WumpusRat

She's not my "main", but for Maxima, I had a modified set of lyrics to Oingo Boingo's "Only a Lad" in her bio, replacing "lad" with "lass", and "Jonny" with "Janey" (since her real name is Jane).

The first time I tried a controller, and went with Illusions because I thought it'd be fun. Got to 20th, got Phantom Army, and just started laughing maniacally as they curbstomped the entire room full of enemies. Then they went away, and I saw that HUGE cooldown. "I must make this permanent!" And the power that really changed the game for me the very first time was Hover. Getting to 6th level for the first time, picking it up, and floating up into the air. Being able to actually fly in an MMO. It was a marvelous feeling.

I'm fairly similar. I rarely use them, and usually too late when I do. I'll end up face-down looking at my tray of purples and greens and think "Hm, I should have used some of those, I guess. Oh well."

Anything/FF MM Anything/Electric MM Anything/Time MM Anything/Rad MM Anything/Marine MM Anything/Kinetics MM Anything/Trick Arrow MM Anything/Nature MM Proceed to steamroll. If you want to make it extra over the top, make them all thugs, and all pop gangwar on the AV.

I'm curious what you're trying to fight that it feels like a slog at 5th level vs any other AT. Damage is so similar at that level that the differences in scaling haven't really kicked in yet. I primarily solo as well, and most of the time don't bother running DFB, I just do the arcs in Atlas. My first two attacks are always the single-target immob and the hold. Most fights go immob-hold, mob is dead due to containment doubling the hold's damage (or if it's a lieutenant, they're at half). Grab the prestige enhancements off the START vendor to get a little free damage/recharge into the powers (and the rare proc), and just murderhobo your way through stuff. Unless you kick the difficulty up at low levels, you should steamroll just about everything unless you're trying to fight orange and red-cons. And with illusions it should be even easier, as Spectral Wounds actually hits nearly as hard as any blaster attack at that level. It sounds like you may be picking on large groups of mobs, if you're getting just hammered like that. Trollers aren't any squishier than a blaster, defender, corruptor, or any other non-tanky AT at that level. With FF, you can pick up Repulsion Bolt at 4th and punt stuff off of you. But most things shouldn't be getting to you with your controls. Confuse one (now you have a buddy!), hold another, and just cycle back and forth until they're dead. Or just tank a few hits. It's not like white-con minions are going to be chunking your health at 5th level. If you really want some extra punch at low levels, you can pick up Sands of Mu, Nemesis Staff, Blackwand, or Ghostslayer Axe from the START vendor as well. Gives you a few extra attacks to pepper into things early on to help you through the first few levels. And don't sleep on your origin attack. It's free, ranged, and does a decent amount of damage at that level.

Initially I wasn't really sold on controllers or dominators. I didn't much like them, as I preferred being much more aggressive in my playstyle. I glomped onto masterminds the moment CoV came out, and they quickly became my favorite AT. Since coming onto HC, and being able to just make as many characters as I want, I decided to try out some trollers. And damn are they fun. I have almost more trollers than I do MMs at this point, which is a pretty massive switch for me since back on live, I literally had 30-35 masterminds. But trollers are tons of fun. Giving up at 5th level before you get any of the real powers of the set (most notably Phantom Army, the keystone of the illusion set) seems a little odd. Yeah, they don't curbstomp stuff at low level, but you can just slot your single-target hold and immobilize for damage and pretend you're a mini-blaster until 12-16th when you start getting some more serious powers.

I really disagree with this idea. The whole basis of controllers is that your powers are for making things helpless, not just steamrolling. Though you can certainly slot them that way. Most of my trollers can solo just fine, though large groups with numerous bosses do take a little bit to beat down. But allowing trollers to "overcome enemies solo at the same rate as their damage-dealing counterparts" would be overpowered, imo. It's the same reason defenders and corruptors don't do blaster-level damage. Controllers have the ability to completely lock down groups of enemies, making them easy to pick off. And they have support powers as well. Letting them do blaster-level damage when they're alone would be silly.

Champions (and Hero System in general) was definitely a very complex character generation system IF you used all the bells and whistles. Essentially, it was a lot of math. But you could make just about any character you wanted. They have (or had, at least, I haven't seen anything past 4th edition) general-purpose powers (Energy Blast, Armor, Flash, Killing Attack, etc) that you can buy, with various costs per 1d6, and then just say it's whatever special effect you want. A character with a high-powered rifle could have a ranged killing attack with it, or if they went with "slightly less lethal" rounds, buy it as an energy blast and say it's physical damage. If they wanted it to be completely non-lethal, they could apply a limitation on it of "no body-damage" (body being the stat for hit points, effectively) and make it cost a bit less, or if they want it to be some round that explodes on impact and douses the target in chemicals that knock them unconscious without dealing any other damage, you could buy the advantage "no normal defense" and say "the defense against this is having the power that means you don't have to breathe air", etc. It's a fun game, but if you've never played it before, you'd definitely need someone to help design a character, as it's definitely made for math nerds. 🙂

The cooldowns are long, but proper slotting can bring the recharge down a LONG way. On my trappers, most of my powers are on 30-40s recharge (and that's without using hasten), simply because of how easy it is to stack recharge on Homecoming, particularly on a mastermind (you can split Superior Mark of Supremacy into three sets of two and get 30% global recharge right there). I mean, you're not going to claim the recharge on most big nuke tier-9's is "too long", right? Or the recharge on incarnate powers? Those both have a longer recharge than most traps abilities. As for detonator, I never take it. Even now, when your henchies can be resummoned quickly it's kind of a waste. Back on live it was HORRIBLE, since the recharge on the pet summoning powers was something like 30/60/90s, so losing even a tier-1 could mean a good bit before you could summon it again, and losing your tier-3 meant you had to run away for a while to regroup.

You can single-click to store/pull from storage, one at a time. I do this all the time to restock my salvage stockpiles in my bases, as I keep a fixed amount of each type (especially commons) and I can see how many I need at a glance. So just open that storage bin, open my salvage window, click a couple times, move to the next.

My big project I've been working on for the last year and a half or so was making CoH characters out of the various D&D and Pathfinder classes. Some were easy to translate (rogue, fighter, barbarian, etc), others proved really difficult. But it was a ton of fun.

I kind of wish people would stop using "but pylon tests show..." as the basis for their ideas on power balance. Pylons are kind of a dumb thing to test on, because it's static. You can easily set up a kit to SPECIFICALLY take down pylons and nothing else, and skew results that way. For instance, the "only three needed powers" referenced here? What about dealing with big groups of mobs? You have no aoe at all in your "these are the only good powers" argument. So I guess you just whittle every enemy down one at a time, then? That seems like a waste, when you have perfectly solid aoes right there in your kit. Or are you so reliant on your incarnate powers to deal with groups of mobs that you can't handle large packs more often than once every couple minutes? Personally, most of my characters tend to have 5-6 attacks. Both for set bonuses as well as the fact that I don't build hasten on most of my characters. So I have 3-4 attacks to make up a nice single-target flow, and then a couple of aoes to toss into large groups of enemies. I can jump into the middle of a pack, pop my aoes, finish off the ones that are at a sliver, then focus down the bosses that are left at half or so. Maybe I just don't have the proper "must minmax everything to death" mindset.

Yeah, as others have said you can't compare Phantom Army to any of the other pets that taunt. PA is invulnerable and with enough recharge, you can make it permanent. Permanent, invulnerable tanks on an AT that can dish out a lot of damage would definitely be a bit imbalanced. Personally I've never missed the taunt on my illusion dom. Would it be nice? Sure. Would it make a lot of stuff too easy for her? Definitely.

I don't really see 61% accuracy as "low". It's middle-range. Not everything has to have 95% accuracy, especially on powers that don't have any sort of innate to-hit penalty. But when it comes to sets, the problem is if you design the full set to be "perfect" (90-95% accuracy, 95-97% damage, 90-95% recharge, and 80-95% end), the set could end up being TOO good, depending on the set bonuses involved. Cupid's Crush for instance I always try to fit the entire thing into a power, since the set bonuses are amazing. Most of the time when I'm building I'm aiming for set bonuses to shore up my resists, defense, or other such things. It's why a lot of my melee characters will 6-slot Touch of Death in their melee attacks, despite it being a 40th level set. Fully slotted, the set bonuses are great, and while it's only got 43% or so accuracy in the set, I tend to have enough +acc and +to-hit in other places in the build to make up for it.

Something a bit more super-heroic this time. Or at least rogue-ish. Maxima, one of my first characters on HC. Superstrength/Invuln tanker, perpetually on the wrong side of the law. And frequent enjoyer of punching Manticore's teeth in.