WumpusRat

Every now and then I'll go to PI and do the "PI team forming, +4/8 carnies only" or "malta only" and see who's brave enough to come join me. I get a number for carnies, but usually it's crickets if I mention malta. Running +4/8 in DA can be fun, especially if you don't just stick to Tsoo and Knives. BP in DA are no joke if you don't have massive amounts of defense or capped resists to about 6 different things, because they throw everything and the kitchen sink at you. And then there are the Talons, who laugh at your puny 60% defense and just slap you around with auto-hit aoe stuff.

Normally when I build my tankers and brutes I'm after set bonuses, not looking to slot as many procs as possible and be forced to take hasten, lotg mule powers and everything else I can cram into the build to try and get as much global recharge as possible. Hence why my brutes tend to vastly out-damage my tankers. For normal mission running, would a brute with normal slotting whose attacks are on 3-5 second cooldowns clear faster or slower than a tanker who relies on randomized procs? Or are proc-tankers basically trying to run around and herd up a bunch of stuff so that when they DO attack their procs have a higher chance of going off? I'd think that would slow down killing rather than speed it up, vs a brute who can just jump into any given group, wipe it out, and be running to the next group while the tanker is still herding up mobs. Maybe I just don't get the whole "proc meta" thing, though.

The stuff I normally track is: Current HP Regen Rate (on characters who focus regen) Recovery Rate Endurance Spend Lethal Resist Other Resist (other being whichever one my build tends to focus on) Melee Defense Ranged Defense Exp to next level (if below 49) Inf Last To-Hit Check (if I'm not tracking regen, means I can keep an eye on how much defense or to-hit debuffs I've been slapped with easily)

Hey now, the proc for Sentinel's Ward isn't bad. The other one we don't talk about because it's poop.

I keep myself interested by creating new concepts or batch-concepts of characters. My current project (a bunch of D&D adventurers who wound up in Paragon) has taken me months, and I'm nearly done with all the classes. It's been fun coming up with builds that fit each class, and I gave myself the limitation that I wouldn't repeat any power sets. So once one had shield defense, nobody else would use it, etc. Of course, I've had so much fun with it I might start making "multi-classed" characters, and allow myself to have a bit of overlap of powersets as long as it's one that the "pure" class uses. (The fighter is an axe/shield tanker, for instance, while a fighter/rogue might be broadsword/shield or axe/ninjitsu) My next project will probably be one that I started ages ago, but never really finished. A bunch of elementals summoned by the Circle of Thorns and then who went rogue, and are now on their own exploring the world. The usual air, earth, fire, and water, but also the "para-elementals" of lightning, ice, magma, and mire. And I still have a bunch of other group concepts lying around, like my Rikti-hunting aliens, an ex-original member of the Circle of Thorns who broke off and formed her own cabal with a bunch of apprentices, etc. So I've got tons of stuff to keep me occupied. 🙂

Whether or not I take a travel power is based on the concept I have for the character. And a tiny bit from wanting to squeeze in some set bonuses/lotg slots. The vast majority of my characters have flight as their travel power. Sure, I could just buy a flying carpet or flying disc or jetpack, but the flight power with a couple slots in it gives me set bonuses, 20% slow/rech resist, kb resist, and/or about twice the speed. I'm not a fan of superspeed, and I rarely take hasten on any characters, so none of the powers in that pool really appeal to me much. Superleap feels a bit clunky, and I'm not fond of having to constantly be holding the jump button down to travel. Teleport is fast for long distances, but then you have to slow down and carefully aim in order to get to the final destination, and going around buildings can be annoying. On the plus side, you can get teleport + a prestige flight power (which I've done on a couple characters) and it's pretty convenient. A few of my characters have flying carpets, since it fit their concept. A couple of them have the flying disc thing (either created by force energy, ki, etc). Several of my characters just get around with athletic run + sprint + combat jumping. I do miss some of the more interesting travel powers from CO. Like "earth flight" where you rip a chunk of the ground up and fly around on it. Or tunneling.

During my work trip a month ago I had CoH running on my old windows-8 laptop with 2 gigs of ram. It wasn't pretty, and I had to turn the graphics down to minimum, but it ran enough that I could do missions. Solo though, since it took about a minute or more to load new zones. 🙂

That's generally how it goes for blasters on the teams I've been on. BOOM, lots of mobs get deleted. Blaster is laughing maniacally. Oops, the bosses that survived got pissed and two-shot the blaster. Especially running incarnate content, where the "capped defense" goals are FAR higher. So that 45% defense with zero defense debuff resist means absolutely squat. The first time I found that out was on my traps defender, smugly assuming my 60% defense would be more than enough. Two debuffs later and I was looking at a red number where my defense used to be, and a bunch of pissed off talon boss mobs hitting me for hundreds of damage per swing. But I guess that's why people stick to Council farms in PI. They're like the training-wheels mobs at high level. 🙂

Situationally, yes. And generally those situations happen more often when you're soloing. In a large team, sleep is inefficient, since it leaves mobs just standing around in a large area, rather than clumping them together to be obliterated by aoe's. On a team, I've often found that aoe immobilization is incredibly useful IF you time it properly. When the enemies all pile onto the tank/whoever has aggro, you aoe immob them into place, especially if your immob keeps them from being knocked back, and then damage pours down on them to erase them. I've been on a number of teams where people with aoe knockback powers were quite happy that they could just cut loose without worry once they saw the immobilize go off, and the mobs wouldn't go flying. But in the end, the best form of control is a dead mob. Dead mobs cannot deal damage. 🙂

My friends and I played a few superheroic games back in the day, but the one we played the most was Champions/Hero System. I still have a ton of old character sheets in my gaming filing cabinet (back before we moved stuff to computers). And the old information on the game world I made for our games.

Slotting them for me depends on the build. My GENERAL go-to for health and stamina is: Health: Panacea +health/end proc, Numina regen/recovery, Miracle +recovery Stamina: Power Transfer heal proc, Synapse end mod/run spd, Synapse end mod, Synapse dmg/end mod Gives me two proc'd heals, 91% end mod in stamina, +22.5% run speed, and 10% resistance to slow/recharge debuffs If a character is seriously struggling for endurance, I'll toss another slot into stamina for a Performance Shifter end proc If they're pretty solid on endurance and recovery, I might drop the Miracle out of health

Depends on the controller, really. I have a bunch that I enjoy playing. The standouts are: Illusion/Radiation is basically "summon phantom army, debuff, murder". Not really cut out to deal with huge groups of enemies at a time, but against small groups/AVs/GMs, she's vicious. It was my first "kill GMs solo" build back on live. Her claim to fame was killing Lusca by herself. Took about an hour. 🙂 Symphony/Kinetic is the Bard from my D&D adventurers group. Drop sleep cone, jump in, fulcrum shift, jump back out, cone, cone, cone, cone, everything's dead but a couple stragglers. Earth/Radiation is the Wizard from my D&D group. Open with tossing Rocky into the middle of the enemy group with spirit ward on him, toss down debuffs and aoes, profit.

For masterminds in particular, it depends heavily on the sets. A bot/ff will feel a lot safer than, say, thug/ta. Some setups can be incredibly busy, constantly having to manage pets, keep them focused, rein them in when they start getting a bit too aggressive, healing them (even more so if your secondary doesn't have an aoe heal in it), etc. I have a beast/TA mastermind that I really enjoy playing. She's very hectic and busy, since the pets don't have a lot of defense, and TA provides no real mitigation for them. So it's very much a "kill or be killed" hyper-aggressive playstyle, especially on +4/8. On the other hand, my bot/FF is a "tank" who walks slowly through missions murdering everything in her path. And others that are various flavors in between.

I don't really have one powerset or AT that keeps me going. All my characters are concepts that I want to see play out. Right now I've been working on a whole bunch of "misplaced D&D adventurer" characters. Some of them were easy (fighter, monk, rogue, etc), while others were more challenging to work out builds for (took me ages to figure out what defensive set to go for for a paladin, as they need to be tanky and be able to heal, and I won't use aid other because of the tricorder). It's also been a bit more difficult because I don't want to reuse any powersets, even across ATs. When I'm "done" with them (I have about 3-4 more to go), I might go back to working on my "summoned elementals" character ideas.

Though honestly, I think they kind of broke controllers and dominators. Giving them their pets at 1st level makes the 1-30 game insanely trivial, especially since they added 2-3 attacks to all the pets. I made a water/traps troller, and by the time I'd hit 6th level I had the difficulty at +1/8 because anything less wasn't a challenge. A lot of the changes they made seem to be geared towards making people VASTLY more powerful, with no downside. Most buffs are easily made perma or are perma straight out of the box. Almost every buff now affects the caster as well (some with reduced effect however).

It's NPC Dialogue. I did that at one point too when I was setting up a new computer for CoH, and went "Wait, where are the word balloons...?" I normally put NPC chatter in its own tab.

My standard layout for the three hotbars is: ctrl-1 ctrl-2 ctrl-3 ctrl-4 F B V C G T Q E shift-1 shift-2 shift-3 shift-4 shift-5 alt-1 alt-2 alt-3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 Left hand on keyboard, right hand on mouse. If I just have a few toggles, I'll put them on 7-0. If I have a bunch, they go on a separate hotbar that's moved to the top-right of the screen.

Okay, let's see if it properly exported the build... <edit> Hm, apparently not. The version of mids I just upgraded to doesn't seem to want to export builds. It crashes every time I try to use the "share build via forum export" option. Blah.

I'm at work at the moment so I can't post anything, but I'll try to finish tinkering with my build when I get home, and post it after I run some more tests on the beta server. Though a lot of my builds are tightly constrained to a theme/concept, so sometimes they won't be as efficient as they could be. 🙂 I try to make them as close to theme as possible while still being as effective as they can be, but... My necro/nature build is part of my "D&D Adventurers in Paragon" group. She's a "Circle of Spores" druid. If we could customize pets, they'd look like the mushroom guys from DE.

Ahh, okay. So yeah, I was missing something. 🙂

If you don't have any defense to begin with, then yeah, slotting them for defense isn't really worth much. However the more you stack on, the better it gets. Generally weave and maneuvers end up with 2-3 slots, depending on what I'm aiming for. One lotg and then a def/end, just to lower my end costs a bit. I tend to run CJ in most of my builds as well both for protection from immobilize (if the character doesn't have any other protections) and for the added maneuverability. CJ I usually 3-slot, just to hold a shield wall +resist, kismet +to hit, and reactive defense scaling resist. If I can't fit it anywhere else, I'll add another slot and toss in a winter's gift 20% slow resist as well.

Am I missing something with this? Brutes already have a 90% mitigation cap, just like tankers. Personally, my brutes feel more powerful at taking down enemies than my tankers do. Stuff that my tankers are killing in two hits my brutes often kill with a single attack, due to having the extra +170% damage bonus. Maybe it's because I build for set bonuses rather than loading powers with as many procs as can fit that it feels that way, though.

While Overgrowth does provide +to hit, it doesn't protect you from confusion effects, which tactics does. One of the worst cc's you can be hit by as a mastermind (especially a nature one) is confusion, since suddenly all your healing and buffs are benefiting the enemies, instead of your pets, and your pets will turn on you and tear you apart. As for the combo itself, I have a necro/nature that's a lot of fun to play. I'm in the process of rebuilding her though, since my original build was more heavily-invested into defense rather than resistance, and I'm leaning more into resists lately, especially on builds that can self-heal. For the lich, I don't really bother slotting him for damage, since he only has two damaging abilities, and the rest are cc and debuffs. Slotting him for to-hit debuff can work really well, and I'm experimenting with proccing him out since most of his abilities have fairly long cooldowns.

Yeah, once you hit 50 inf comes in pretty rapidly. I'd spent myself down to around 1.5 mil on my troller I'd just finished getting to 50 and picking up her last few enhancements. Did two arcs in DA and a Market Crash, and I was back up to almost 15 mil.

I always test stuff on the beta server. It's so convenient to be able to see what my character will be life at various stages. 22, 35, 50, SOs, IOs, etc. And since you can get all the stuff like merits, prismatics, etc, for free, you can just test whatever you want. I went through looking at various characters in the various modified prismatic outfits. Neat, but not really for me. So I just sell mine when I find them.