MistressOhm

Totally dressing my bots up as Dr. Evil's 'bullet bra' fembots. 🙂

The forcefields put out by the Protector Bots are rather unassuming, not loudly tinted, and they stay up for as long as the bot (or the generator) survives. If something blows up, check your pet health bars, you can tell pretty quick if you need to take action. IF (and this is a big ask) I was looking to customize the look and feel of Mastermind pets (powers OR pets themselves) I'd probably want to be able to change the way the robots themselves look. I can see having a dropdown for Original/Clockwork/Prae Clockwork/Council/Nemesis for different types of bots.

The 'trick' to Kinetics is getting in close and personal, so any secondary that does well in melee range will work. DP is interesting because of Swap Ammo - if you need a specific 'side effect' (DoT, slow/-recharge, -damage) you can select it on the fly. It doesn't really do much overall debuffing though. I'd be more inclined to go Electrical Blast - the -end effect is pretty consistent, Short Circuit will require you to be in melee range anyway, and the extra Shock effects will stack up (plus you can chain damage off of Tesla Cage now, again at short range). The problem is, PvE mobs don't always pay attention to their Endurance, so draining something dry may or may not make toggles drop or lock out End-expensive powers. Also, know this - mobs that specialize in End drain (Malta sappers, looking at you) are also highly resistant to End drain. This means that your strategy for such mobs is to take them down hard and fast before they drain your batteries. If you want a secondary effect that you can count on to work as advertised, Dark's -acc, Sonic's -res and Rad's -def are solid contenders.

Not as much as you'd think. Speed Siphon makes battle space repositioning easy. if you're teaming with a Tank, the trick will be to always keep the Tank 'downrange' of your targets as a backstop. (That, and not unloading so much damage that you out-aggro the Tank's taunt. But you'll be a Defender, so that's likely a non-issue.) The only powers that you'll need to be concerned with a KB proc are Slug and M30 Grenade, and as @Ringo stated above, a KB to KD enhancement in the Grenade will keep it from scattering an entire spawn. Slug is single target, so just position yourself to knock the intended victim into the tank. 😄 I ran an AR/Kin Corruptor on Live, and the biggest pain point was the early resistance to -Lethal, since AR is mostly Lethal typed damage. But zooming in and out to take advantage of the Kinetics heal and end refill, or positioning close to an ally to give them some of the Power Siphon, that was easy. The only reason I can see using CombatTP would be for the ToHit buff, as Kin already has a great reposition tool in Speed Siphon. Kin is the "comes with free travel powers" set, no need to take a pool power when Speed Siphon and Inertial Reduction give you two perfectly good ones.

I solo'd a Kinetics/Energy defender to 50 on Live. Yeah. Kinetics is so much of a "team with me" set it's silly... but I didn't team. Here's a few things I learned: Think like a scrapper. Close range is where your heal (and later your end drain/refill) does you the most good. Long range gets you hit with counterbattery fire, and since your heal needs something close to anchor off of, if you think like a blaster you faceplant. Often. Don't bother with Repel. Its only use is to keep things away from you, and things flying away from you aren't as useful. Debuff first, THEN blast. This isn't as true with other attack sets that don't send things flying as much as Energy, but it still works. When you get to Fulcrum Shift, this adage really becomes your mantra. You want to leap right into the spawn, debuff them and buff yourself, and only when you're done with the debuff chain, then you start picking them off. Snipe Is Not An Opening Salvo. It's For Shooting Runners In The Back. Seriously. Remember Rule 1 - if you aggro from long range, the spawn will break into multiple groups, one to lob things at you, the others to run at you and feed you a knuckle sandwich. Instead, use your long-range blasts to finish off things that either ran away or got tossed away, and you've no use for them as debuff targets anymore. When fighting something tough, get into its Personal Space. You'd think that right next to an EB or AV would be the last place a 'squishy' would want to be. But with Kinetics, most of your powers benefit you the most when you're right there - not only are you debuffing something's Recovery, but you're healing yourself and refilling your Endurance. (This is the ONLY use I've found for Repel - not to bounce the AV, but to enforce a "just you and me bub" zone where you can hammer on something without all the minions causing you trouble. Even so, it doesn't do anything against ranged attacks, so it's only useful to keep melee adds off your ass while you top off your tanks and make the Big Bad a little less of both.) Spawns are like pool balls - shoot them in the directions YOU want them to go, not just anywhere. You're constantly repositioning yourself so that IF you get a KB proc on a blast, it'll send your target someplace useful, like up against a nearby wall. This is where Speed Siphon really helps - you can zip around the battle space to get the angles right. Knockdown is good - mobs that are knocked down aren't attacking until they get back up, and sometimes you'll get a ragdoll glitch that has them dangling from the scenery for a long time, and during that time they're a target dummy. Just beware of knocking things through the geometry - nothing sucks so much as a mob who YOU can't target because their hitbox is behind a wall, but they can target you just fine. I usually had to exit and re-enter instances when that happened.

People always bitch at Storm Summoning "Hurricane" because it procs Repel and Knockback and keeps mobs away from the caster. Where it shines is the -Acc debuff. SLOT IT FOR THIS, if you don't, you're Doing It Wrong. Don't put extra knockback in, it throws things around just fine 'out of the box'. Slot it for EndRed (so you don't burn all your endurance swirling the air and trash in circles), three ToHit Debuffs, and maybe a Recharge if you find that it drops too often for whatever reason. The only Knockback enhancement I'd slot into Hurricane would be something that procs damage on a KB, and even that is a 'for fun/concept' thing that really is wasting a slot. A good Stormfender will always try to position themselves so that Hurricane keeps mobs penned up in a corner, or blocks a passage, so that everything gets soft-immobilized and repeatedly knocked off their feet (when you're knocked on your butt, you can't do anything until you get back up, see?) Combine Hurricane with Freezing Rain a little ways away, and now there's a spot where things fall down repeatedly AND take cold damage AND get slowed AND have their -recharge lowered, if they manage to get into the Hurricane their -acc drops and they get tossed back into the freezer. Snow Storm is basically a toggle to keep something (and their close friends) slowed and supercooled (and it keeps going until a downed mob despawns, less of a problem of "don't shoot the toggle!" than it used to be.) Thunderclap is a PBAoE Stun - as Sheriff Buford T. Justice would say, "THAT'S an attention getter." And oh yeah... Stormies have a direct single-target heal and 'wakey wakey' with O2 Boost, too. Tornado is kind of a weird power. It's basically a big enthusiastic badly behaved St. Barnard - it chases strangers and knocks them down, and also applies the "Run Away!" version of Fear. But it doesn't -hurt- them. Lightning Storm, in contrast, is summoned over the caster (and then it stays put), and anything that gets close gets zapped for moderate damage and tossed headlong. It's basically a guard dog to Tornado's overly happy lapdog. I usually treat Tornado as a "pull pin and throw" bit of random chaos for when there's too many mobs to really keep track of anymore and I need breathing room. Lightning Storm is more of a specific area-denial tool and it gets more use. "But what about AV's and giant monsters?" These things don't get knocked down or pushed around. Everything else still works. You can drive -Acc to the floor, you can apply Slow and -Recharge, and yeah, they might succumb to the soft Fear debuff, wherein 'get out of the cold wet slippery patch' is suddenly more important than 'kill heroes'. Any mob that is trying to get away is a mob not attacking, and that means their Damage is also soft-debuffed while they're busy finding someplace else to stand.

Or a scrapper. Or a tank. I tried out for that bunch, I think I rolled a Rad/Kin controller called Multiball Bonus. When Vengeance went off, "Get Ready for MULTIBALL!"

All of mine exemplar up, but only Child of the Tsoo has strictly stock enemies and no EB's. I'd start with that one, and try the others once you get some levels in and can soak custom EB aggro without faceplanting (or, bring friends).

So... why not a keyword or a flag - SFMA | Farm ? Every published arc would need to choose one or the other. If coded right (binary 0 or 1), it would take one bit's worth of memory per story to do this. I have nothing against farming - sometimes I really don't want to grind levels thru the same damn content I ran back in '08 or '09, and a well-done farm mechanic will boost me past those parts. It also means that when new powersets come out, or ones get tweaked, I can level up a character to see how those sets work (and not feel bad about deleting the character after, if the set doesn't work for me). But, as much as I like running a farm here and there, I have no desire to create one... and as a writer, I would like to get more exposure for those arcs I DO put up for public consumption. And as @cranebump said, the farms are taking over the listings, and without some way to filter the list, it's damned hard to find story arcs these days.

"No don't kick him! He's fine, watch this." Pop Vengeance | find new spawn| Recall Friend | Fallout go BOOM | Mutate And then you get the chorus of "WTF?" and a few "OHHH that's how that's supposed to work".

PLEASE tell me this powerset comes with a conductor emote, or lounge singer, or something music-y. 🙂

I can actually see "guns" being used for a lot of the blaster sets. It'd mean more animation sets, but the powers themselves wouldn't have to change. And yes, having Magical origin on a lot of characters, I'd love to see some arcane handwaving, finger-tutting, and other coolness to make powers into cast spells rather than just "here, have faceful of flames/cold/darkness/energy/whatever". BUT... I know that would be a hell of a lot of work. So it's not expected to happen.

Yah that resulted in a lot more Paladin spawns (often 2 at once) because the whole point is to fry the Clockwork BUILDING the Pally, before he's completed. That's how the badge was supposed to work, at any rate. But if no one's fighting the little guys... you get Big Monster.

55 and change. Started playing in 2006, I think it was. First MMO was Everquest (wow what a grind THAT was) and then WoW... and then someone told me there was a superhero MMO. Oh REALLY?

Keep the bots on Defensive, and use a destructable pet like the P2W drones (or seekers if you have the Traps secondary) to attract fire. The bots will respond with an alpha strike that usually carves up whatever attacked your poor drone. Also remember that if you set your bots on Defensive Follow, they'll share damage dealt to you (Bodyguard Mode), so provoking a mob by firing at them isn't as painful as it first sounds... and again, your crew will answer all aggression with overwhelming force. 🙂

Using the Paragon Dance Party as a secret transit hub (then Pocket D was created and it took over the role). Supergroups had to work at unlocking beacons for the teleporters. Street sweeping in groups. Working from one end of Steel to the other, you could get 2, 3, sometimes 4 levels easily. Superadine Troll Raves. Nothing like getting off the tram in Skyway and seeing a HORDE of SupaTrolls mobbing the police drones. The first time you put down a Carnie on a melee character, and encountered the end-drain death effect. Uh oh. Getting punted off teams when you used Build Up / Group Teleport / Fulcrum Shift / nuke PBAoE, and the whole team was suspended in midair as the spawn that everyone was teleported into just... died. "What the HELL?? Stop that!"

Even though CoH was the game that broke the Holy Trinity of Tank/Deeps/Healer, the devs still thought along the lines that any 'difficult' content would need different roles fulfilled. You still needed to grab aggro and hold it. You still needed healing or status mitigation. And you still needed damage (and lots of it). They didn't think about what would happen if a buff/debuff heavy team took on ALL of those roles simultaneously, healing each other, lowering target stats to the absolute floor, and raining out a ton of damage all at the same time. You don't need a tank if the mobs can't hit you hard, you don't need a dedicated blaster if resistances are floored and to-hit is buffed to the cap, and you don't need healers when everyone on the team can heal. And with the FFoF runs, using unlucky (or unwitting) characters as sacrificial lambs for Vengeance/Fallout was just icing on the cake. "No, stay down, don't port off to the hospital, we'll just TP you around and use you as a bomb." has to be one of the silliest and yet most fun ways to get PL'd in the history of MMO's.

So, first off, I finally got around to creating an origin tale for one of my beloved Live characters, my first COV character "Daisy Chain". Annnd it has some bugs in the final mission. It 'completes' when the boss is killed, BUT it contains three allies (the first you lead to the boss, and the other two appear as you're fighting him, they're supposed to be led to the exit.) For some reason I can't chain Find First Ally - Defeat Boss - Defeat First Ally - Find Second and Third Allies & Rescue Them Suggestions? And yeah, aside from the above buggy behavior, I'd love feedback on the arc. Thank you! 🙂

Back on Live, Kinetics and Radiation were two powersets that if you built an 8-man team where everyone had Kin or everyone had Rad, you could wipe the floor with pretty much whatever you ran across. Two supergroups (Pinball Wizards for Kinetics, and Faithful Fans of Fallout for Radiation) demonstrated that the stack benefits were SO extreme that Positron contemplated nerfing both sets into the ground. 8-stack SB wasn't so much the boosted speed, but the boosted end recovery and recharge rates, that made things so crazy. People were speed-running the Posi TF (easily one of the longest in the game before it got split into two), and on the Live forums Posi actually came out and said "these guys figured out how to break the game". But at the same time, the gameplay tactics used were so damned fun that the devs let most of it stand (unlike the fire-farming, which nearly had the AE shut down when people started using it to PL their characters).

This is really quite good. As for the RP aspect of being able to zap oneself into any base from anywhere, I'd think it would be useful to perhaps restrict use of base entry to the following: 1) Next to a Base Portal (obvious) 2) In the Tram Station / on a Ferry 3) On a Smuggler Ship (sub or cargo ship, as is used to get to Striga Isle or Peregrine Island) The other possible method is to use /loc to find coords to instance doors in the game, perhaps to a warehouse or a skyscraper or whatnot. Then when you create the base, you can set an "entry zone" for your base so that the command can be used there. That of course would involve considerable coding to keep track of all the base "entry zones" and cross-check them against where someone is when they type the command....

Populate Kallisti Wharf, finish the origin pool powers, perhaps "clean up" some of the older costume bits (a lot of the 'with skin' textures could use some love), add more RP animations, and do something, ANYTHING to make it easy to filter out the farming content in AE. Other than that, what's been added so far is awesome. I have to thank you profusely for what's been done so far. (and yeah, IF any of the original Devs would care to jump back on board, we'd love to have them.)