Sovera

I'm not going to deny you what you'd like to play, but I will say that stone armor has been made obsolete with time and that its drawbacks are not compensated by its benefits. If you want absolute stupidly sturdyness look into Invulnerability and as a benefit you can jump over a curb (granite form itself is unable to jump in the slightest or even fly). If you want slightly less but a much more ecletic toolkit (heals, absorb shields, two endurance recovery tools) then Radiation Armor is close behind. You do have 1k slots and it's no big loss to level and gear up since you can just /respec and recover the IOs later.

Calling @Wernerto aisle 5. @Wernerto aisle 5 please.

Same. Save us, @Jimmy

I felt like moving away from the tank and wanted to play support for as long the whim lasts. This build is not breaking new ground or super original or innovative, but perhaps someone can make use of it. Why Kin? Why Defender? Why Archery? Power Siphon on top of Fulcrum Shift? How to play it? Leveling build? The build.

I have been accused of many things in the past, but not cryptic-ism.

I have but one like to give.

It's the Steam Jump and Jump Pack. The macro I'm using is this: jetpack2.txtjetpack.txt Alter the keybind to whatever you'd like. I use mouse button 4 to activate my travel power so I just added Shift as a modifier. Alter the path according to where you have the game installed. If you have it in C:\City of Heroes then change it to that. The keybinds can go straight into the C:\City of Heroes folder if that's the case. I just made a Binds folder to keep my binds separate of all other files in CoH's folder. Once done and in the game do /bindloadfile c:\games\coh\binds\jetpack.txt You only need to do this one time. Again, change the path to whatever it is you are actually using. Somewhat related I also have /bind button4 powexectoggleon fly$$powexectoggleon afterburner which allows me to spam the button and not detoggle either.

You're correct that it is slow.... but only if you do not use the jetpacks! MWAHAHA! Imagine a solid near 60 mph without travel supression, -and- tridimensional -and- able to stop on a dime! I'm constantly zooming across the battlefield under their permanent effect thanks to a macro. But you are correct that the follow command does not bring a hovering character to melee range. 95% of the time it is not a problem, and then there is the chaos of hunting GMs for an Hami pop andnot having a clue whose toenail did we target.

Yes, I can't say that I understand this stress that people talk about. I am not saying it is not there or their feelings are inconsequential. Only that I do not understand where the stress comes from. A raid, maybe. Raids needs X of one AT, X of another, then we need to decide who takes what role and if people are not volunteering we need to force it and assign a non volunteer to do it. And 'it' might be really important such as locating bombs or there will be a wipe, or killing a certain NPC or things will sour. But for a TF or just missions? I do not understand. Mostly because the game is really simple. There are hardly any mechanics. It is funny to see new arrivals be like, 'I never did this TF! Is there anything I should be aware of?' This is a typical and worthy question in WoW where each boss has certain mechanics such as reflect damage or kill a certain add fast. But here it's just 'mmmyenooo. Just hit stuff until it stops moving.' I started like everyone else though. Not much of a clue. Logging in, posting a hopeful 'Level X looking for work!' which worked 1% of the time. Then I decided at some point I did not care to be semi AFK and looking at the chat once in a while to see if someone was posting something I cared to join. So I took over. And this is what I want to say. People being stressed and anxious about leading is something valid. They are as they are. But I want to make sure people are not making a mountain from a molehill. And this part is very important. Sometimes when I am leading and I am a bit under level I ask someone higher level to take the star and start the TF. I've lost count of the people who have said 'I hate leading' and 'I'm too lazy to lead'. In both cases I'm '... leading is literally click on the Contacts tab and ask for the next mission'. I led -so- many teams when I was doing my alt leveling spree. But I never overthought it. A '/lfg LFM to do X', click the name, invite, team is full, click contact, get mission. Mission is over. Click the Contacts tab, click contact, get new mission. Repeat, repeat. Never a thought about 'herding', never one about picking a specific team composition (MUST HAVE A TANKER AND A KIN AND ONE EMPATH AND SINCE I DO NOT LIKE CONTROLLERS THEN NO CONTROLLERS ALLOWED! (I really do not like Controllers, but I never even pay attention to what I am inviting. This has led to me, not liking Controllers, teaming with three or four at a time), and since almost never is strategy involved then never a worry about having to instruct players on what to do. Click Contacts, set mission, fly there, wait for team, do mission. Bit of verbal chatter or just doing it in silence. This is what I feel making a mountain out of. Leading a raid involves indeed decision making and assigning roles and worry about composition. But to do missions and TFs it's anyone free. And if the one leading does not care to do missions at +4 then that is fine, because they will say so on the advertising and only those who wish to do it will join. Market Crash, for example, is usually run at only +2 since there is this rumor or myth that the last boss is bugged if ran at +4. But when I wanted to test my last build I specifically said I was going to run it at +4. And people joined. One mentioned the bug and if I was sure. I said I was, they said okay, and we did it. Incidentally I've run Market Crash at +4 a few times and never noticed the boss doing anything buggy at that difficulty level.

Toggles check once every 10 seconds. A minute has 60 seconds. Sounds like it was tailor made for an aura.

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.