Pixie_Knight

I take him very seriously, when he's an Elite Boss and I've just used up all my insps in the previous room while playing a squishy. Never have I ever soloed an Archvillain with a controller (or any other class)

You've never gone Hurricane Bowling with a Storm defender or /Storm controller?!

You sir, or madam, should be slapped with a wet fish. That was evil, wrong, and over a decade out of line.

Repel Ball... Is that anything like Hurricane Bowling?

Eh, I got rather good at typing fast enough to convey info (and quip) without pausing the fight back in the day. Then again, my Trick Arrow/Archery defender had a chat bind to call out "Aww, out of arrows!" when my endurance bottomed out. Then again, I use to run with an all Defender supergroup on Freedom. And after one incident the SG had a motto... "When the pixie says 'oops'... RUN!" That came about when we were looking at a sizable room that was filled wall to wall with +2 and +3 Council goons. We were studying the room trying to figure out tactics and decide who would pull, relying on the Storm defender's stealth aura and my Flash Arrows to keep enemies from noticing us. Only, at one point while refreshing the Flash Arrow debuff I accidentally hit Glue Arrow instead.

Heh, I had initially set aside Defenders too. But it wasn't because they didn't feel "super". It was because I got really sick and tired of teams taking the time to figure out who my debuff anchors were, then killing those mobs first. I also got fed up with trying to heal Stupid. I flat out tell the team "my heal is centered around me, and requires an enemy to use. Don't run off" and "My rez requires a living enemy, and I proactively use it as a minion mez." What do I get? People running around corners then demanding I heal them. The worst offender was when I playing a level 8 (I think) Trick Arrow/Archery defender just after those sets got released. The team leader actually bothered to ask me if I wanted to join rather then just sending a blind invite. That impressed me a lot. I explained that my character couldn't heal at all, and was a pure debuffer/attacker. Team leader was fine with that, so I accepted the invite. I was the 8th person on the team. A team with no controllers and no other defenders. At this point the team leader posted the following in team chat: "YAY! WE GOT A HEALER! WE ARE GODS NOW!" That... was a warning. One I should have paid attention to. The leader ran off while I was heading to the mission entrance. It turned out he was cranking up his mission difficulty to the max thanks to that "we have a healer, we are gods now" mentality. I was the highest level person on the team, and when I entered the mission I saw wall to wall Outcasts that conned red to me. I was blanching, and suggested that maybe turning the difficulty slider back down might be a wise idea. Most of the team was level 5 after all, so level 11 minions was a bit much for the team. Hell, I wasn't confident in my ability to reliably hit them, let alone defeat ONE enemy. I was ignored, and instead the team charged in recklessly. At this point I fired off my Glue Arrow and Poison Gas Arrow, and began spamming attacks as fast as they recharged. Whenever my debuffs were recharged, I fired those off again. The rest of the team went down in seconds, naturally. Meanwhile I was eating Inspirations as fast as they dropped. Green, yellow, orange, didn't matter what it was. I needed every edge I could get just to survive a tiny bit longer. Well, somehow I managed to survive that first room. And by the end of it all I had a tray filled with Awakens. Since the team were yelling at me to rez them, I started handing out Awakens to everyone. The next room (hallway actually) had fewer enemies, only eight of them (as opposed to 20). And once again the party charged in recklessly, leading me to spam everything I had the second it recharged. As well as spamming Inspirations as fast as they dropped in the vain hope of surviving. Once again I barely managed to survive the furball, while the rest of the team went down in the opening few seconds of the fight. Since I didn't have any Awakens, people had to go to the hospital and run back. When they returned, I got booted from the team for being an "XP leach" since I wasn't a Healer. Never mind that I was the only one on the team that was surviving the fights, let alone defeating a single enemy. Also ignoring the fact that they were getting defeated so easily because the team leader cranked up the difficulty to the maximum with a full team and picked MY mission. Needless to say, it took a few months before I was willing to touch a Defender again.

Just so long as Rick Rolling doesn't make a comeback. That was annoying.

I've done respec trials (hero side) that had kelds on the team. Two words for you... Cyst Crystals. Even worse when the team leader makes the critical mistake of being 2 levels higher then everyone else on the team. And to make things still worse, often said kelds don't bother warning the team that there are cyst crystals. Which means the first warning the team gets is when there's hundreds of unbound nictus swarming the team as they try defending the reactor. Often with the keld(s) already dead because they weren't scanning for void hunters/quantum gunners either and got blindsided. I've seen cyst crystals cause soo many respec trials to fail. Then again I've seen a lot of them fail because the team leader didn't understand that with a full team mobs will be +2/+3 to the highest level person on the team... meaning that the rest of the team is likely facing deep purple conning mobs.

Okay, I'm *trying* to do the final mission for Dark Watcher in a praetorian Resistance: Warden run. The mission is Assault Neuron's Tower. I did the first part no problem, and it told me to use a "stairs" door to go to the upper level. At which point I got attacked by an EB. During the fight the Elite Boss jumped off the roof and has vanished. My mission objective however is still to defeat that Elite Boss. I have tried jumping off after the Elite Boss. I have tried going through every single door I can find. And nothing is allowing me to progress the mission. Is it bugged? Or is there something I've missed? Update: I reset the mission and tried again, this time using Gang War to make it difficult for the EB to move. Only for the second EB in the mission to ALSO jump off the roof and vanish. Why are the two Elite Bosses in this mission even able to do that?!

I had gotten a Plant/Trick Arrow troller to 35 before the server shutdown. Never have I ever ran a Respec Trial while playing a Keld.

Far as I remember, "speed runs" where were someone with team teleport stealths to mission bosses while the rest of the team waits at the door, then teleports the team to them. Thus skipping all the mobs. In my opinion, if you want to run a TF at higher difficulty then it defaults to, THAT you should mention. Similarly, if every mission will be stealthed, mention that. Otherwise the default assumption should be "we're fighting our way through missions as a team on the default setting".

Was it a Thug mastermind named Father Bone? If so, twas me.

So set things to not spawn bosses when soloing? Not that even bosses survive long under a double mire aoe assault. And if need be, blow up one of the plethora of defeated enemies. That'll probably finish off any stragglers. Also, believe it or not but a Trick Arrow defender also unleashes frightening amounts of aoe damage after level 32... Assuming you can ignite the oil slick that is. Oil slick, the large aoe -resist arrow, maybe acid arrow, light the oil slick, and everything melts. Slotted right, you can do this every other enemy group, at least.

If played well, a tri-form Warshade. Alternately, a Thug/whatever you want mastermind does AOE rather well too. As do bots, from what I hear.

My first attempt at a controller was a Mind/Empathy controller. And it was... Well, I wasn't really impressed. This was back in Issue 1, and I'd gone in knowing the damage output would be low when compared to my scrapper main. And at first it was okay. The tutorial (Outbreak) was fine. Tedious, but fine. I got my single target hold almost immediately, and I thought things were going to pick up. Only to discover by level 5 that I couldn't even do a street sweeping mission in Atlas Park. My damage was so freaking low that defeating anything took ages. Which was fine, because I could keep a group of 2 or 3 non-boss enemies locked down forever. The problem was that people would see me slowly chipping away at the health of enemies and "helpfully" jump into the fight, often one shotting enemies I'd barely gotten down to 8/10ths of their max health. Which would naturally rob me of credit for the defeat, and most of the xp/influence. So maybe teaming? Yeah, that was a bad idea too. I'd get yelled at and/or booted from the team for doing anything other then spamming Healing Aura. That character never got to level 8. I later tried again after Containment was added (around Issue 6) with an Illusion controller. Can't remember what the secondary was off hand, and that's mostly because I ended up rarely actually using it due to locking down groups of enemies so my secondary had nothing to contribute.

And that's fair. I enjoy masterminds, but find bots/force field to be too passive, for the most part. I mean with that combo you barely have to do anything besides set them to aggressive.

Yeah, if you just order a single attack or use secondary abilities, I can see them feeling too passive. In which case taking the personal attacks may help a bit. On the other hand, masterminds are best played via micromanaging your pets. I constantly find myself directing them to attack specific enemies, calling them back when they are about to do something stupid (like Brawling an explosive destructible), and so forth. About the only time I passively let them do their own thing is during a Mayhem mission. And that's cause I have them set to Aggressive Follow to rack up destruction.

Wait, WHAT?! Yes, kelds are fairly weak starting out. And if you solo only, a human form keld can feel weak at any level if you don't know how to play one. But they can be rather dangerous. Warshades especially have a rather high potential when played well. If you do a human only build you're character is a sub-par blaster with minor healing or control and some damage resistance, true. In teams though it's still viable. But a triple form (or even duo form) keld that's played well is a sight to behold. They can change things up on the fly, depending on the situation and what's needed. Party needs some healing, a peacebringer can bring that. Then they can switch to off tank with Dwarf form or damage dealing in Nova form as the situation requires. Warshades can provide solid crowd control via a PBAOE minion stun aura, single target hold, and single target immobilize. In Nova form they can once again be a very solid damage dealer, or tank decently in Dwarf form. And then there's the jaw dropping awe that a double mire into nova form aoe alpha strike can be. Teleport in either in dwarf form (to survive the alpha strike) or human form (to negate most of it via minion mez), hit Mire for a massive damage buff, switch to human or dwarf (depending on how you started) and use your second Mire, then switch to Nova form while jumping back and unleashing AOE doom on the massed enemies. Their biggest flaw is how slot starved kelds are, especially if going for a triple form build. They can make great use of respecs though, since inevitably a triple form keld will have slots in powers that don't benefit much from them early on. A human only build does need to be planned out though. But... Ninja/poison masterminds have always been considered beastly. Okay, sure they are heavily single target oriented. But the nastiest fights are against a single tough foe, which ninja/poison can shut down with relative ease. Like all masterminds though, expect to be resummoning mid fight quite frequently against EB/AV. Personally, I have trouble with brutes and stalkers. Brutes I... Well, the Fury mechanic encourages reckless charges at levels they can't really sustain such a reckless charge very well. As for stalkers, they feel too much like a glass canon to me. And I'm not a fan of the playstyle they originally encouraged of "Assassinate, then run away".

If I want to bind my warshade's transformations to numpad + and numpad Enter, what would be the wording needed? Actually, no, wait, I think I'd rather rebind my Quant/Void/Cyst target to numpad +, and bind the form changes to numpad / and -. So what would be the wording? I'm fine using a macro to switch back to human.

You are aware that the AH is a blind market, right? The highest bid goes to the lowest seller. And nobody can see who made the last bid or sale. As such, when I list things for 10 inf I'm not actually selling them for 10 inf 99% of the time. I'm selling them for roughly the current market value. I price to make a (small) profit if someone tries to bid super low, while still selling quickly.

Think of it like this... You're spending millions (if not billions) on the recipes, and millions on the rare salvage needed (assuming you didn't get lucky and find it) to make those IO sets you want. Sometimes they require common salvage, which if you have been deleting you also have to buy. Or you could take the common salvage you don't want/need and sell it to other players who do want/need it. Which in turn helps pay for the stuff you do want. Yes, it's easy to get Inf. But not everyone will be sitting at the level cap farming Praetorians for incarnate salvage. Not everyone skips through levels as fast as they possibly can, because they actually enjoy doing the 1-50 content and reading the mission briefings/debriefings. Then there's the fact that if everyone followed your advice of "just delete it" or disabled all common salvage drops, well, the AH would run out of stock right quick. At which point good luck buying those common salvage pieces you need/want 🙂

Bad idea, because you'll then be unable to get the common salvage you do need. I generally put up salvage I don't need/want on the AH for 10 each. That way I'll get at least 5 Inf, but more then likely I'll get much more. Of course, I then frequently end up regretting selling a piece of salvage shortly after it's sold cause now I need it for a recipe I want to craft.

The game did change over the years. But the core of it remained (mostly) untouched. Some changes were much needed, although certain sections of the community railed against them. These include capping aggro to 16 enemies (as opposed to everything on the map, at once) and the Global Defense Nerf. GDN got everyone up in arms, me included. My main (and at the time only character) was a Claws/Super Reflexes scrapper, and I was positive that GDN was going to utterly destroy my character's viability. Amusingly, before GDN hit I was slotting my defenses with 3 Defense SO for the passives and 3 Defense/1 End Redux for the toggles. I was aware that if I six slotted them for defense I'd be virtually untouchable. But I'd felt my defenses were good enough as it was. If I needed more defense, I could pop a Luck or two to bolster my Defense. Then GDN hit, and I panicked. Using my free respec, I changed my build to having TWO attacks and every single pool power that granted defense and could be ran at the same time. So Combat Jumping, Maneuvers, and even Stealth. And everything that gave +Defense got six slotted for defense. And you know what? That was a huge mistake. Right up until level 30 I had only Strike and Swipe for attacks. Oh, and Brawl. But I felt like it was needed. When Enhancement Diversification came along. And I panicked again. I was among the many who were raging on the forums over ED and how it would ruin our characters. I came very close to quitting over it before the patch even went live. Only, when I used my free respec to redo my build (getting more attacks in the process) I found my defenses were not as paper thin as I feared. In fact, they were still on par with what I'd originally considered "good enough" back in issue 4. When the Vet attacks were added (nem staff, sands of mu, and so forth) they were an instant game changer... for some AT. For a low level controller it allowed you to actually kill things quickly enough while street sweeping that people would jump in and one shot the mobs you JUST started fighting to help you out. For a low level Dark Melee it meant you had a full attack chain faster. For Dark Blast users it meant that you might be able to defeat Banished Pantheon easier (since they heavily resist Dark Energy). But they come at a cost. They can't be enhanced so they have baseline accuracy, and they all have a rather large endurance cost. So using too many of them can cause your blue bar to bottom out fast. The origin specific inherent attacks (throwing knives and the like) are also a huge help at low levels since they help flesh out your attack chain until you get 2 or 3 attacks. But they were never actually needed. And in all honesty, most powersets don't need the extra help at low levels. The one or two attacks you'll have from your powerset (so far) are more then enough to last you till you can get more. Oh yeah, that and the Synapse TF could be brutal. Better make sure you went to the bathroom, have something to drink, and maybe some snacks on hand. Cause they were long. But I had some very cool moments during them. Such as one group I was in, we ended up running town the streets of Paragon City during a Posi TF in a flying V formation. And stayed in that formation even when taking turns. We didn't plan it out or anything. Things just worked out that way.

How often does any blaster get the full effect from their DoT while on a team? Sure you can hit for 100 damage in a single hit, but how often did the enemy only have 30 health left when your attack landed? When teaming any blaster is going to be 'wasting' damage quite regularly. DoT or Burst damage, it doesn't matter. Most of your damage is being wasted on enemies that died after only taking a portion of it. Hell, just using a Nova power will frequently be wasting damage because it's doing far more damage then any of the enemies being hit have health. If you're going to claim that Dark's DoT are low damage due to being a DoT and everything dying too fast, better make the same claim for every other DoT. That includes every single Fire Blast attack, at least a third of Ice Blast's attacks, and so forth. Better also claim that any Rain Of type attack is useless because enemies run out of it, thus don't take the full damage. Go through the list I made of attacks for Ice Blast again. This time pay attention to how many of them are a DoT which takes 6-15 seconds to complete. There's more then you might expect. Fire Blast will be the same. In fact, if you ignore the minor fire DoT (since enemies are expected to die before it can matter) Fire Blast's much vaunted high damage... isn't as high as you thought.

Your reading skills must be utterly false as I clearly stated you can with most but are far slower older MMOs are not solo encouraged they have classes that are solo friendly period Being slower does not equal "not solo friendly"... My reading comprehension skills are just fine, you're own personal definitions for terms are the problem. Exactly. A controller might take longer to defeat enemies, but they can do so in absolute safety. Defenders do lower damage then the main 'damage dealer' archtypes, but again tend to be completely safe. How is that not 'solo friendly'? Okay, so sonic or force field doesn't have as many tools to aid the soloing defender. But even they can handle greater odds then in other contemporary MMOs like Everquest 1 or 2. When I'm playing WoW my 'tank' build characters can handle 1 or 2 enemies at a time. Maybe 3 depending on what type it is and what class I'm playing. But if it's an Elite enemy, then I'll struggle to defeat a single one without backup. Doesn't matter my level, if the Elite mob is conning white and I don't have a tanky pet to hold it's agro I'm probably going to die while trying to fight it. And if I do have a tanky pet, I'll be having to heal that pet quite a lot during the attempt. Conversely in City of Heroes once I get to SO enhancement levels my characters are generally capable of handling 5-10 enemies at a time, at least. Multiple bosses at the same time? Yeah, that's doable. By the way, bosses feel about on par with Elite 'trash' mobs in WoW for power. Is that an Elite Boss? Hmm, I think I just might be able to take them. And if not, just load up on consumables and try again. Probably with more success. Elite Bosses would be the equivalent of the 'end boss' for a typical WOW dungeon. While Archvillains would be the equivalent of a Raid Boss. I've never heard of anyone in WoW soloing a raid boss without having massively out leveled said raid. Let alone soloing dungeons without having first outl eveled the dungeon.