Pixie_Knight

I'll admit, when ED was first announced I was among those who were up in arms about it. My main was a claw/SR scrapper and Defense was my lifeblood. My attack chain consisted of Swipe, Strike, and Slash. And I didn't pick up Slash until level 30. Yes, this was back when Swipe was a series of 6-8 swings and Strike was a baseball pitch style windup before punching. I didn't have any other attacks because to be honest every slot was being devoted to defense. My defensive toggles were six slotted, as were the +def passives. And I needed all of that to survive, especially against mobs which could hit you with def debuffs. Cascading defense failure was a thing, and the only solution was to have such high defense that the debuffs couldn't land. I thought ED would make my character entirely unplayable, and I was quite vocal about my discontent. Then the patch went live, we got our free respec, and I grudgingly dropped my slots down to3 in passives and 4 in toggles or attacks. Suddenly I had the extra slots that would allow me to have more attacks, so during the respec I grabbed another attack or two at the expense of delaying Stamina a bit longer. And you know what? It wasn't anywhere near as bad as I feared it would be. ED didn't come in a vacuum after all. Along side it were some tweaks to how ACC and Defense worked. Sure I got hit a little more often, but no where near as much as I thought I would. And sure my attacks were doing about half the damage. But I had a full attack chain and some stronger attacks, so fights were actually shorter. Cascading Defense Failure was still a thing, but those were the same mobs I had difficulty with before, so there wasn't any real difference. As such, I'd say that ED did exactly what was intended. It allowed more and varied builds rather then everyone having the exact same cookie cutter build. The addition of IOs later on only made things better still. As did adding def debuff resistance to Ice Armor and Super Reflexes.

If you're playing an arachnos soldier, you don't even need to slot accuracy into your attacks. Just slap some enhancements into your passive that improves hit rate. That'll be good enough most of the time. As for slotting two generic IO acc enhancements because that's equal to an SO... What level are you? You might be better served putting in one level 25 (or higher) generic acc SO and three level 25 generic damage IO. Now granted, there are some attacks with kind of low accuracy by default. These will ideally take a couple acc enhancements or a set with plenty of +acc. But remember that generally speaking, a single SO's worth of acc will put you at or around the soft cap. You'll still miss, but not very often unless fighting specific types of enemies.

All the above is true, but really Dark Armor tends to have it's users sucking wind badly for quite some time. The health recovery power is a must have, but damn expensive even if slotted for endurance redux. Things do get better, but not until the late 20's I believe. And even then you'll be heavily slotting for end redux.

I'd just signed out after remaking and playing my original hero main for a while. Decided to check the forum, and this post was the first thing I read. Not ashamed to admit I'm crying now. But they're tears of joy. Just... So glad to be back. Welcome home indeed.

I'd long suspected that the real reason the servers started losing population over time was due to NCSoft not advertising it at all. This meant there wasn't really an influx of new players, just old players returning for new issues or expansions. Then when they played the new stuff to death, they'd leave again. The biggest thing NCSoft did to advertise the game was... shut it down. At which point so many people who never heard of it were wondering what is so special about this closed down MMO that has people so up in arms about it's shutdown, while so many others fade away without even a whimper. The fact the game still holds up just proves how great a job was done making it to begin with. And how good a job those responsible for it's rebirth did at recreating it.

The idea of trying to play CoH on a tablet... horrifies me. I mean, I routinely have 30+ keybinds as a standard control setup. I don't want to think about how much of a nightmare it would be to run CoH on a tablet. Even with a bluetooth keyboard, there woudln't be the numpad. And that's where I bind my most frequently used abilities.

Honestly, it never really bothered me before, and I was running a Claw/SR scrapper. Devouring Earth caused me more problems. Well, them and Malta sappers.

Altitus is a problem? News to me. *begins work on recreating the 2nd of dozens of characters lost when the original servers shut down* Hmm, Madam Enigma, Mistress Poison, Donna Sidthe, or someone else...

Been playing the last few hours. And it feels like I'd never left.

I think Rad Melee/Armor was a late addition, issue 23 or 24. I remember Titan Weapons had recently come out when the game shut down, and think I remember Dark Control, bio and bio-armor too. I don't remember water blast, but I could be wrong. Blasters weren't my favorite class after all.

To be fair, Kelds and Arachnos archtypes were a reward for getting a character to level 50 for a reason. By the time you reached level 50 you were ready for the new challenge. Of course, wolf spiders and Widows aren't 'hard mode' like Warshades and Peace Bringers are. EDIT: And for gods sake, if you do make a warshade or peacebringer the first thing you should do upon entering the tutorial is creating a macro to target Void Hunters. I'd have to look up the exact way to phrase it, but have the macro search for and target enemies named 'void'. And always use that macro before engaging. You'll regret it if you don't. Void Hunters are your bane, and require priority targeting. As well as leading off with a Hold if you've got one. Otherwise they can 2 or 3 shot you, regardless of your level.

Yeah, when the admittedly crappy Pool Power healing ability is more then enough to keep the team (or even a group of mastermind ninja) alive, that's amazing.

Welcome to Paragon, and may you enjoy your time here. DC Universe Online is a good game, but they never really tried to compete with City of Heroes. Rather they wanted to be played alongside CoH. Cryptic's second attempt at a superhero MMO flopped fairly hard. Champions Online is okay, but it's very easy to burn out within a few weeks of playing. And it's just not as fun as CoH was. It kind of offends me that Champions Online is still around with official servers when CoH got the axe. But oh well.

There were a lot of Force Fielders out there. You just might not have seen them because they weren't joining PUGs. They were having too much fun in static groups composed of friends or steamrolling everything in all defender teams. Mostly because the common PUG attitude of "if it's not a Healer, it's not worth having on my team". I ran a rather amusing Ninja/FF mastermind. The concept was "He's not a mastermind, he's a powerful psychic who riped the minds of his victims to shreds." His foes would see ninjas in hamster balls, but nobody around his foes would see this.

Original Hollows? Go home, you're drunk. Yeah.... Level 5 quest door that's deep within level 10 Troll territory? Not fun. Original Hollows is the single biggest reason I'd spend far too much time slowly Hovering across a map.

I first discovered City of Heroes a year after it came out. In fact, I joined during the 1 year anniversary event so Madam Enigma had the badge for that. The game was my first MMO, my first (and last) MMO addiction, and saw me through both good times and bad. Even though towards the end I wasn't playing anywhere near as much as I use to, I still greatly enjoyed City of Heroes and would keep my subscription active most months. It was a major part of my life during the last 20 years, and I was saddened to see it go. As well as angered about why and how it was shut down. So angry in fact, that I decided to boycott NCSoft even though they had published many MMOs which I had enjoyed a lot. And to this day I still wont touch anything with NCSoft's name on it. For years I'd been wishing and hoping the game would resurface. But over time I gave up on that hope. So when a friend of mine pointed me in this direction yesterday, I was skeptical. And to be honest, a part of me wont believe it's true until I'm actually signing in and making a character. Even so, thank you to the people behind this resurrection of what is in my opinion the single greatest MMO ever. I can't wait (even though I'll have to) to start making new memories in Paragon and the Rogue Isles.

Can it possibly be worse then a Ice/Mace tanker? They suck down endurance like it's going out of style at any level.

Honestly, I might have trouble finding a new power set combination. Unless there's stuff that is completely new, that is. Don't recall water blast for example. I played pretty much anything. Not as much tankers, but scrappers had the same power sets (mostly). And I did play brutes, who did use the same power sets. Wasn't a fan of the stalker playstyle though.

Part of why Howling Twilight is at once the best and worst rez in the game. :) The other part is because that clutch moment, half the party is dead, you hit HT... and MISS. >.> That's why you slot it for accuracy, recharge, and stun duration. :) I lost count of how often using it offensively prevented deaths I'd otherwise have had to revive players from. Then again, I also lost track of how often an idiot blaster who spent all their time trying to impersonate a scrapper would yell at me for not healing him, when they are targeting through me and thus killing my target as I'm trying to heal him or her. Often this was someone who listened and internalized the "Stupid Blaster Tricks" tips on how to maximize your damage output, as given by the devs. You know, such pearls as "tell the Defenders not to heal you unless your health is critical" or "drop from the height cap into a group of enemies then hit your Nova power".

A note on this: Many, if not all, of the anchored debuffs now stick around until the body decays, which means they basically always last the entire fight unless you're fighting ghosts, so it's not as important as it used to be to leave the anchor for last. I've been playing a rad/ defender a lot recently, and even if the anchor is the first to fall in the fight, it's down to mopping a few errant minions by the time the toggles drop. Huh, that's an interesting change. I use to get so annoyed with people killing my rad/rad defender's anchors first. Especially when I'd call out my anchor, and everyone would stop for a moment, search out the anchor, and target that enemy first. On the other hand, my Dark/Dark defender got yelled at a few times for having her group rez on cooldown when someone went down. Mainly because I used it offensively as an aoe minion stun. Another time the same character got yelled at for not rezzing a near complete party wipe right away because... I had to track down an enemy and pull them back to the group first.

To start with, no your character isn't indestructible yet. This is especially important to remember with scrappers and tankers. At higher levels those two classes are extremely survivable. At low levels however your defenses are paper thin, so try not to engage too many enemies or too high of level of enemies. This will start to change by around level 12. Once you start slotting DO (Dual Origin) enhancements you'll find your character's survival rate will jump. This happens again at level 22 when you can start slotting SO (Single Origin) enhancements. But while you're slotting TO (Training Origin) enhancements you're mostly gonna be focusing on accuracy so your powers can actually hit. Speaking of enhancements, there's three basic types. TO: Training Origin enhancements are the weakest ones. This is what you'll start out using, and they generally provide about a 7% boost to effectiveness per enhancement as I recall. Anyone can use these, but they are again the weakest type. DO: Dual Origin enhancements are a bit stronger. They provide a 15% boost, I think. Been years since I played though, so don't quote me on this. They're known as Dual Origin because they can be used by two specific Origins. Or in other words Science and Mutant, for example. If your character's Origin doesn't match the enhancement, you can't use it. SO: Single Origin enhancements are called such because only one Origin can use them. A Science origin character can't use a Magic SO, for example. Neither can a Tech origin use a Mutation origin enhancement. They provide a 33% boost to the effectiveness of a power. Which brings up the next point. How to slot your powers. Enhancement Diversification means that you'll get far less benefit then is worth the effort if you slot more then 3 SO enhancements of the same type in a single power. This means for damage dealing powers you'll want to plan for 3 Damage enhancements. The way this works is there's a soft cap of around 90% (I think). If the total bonus from your enhancements would exceed this cap, the effectiveness of the most recently slotted one is reduced. For instance the first 2 SO Damage enhancements provide the full 33% to damage. The third one might provides a 27% boost to damage. The fourth one might provide a 5% boost, as would the 5th and 6th one. It's rarely in your benefit to slot more then 3 SO of a given type into the same power. Invention Origin enhancements are a bit different. They come in sets, which can have anywhere from 3 to 6 enhancements in the set. The more of a single set you slot into the same power, the more effective the set is overall. These generally have bonuses which keep in mind the ED (Enhancement Diversification) soft cap. As such a damage oriented Set with six enhancements in it might provide the accuracy of one to two SO enhancements, the damage of three SO damage enhancements, and Recharge equal to two to three Recharge enhancements. Plus maybe a nice additional benefit such as a chance of bonus damage or chance of stunning enemies. These can be a pain to craft yourself, and depending on the set can get stupidly expensive on the Auction House. HO, or Hammidon Origin enhancements can be slotted by anyone, and tend to provide an SO's benefit to multiple things with one enhancement. Such as Accuracy/Damage or Accuracy/Hold Duration. These generally are gotten by joining a Hammidon raid. Personally, I never participated in those. In general, if you want to use IO, it's a good idea to pre-plan which sets you want and what powers you'll be slotting them into. Otherwise assign slots as if you're going to be using SO enhancements. There is a lot more, but this is a good beginning point without becoming too overwhelmed. Other things like the Incarnate system get explained nicely in-game. But there is one other tip I can give. Blind Invites Are Bad. No, seriously. send the other person a /tell to check if they actually are interested in teaming up. Then wait for a response. Us long time vets have been burned badly by Blind Invite PUGs (that's Pick Up Groups). It's rude and tells the person receiving the blind invite that you don't care who they are or what they can contribute, just that they pad out your team size. And worst of all, it tells us your team is most likely going to be one of those teams. The ones where everyone runs around like a chicken with their head cut off. Where the scrappers race off in three different directions then demand healing from the Defender who isn't even in the same room as they are. Oh yeah, one last thing. If your team's defenders, controllers, dominators, or corruptors are calling out an anchor... this isn't them being cute. This is them telling you which enemy to leave for last. It's important. And here is why. What they mean by 'anchor' is "this enemy is the anchor for my crippling debuffs that are keeping the team alive. If you kill this anchor, the debuffs go away." To demonstrate why you don't kill anchors first, I once had my dark/dark defender stand in the middle of a sizable group of enemies and just let them continuously try to hit me for 20 minutes. This wasn't even at high levels. My defender at the time was maybe level 22 and had just slotted three -acc SO enhancements into the anchored to-hit debuff. Good Dark and Radiation defenders are likely to have a macro to call out which enemy is the anchor, and they'll try targeting an enemy that is unique. Such as a Freekshow Tank. If your team mate does call out anchors, try to leave the anchors for last. It'll prevent soo much damage that you would otherwise be eating.

Exactly. I'd logged a LOT of time on Madam Enigma, as well as my many other characters over the years. My mains were coming along nicely in regards to their Incarnate stuff, and that was with me suffering a bit of burnout at the time thus not feeling like grinding for incarnate abilities most of the time. My 'just because someone on the forum says nobody plays it' Ice/Mace tanker was in the 30's. My 'joke' DM/Regen scrapper was in the low 40's. I had multiple blasters, corruptors, controllers, defenders, you name it I had at least 5 of them and all were all played regularly. About the only powersets I didn't mess with was the 'pure healer' type ones. I'll have a lot of 'work' to do to get back to where I had been. And I'm gonna enjoy every minute of it.

I'm probably going to recreate Madam Enigma. As well as a couple of my villains. Definitely want to make Praetorian as well since that was a fun intro arc. Aargh, waiting for the client to download sucks. I keep thinking about how great the game was, and how much I miss it. Then I check the download, and it's not even 1/100th of the way done.

To be honest, starting from scratch isn't a concern for me. I mean, every single character of mine would start from scratch. I didn't sent Inf to my alts or farm powerful enhancements for my alts. Each one would have to earn their own way.

My first memories of CoH was spending an hour (at least) in the character creator getting my look just right... Then another 3 hours fighting with the game to get a name. Afterwords I blazed through Outbreak, enjoying the storyline. But by the time I was done with Outbreak I was still kind of annoyed with spending three hours trying to get a name before I finally got Madam Enigma, who became my main. So I signed out for the day. Still, that was the start of what quickly became an addiction. Yeah, CoH was my first MMO. And I got addicted hard. Unlike some people I still ate food, drank liquids, and went to bed. I also was managing to get to work just fine. But if I wasn't sleeping or at work, I was playing City of Heroes. Blew off friends and family, to my shame. I did share my account with a friend, but he could only log in for 3 or so hours at a time. And then only because I had to get some sleep. I'd set an alarm to wake me up and kick him off the game (and out of my apartment) after 3 hours, 4 hours at most. Then go back to bed so I could be rested for work. Anyone remember when Trick Arrow and Archery were first added? I'd been part of the beta for that update, and had fallen in love with Trick Arrows. Annoyingly the devs overbalanced things due to the fact entire teams of 8 Trick Arrow users would completely wreck the highest difficulties, even at low levels. Even so I made a Trick Arrow/Archery defender named Donna Sidthe as soon as the update went live. And it was still decent. The recharges were HORRIBLE out of the gate, so every trick arrow needed an Accuracy enhancement and three Recharge enhancements ASAP. But it was decent. I got to the Hollows, and someone sent me a /tell asking me to join their team. And let me tell you, I was impressed I'd actually been asked instead of blind invited. So I explained what a Trick Arrow defender does, and that I couldn't heal. Team leader was all "That's okay", so I accepted the invite. As soon as I did the team leader said in group chat "We have a healer, WE ARE GODS NOW!" I was the only defender on the 8 person team. No tanks or controllers either, just scrappers and blasters. Just me, a level 8 or so TA/A defender. I think I had Entangling Arrow, Glue Arrow, and Poison Gas Arrow so far from my primary. And the first two attacks from my secondary because I did solo too. At this point I was worried. Anyway, we got to the first mission and I saw wall to wall Outcasts, all conning purple. All at least four levels higher then me. And I was the highest level person on the team. So naturally the rest of the party all dived in, and face planted within seconds. Meanwhile I'm using a couple purple Inspirations to (hopefully) survive this cluster puck. At this point I'm spamming everything I've got as soon as it recharges. Entangling arrows to try keeping things away from me. Glue arrows, poison gas arrows, I'm chewing Inspirations like they're going out of style. Every time I get one as a drop it's used immediately, all in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Finally the last enemy in that room is defeated. I look at the chat window, and everyone's yelling at me to rez them. Fortunately for them in the frantic battle I'd managed to get 7 rez inspirations. So I handed those out to everyone. At this point I got yelled at by everyone, including the team leader, for never once healing them or preforming a combat rez. Never mind that I'd explained to the leader already I couldn't heal. The next group of enemies went even worse. I wasn't able to survive that time either. After everyone rezzed I got booted for "being an XP leach and waste of space on the team". O.o