Sovera

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.

It's peculiar that the winging way of making up things as we go (Marvel/DC comics, that at some point become so rife with contradictions (oh hey, lets make the Flash say he can react to things in a femtosecond -and- can break the light barrier. Now lets have him get surprise punched by someone who throws boomerangs) that they are forced into period reboots) is actually being sighed at with nostalgia. I much prefer things explained and related to each other even if the in-game explanation is not how the lore says things actually happened. Guild Wars 2 did one thing I rather liked at the time and was that the lore found in the game (usually taken as iron clad gospel by players) was -not- a retcon but rather a mix of racial propaganda and rewriting history. Things -had- happened as lore said they did, but the races rewrote things to their liking either because they were the victors or because enough time had passed to distort things.

You know, I'm rather curious about this. It pretty much shows how we cannot, and should not, try to please everyone. I've had this interaction (once) in the past. We were on a Citadel, team split up, someone mentions the team split up, we pipe in that the team seems to be doing fine (no one was dying). Player was unhappy. We keep on playing. After two or so missions they mention they don't know why they are bothering since everyone is doing fine and can 'solo' the missions by themselves. I don't believe the person quit but they were unhappy. At this point, like with them as with you, I don't know what I am expected to do. The mission -can- be done more quickly with everyone splitting up. No one is dying so it's not hard (Citadel, Council, etc). So we need to go all together in a tight knit group for... what reason? To make someone happy about being in a team ball? I'm not being sarcastic. This is me asking. What is the expected behavior? You're saying if you go into a team and three players can tackle the content and are tackling the content alone instead of a team ball you just quit the team. What is the expected behavior? Even if fighting an easy enemy that is not dangerous it's not being done correctly if not performed in a team ball? Has it become a sin to purchase attuned IOs and actually work out a build instead of randomly slotting things? For some people this seems like a yes, and I return to my first paragraph.

I don't have connection problems. I have a 1gig connection and do not use Wi-Fi. It really is something that only happens when standing in place for a while. And chatting. At the top of my mind I don't remember crashes in my long idling bouts in PD. Someone like @Number Six can probably dissect the latest crash logs.

And instead of 246 you get 387 + double chance of procs going off, yeah. But if wanting to use something else than Fire Armor then Spinning Strike or Sweeping Cross is acceptable.

There are two things to consider here: - First is that comparing the game with mechanical decisions regarding gameplay to the comic book demi god that hears a gunshot from the moon and travels down to earth in time to stop the bullet is always going to end in tears. Compare rather to more normal power levels and it's not unheard of that top speeds can be breached via adrenaline and need but there is a reason why 'top speeds' are called top speeds and not 'unhurriedly moving along'. If a motor only goes up to 100 kph it's not because there is a big need to stop a bullet that it suddenly goes up to 500kph. But there might be a turbo function (dare i say afterburner?) that allows to momentarily redline this. - Second is that I'm hearing a lot about feels and not enough about testing. There were people who actually tested the travel powers and reported their findings: in a complete straight line with absolutely nothing in the way and over a long enough distance that 30 seconds was not enough to reach then Fly reached the door 20 seconds after SS. In places with detours (if I recall correctly they tested in Grandville or something?) and shorter distances Fly outpaced the others. So we need less spreadsheet navel gazing and more 'I went to X map, tested, and Fly is unacceptably slow according to these numbers'. Which, per testing done, is not the case. Most times we are in 30 second distance of a mission, more often there will be detours.

Perhaps not blind but rather your Mids being outdated. Be sure to have the latest one. Could you post a screenshot of what you're seeing? I see what you mean though, but if you reorder slots everything is accounted for though Mids spazzes out even in respec mode about too many slots spent at level 49.

Spinning does less than half the damage of CU. Looking at my current build Spinning does 240 damage with three combo points where CU does 740 with three damage procs (but I prefer slotting a FF proc with 89% chance to go off in order to accelerate cooldowns so 676). You can go around this by switching the order in which you use the skills. AoE just spam Spinning Strike. ST use Spinning -after- CU (ergo before starting to accrue combo points). The 2.5 gap gets filled regardless but now your three combos points are not used.

Awkward. Early Build-Up replacing early AoE is a bit of a wash... -with- Burn to replace that lack of AoE. BU + Burn kills half a pack so BU or Dragon Tail is kinda the same honestly. The single target definitely suffers. I won't wax more poetic on the animations which are extra sweet compared to MA but Shin Breaker -definitely- would have gone to level 26 to spread out the set's hard hitters. Dragon Tail and Spinning Strike are a bit of a wash as well. DT animations a sliver faster, ST hits a bit harder on three combo points. Combo points add a layer of awkwardness when we have our finisher ready to be used but not three combo points (easy to happen since things recharge fast but if we use extra clicks (heal, BU, FE, Consume, even Hasten). I find the combo points don't add enough damage to matter much and tend to just ignore them. If I have the combo points it's cool, if not the skill goes off anyway. Back when I tried it on a Stalker, I think it was, I noticed I would hit a -1 lieutenant with Crushing Upper and no combo points and leave it on a sliver of HP, then I would do the same but on three points and the mob would also be alive on a sliver of HP. After mathing it up looking at the combat log there -was- a damage increase but minimal. On the long term it remains a damage increase though, but I bring this up to say I feel it better not to be a slave of combo points. Better throw out more Spinning Strikes in an AoE situation or more Crushing Impacts than to delay them. Speaking of CU it has some very nice damage proc interactions to it does about 150 damage more (per mids, I need to reach 50 and test this with in-game numbers) than Crippling Axe kick. Without Burn there would be an awkward 2.5-ish second gap that could be filled with Spinning Strike to use up those combo points... but then CU is up and now it has no combo points to use because Spinning Strike's much lower damage consumed them.