WumpusRat

If it's tied to the drop table as reward merits, didn't they change Adamastor so that it only gives merits like once every 18 hours or something? Just so you can't summon him every hour on the hour and get merits anymore? Which would mean you'd only have a chance at the recipe every 18 hours, too.

I was goofing around last night and had been thinking about a silly concept character I wanted to make for a while. Basically the "minor villain with delusions of granduer" sort. All her schemes are so terribly small scale that they're nothing more than minor annoyances to the powers that be, despite the fact that she herself is ridiculously powerful. Like she'd leave a mocking audio call to the some hero group telling them she was going to kidnap the Fautline dam (not the dam workers, the dam itself) and make it believable enough that they'd go check. And while they were out, she'd sneak into their base and replace all the lightbulbs with ones that were far too bright, and tilt a bunch of the paintings. Then leave a mocking note for them. I'd never come up with a name for her, though had been musing about things like Madame Catastrophe or something similar. But a song I was listening to last night mentioned champagne, and her name just came to me. Thankfully nobody had taken it yet. So the villainess Doom Perignon was born. 🙂

Yeah, the more I look at it, the more it seems like it was part of another picture and copy-pasted onto that one. It just looks so different to the rest of the art.

Generally when I create a character it's because I've come up with a concept I want to explore. Sometimes it's a powerset combo I haven't tried before, but most of the time it's an idea for an "archetype" that I want to play out. For the last year or so I've been making D&D/Pathfinder classes that wound up in Paragon, and have been putting together powersets that I think work for those classes. Some of them have been really easy (shield/axe tanker for the fighter, for instance, or beast mastery/nature mastermind for the druid) others have been really tough (the paladin in particular was hard to figure out since I needed a tanky weapon-based melee class that could heal, and I don't want to use aid other because of the dang tricorder). Another thing that I tried to do for the first 20 or so was to never replicate powersets. I still TRY to, but some of them have had a bit of overlap, as there are only so many weapon-based melee sets. So it's gotten me to explore some powersets that I'd never really thought much about before, and try out combos that have turned out to be really fun. Like ninja/empathy, or gravity/trick arrow.

Could be interesting. Though my work schedule is a bit wonky for most regular times. I work second shift (4pm - midnight) PST and my weekend is tues/weds, so that kind of puts me off track with most people. 🙂

Yeah, I've done the Ouro version of it too. I agree, it's very well done.

Somebody once told me That Malta's gonna roll me I ain't got no status protects She was looking kind of glum As the Sapper began to hum And zapped her straight into the bulkhead

Also remember that you're up against Malta. They're SUPPOSED to be the "anti-super" villain group, with the tools to take down superhumans. But if you're on a character without innate status protections, yeah, carry break frees, proactively take out the enemy CC-casters, stack a lot of defense (purple insps can help you mitigate a lot of incoming), etc. Malta aren't meant to be easy. They can and will absolutely shrek you if you're not prepared.

A lot of times if I'm just hanging around in Ouro (usually because I'm afk for a while), I'll go out to one of the little islands and do /lotus. Meditate among the planes. 🙂

I certainly hope the gun attacks don't become "required", though I don't think you're "gimped" in any of the other MM sets if you don't take their attacks. Mercenaries give a stacking +3% damage per attack you land on a target for the mercs. But simply running Assault gives +11%, more than all three attacks combined. Necromancy can summon wraiths, which deal (minor) damage and can taunt. Handy, but not absolutely required. I do tend to take them when I'm leveling, but respec out of all but Life Drain at higher levels, just for a wraith and self-heal. Robotics moved the -regen to the MM's personal attacks instead of the Assault Bot. While this is the closest to "required", it's still not mandatory. You can pick up Envenomed Dagger. Or take a secondary that has -regen powers. Mostly I'm looking forward to what I hope will be a good revision of Beast Mastery. Ever since the upgrade to Robotics, Mercenaries, Necromancy and Ninjas, BM has become the absolute bottom-tier MM primary, and definitely needs a rework.

Laura Lockhart's mission was honestly the first one I can remember doing in CoH and being honestly angry at what happened to her. You don't get much real interaction with her, but she definitely made an impact. Though my favorite contact will always be Dean McArthur. D-Mac cemented himself as my favorite the first time I ran into him back on live when he high-fives you after a mission, and how he seems to honestly respect you. He may be a cheesy flirt if you're female, but he knows what you're capable of, and he's doing his level best to help you out. There aren't many contacts that even my most hardened villain characters would lift a finger for, but if someone said "Hey, you know that D-Mac guy? Some vigilante guy kidnapped him..." that poor vigilante would get the beating of a lifetime. Probably from quite a few red-siders.

I was doing some testing with a Sentinel build today, and ran into a bug with one of the powers in the set, Proton Therapy. The power has a 50s base recharge, and while recharge IOs slotted into the power function normally in reducing its recharge time, GLOBAL recharge bonuses don't seem to affect it properly. For instance, with 3 50th level recharge IOs in the power, it has a 99% recharge rate. It recharges in just over 25 seconds, which is normal. With 100% global recharge, the recharge rate only went down to 23 seconds. Both Mids and the game server list the recharge this way. With 199% recharge, it should be recharging in just under 17 seconds. I added Hasten, which brought my global recharge up to 170%, and the same 99% recharge in the power, and the power's recharge dropped to 17s, when it should be closer to 14s. Is there something in the power (or the Rad Armor powerset as a whole) that somehow affects how global recharge affects this power? And if so, is it intentional?

And since it benefits from containment, a power boosted bolt on a contained target actually does a significant amount of damage. I've hit stuff for over 400 damage with it.

One of the characters I played most back on live was a thug/dark MM named "Tiny Whispers". She was a little "shoulder devil" that gotten a bunch of otherwise normal guys to "go bad" by constantly urging them to sin. The pyro was a former diner cook, the two tier-1 thugs were accountants, the enforcers were police officers, and the bruiser was a rugby player. I had a whole slew of RP macros set up for them, where the thugs would be talking with one another, with one of the former-accountants giving tax advice, the rugby player reminiscing about a big game he made the winning touchdown in, all of them sitting around aimlessly chatting and ogling spandex-clad girls, etc.

My favorite spot is probably in Atlas Park, there's an area at the top of a building that you can get to via a doorway down at ground level. It's a glass-ceilinged little indoor park with benches and plants and such. We used to go there to rp a lot. And "the hole" in KR. A massive double-tower building with a walkway that goes between the buildings but has a roof over it. Except for one square hole that goes from the ground up to the top of the buildings. And there are windows along the inside of the hole. I can't imagine why you'd want to look out your window and see that.

I've never really had a "main" character in any MMO I've played. I have characters that I play MORE than others, but they tend to shift around based on whatever mood I'm in, and if I've fallen in with a regular group. Usually I just keep thinking up new ideas, and go "Ooh, I really like this!" and play the heck out of it, and by the time I'm in end-game and finishing the build up and stuff, I've had another idea and that becomes my next big project. I think my highest vet level is around 15-16 on any character because of it.

I think I have one angel character (a demon/thermal MM), because I liked the idea of this constantly-frustrated angel shepherding a bunch of unruly demons. I have one demon character (who's also a demon mastermind) who gets into arguments with her minions about who's the most powerful. And among my D&D adventurers, I have a tiefling and an aasimar, though I don't know if they really qualify, since they're based on D&D demons/angels rather than Christian ones.

Demons and Thugs definitely don't really need much "upgrading", just an overhaul to bring them in line with the other pet sets. Beast Mastery definitely needs a thorough overhaul, though. Particularly the set's damage output needs to be decoupled from relying so heavily on the Fortify Pack passive. The fact that it's nothing more than a mule power for LotG (and maybe Kismet, a KB IO, etc) is sad. The passive is the only real benefit of the power, as triggering the active dumpsters your pets' damage output for the duration of its effect. IMO, what I'd love to see for Beasts is to put Fortify Pack on a swing-toggle like Staff Mastery has. So that you can give your pets more tactical orders. Fight Aggressively: +crit and +damage based on stacks of Pack Mentality, like it is now. Fight Defensively: +def and +resist based on stacks of Pack Mentality. Fight Tactically: +to hit and %chance to knockdown based on stacks of Pack Mentality.

Same. Since I run mids on another computer, I can have the mids window open on one monitor and the game running on my main machine, and just glance back and forth to verify changes I make. It becomes fairly easy, and the whole process takes less than 10m.

Depending on the archetype I'm playing, I'll do anything from 0x2 to +1x4, while leveling. Anything beyond that becomes a bit too much of a slog, since I'm generally running story arcs for badges and merits, rather than just raw exp, so I want to get to the end and get my rewards. If it's a story arc I haven't done before, I'll usually stick to minimum to run it the first time, so I can focus more on the story, maps, etc, rather than grinding for exp.

CoH's rng has always been loopy. That's why they added the streakbreaker in the first place, because you'd often see 6-7 misses in a row even with a 95% to hit.

Tested it on my shield/axe tanker, bots/ff mastermind, elec/elec defender, and dark/dark sentinel tonight. Tanker, MM and defender did just fine on +3x8, though the defender had a couple rough moments in big packs. Sentinel got her hiney spanked a few times, since they were doing enough damage to overcome my regen/healing, especially when warwolf bosses were mixed in.

I'm really keen to try them out now. Once I get home from work I'm going to take a few of my characters through some missions with CoT and Council and see how they do.

Demons, thugs and beast mastery all need to be updated. I was hoping it would get done by this issue, but no such luck. At this point I'm guessing it won't be for another year or so.

I occasionally did some PI groups that specifically went after Malta and Carnies, since people tend to avoid them like the plague. And it was always a fun time introducing some people to Carnies' giant weakness to lethal damage, and watch them just tearing through missions like a chainsaw through cotton candy. 🙂