Sovera

I went to level a Bio/Claws. Hmm... Squishy. Only level 32 though. Longbow and CoT tore it to pieces. But those because they debuffed defense (and since I'm leveling everything but my attacks is unslotted anyway). Council and the.. whatchamacallit.. Wardens something, the low level magic faction redside, they were nothing dangerous even with said unslotted shields. The damage does have that extra crunch, I can feel the -res and +damage working together.... but the QoL that is having a second low level AoE was missed waiting for Spin to come off CD each time. Nice and crunchy though. Theft of Essence works very well in DNA Siphon and I was surprised at seeing DNA Siphon heal so well on a tank. I'm used to it being a midling heal on a Scrapper if memory serves. I don't know if I will stick to it though since I've done Bio to death. I was thinking maybe use SR and abuse it to proc everything to the max though the thought of the endurance woes holds me back.

Yes. I do it all the time when I don't get a team to do it with. You're going to be downleveled to the appropriate level bracket anyway, but if you insist on doing it at the 'right' level bracket, then still yes. Then it depends on what you want to do. +0x1? You don't need a butt load of inf or a super duper build. The end boss WILL be an AV though but they are not super hard and you can stock up on envenomed blades from the P2W if it's a low damage AT. Most of the time you just need to stock up in medium inspirations before the last boss. +0x8? Yes, you're going to want a better build to do it in the low levels and even so the CoT part of Posi 1/2 will probably kick your butt since they stack so many debuffs.

I feel the same about Thor. From a stoic power house to a clown in a cape.

I was actually thinking of that one as I was writing the previous post. No no, Bill, the correct answer is: mmkay.

Mmkay.

...what? Brutes lag behind every other melee AT. They get no defensive bonus so the same slotting on a Scrapper will yield the same numbers on a Brute.Then they have crap for ATOs. Brutes are good for specialized farming. Scrappers kick their butts otherwise. You should not be throwing words like facts. Meh, plot device. Also plot device. When the writer wills it things happen. They can call it whatever they want. You know the feat where Spider-man defeated the Hulk? He made him laugh with a joke and he turned to Banner.

The answer seems to be TW. In fact the question is TW, and the answer is yes. Ultra damage and constant KDs seem to be the answer to everything.

- You need to think about what skills you're going to use. The ATO +res is important and you're not going to be spamming Spin in a single target situation. It also stacks three times and your S/L resistances are already overcapped with just one. Lower the S/L resistances a bit more and try adding more S/L defense instead. - You forgot damage/endurance in Focus. - Agility kills your procs. - Slash can be procced out for much better gains. - I have no idea why you have Hasten with only one slot, but Environmental with six. Well, I do, it's because with Agility it drops to 120 seconds. - +5ing everything is short-sighted. If you ever exemplar down further than 45 you suffer a catastrophic loss of near all set bonus apart from the PvP and purple ones. - No travel power is rough, but it's a choice. Consider something like this. 40% defense is enough for 90% of the content. When the going gets tough you use Barrier and softcap yourself. With Theft of Endurance DNA Siphon fills up your blue bar so you can trim down your slots for it (mostly because Bio is slot hungry as heck). Hasten is at 130 seconds instead of 120, but two FF procs mean it will be perma. With one ATO proc in Follow-up you have 77% resistances to S/L. With a second you get 83%. For 90% of the content this is fine but when the going got tough you used Barrier and now it's 88%, HP lowered to 90% and your Scaling Resists in Hover turned that 88% into 89%. This is the ATO did not just proc a third time adding another 7%. Focus with the Damage IO instead of the Damage/Recharge is on purpose to help the procs go off (40% with DMG/RECH versus 46% with just DMG). Swipe is just a mule (though helpful if you exemplar lower than 21) and rotation should be Follow-up, Slash, Focus. You can drop whatever you'd like such as travel powers and re-grab things you'd like such as Taunt and Assault if it's your thing.

You want to feel useful as a support? Roll a Plant/Kin. You are welcome to any team from level 8 to level 50. You make low levels safe with Seeds of Confusion. You heal the team. At level 20 you do all of the above but also boost their recharge and recovery (which is always horrid in the low levels). At 38 you also boost their damage while *still* keeping people safe and healed if need be.

I made this for myself but a friend from the game was interested so here it is. Even removing all the higher level IOs and not turning on Maneuvers it still has 42% defense at level 20. Perhaps not 42% *as* a level 20 since there are never enough slots as we are leveling, but I am going to say in the low levels it should be fine. As usual buy purple inspirations while leveling. A good tip is to leave 20-30 medium purples bids for a low price like 500 inf and keep playing, then /ah between missions and pick a few to restock. I have tried to abuse SR's ease of slotting and just go ham with procs though in the end Radioactive Smash needed a push to not have a gap, as well as needing the +res proc proc. So I sacrificed it and only lost about 25 damage but got a reliable place for the +res plus 10% recharge. The single target rotation ought to be something like Devastating Blow (6.6 recharge), Radioactive Siphon (1.8 animation), Radiation Siphon (2.4), Radioactive Smash (1.8). 1.8 + 2.3 + 1.8 = 6 seconds. Barring Force Feedback procs it has a 0.6 second gap which is ok in my book. In a team with anyone who throws a speed buff this goes down further. 59% S/L resists with one ATO stack. 66% with two. 72%-ish with three. If choosing Barrier then 77%-ish. Then the scaling resists kick in if/when reaching 50% HP. 40% E/N resists. Same math as above. Incarnates are a personal choice. With accolades and Musculature 45% the build has 3.69 EPS not accounting for the Performance Shifter proc and the Panacea. In my experience this is not really enough but there are the Recovery Serums from the P2W vendor to catch a breather. It frees the build for Barrier and adding another 5% resists on top of being a team wide panic button. SR is one that needs Barrier the least, I know. but when it needs it *really* needs it. The alternative would be Ageless (does close the gaps a bit, and fixes the endurance hole) or Rebirth for a more reliable heal. The build could do with more tweaks since I had not finished it: - Fusion comes super later at level 30 but I could not really fit it sooner. It could be taken at 26 instead of Quickness and relegate that one to 30. I would much prefer to have Fusion available before level 20 but... where!? One of the scaling resists could be taken at level 30 such as... maybe... the ranged one? Or perhaps the AoE? Scaling resists are not strictly needed in the low levels but they do give a pretty massive 10+% defense. So now we can see why I took Fusion so late. Of course this could be fixed by not taking Flight. Using something else would allow to take Fusion at 22-24. - I still feel I should have split Superior Gauntled Fist for the extra 6% to E/N but then I would need to place it somewhere which would spoil the no recharge attempt. - Defenses are 2.5% short for Incarnate content but I'm not OCDing about it.

While I'm typically lukewarm about DD (and Batman, and most 'normal' people who put on tights and go fight crime), this comic I read when I was a kid was pure bad assery. The detail of the club shattering with each impact was exquisite.

This was a trip. Also, don't listen to Bill since he is playing innocent.

Savage Melee has exquisite animations though. The T3 is jarring though, it does not flow into the other animations.

I still have one disband at Mary's fight. Everyone quit. We were being detoggled like mad, too many squishies were being killed in three hits by purple bosses, and of course the Hurricane spam and Lightning Storm stacking was insane. It is one of the reasons I always take Focused Accuracy since then. Then there is the suicidal team where everyone gave up at the last Mary fight. Everyone? No, a small core of indomitable players still held out against the invaders! We were down to three. And PISSED! 😄 One of us goes to collect Warburg nukes. The rest stocks up on inspirations. We go back in. We dieeeeeee. We go back at it! Moar nukes, moar! Envenomed Blades! LOTS OF KITING! And we got it. At something like 3 AM. Of course we did not finish the TF, but like hell we were going away with our tails tucked between our legs because of that fight 😄

I have two things to add. Players who feel useless should consider making their own teams. Advertise them as such and only those who care about it will join. And we have enough players that such people -will- join. 'Recruiting a small team (2-3) to do X TF at max difficulty.' It's not perfect but duoing TFs has been a breath of fresh air for me The second thing is what I have mentioned a couple pages back: the premise is flawed. We face the same enemies we find in the streets than we do in a eight man team. Does it not make sense that if a player solos the enemies they find in the streets then multiplied by eight the same enemies in a mission will melt like wax? It is not sustainable to have a spawn of ten enemies be five minions, three or four lieutenants and one boss. Even without nukes, even without incarnates, the minions die immediately. Now we have eight players VS five mobs. How do we turn this challenging? The foundation is shaky. @Lineamade it work by exquisite enemy composition and even so by their own words (and my own experiences running it with Linea) 'one or two will die per run'. Imagine the hardest content in the game currently being the 801 AE missions and even it barely kills people! (Linea could make it even harder, mind, but this is the exquisite composition I mentioned above: not suicidal, not too easy. Perfect. If there was but one thing that we could do for the game's health then I would heartily say to recruit Linea into revamping every faction's enemy NPCs) We can say power creep. I say sandy foundation: we kill half the group in the first seconds and even the 801 series is manageable afterwards. There is a reason the all boss ambush at the top of the hill in ITF is a common party wipe. That the climb in the second mission of the ITF with the constant ambushes tends to kill a few players in a team each time: there are so many enemies coming we are unable to quickly kill half a pack and face only five.

As someone who did karate a couple decades back all the alternate punch animations in Martial Arts are a riot. But there are a great many attack animations that come out pretty ridiculous since the devs ran out of things to fill 2-3 seconds with (Devastating Blow, anyone?)

I've done that mission twice recently as it is necessary to unlock the Katie Hannon TF. The first time I actually did the mission. The second time I tabbed out with Burn on Auto. But as pointed out here the next wave only spawns once the previous one is defeated and mid way through the mission I just turned off Blazing Aura and removed Burn from auto and AFKed.

People can create AE missions with those parameters. But they cannot play content with them. And we have a -lot- of content. I see Linea advertising for their 'AE missions purpose tailored to be extra hard, not a farm' and someone once in a while will zing them that 'is it really not a farm if you do it 4-5 times a day every day?'. Same deal here. We can create a mission with those parameters. And then be stuck playing it over and over. But can we duplicate the large swathe of content that exists in the game in the AE?

It works once more. Thanks for the speedy fix.

I'll say what I've said in the past: CoH is the Path of Exile of MMOs. People play it and love it to against a screenful of enemies and obliterate them. Now WoW (and others) follow a different approach where we enter a dungeon and all enemies are elites. Fights can take up to a minute per pack. We do it in 10-15 seconds. Some simple things that would help would be an all boss (no more minion, lieutenant and bosses. Instead all become bosses, and bosses turned into EBs, mebbe?) difficulty setting that mimics the elites of WoW. Now suddenly everything hits hard and defenses, CC, buffs and debuffs matter. I can only speak for myself but I would be much more interested in running something on that difficulty and have everyone contributing to reap the extra XP and raw inf. As long as the common pack of enemies consists in 50% minions that get wiped in a single AoE volley then those foundations are not stable to build on.

Stock up on Recovery Serums from the P2W vendor. They cost peanuts. But it sounds like you may not have slotted all the +recovery uniques and have been using generics to level.

We have ID, of course. It ended with a +7.5% HP unique. Recovery is kinda iffy. I took some slots and added them to Health for the uniques since I was at -0.10. Even with Transference that was too much for me. Okay then, I guess I'll try the Barrier route.

I am making a duo with a friend where we both are rolling Illusion/Kinetics. I have little experience with Incarnate choices for Controllers but I do know Clarion is the choice for squishies. On top of PA being near perma (actually well on perma if we are together and speedboosting each other or just keeping Siphon Speed at two stacks) the build I cooked is also at 45% defense to S/L/E and ranged which leads me to consider what do? - I can shuffle the slots and go down to 40% and then use Barrier for the last 5%. It would be easy enough to carry a row of Breakfrees to free me from any CC especially since PA takes agro and the build focuses on single target CC and attacks/buffing (I mean, it has Spectral Terror but there is not much point in casting it other than sticky situations) which reduces agro. Also we can restock BFs between missions. - Stick to 45% and then take Clarion and use on cooldown to be immune to CC. It's a more common choice, but dunno, 'just' immune to CC seems a bit weak to 'waste' an incarnate with. Barrier as a team wide panic button is more appealing. Opinions?

Not much point in Controllers. I don't want to pee in someone's cornflakes so I'm stating this as my opinion. As a plus if having fun with a Controller that's what logging into a game is about. That said you can still greatly speed the already fast end game with something like a Plant/Kin. Seeds of Confusion at level 8 makes enemies fight each other so your team is safe, and the enemies hitting each other makes them lose HP so they die faster. And finally you throw Fulcrum Shift and Speed Boost which makes your team love you to bits.