MistressOhm

So, I'll answer this from the SWTOR standpoint, because they do allow this for people who buy the expansions (with new level caps). Rather than slog thru all of the lower level content AGAIN, you have a certain number of 'tokens' granted with the expansion purchase, such that when you create a new character, you can burn a token and choose to set their level at the STARTING level for the new content. In the case of Knights of the Fallen Empire, it was Level 60. In the case of Legacy of the Sith, it was Level 70. The new character has all of the class story marked as 'completed' up to that point, with a 'neutral' alignment between Light and Dark, and a level appropriate set of gear. This allowed people to run the new content right away, instead of finishing a character level process to 'get there'. While SWTOR shines in story (Bioware did a great job with the class stories and the expansion arcs), the actual character classes are basically mirrored between the two alignments, and there isn't nearly the amount of customization that CoH had even out of the gate (much less now). So there's much less risk of "not knowing how to play" a newly-minted high-level character. So that's much less of a factor. I would support an account-bound P2W token that would allow you to "respec up" a newly minted hero or villain, as long as an alt spent the INF to get it. And it would have to be substantial, maybe hundreds of millions of INF, perhaps even a billion. Reason for that is to ensure that the player either has put in the time to earn that kind of money, or has a sponsor willing to drop the cash for the upgrade. And yes, that would be per upgrade.

I've found I can burn them down on a Robots/Traps MM, because even tho' they're singularly focused on my cyborg ass, traps still work to mess with them. Caltrops, poison gas, and acid mortars soften them right up for the robots to disassemble them. It does mean I have to set traps and scoot, though, and ALWAYS have the Force Field refreshed before knocking if it's starting to flash. The Vampire is the tricky one, he likes to lead with a high mag hold, which means if I don't already have the bots in Bodyguard mode, I can't issue commands while held and they'll ignore it. The Matriarch leads with Thunderstorm and Hurricane, which means there's a lot of AOE stuff going off that scatters the team, that can make coordination difficult also (and that End Sapper curse she's got is nasty if it hits). The Mummy's not that hard, he just has a MOG that you have to cut back to T1 attacks to plink at him, bank your END, so that when it wears off and he's stunned, you can then Fire Everything and put him down. Did not know that the Mummy has no jump game, though, which means vaulting to a nearby roof and hammering on him from there is viable. The Vamp DOES have a jump, and the Matriarch, Spectral Were, and Hollow Specter all fly, so if you need to disengage, getting up out of reach won't help much. All that said.. on certain classes and powersets, these guys are !Fun while solo. I can see why a lot of people would be thinking the occasional EB spawn would be Cruel and Unusual Punishment. My only offer of consolation is, there are a LOT of zone events going off, and during those events, you collect no XP Debt. So if (!) you're soloing ToT at L25 or upwards, and you're "squishy"... try and do them while the Banner zone events are running, those are only in specific areas but everyone in the zone gets the "No Debt" buff. Zombie hordes? Those can make ToT'ing ... interesting.

So far my /SR and /Ninjitsu stalkers have had no issues. Toss Caltrops as soon as the "Trick" sound effect goes off, no matter who pops out, they're soon nursing sore bunions and trying to get out of the sharp and pointy. That gives me enough time to get the AS off in most cases. I HAVE been one-shotted by the Mummy on my Dual Blade/Ninjutsu, the RNG gives them the lucky roll to get past all my Defense and "HI! Here's a diseased fist to the face."

Yah once the Combat phase ends for whatever reason, they have 20 seconds to reach a door. Which for most ToT locations, there's doors all over the place (altho I did see an EB make a beeline for a door across one of the Founders Falls canals, even though there was a door ... right next door to where the battle was! So apparently 'door choice' is semi-random.) If you keep it from reaching a door, it'll just poof once the timers run out... which is REALLY frustrating, because you're wondering, "did I drop it? Oh. It despawned. Phooey."

Was using Perf Shifter set and didn't see the benefit of that proc that often. I've switched to Power Transfer, which pops an occasional heal, only 5% but it's useful. Hurricane doesn't proc KB all that often, most of the heavy lifting is Repel and mobs still get pushed away by that. LOVE the -ToHit it applies though, especially to bosses, EB's, and AV's/giant monsters. As long as you've End to keep it going, it truly does turn you into a Tankfender. Don't know why anyone would NOT use a -ToHit set for this. A KB/KD would be useful in Gale, however, as an added, targeted KD cone (Gale is kind of a useless but cheap power as it is.) I tend to slot LS for straight Damage, a Recharge, and an End reduction, because it doesn't miss and you can perma the things with one Recharge SO. Even then it doesn't hit THAT hard, but it's useful for keeping things off their feet. A KB/KD proc conversion there would be good to keep from throwing things away rather than down. Uff. I'd have to quintuple-slot it for Acc to make it reliable. Right now it's just a placeholder in the power tray. I'll have to push a Disorient set into it, and see if it gets better. My go-to boss debuffer is Snow Storm. -fly, -rech, and Slow, as a mob-centered AOE. It burns Endurance like trucks in a mud bog burn gas, though, so have to slot for End reduction along with the Slow, and a Recharge or two to get it back when it drops. And so far I've skipped Tornado. I may have to revisit, to see what it can do, but at first glance it seems rather chaotic, even more so than Hurricane or TS.

So necro-ing this to chime in. Storm + Elec is THE Debuff Queen. Properly slotted Hurricane (I'm using Dark Watcher's Despair set) not only floors Acc for anything in the radius, but also enforces positioning with Repel and occasional KB procs. Snow Storm applies an excellent Slow and -Rech to not only the target but also anything nearby. Thunderstorm and Freezing Rain throw in KD/KB and Fear (the "Run Away!" kind), FR also applies a slow and a -rech debuff from the Cold damage ticks. Then we get to the Electric Assault side of the secondary. Because this is a Defender set, the -End on every attack is made more effective than from the Blasters, they do more damage but less status. Short Circuit, properly slotted, will nearly wipe a mob's blue meter all the way down, and a couple of shots of Electric Bolt, or a Ball Lightning, will completely empty the tank after that. The End refund (which isn't much, so do slot for End Reduction -everywhere-) makes the high toggle usage of Storm a bit more bearable. I've BROKEN trick or treat EB's on a L38 Stormfender, to the point where the "have I attacked in 60 seconds?" timer runs out and they despawn. Not because there's nothing to attack, there's nothing to attack WITH. Think about that, an EB completely locked out of attacking at all, for a full minute. All because a solo Defender has drained the End, debuffed the Recharge, and put them into a Fear state trying to get away from a T-Storm pet. So! if you want your high-risk targets to become punching bags in short order, take along a Stormfender with lightning powers. 🙂

... damnit, no. That's not... ergh. SORRY GUYS. PARTY'S OVER, HEF'S KICKING US OUT.

I've always found Patch Notes to be fairly complete. But then there's people who prefer bullet points to paragraphs. (Maybe the devs should put Patch Notes into Powerpoint slides? /s )

OK then that explains how this is happening, I'm debuffing the EB's to the point where they're UNABLE to attack for 60 seconds (no end, recovery nerfed, speed nerfed, Acc nerfed, ragdolled/KB'd, feared.) If I successfully shut them down right off, and then spend the rest of the encounter whittling down their health, they despawn mid-fight, but if they manage to get a few attacks off during that time, their timer resets and I can keep pounding them down. This is why the behavior seemed 'random' in terms of health meters and time. The minion/lieut/boss mobs don't last the full minute healthwise, so they never try to disengage. It also explains why the Mummies are unlikely to despawn - they are very melee-centric, and immune to Repel, so they still try to engage even when debuffed. The Matriarchs, OTOH, work from range, and most of their attacks have a high End cost. Same with the Specters. It's likely a serendipitous occurrence, seeing as the Storm Summon/Elec sets together do so much debuffing as well as End drain. Most other powersets could accomplish some of that, but not all. SO... perhaps their debuff resistances need to be improved? End recovery boosted? Something that lets them fight on when a Stormfender shows up and tries to reduce them to a gym sandbag? Increasing the Combat timer to a higher value would force them to fight on, but at the same time, being able to completely lock an EB out of attacking is a bit overpowered for a single character, too. (No I'm not saying Nerf Stormfenders! just make the EB's harder to debuff.)

There's always that one bot that insists on melee'ing (and gets itself smashed to bits in the process). Here's how I would approach the problem, IF the Bots set is supposed to fight from range and not melee: 1) Add a Mag-2 or Mag-3 Knockback to the Melee attack of the Assault bot. Give the Protectors a short-range Force Push instead of a melee attack. Take away the little guy's punch attacks and instead give them a high-mag Stun attack (tasers?). The idea here is that IF something gets into melee range, it can get shut down and ejected back to 'ranged' before it does too much damage. 2) Remove the "follow" behavior between bots and their aggro'd targets. They just need to close to range, not stomp right up to them and pound. That's for ninjas and zombies. Bots should have better programming! 3) Allow the MM to switch modes on the Assault bot with a toggle - Mobile and Entrenched. Mobile = current behavior. All weaponry is close to mid range. Entrenched = Bot anchors itself to one spot, deploys a shield, and goes to long range AOE attacks only. Protectors would prioritize a damaged Entrenched bot over the other pets wrt repair and shielding. Switching modes would take a few seconds of transition, long enough to keep a MM from toggling between the two all the time, but short enough not to lower overall DPS too drastically. During the transition the bot would be defenseless. The danger with the above, of course, is that a closely grouped spawn will get scattered by the bots. There's also the assumption that Bots are only a Ranged set. Personally I don't mind the melee parts of it, because I can run in and plant a Poison trap whilst the spawn is busy trying to turn the robots into component parts. That usually shuts down incoming damage pretty quickly, as the spawn starts choking and puking. Other secondaries might have better strategies, however.

I've been soloing EB's off of the Trick Or Treat spawns, and I've noted that they tend to despawn mid-fight. I haven't narrowed it down to how long the fight goes on (seems to be random), but there's some factors that might come into play here: By design, they're supposed to despawn if no longer aggro'd. This doesn't appear to be the case here, however. I'm fighting them predominantly on a Storm/Elec defender, L39-40 range, and as such, I have the EB's Slowed (Snow Storm), -Acc debuffed (Hurricane), Endurance drained (Short Circuit + electrical attacks) and often Feared (Thunderstorm, Freezing Rain). This means they're not attacking, but actively trying to run/fly away, for most of the fight. The ones that tend to 'vanish' are the Matriarchs and the Ghosts. The Mummies usually stick around, as do the Vampires. The Ghost Werewolves are iffy - sometimes they vanish, other times not. I have had EB's duck into a handy doorway if debuffed and tossed nearby. I'm assuming this is another way they despawn. No matter how much damage is done, no XP is granted if they simply despawn or duck thru a door.

This isn't that far away from my house.... >.> (Kings Row at Loop 288, Denton, TX)

Objective Viewpoint: This is a game. Slightly more detailed objective viewpoint: This is a construct designed, by a carefully graded algorithm of risk vs reward, effort vs accomplishment, to burn as much idle time as possible, from multiple people, at the same time. Originally it was designed to do that to such an efficient and, yes, fun degree, that people paid for it. Subjective viewpoint: I play my game how I like to play it. I don't like it when the game is changed so that my 'play' gets negatively impacted. The above is the seed of the conflict. Some people's play is being impacted. "Nerfed" as it were. And no, they're not happy. Others, however, are probably thinking, no big deal, that isn't how I play so I don't care. And still others are thinking that perhaps this is targeted, because "some methods of play are not approved of" and they either feel like they're the ones being slapped down, OR they're happy that others are being slapped down. Whatever. All I know is, the construct was artfully done in the beginning, developed over years of work, and now is being lovingly maintained by a bunch of die-hards who would prefer that the system be played rather than just remembered. And I for one appreciate the efforts to keep it going, even if some of the details aren't always to my liking.

"I can only take you as far as the lobby!"

Atlas and Mercy (and maybe Nova Praetoria? I have no idea if the Cole Regime allows this kind of supernatural tomfoolery!) are off limits to ToT'ing. Every other zone, if you would get experience street sweeping, you should be able to do Trick or Treating there. If you've outleveled a zone's street mobs, then you need to move to the next zone 'up'.

Gone To The Americans, yes.

I do recall that it's not nearly as easy to set up a map with EB's - now the most you can get are bosses, which aren't as valuable XP wise.

Was in Talos last night when the zombies invaded... and because someone was AFK next to Luminary, ALL of the zombies were spawning next to the base portal, and immediately getting vaporized by a police drone. Tried standing a ways away. no dice. Moved to the top of the hill. Nothing. Resumed ToT'ing, and in between beating up on monsters (and occasionally getting sent to hospital), I watched a steady parade of zombies crawl out of the base portal planting bed, take one step, and vanish. It was... incredibly sad, in a way. The utter futility of undeath.... all because someone decided to eat dinner while they had their training screen up.

We get that there's multiple ways to play the content. Linear, pseudo-linear (by revisiting arcs missed on the first pass), or the PL and then backtrack method. That's fine. However, when someone doesn't know what to do when there's no PL method in the starting zone, that's a problem. This isn't a critique on the practice of farming or PL'ing as a general rule. But it IS a critique on the players deciding that the linear game isn't worth playing, or the players doing so linearly aren't worth helping out. And I think this may be why Posi was so pissed off when he discovered that AE went immediately to City of Farmers, because every player running arcs in AE repeatedly (doesn't matter where) is a player who is NOT visible in zone actively doing stuff. I don't know how Ouroboros works in that regard, it appears to put people in the appropriate zones but enforces some kind of exemplar on them, so that might be OK. If they're phased off from non-Ouro players? Then they can't be interacted with, there's no sense of population, and people leave because the place seems empty.

Ah! OK. The WoW reference threw me for a complete loop then. Was thinking since you mentioned it specifically, you were comparing the two. No idea which server you're on (I'm strictly on Everlasting) but I have heard that people are migrating from the less-populated servers to the big ones. I've been playing pretty regularly for the past few months, and I haven't noted a falloff that drastic. When the last patch went live (and subsequently foreclosed upon/nuked the starting zone AE buildings) I did notice a lot less people IN the starting zones (gee, who'd a thunk it?) but Pocket D still seems quite lively, and theres's usually a few roaming around Oakes and KR in the evenings.

Compare and Contrast, a game that is actively marketed as a subscription model, with a worldwide playerbase, to a 'community revival' of a game shut down 10 years ago, with no publicity or marketing save word of mouth. Of COURSE it's going to be night and day. Also, I gave up WoW long before the "culture" at Blizzard got aired out. Every expansion was a new grindfest, making your best gear worthless and changing skill rotations at a whim. I got tired of logging in to a completely different game every time (and having to pay for it on top of the monthly costs). I MUCH prefer CoH, regardless of whether or not there are any other players in the game at the same time as I am.

I agree, the respec process (and yes, it IS a process!) is really effing clunky. I don't like that I can't see my current enhancements when choosing powers OR slots. I've messed up set IO's more than once because I forgot to allocate enough slots in one power for the set that I have.

Big office maps... from a door in a very small warehouse. "Is this, like, a basement? Wow."

This is an awesome idea. (also, if it's possible to do so, attach/include .costume files for such races if you develop them for AE. That way, the look/lore is standardized, and even though there may be many copies of custom characters on the AE itself, those that encounter such races get a seamless experience encountering them in SFMA's.)

There is an Arbiter near the submarine dock, and Fusionette is stationed near the University.