Pixie_Knight

I'm from champion. Then again I had characters on every server, although Atlas was my home server.

I'll have to look at them, but didn't those enhancements provide a TO worth of effect? While they didn't expire, I remember them also getting replaced fairly quickly.

Besides, you want perma debt? You wanted a /super reflexes scrapper in issue 1. I didn't manage to claw my way out of debt (literally since it was a claws/sr scrapper) until level 30. Between not being able to afford to fully replace every single DO right away, not having enough slots for everything that needed them yet, and cascading defense failure due to zero def debuff resistance Madam Enigma was constantly paying off xp debt from level 12 till level 30. By level 30 I was finally making enough inf to keep my SO enhancements up to date. At which point Madam Enigma finally stopped dying regularly. Of course the Defense Reduction patch hit shortly before she got to level 30, and I over reacted by switching to just 2 attacks and six slotting every +Def power I could get. Which in retrospect I regret doing since while the character stopped dying regularly, I also stopped having fun with the character until ED caused me to switch to a more reasonable build.

No, but I think you can set up a series of macros that will trigger each other. I vaguely recall setting up a macro chain on my warshade back in the day to fire off Black Dwarf Mire then trigger the macro to return to human and a 3nd macro. The 3rd macro fired off Sunless Mire then triggered my "shift to Nova form" macro. All as a setup for me nuking a group of enemies. I then had yet another macro to target any Void or Quantum in a group and use my single target hold on them. Might be misremembering, it has been several years after all.

The simple solution was... to fight smaller groups of enemies. If solo, did you really need to be trying to fight 16+ enemies all at once? By being willing to use more single target and fight smaller groups at a time, the aggro was survivable. By all means use the AoE attacks. But doing so could bring more heat then the blaster might be capable of surviving. To be fair, a Trick Arrow defender faced the same issue. The debuffs are nice, very nice in fact when slotted up. And yet in large teams it could prove difficult to survive laying them out. I mean, I've literally seen my trick arrow defenders peal all aggro of a pair of very skilled and well slotted tankers using just the debuffs.

But yeah, trench coats lock out wearing a cape or having wings due to them being a 'butt cape" effectively.

Tailor missions and badges. I think the tailor is also where you go for the body scuplting (changing your size...) I think the one in the Tiki Room of pocket D is the only one that lets you change your body type (male, female, huge, size). Thanks or the tip on the Tiki Room. I have a character that has her second costume stuck on different size than the main. I'll be heading there later to fix it lol. Where in the D is the Tiki Room? Through a door on the villain side of Pocket D, I think. There's a couple tiki masks next to the door. There's also a door there to the ski lodge area, but not sure where in the ski lodge that door is.

Tailor missions and badges. I think the tailor is also where you go for the body scuplting (changing your size...) I think the one in the Tiki Room of pocket D is the only one that lets you change your body type (male, female, huge, size).

As do VEAT outfits, frequently.

You can most assuredly have wings or a cape with female character body types. They're under the Back costume options, but may be locked out due to other costume pieces. Maybe. That said, Aarachnos Soldiers I think are limited to the Crab Backpack for back options due to the fact that if you go down the Crab path later on, the VEAT MUST have that costume option since it's also the source of their Crab tree's attacks.

Ever since the Invention system went live my system has been to ignore TO, DO, and SO entirely. I'll craft level 15 IO instead for the powers/slots I expect to have from 12 to 21, and build level 25 IOs for once I hit level 22. As I level I might craft stronger IO if I get the recipe for one I can use as a drop, otherwise I wont bother updating again till level 50. I'll also start considering IO sets at around 35. Any earlier, and it's not worth it IMO due to losing too much damage and accuracy. But around 32 is when I seriously start thinking about what sets I'll be slotting, and where I'll be slotting them. This will guide where I put slots beyond the 3 to 4 I normally put in a given power.

IMO, just selling the salvage you don't need and running missions is more then enough Inf while leveling. Heck, even with doing double xp no inf I was able to fully prep for level 22 before I even hit level 12 just by selling salvage and generic recipes. It's not amazing inf gain, but more then enough.

It's not hard to get Inf overall. In fact, it's possible to create most of the level 15 generic IOs you'll need before you even reach level 12, and every level 25 IO for your planned leveling build long before you reach level 22. And after you have those crafted, well, there's not much need to spend any Inf overall. You can buy Set IO enhancements. Or you can upgrade your generic IOs to stronger versions if desired. But neither are exactly required to do. Incarnate abilities can be expensive to make, as I recall. But that paled to how long it took to get the materials required. So in general, I'd say it's not worth stressing over the best way to get influence or infamy. You'll get more then you actually need, most likely. There's a very good reason why the various Real Market Trader gold sellers abandoned trying to create a market for their services in CoH. In-game money is so easy to get, that even the most impatient of players felt no need to buy it with real money.

You could get capes by the time I joined, but yeah. They were locked until level 20. Auras as I recall were locked until level 30 or so. Getting a character's access to capes and auras felt like a big milestone. That I kind of miss. Same with unlocking VEAT and HEAT only when you got a character to level 50. It felt like they had cheapened things when those AT were made to unlock earlier. Not to mention, kields really do require you to have experienced things and become familiar with the game. Especially the harder content. They were CoH: Hard Mode, unlike VEAT which are kind of easy mode in a few ways.

You know, back when I first started playing City of Heroes everything was new, fresh, and exciting. I was experiencing the dream. I was getting a chance to be a "real" superhero. I had a lot of free time, and devoted it to this new amazing game because it was fresh and fun. Because it let me live a dream. And part of this was that I would frequently have chat output set to Local and banter with the villains during missions. Solo or in a team, it didn't matter. I'd take the time to type out witty banter, threats, or Hero Speeches in response to what the enemies were saying. It was fun, it was immersive, and yes I realized it probably came across as weird when I bantered with Clockwork King during the Positron Task Force. But over time playing because it was fun morphed into playing CoH because I was addicted. I stopped paying attention to every mission briefing and reading every clue that dropped. I stopped jumping in to save a mugging victim or stop a group of carjackers. I stopped role-playing, by and large. Instead I just rushed through accepting a mission, and ran to the next way point while ignoring any mobs I came across on the way. Oh sure, I still did some role-playing. But it was mostly just using a specific speech pattern in team chat or hitting a macro saying "Out of arrows" when my archer's endurance bar runs dry. And even that was rare. I played City of Heroes and City of Villains for most of the game's life. I might not have subscribed every single month, but it was usually one of the 2 (out of 10 at one point) MMOs I had active. It was generally the 2nd game which would be cycled out. I was addicted, badly. Not to the point of not eating, sleeping, or doing other important things such as going to work. But it was impacting my life. If I wasn't at work or sleeping, I would probably be signed into City of Heroes or posting on the forums. Often both at the same time. Even after I suffered burnout due to a year and a half of obsessively playing City of Heroes I didn't abandon the game. I played it less, but still played at least for an hour most days. But towards the end even the minor role-playing I did such as using a "out of arrows" chat bind stopped. The game wasn't even a hobby by then. It was fun, but I was treating it like work. I wanted to progress my Incarnate abilities, so I turned the game into a job. In the last few months leading up to the server shutdown, I couldn't honestly tell you if I was enjoying my time playing City of Heroes or not. But it was still a big part of my life. The server shutdown affected me a great deal, although to an outsider this wasn't obvious. But now it's back. And I already am seeing early signs that I might be becoming addicted yet again. Once more I'm spending most of my time either awake, at work, or playing CoH (or browsing the forum). This kind of has me alarmed, but at the same time it feels like I've returned home. It's a good feeling, and not one I've ever experienced from a video game before. Then last night I found myself doing something I hadn't done in years. Not since a few months after I first started playing CoH. While running the Destruction of Galaxy City aftermath arc on a new Willpower/War Mace tanker I found myself bantering with the enemies. And as I delivered a sorrowful speech about the price of giving up hope to a Vahzilok low level mission boss it hit me. I've come full circle. Not only have I returned to the city that dominated much of my adult life so far, but I've regained that sense of wide eyed wonder that I first felt upon stepping into Paragon City all those years ago. I'll have to take care to not become too obsessed. Try to find a better balance between my time in Paragon and the real world this time around. But having that innocent wide eyed wonder returned, experiencing the simple joy of being a bold Hero or dastardly Villain... Even if the servers get shut down tomorrow you've brought this happiness to me. Thank you for this. It's good to be home.

Of course, it was also entirely likely your slotting wouldn't matter at all if you weren't the sole tank on the team. Why? Because you were expected to do nothing but walk just inside each mission. 'teams' like this is why I mostly soloed or ran Synapse and Positron task forces after level 15. I played City of Heroes to play the game, not go AFK while someone else does all the work.

*groans* That was painful.

And honestly, Instant Healing isn't even needed very often on a /regen scrapper. Between Health and the other toggles/passives (once slotted up) you don't even need to use the burst heal that much usually at later levels. The original One Who Cares was Dark Melee/Regen, and after level 32 I found myself using my two heals less and less often. And Instant Healing was mostly only needed for specific types of bosses or EB/AV fights. My normal regeneration rate was enough for most encounters. Sure Freakshow Tank bosses hit hard and I'd need burst healing, as did Warwolves and a few other enemy types. But more often then not I barely had to heal myself after a while.

Not all costume pieces can be used at the same time. But yeah, I think many of the crafted ones are missing. Not sure though.

Back on live servers I did a lot of soloing as a villain, true. But I also joined a lot of teams. The same was true with heroes too. Actually, I got on more teams after a while with villains then heroes because heroes felt like they didn't need a team.

Exactly! What I'm basically hearing from people in favor of repealing ED and the Defense Reduction (as well as every other game balance nerf that stopped their 'I solo 8 man content on the highest difficulty all at once' farming) is "We want our cake, and we want to eat it too." They want every nerf repealed, while retaining every buff and system which was introduced after the re-balancing. All while ignoring that those balance changes were to stop detrimental things such as the above mentioned 8 man content soloed all at once farming. The belief seems to be this would bring balance back to the game, when the patches they want repealed were implemented because of game breaking imbalance. Do you know why back in issue 1 I wasn't slotting for maximum defense? It's because I stopped at 3 to 4 enhancement slots in any given defensive power by choice. I knew that if I six slotted everything I could floor the enemy's chance to hit me and become practically immortal. I stopped slotting additional defense buff enhancements when I found a point where the challenge felt right. I didn't want enemies to be missing me 95% of the time unless I used Luck inspirations or hit Elude. Not that I had Elude yet. I'd only just reached level 26, I think, when the Defense Reduction patch came out. I know I had hit level 32 with Madam Enigma when ED went live. And in my fear, I panicked. I used the free respec to completely change my build. Instead of having every attack so far and 3 slotted defenses (I would have added the 4th slot for End Redux in the toggles in the 30's) I changed to having Swipe and Strike as my only attack powers, picked up the Fitness pool for Maneuvers, and Combat Jumping. I also six slotted everything I could that granted defense. To be honest, missions were an unfun chore. I was nearly untouchable, but seemingly it took forever to kill anything. Oh, I was still carving through enemies quickly, but it felt like it took forever. And being that untouchable wasn't really fun. When ED hit, I used the free respec to drop back down to 3 defense enhancements in every defensive power. I also dropped Combat Jumping and the Leadership pool so I could have more attacks. Which also got slotted for 1 ACC and 3 attack. I expected my character to die pretty much instantly against even level enemies. To my surprise, that wasn't happening. I still dodged most attacks, but enough were able to connect that I was still facing a challenge. I was actually having fun with Madam Enigma again. Before the sweeping changes to how Defense worked and Enhancement Diversification I tried making a tanker. I got my tanker to around level 16, and ended up deleting them because everything was too easy. I was following the "optimal" slotting strategy of 6 slotting the defenses before you even consider adding anything to attacks (and then only really enhancing a strong AOE if you had it, otherwise just one ACC in each attack). But I wasn't having any fun. Missions were too easy, and too boring. Nothing could remotely challenge me, not even the AV in a mission I'd joined. But at the same time, fights went on far too long because I could barely hurt the enemies. Same with when I tried playing a controller prior to ED being implimented. I was untouchable, but missions were long, boring, and tedious. And if I joined a team I'd either get yelled at for using my primary instead of only being a 'healer' (I'd made the mistake of making a /empathy controller) or they would yell at me for daring to try contributing to the mission, thus ruining the tanks "gather up every enemy into one spot so he can AoE them with the team standing at the entrance" farming. Never mind that you'd have no idea before joining and getting into a mission if the tanker would be that type of tanker. Most were, but not all of them. Yes, for those of you who champion the cause of "remove Defense Reduction and Enhancement Diversification", the changes made to stop solo farming of 8 man team content is what actually kept me playing the game. I almost quit because those types of 'teams' were ruining the fun of the game. And between when DR went live and when ED went live, I was barely playing Madam Enigma due to her being too powerful to be fun. What kept me in the game was playing lowbie defenders that were powerful, but not "I trivialize all content" levels of powerful. I was only able to enjoy playing those defenders because tankers were no longer able to round up every enemy in a max level difficulty 8 man team mission then AoE them to death all by them self. Or in other words, the game about superheroes was able to keep me playing because teams of super heroes had to act like a team rather then a cheerleader squad.

Yes, those tankers were 'gods of survivability'. I'd already pointed out how "round up every enemy on the map into one location then AoE them to death while the rest of the team just twiddles their thumbs" was detrimental to the game. Tankers were forming 8 man teams, then insisting the rest of the team enter the mission and do nothing just because the tanker wanted to have some fun against a mildly almost (but not quite) dangerous challenge. Yes, scrappers were soloing AVs. And we continued to do so afterwords too. Well, not every scrapper. But then again not every scrapper could solo AVs to begin with. Yes, defenders were soloing AVs. But those same defenders were still soloing AVs after the ED went live. And were doing so a bit faster due to having more damage. And yet, you seem to forget some of the other changes that were made over the years. Because you see, soloing AVs and Giant Monsters? That wasn't intended. Those were suppose to be group content. It was suppose to take 8+ people to take down a giant monster, not just one. It was suppose to take 5-8 players to defeat an AV, not just one. And later patches tried to address that. Some doing so better then others. I remember when Giant Monsters and Archvillains became unkillable because someone put the decimal in the wrong place while buffing their regen. But other then problematic abilities/mechanics like taunt/aoe target caps, aggro caps, Burn being nerfed, or it being too easy to hit the Defense and Resistance caps, the devs didn't make that many direct sweeping and drastic changes to powers. Well, not to weaken them anyway. And later on they revamped each class in turn to re-balance and mostly buff them. This is where the AT inherent abilities came from, as well as some of the better changes to powers in general. Claws lost it's longer animations, thus improving it's DPS. Ironically Demon Summoning's demonlings have the original animation for Flurry. Granted, those inherent abilities were also to fall in line with the way City of Villains classes were balanced. Basically, the things you and other 'anti-ED' fanatics claim were stolen... were the very things which were detrimental to the game as a whole. The people who howled and raged the loudest about the aggro cap and taunt cap (as well as changes to Burn) were also the ones who were doing the detrimental stuff that needed to be dealt with. The rest of us just got caught in the collateral damage, but we moved on after raging a bit and realizing "wait a second, this is actually better then before".

Pre ED 3 slotting would get you 100% enhancement over base damage of a power. Pre ED 6 slotting for damage (something only devices blasters could get away with) would get you 200% enhancement over base damage of a power now a days it will only get you 110% enhancement a completely negligible "improvement" over 3 slots, that is a figure less than 3 SOs & 3 TOs combined pre ED! Pretending that 6 slotting an enhancement type post ED is much of a choice at all is pure sophistry. What is more optimal, an enemy being affected by a Hold longer when you can already double or triple stack the hold without any recharge redux slotting, or the enemy being defeated faster? Before ED everyone would have said "Slot hold duration". People also whined and complained about how low controller damage was. After ED people were willing to consider adding damage enhancements to their crowd control powers that accept them. Suddenly the crowd control powers didn't need to last as long because the enemies are defeated faster. Guess what, this was possible before ED, and would have been just as viable. But people ignored the option because slotting for hold/imobilize/stun duration was considered 'optimal'. Do you see the catch 22 here? Tankers 'needed' to 6 slot their defenses to survive the masses of enemies trying to pound their heads in. But this came at the expense of slotting for damage in their attacks. So of course a solo tanker takes forever to defeat foes. After ED, fewer slots were being devoted to defenses, so more damage could be slotted. Suddenly tankers were able to defeat enemies in a reasonable amount of time, so they didn't need defenses that are at the hard cap just to survive normal spawn sizes. Blasters 'needed' to 6 slot for damage to defeat enemies fast enough to not die. Then after ED, they started experimenting with other enhancement types too. Suddenly they're finding utility in abilities they ignored due to being "low damage", and not needing as much raw damage due to using tools that actively mitigate enemy damage. Defenders suddenly had more slots after ED forced them to re-examine their slotting methods, and could devote slots to increasing the damage of their attacks. Oh look, enemies are going down faster. What's that you say? That's not damage mitigation? Wrong! Defeating an enemy is the ultimate form of damage mitigation since that enemy stops trying to deal damage entirely. All of these were strategies which were perfectly viable before ED. But were ignored because the 'optimal' slotting had already been decided, and anything else was considered useless. So isn't it funny that enemy health and damage wasn't lowered, but players doing less damage or having less defenses wasn't as detrimental as it had been assumed by us players it would be? My opinion based on experiences with people over the years whining about ED long after it became fact and we got to see the end result is... They are just butt hurt over losing the 'easy mode' that 6 slotting damage or defenses could be.

I've long ran a claw/super reflexes scrapper. I've fought all (or at least most) of the AVs and many of the giant monsters too. And despite claws having low damage (for a scrapper), I've never really felt unable to hurt my foes. Okay, some have a panic button power which I might have to wait to wear off to hurt them. But most things drop quickly, even if they resist smash/lethal.

Combat Jumping's biggest problem for travel is that while it has decent vertical mobility, it has almost no horizontal mobility. But combined with Hurdle (which has more horizontal then vertical mobility) they mix rather well. Can't leap tall buildings in a single bound, but can get around most zones fairly easily and quickly.