Chaos String

My fave for the "squishies" (eheh) is Clarion. Mez can get bent.

The first time I played this arc, several things happened that made a very bad impression. 1. There was a countdown timer. By itself, this is fine. Give me some duress. 2. I had to click a bunch of glowies while being ambushed. Now, this is annoying. But it's fine. 3. I needed to read a lot of exposition in order to make a moral choice. Okay. Wall of text aside, I enjoy character growth. The problem was, I had to deal with ALL THREE OF THOSE THINGS AT ONCE. That's right, I had to read like 18 lines of text to make a character-defining moral choice WHILE A TIMER TICKED DOWN AND WAVES OF ENEMIES AMBUSHED ME. Or so I thought. Turns out that I had missed a glowie. When I ran the arc again with another character, I was able to click all the glowies and stop the timer/ambushes before making that moral choice. But I was very reluctant to run that arc a second time after how mind-bogglingly stupid it seemed on my first run through it.

Ordinance Possum. BR/Dev blaster, an homage to Rocket Racoon. "Next humie to call me, 'O. Possum' gets shot out of a cannon." Just couldn't pull together a costume that didn't look like hot garbage.

Fire/Kins did it before IOs existed. Who needs softcap defense when all the mobs are stunned and immobilized and Fulcrum Shifted? Any damage they deal is easily healed. So firekins were a legacy FOTM long after they were theoretically obsolete, which was issue 8. If you ever decide to have a go at playing with just SO enhancements, you can't really make a stronger choice. But if you use all the tools of the modern game to stack defense and recharge and damage boosts on a brute, the Fire/Kin can't really compete in a solo setting. It still provides great support for a variety of team comps, though.

I'd love to have access to the Ouroboros Mender costume pieces. Since my best characters are Menders in some capacity or other.

Wait a minute, so if our characters pick us, and we pick our noses, by the transitive property of picking things, our characters pick our noses? ....wow, that could save me some time.

Before the snap, Chaos String was a Grav/Kin controller who, after glimpsing the entirety of the multiverse for a fraction of a nanosecond during a particle accelerator accident, attained a unique understanding of both chaos and string theories, and found himself able to manipulate spacetime on a fundamental level. I find that a bit trite now, and anyway I don't much enjoy playing controllers anymore. So, after playing Cyberpunk 2077 I reimagined the Chaos String as malicious code that can infect any hero or villain with cybernetic augmentations, creating an alter-ego with its own agenda of vigilantism.

My Thugs/Time MM is a former assistant to Dr. Aeon who swiped the Temporal Deflector designs from his desk while bringing him coffee. She photocopied them and perfected the design in her spare time, then used it to rewrite past events to steer her ex-boyfriends into a life of crime, then blackmail them to serve her. Her name is ForgetMeNot, and she's a rogue (I don't do morally unambiguous). An absolute beast too, solo or teamed.

I remember teaming with a MM on live whose Assault Bot was named, "DoorBlocker 9000." I also remember the patch which no longer required MM pets to be resummoned on every map change. I remember thinking, "Great, I'll never be able to go to the Black Market again without wading through 3984738 bots making clankity clank noises jumping over themselves to bubble each other." Therefore, it's hard to say with a straight face that people's pets do not annoy me. That said, no, they don't annoy me.

Hey @Snarky, do you do all the unlockable contacts, too? I ask because I'm doing an Ouroboros completionist run currently, and I found I needed to take the time to do the miner strike event in Sharkhead to unlock one of the 19-24 contacts, as well as Crimson Revenant a bit later. And there are a lot of contacts like that redside. I know that Veluta Lunata used to be one of them: you had to spirit trap some ghosts at Fort Cerberus to unlock her, but apparently not anymore. Here's a list of the ones that still require badges to unlock: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Unlockable_Contacts Anyway, I do my redside completionist runs a little differently: I don't bother to exhaust the contacts; rather, I run all the content through Ouroboros. But I am a bit of a stickler about having all the souvenirs in the correct order. Currently I'm doing it with a DP/Nin blaster. I really wish the unique Ouroboros costume pieces were available in the costume editor. If they were, I'd have a bevy of proper Menders in my stable, but the approximations I'm currently able to make are unconvincing, so I just have regular vigilantes and rogues who work alongside the Menders. Anyway, good luck on your run and tell Veluta I said hello.

Here's the build I'm following right now. Only 30ish level at the moment but I'm slotting attuned enhancements as I go. At 50 it will be softcapped to S/L and ranged. With hasten up the ST chain will be GD - SotW - P - ES - SotW - P for what looks to be decent damage. Hasten isn't quite perma, and with it down you'll need to throw in a CP after ES. Not the best blapper ever but I enjoy the simple playstyle and looking badass. | Copy & Paste this data into Mids Reborn : Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1392;652;1304;HEX;| |78DA8593EB4E13511485CF74A6D69696D25228050ABD405B8116F0054C143431402| |A35FE6D2630B4834DDBF492E04F5F83ABFA00BE80AFE22B2826826250EB66D6021A| |FE38817EE7AC73D96BEF3DB3BEB7E2FFF8ECED23A5059ED4CC76BBFC587E3B56CBB| |36176BA2DB3A6E409AC9B7B76DD4AACEEEC345A1D8F2813DC55DE34EB156BBBB0D2| |356BE5A2DDEE346AEDA9EBB552B7D994FD850DBBBE6B965FB64CBB6ED72B2A506C3| |46A85A776A5DA91A9DF99AD596653263E67526A5AD676F05ADFB65AEDAADD8CAD36| |EDADC2F5D5EBE696253F57E33763E22725FFB121C5A7E75647826543B98EC17B27A| |0EF1D38F81E9CFA007ECFDD9C953F79D499289A86DBB41DDE56E16D55D06F8363AF| |C1C95DF05CCEEA74A2D3894127C67F9C4C4A166EC4EDC565ECE13D9E7DDD59BF7F4| |01E82FE2370EC044C1E833FC48397FEBD3ECDD11E0C907E3200CE0D9241D0254107| |10571F285E95577C6D820B2FC812382A7B0388A30546707E3102FE140F417A085EB| |A1C6DE837F9078C28F81DFD8B79BE074E4BEE21E61E620DC3AC6198358CB086A377| |6A7821718711571F4E5C695E95271767C0655217FF23F438129541DC50330FE169E| |68C3C07172EC0E55FA02167A338EB8A32F72C73CF0F8129D913637D62F388394E86| |656D026B6A22092D2D5A9C6F62FC336A91945A4CB316D3CA70B48446BA481D4C1AA| |41BBC94B329D622458F697A4CD3637A18BC94BACDB216B3EC5786FDCAB05F19F629| |CB3E65D9BF90F8CEB11639C699639C45C689C89E79E636CF3D51D10AD40ACCF7933| |47E89DA126B95947414BF8B49E3EED7BA76BB2AAF3D6E291A9444D39C5D5F7C37DF| |B4D2F27857BEF66B3968A7B79A4B4B22BFF1E72264A5F7AFE0FB5BFFB953D47A5F7| |CBB11B177D0373EEC1BFF03B215D045| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|

Nitpicking here, but Johnny Blaze is Ghost Rider. Johnny Storm is the Human Torch. And I'm pretty sure Human Torch would be Fire Armor, not Willpower.

I had a Rad/Mental/Ice too, back in the day. Did S/L farming surprisingly well, before incarnates were a thing. With softcap S/L, Drain Psyche for regen and sustain, three good PBAoEs (the nuke, the DoT and Psy Shockwave) and two matched cones, you could just jump in the middle of a ton of baddies and spam AoE. Kind of an AoE blapper. Pretty fun. Did okay on teams too. Single-target damage was suspect, for a blaster. Fell apart soloing villain groups with mez or a lot of exotic damage, but you could easily plug those holes in today's CoH. 8/10 would recommend giving it a go. My current favorite blapper isn't a really great one per se, as it has no Aim or Build-Up, but DP/Nin for the Deadpool / Deathstroke vibe is crazy fun. Lots of stabbing. Lots and lots of shooting. 7/10 almost doesn't suck at all.

Literally epic!

If Hide is inherent, how do I escort hostages? Call a brute?

I remember being part of one of those tests. We would target the nucleus, hide behind a rock spire, summon and when called, order them to attack. It ...didn't... really work well.

The issue with provoke is that against a level 54 AV, you have to slot it AND kind of spam it to reliably keep aggro. While managing your pets and keeping the buffs/debuffs/heals going. Doable, but not optimal. I suggest that for dedicated aggro management, Tanks and Brutes are fine. But for a tankmage, in the sense of leading the charge while doing crazy DPS and applying buffs, debuffs and heals all the while? MMs are awesome.

Sure, you get the buffs whether or not you cast the pets they're in. But I think you may be underestimating the contribution of your minions.

Personally, I would not rely on this kind of "non-stealthy" stealth as a MM. Not that it couldn't work, but I'd find it mighty inconvenient. When I stealth missions as a MM, I don't summon my pets until I have found the objective. If it's a glowie, I'll usually just summon a sacrificial wave of minions to get rekt while I hit it. Otherwise, I find the nearest quiet spot to summon, buff up, and take out the boss or whatever. Having to do any of this while mobs I aggroed previously are already shooting at me would be a mess IMO, although I define mess as any non-zero level of messiness. I'm sure it will be fine if you want to go a different way.

Oh yes, I was speculating: I assumed the badge was for 7th Gen PPs. I take it I am mistaken and they are a new mob type?

If memory serves, the blueside arc "The Revenant Hero Project," a 35-39 arc from Gordon Stacy has a mission full of 7th Gen PPs which could be farmed for that badge.

I can confirm Thugs/Time is awesome. Muling is putting enhancements into a power just for the set bonuses even though you might never use the power itself. For example, sometimes people will slot Boxing or Brawl with 4 Kinetic Combat for the S/L defense bonus. Then those unused powers are referred to as "set mules." Frankenslotting is when you slot a power not with a full IO set, but a bunch of different enhancements or partial sets. This can be useful for maximizing enhancement values, and/or packing procs into a power. It is often highly effective for MMs to frankenslot their summons. Forget/Ignore. They don't matter. In some fringe cases they could in theory make a difference. For example, the magic and tech origin powers could theoretically be useful for lighting Oil Slick Arrow, since they deal energy damage, and it's possible you might not have any other source of fire or energy damage in your build. But in 99.9% of cases, those powers are irrelevant past single-digit levels.

His last one was aight. They should make a movie.

I think you're interpreting all this too literally. There is a contrivance in LOTRO called the Halls of Memory, wherein you and Gandalf are wandering through a book, witnessing events depicted therein, and the scenes are connected via these little trippy passages that give the HoM their name. In Fallout 4, there's a contrivance where you experience someone's memories in a similar way. Of course there isn't really a twisty maze of little passages between past events. It's a metaphor. I have no idea whether Rularuu is meant to be psychic, and I don't think he's trying to claw his way into your mind. Rather, the Shadow Shard IS Rularuu, and as you travel among the scattered isles, you experience various emotions and imagery as you encounter fragments of his psyche. It isn't your mom's blueberry pie, it's Rularuu's [THING], where "mom's apple pie" is as close an approximation as your brain (neural net, or whatever) can come to making sense of [THING]. Again, I think the point of all this is to be vague and surreal. Especially as the entire zone looks like something Salvador Dali might have imagined. On whether the writing conveys anything of interest, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Given that in this thread alone, one poster said he thought that the text of the exploration badges was just the player wandering around going mad, and another poster saw it as character hijacking, I'm quite prepared to concede that this writing leaves much to be desired in conveying the true nature of the Shadow Shard. But when I toured the shard and collected them, I felt quite moved by the idea that this isn't at all a place where a godlike being was imprisoned, but the shattered and scattered remnants of the being itself. It was decidedly more surreal than anything else I'd seen in the game, but the intent of the writer seemed clear enough. I may have been mistaken.