WumpusRat

I'm working on one of these right now as an alternate ranger build for my D&D adventurers. I haven't finalized a build, as I've been just trying out various combinations on the test server, but overall it's pretty solid. I did end up having to pick up the medicine pool, since there's not enough damage-prevention within TA. But the couple of builds I've thrown together to try out on test have been able to go through +1/8 in incarnate pretty easily, only occasionally losing a pet here and there, without any incarnate power slotting. I'm going to test it again tonight with everything at tier-4, to see what 53rd level pets are like against +3 or +4/8.

I just use tab for that. I have ` set to 'target_next', so I can flip through enemies quickly. R is my autorun button, has been since EQ back in the olden days. 🙂 The only macros I really have are for random character comments, switching builds, or opening various windows (for some reason the / character doesn't always register for me, so I made a couple of macros to pop open windows instead of typing /<whatever>). For powers, I have 1-6, then sh-1-6, alt-1-6, ctrl-1-6, T, G, V, B, C, F, Q, and E bound to other buttons, so most of my powers can be done with my left hand.

My current project for the last few months has been my "D&D adventurers in Paragon" characters. I've been going through all the D&D classes (all the 'main' classes and a few alternate ones, though avoiding some of the really niche ones) to make them into CoH characters. So far the ones I've gotten to 50 and incarnated out are: Fighter (shield/axe tanker) Artificer (bot/ff mastermind) Bard (symphony/kinetic troller) Barbarian (stone melee/willpower brute, the 'juggernaut' subclass, basically a living siege weapon) Cleric (elec/elec defender, follower of the god of storms, hence all the lightning) Druid (necro/nature mastermind, she's a 'circle of spores' druid, so her 'undead' are made out of fungus -- if we could customize, I'd use DE mushroom guys) Paladin (katana/rad armor tanker) Rogue (claw/ninjitsu scrapper) Warlock (cold/dark brute) Shaman (seismic/stone armor sentinel) Still working on the monk, ranger, wizard, sorcerer, alchemist, and psion. Might add a couple from pathfinder, as well.

One of my "D&D Adventurers in Paragon" is an Earth Shaman, who's built as a seismic/stone sentinel. She works a lot like an "earth bender", basically smashing people with rocks, turning attacks aside with rocks and floating stone armor, etc. While her aoe is lacking a bit (I didn't take meteor because it didn't really fit the concept, and the power is incredibly slow), she's incredibly effective at just slapping things down and taking a beating without dropping.

If I take the fighting pool on a controller, it's because I have something specific in mind for their concept. My ill/rad is more of a "stand back and control small-scale fights without any risk" concept, so she doesn't need it. My symphony/kinetic is a D&D bard, and needs to be in melee to make use of her kinetic powers, so I took fighting (and mu shield, so she's got capped smash/lethal/energy resists, and is very tanky). Similarly, I rarely take hasten unless I'm using it for something specific, like perma-dom, perma-phantom army, etc. Like 95% of my builds don't bother with it.

Oh hey, someone from my neck of the woods. I grew up in Santa Cruz. 🙂

I just finished leveling up and kitting out my ice/dark brute. She's a lot of fun to play. I'm working on getting her incarnate stuff unlocked right now.

I've never had more than like 200 million in cash spread among my various characters. I tend to think up a fun concept, level the character up, kit them out, get them all set up with incarnate abilities unlocked, and by the time that's done, I've thought of a new concept I want to play, and it starts all over again. I don't tend to really do any "farming" for influence once I hit 50. Though if I liquidated all the stuff I have stocked away in my three SG bases and the several thousand merits I have, I could probably come up with a billion or so.

How many merits can I make in an hour? Well, depends on what I'm doing. With a brand new character fresh out of chargen? I can make about 40-50 merits in an hour (I timed it at one point because I was curious, and was farming merits). With a higher-level character? Can vary, but usually between 50-100 in an hour. And that's without doing Hami raids.

I take Physical Perfection on a lot of my brutes, since they're all themed builds and rarely do any of the actual powers fit the concept. Depending on how end-hungry my build is, I'll either slot a performance shifter end proc, or a power transfer heal proc.

I was just browsing youtube back in 2020, and stumbled across someone's video about "Is CoH worth playing in 2020?". It made me go "Wait...CoH is still up?!" Did some searches, and wound up here.

The two giant monster hunters I use are my illusion/radiation controller, and my necro/nature mastermind. Both of them are capable of soloing giant monsters with relative ease, though the troller is obviously a lot slower.

I just have my chat windows saved as a file. Though I can't remember the command off the top of my head. It's something like /loadchatfile <name>, or /chatloadfile <name> So I just do /chatloadfile chat and all my windows are neatly arranged and set up.

Personally, I really like the maint drone. It allowed me to drop the medicine tree from my bots masterminds, as the prot bot healing was never good enough to really keep up with a lot of incoming damage, while the maint bot is pretty good at it, able to heal a lot more rapidly. Does it look a little goofy? Yeah, maybe. But I don't mind that. I see it as a huge buff. If you never took the medicine tree I suppose it could be seen as a "nerf", since you have to take another power, but still. I like it.

I mean, TECHNICALLY I'm 37 rats in a trenchcoat, but shh, don't tell anyone.

Nope, not on accident. I rarely take power boost. Generally because I try to make stuff functional without relying on powers that aren't always up. All the numbers on my build are without using power boost. Also it's "her" not "his", just to clarify. 🙂

Because the heal portion of Chrono Shift is the least important part of the power to a lot of people. Fully slotted for healing, it's about a 500ish heal over 30 seconds. Two Temporal Mendings will heal more and faster. The group-wide recharge is what people generally use it for. 50% recharge for 90 seconds is massive. Saying "my way is the only right way to slot this power and everyone else is wrong" is pretty arrogant.

Auras: There are 6 unique IOs that can be slotted into pet sets, each one provides an aura around the mastermind that gives benefits to your pets. Two provide 10% resist, one provides 15% resist (if you have the Superior version of the MM ATO, 10% with the normal version), two that give 5% defense vs everything, and one that gives 10% AOE defense. Ultimately, you can give your pets +35% to all resists, +10% to all defense, and +10% more to AOE defense. For pet sets that don't have a fourth power to slot the auras into, if you want all six you'll have to fit them into the main three pet powers. It doesn't really matter which one you put where, so "any two" can go into a pet power. The only time I will specifically put certain auras into a pet is with the Superior Mark of Supremacy and Superior Command of the Mastermind sets, as the SMoS 2-part and SCotM 4-part offer 10% global recharge bonuses, and between those two sets you can achieve the goal of 70+ acc/end, and 80+ dmg percentages. 2 parts: Mark of Supremacy is a 6-piece set, and the 2-piece bonus is (with the superior version) 10% global recharge bonus. So most of the time I will split it up between all three pet powers, to give 30% global recharge.

Unfortunately I'm in PST and I work from 4pm - midnight, so I wouldn't be able to really join in. 😞

From 40-50? Sure. From 1-40? Not really. The thing is, you'll get far, FAR more influence from just selling the drops and converting merits into boosters/converters and selling those than you'll get from mob-based influence on your path upwards. At 40+ you'll start seeing some decent inf gains, so at that point turning it off (if you're a "new" player who doesn't have any other income) isn't a bad idea. But considering that even as a brand new player, all it takes is asking "How do I make enough money to buy enhancement and stuff?" to get a flock of people to offer suggestions, advice, or even ferry you around to get the exploration badges in Atlas for 5 merits, which you can turn into 1 million inf. The "penalty" of lowered inf for increased exp is just a tradeoff. Do you want faster exp gain, or do you want more inf? And for low-level characters, it's more like "do you want twice as much exp, or a handful of inf that will, after 30-40 missions, net you enough for a couple SOs?" I don't have any "farmer" characters. When I came back to the game for the first time, it was basically as a "new player" (though I knew how the game worked, mechanically). Took me all of about 20 minutes to make my first million inf. Mostly because I was just bouncing around going "Whee, CoH again!" for about 15m of that.

And when you enter the final boss room, you hear a dozen Castillos shouting at once, "And now for my dramatic entrance!" Then the entire room explodes in fire, consoles erupting, the ceiling starts to crash down, and you can hear the supports for the entire sea base groaning as it starts to collapse. One random Castillo, "Too much, maybe?"

Jack was a big believer in "make players struggle". He was quoted on the original forums many times for wanting things to take as long as possible, and be as hard as possible, because that was his idea of "the perfect MMO". A lot of the TFs that were chock full of "kill every enemy" were due to his design influence. And when he realized that people were figuring out how to make things easier through slotting stuff well, he pushed for the whole "enhancement diversification" (ie, game-wide player nerf) to force people to have to struggle even more.

The new FF set is much more interesting to play with, though it's still a fairly passive one. The new force bolt is far better though, as it comes with a -res debuff. On my Bot/FF character I use it to juggle enemies, with a KB->KD proc in it, so I can just keep bouncing them onto the ground and debuffed. The damping bubble makes for some decent "fortress play" style, where you can drop it down and fight from within it, and have defense against a lot of debuffs. Best part of the page-5 change for Bots, to me, was that I was able to drop aid other/self/field medic from my build, due to the repair drone. Allowed me a lot more flexibility. For Bot/Elec, the circuit powers affect your pets as well, yes. It's a solid combo, though you need to be a lot more active with it, due to the need to often hit 4-5 targets at a bare minimum, and 6-7 (if you include yourself) often, so you need to keep your static stacks up. Faraday cage is an awesome power, though there's always the need to deploy it rather than just having it always on like dispersion bubble. But both are solid combos, and I enjoy playing them.

After finishing up a couple of defeat badges today, there's one other reason why I wouldn't want to go back to an I-1 server. No streakbreaker. Missing numerous times in a row with a 95% to hit happened all the time back then.

Just remember that Issue-1 was pre-innate abilities for ATs, too. Meaning no gauntlet. A tanker who wanted to keep all those mobs on them would have to slot their powers with taunt, or spam the taunt ability constantly.