Sovera

If we are to be honest new content will not be a panacea that makes players happy and/or increases their retention. A new arc, new missions, or a new power set will not breathe in months of extra gameplay to someone who has reached the end of their interest in the game. I can say so because I'm there myself. The community is great, and I loved this past year of going nuts over the game up to even waking up earlier on my own (not setting an alarm for it) because I wanted to level something new. Leveling new characters with double XP was also a net -positive-. Slowing leveling is not something I feel that would have made me extra interested in playing as I would simply had abandoned projects earlier instead of reaching level 50 with them. But over a year later (I have characters with 450+ days of offline) I can say I've done it all, leveled all I cared, played all I wished to play, and there is nothing much more to do. My friend list is empty, the roleplay crowd has thinned, and my interest in joining random persons to do random TFs is no longer there. So I'm waiting for WoW's expansion next month and will be playing something new. Please accept I'm not saying this out of pettyness and 'if only there had been more page releases!!!'. We can only do something so much before we are done with it. Playing the same game for more than a year is pretty damn good. The only game I've played for longer (two years in a row, not touching other games) was GW2 and it was because of the amazing game it turned out to be but mostly the amazing roleplay community that kept things going once the pew pew novelty wore off. CoH is a great game in the current climate. Several years back I had left it, went to Champions Online for a while, grew bored with it, played WoW, grew bored with it, then came to check CoH, paid for a month, came in, looked around, got icked at the old graphics (THEM HAND MITTS!) and logged off after half an hour and didn't log again for the rest of the month I had just paid. But the day of abundant MMO riches is past and the fact we can play CoH without a sub, and just log in at any moment and not worry because our gear and whatever current power mechanic is now several tiers late making catching up a hassle also is CoH's strength. We can always just log back in at any moment, not worry about 'wasting' a month's sub to play a few days in a month and just have our fun.

It isn't City Of Kinda Ok Heroes either. I'm like nihilii. I start by building a character in Mids. I don't bother cooking a leveling build since that's just replacing purples for Kinetic Combats or Obliterations and having Build-up/Hasten triple slotted. But the character has not even been formed and I have it all pathed and tweaked to reach my goals. That does not save me from what the OP mentioned though. I've literally reached level 50, resppeced, be mid re-slotting things and be glancing at Mids and be 'hmmmmmmm, if I would remove a slot from here... I could put it there... and then....' which leads me to re-respec two or three minutes after respecing 😄

You can boost the defense much more easily than you can the offense. It's how we can play a squishy Fire Armor for most content. But we can not really boost the offense. At most we can add more recharge and more damage procs, but in most cases the offense oriented sets can do the same and still rely on IOs and incarnates for their defense. In most cases we need to assume things are balanced and there is no free lunch. Psi Melee gets the Insight mechanic, but it's not free damage. The set is balanced around the idea that Insight's extra damage will happen and thus the output is slightly lowered because of it (too much IMO, as a pylon test had it lagging really far behind). Dark Melee is the same and it's easy to look at a fully pumped Soul Drain and go whoa, but the tools that accompany it are not especially good since they already take this into consideration. This is something that I had from a previous experiment. I tried punching the resistances as high as I could which did not end up being all that high. I would thus still use Barrier as a panic button and in any case as a Tanker Barrier to protect the whole team at key moments (ambush in the ITF's first mission, sewers in Tinpex and the whole run run run moment where we destroy war walkers and then face Director 11 while ignoring the ambushes around him, etc) feels like the right choice. The slots in Shadow Punch would have gone a lot better in Taunt (meh 1.5% fire and cold resist, eh 1.5% max HP, 3.75% S/L versus 1.8 end, 2.25% S/L resistances and then 2.5% S/L defenses which would still reach the softcap) but if you exemplar too much you'll miss having an extra attack with at least minimal slotting. Switch slots around as you will. Assault is a is a free power. You could take Taunt though I personally do not use it, but it is nice to have simply for the -range component. You could exchange it for Hibernate and be near unkillable between it and Barrier. Or you could take Dark Consumption, but with Energy Absorption properly slotted and on a 18 second CD it may be moot. Single target will be Midnight Grasp, Smite, Siphon life, Smite. Repeat. You're still not going to win any prizes at ST (which won't happen anyway unless you go Fire Armor, Bio Armor, or Titan Weapons) but can unload a lot of AoE backed by Soul Drain which ought to help speeding things up. Fire Armor/Clawssssss

I stand corrected. It should be an AoE flag then.

Actually it's best not to quote me. I went to check just in case I was saying something dumb and the power attributes does not show the endurance debuff and the tooltip says 50%. I'm sure I saw the 96% -somewhere- but I must have mistaken it. I do know it certainly feels like more than just 50% since my blue bar ignores sapping when I use Consume, but, I have no tangible proof of this. Edit: Ah, found it. The tooltip of the power itself and not the tooltip of the buff.

Slotted for endurance it goes to 96%.

I just did something and I want to insist that you are fighting against the tide if you absolutely refuse to use the auction house even at the most basic level. I started a character with no money transferred and had something like 40-50 mill in slotted things and another 26 mill in money waiting to be spent after a day of playing. Playing playing, not 'sitting in at the Auction'.

On a lark I have started leveling a new character on Excelsior and decided on iron man rules (no inf transfers). Which means starting with zero cash and like a destitute refugee (from another server). A few things were immediately noticeable as I went on and it ended being that my experience in leveling with ATOs and attuned IOs made a world of difference. I mean, yeah, intellectually I knew it, but the rose tinted glasses made me remember leveling without them much easier than it turned out to be. I leveled feeling super squishy and my damage output being no great two shakes. Burn, as praised as it is by the community, is a weak little thing when we compare its basic slotting to the procced out slotting. Just like Savage Leap of Savage Melee Burn takes to procs like fish to water. The summoning of a pseudo pet who tries to use the procs a second time, coupled with the long recharge and animation makes it an amazing host for damage procs. In its ultimate form it is a 10 second ish mini nuke and in its basic form it is a warm breeze. Anyway, I will add my experiences as I leveled because new new players can certainly make use of it.

If it does not bother you to toggle it on and off you can use both jump packs from the P2W to achieve hardcap maximum Hover/Afterburner speeds. Use one for 30 seconds. When it wears off use the other. For all purposes it's perma. If the aesthetics bother you detoggle the pack once done moving.

It's dead and no replacement has been found. You can try your luck and beep @The Philotic Knightsince he is always looking for his next project. It may be outside of his expertise but no harm in trying.

For some idiotic reason Camera Shake is under Controls, Mouse 🙂

You can turn off the shake. I had to once I got to Dark Astoria and the Sirens made my screen non stop vibrate.

If you don't do tours you're going to miss 90% of the base. Screenshots do not nearly give the full value of the ambiance and the little nooks.

I can't give percentages, but a fair bit of my time. But mostly because my main is very exemplar friendly so it pushes me to do it where with exemplar unfriendly characters I've decidedly shied away from doing low level TFs thinking I'd only have important skills later. 'Ach, no, I only get my AoE by Yin' is a good reason for me not to do have done lower level content. My main is at 90% of full power at level 15 so I exemp all the time now.

Slow animations I can stomach for a while and eventually it becomes too much and the camel's back breaks (not you, @Camel). This was a distinct thing with my Rad Melee Scrapper and Tanker. Trying to live through Rage's crash was also something I stomached for a while but after the Nth's time of jumping into a group and suddenly taking a lot of damage while unable to kill them (Fire Armor is about killing them first during the leveling) eventually got to me despite giggling at tearing half an even level's boss' HP with one double stacked Rage Fiery Embrace empowered KO Blow. Low damage also eventually becomes too tiresome. Fire/Katana Tanker behaved nearly as well as Fire/Claws with much better slotting, but Lotus Drops being half the damage of Spin sapped my will to play. It would have been fine if I hadn't played Claws, but having done so I knew there was much equal ST and much better AoE waiting for me. Started a Katana/Rad Scrapper expecting Scrapper and Katana to carry me and then no, oof, whittling enemies until level 26-32 with no damage push from the secondary made me go nah. Didn't even get past level 25. Squishyness also makes me drop characters. After dying a few times on my Stalker or Scrapper I moved on (probably not fair since I could do something about it). Claws/Bio Scrapper is the best thing since sliced bread, but it does not handle hard content very well (TW/Bio does, but because it does so much damage with KDs and defense boosting skills that things don't last long enough to hurt back). Exemplaring is also important and a few attempts at playing some characters with all the important powers out of reach (sole AoE, set defining powers) I also said no.

Doesn't increasing the slider to x8 do this? I have no idea if it does or not as I never really bothered looking at XP, but I would have assumed that it does.

Latest mozilla, control + F5 doesn't do a thing. Not important for me and if no one else complains then it's all good.

No actual updates, sniff. Also, dunno if it just me but:

Happens sometimes. Nearly a year later (11 months?) I can say that, yes, Fire Armor on a Tanker does the near unkillable ^^ I didn't like Rage and its crash so stopped trying to like SS though.

Self-inflicted handicaps are common in games. Basically Switchfade is/was pretty respectful in his reply but it does not mean anyone else but him need to follow his self-applied handicap. The only thing that matters is when 'competing' such as in pylons or time-it-took-to-solo-a-TF to be upfront about what was used so the metric is not skewed. That is why in pylon times a person will say if they used Incarnate clickies and lore pets and the same for TF soloing.

You can't add more other than the base empowerments so you have to live with what you have. Carnies do it automatically when they die and it is tough with meleers to avoid it since they die in melee range, it's auto-hit (thus bypassing SR's defenses), and they aaaaaaaaaall doooooo eeeeeeeeet. Sappers are the easiest to deal with: kill them first. They are minion level and should die in 2-3 hits. But be mindful that you do not mistake endurance debuff resistance and recovery debuff resistance. Bio gives you 86% to endurance debuffs, which is great against a sapper taking a big gulp of your blue bar, but it has 0% against recovery debuffs which is what Super Stunners do (and everyone who does electric attacks, including some enemies in Arachnos). Fire Armor also has something like close to 100% against endurance drain, but 0% against recovery debuffs. Rad Armor gives you 86% to both Recovery and Endurance drains which means that coupled with Radiation Therapy with a Essence Theft proc you should never be in problem. When ever you are at 25% or so just use RT and you're back to full. Between 86% resistance and RT being back up in 20 or so seconds you should be fine. With your Bio Armor character what I recommend you to do is: - Grab Recovery Serums. They are very cheap at 10k a charge so just buy max stacks (50) and when fighting things that sap like Carnies use it when ever it is up (don't wait until you are drained to use it). - Put an Essence Theft proc in DNA Siphon. This ensures even in a small crowd of 3-4 enemies there is a good chance you'll boost up to a full bar (mainly try to use it on a pile of corpses to boost your Recovery. Using it on live targets just gives you a small bite of blue bar instead). DNA Siphon is an easy skill to overlook since Bio is starved for slots and the skill is a one slot wonder, but it's a great place to get some easy bonuses and incidentally buff its recharge. - If you know you are going to face troublesome sapping foes (not Council or whatever easy faction) then spend the literal two-minutes-by-the-clock to buy some white salvage and use the SG base macro to quickly boost your resistance to debuff and your recovery with the base empowerments.

The simplest way is having energy defense since sapping attacks usually comes in the shape of attacks. If it does not land then it does not sap. But some of those are auto-hit like a Super Stunner's ressurect or a Carnie's death. The second way is having overwhelming amounts of recovery. It's not perfect but Rad is an endurance faucet with Particle Shielding used on CD and Radiation Therapy with a Theft of Essence proc. Bio can use DNA Siphon on corpses and it also takes a Theft of Essence proc (these make all the difference btw). On top of these we can purchase Recovery Serums from the P2W vendor to give our recovery a major boost. I did Katie Hannon a couple days ago and my whole team was being detoggled like mad as the constant spam of Lightning Storm sapped them but between Consume and Recovery Serum I coasted along. The third way is using Base Empowerments (https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Empowerment_Station_Buff_Recipes_and_Ingredients) which is the sole place we can actually obtain endurance drain resist (don't quote me though). It's only 20%, but, you can also purchase the 17% recovery boost from there as well as these buffs cost absolute peanuts and last for an hour and a half.

In the comics he call tell colors by the temperature in a semi comic book science BS related to how darker lights absorb more heat, but it was shown it takes a while for him to figure it out. Detecting if he is under a light should not be something he can spot all of a sudden, though we have been shown he could detect the heat the lamp gives off (less and less a thing as we move to LEDs). The comics sometimes try to put in in flaws with powers but they rarely are consistent. The Flash is constantly under a 'I cannot move too fast otherwise I create tornadoes in my wake and the sonic booms would shatter windows', but these never materialize when he fights bad guys at stupid speeds. Invisible Woman's forcefields allow light and sound to pass so she can be taken down by those, but we rarely see this come up other than plot requiring it. Superman is weak to magic, but it's completely lip service which happens according to plot where either the slightest thing is magic and cuts him, or he tanks magical lightning/blasts and comes out of a bit woozy, shakes it off, then proceeds to win. Daredevil has had some nice touches over the years. 'Press the green button!' and he's welp! Bad guy gets away in a car and the cop shakes Daredevil, 'What color and make of car was it!?' and he is welp! In one of the most recent Hawkeye comics Clint is dressed as Ronin after a HUUUUUGE plot of him pretending not to be Ronin, lying about it, hiring a Skrull to impersonate him, even using time travel, only for him to be on a rooftop unmasked and as Ronin to have DD go 'hey' and Clint nearly has a hear attack (it was really well done 😄 ). DD proceeds to talk normally with him while Clint is like, wut??

You didn't read the link in my signature, did you? Where I posted the first TF that takes about 30-40 minutes you can do starting at level 8 rewards you with nearly three million? You should probably buy the stuff from the /ah too since there is a good chance it is much cheaper.

Claws/Bio is the combo that gels better on a Scrapper than any other AT. I feel you're going for Dual Blades and Invuln only to set yourself up.