed most things. My health is in the yellow, my defense is in the reds, my heal is recharging, but there are only three or four mobs left. I let my natural regen take the wheel and continue pounding the last of the enemies. With so few I'm safe as they don't hit fast enough for the debuffs not to expire and my heal recharges fast anyway. 2) - I have -not- killed most things. Perhaps I jumped in without BU to help me kill fast or another group joined in, or enough lucky hits went through right at the start and debuffed me hard. Regardless of the why I'm surrounded by enemies, my HP is in the yellow, my defense is in the red. In this scenario more heals or a shield don't help. In the time it takes to animate the heal while debuffed into the reds and surrounded by enough enemies still hitting and keep the debuffs up I will have that recovered HP dropped before the animation has ended. In the second scenario it does not mean I'm going to dead (it would if stubbornly girdling my loins and refusing to budge). I immediately take up into the air out of reach, wait for my heal, maybe use Barrier to recover my defense or just wait until the debuffs ended. More heals would serve me no purpose since jumping back in the second scenario (too many enemies still alive, defense in the red) would just have my HP smeared again until the debuffs expired. A shield is just a preventive heal, but when we are taking 95% of the hits it gets eaten. Now, this is an extreme case. As I said in the past I tank the ITF just fine. I just plunge first when it's the towers and that means I'm at agro cap for a good while until the towers are cleaned. But I'm also in a team that is helping with the killing so mobs are crumpling. When I mention this it's just to say that X armor set is better than Y powerset can boil down a lot to spreadsheets but when we are actually playing the game everything works out fine to 97% of the game.