WumpusRat

Oh nice. Maybe I'll try to reprise my starship build high up above the base level, then. I'd scrapped it several times due to constant drifting.

I've played dozens of MMOs over the years. There are a few I still play from time to time, or that I'll drift off of one game and start playing again as my "main" MMO. Currently I'm playing EQ2 again, and still log in to DDO and LotRO now and then when they come out with new content.

I would argue that this isn't really true. On my beast/TA mastermind, EMP Arrow was a very important part of my arsenal against EBs and AVs. Without it, I have zero status protection (other than immobilize, thanks to CJ), and my pets' resists are fairly low, even with all the auras. With it, my pets' damage resistance would get pushed up to the point that it took a couple of hits to drop the tier-1's, giving me time to save them. And since my only healing was a single-target Aid Other, that extra time makes all the difference. Additionally, the status protection means that I can keep using powers without fear of being locked down and having to pop breakfrees (assuming I still have some left) to try and avoid a wipe of my pets and myself. It's not something that you need in every fight, but when you do need it, it's definitely a "thank god I have this" power.

A lot of my current characters are magic origin, as they're D&D characters that were forcibly ported into Paragon and are living here now. Even the classes that aren't inherently magical, like rogue or fighter have the magic origin, because of how they got here, and that they use magical items, etc.

Yeah, I don't use hover for general movement anyway. I just use flight. If I want precise control (like flying around indoors or something) I'll kick hover on as well, so I get all the speed of flight and the control of hover. Costs a bit more end, but I'm generally not doing that for more than a few seconds in combat anyway. Generally hover and EM are just LotG mule slots for me.

Funny, I don't think I've EVER put slots into Evasive Maneuvers. It's always and forever a LotG +rech mule slot, and nothing more. Personally, I like flight because it's the most freeform way to travel. I can operate in 360 degrees and move around as I see fit. Want to go to the top of a building? Just fly up. Want to get those badges high up on ledges and things? Fly up and grab them. With superspeed? Yeah, still need to find a way to walk up there, and trying to move at high velocity on a small ledge 200 feet up is going to end up with me falling off. And superleap doesn't cut it for a lot of places, so you have to jump up to ledge #1, then ledge #2, then to the point you're aiming for. Flight is just more convenient.

Actually this would create MORE abuse, for one simple reason: A couple people could click on doors while your ToT league is parked in an area and anything that comes out you and your league get no inf/exp/badges for. This would end up with people screaming at one another about "this is our camping spot, go find your own", etc. Just like back in the day when you'd get a group and just camp in front of a spawn of mobs for hours on end grinding exp. Personally, I don't really care if someone "leeches" off stuff I'm already fighting, since I only ToT for the badges, and stuff dying faster = faster badges. Sometimes I just want to do my own thing and not worry about being in a group/league, so I can go afk at a moment's notice, look stuff up on the other monitor, or whatever else and not have people getting irate that I'm "leeching while afk". Which is why I almost exclusively ToT solo in Kallisti.

Well of course the doorways are taller, they have to be to account for the fact that there are 8-foot people walking around. Can't make Captain Meltdown, The Easily Annoyed Walking Nuclear Pile have to constantly duck under doorframes, after all. Otherwise he'd eventually bump his head and you'd lose a city block.

My characters are based on a concept I have for them, and that includes how they look, how tall they are, etc. All my D&D/Pathfinder immigrants are based on their game races, so their heights are pretty defined from the get-go. The tallest one is the giantkin barbarian. The shortest are the two halflings, and a gnome who's a couple inches taller than them. The two dwarves are built with the "huge" male body, cranked to minimum height and large physique, since I can't make a proper female dwarf using the female body -- the legs end up looking too long, even with minimum leg length. So I just go with the "small-huge" male body, put them in full armor, and they end up looking like proper female dwarves. Besides, nobody but other dwarves can tell male from female anyway, so it's all good! I have a couple of very tall other characters, and a lot of short characters. But none of them really follow any sort of role/AT pattern with their heights. Just whatever I feel like for the character.

It would certainly be nice to see a new mastermind primary, considering the last new one was at the tail end of live, with beast mastery. Other ATs have had primaries ported over to them, or created entirely, but MMs still languish with only 7 primaries to choose from, by far the lowest number of any AT in the game (other than kheldians and veats, but they don't really count). Going purely by damage types, the ones that we already have are: Lethal -- mercenaries, necro (the grave knights' sword attacks), thugs (all the guns), ninjas shuriken/swords, beast mastery animal claws/bites Smashing -- thugs Bruiser, necro zombie punches, ninjas kicking Fire -- thugs arsonist, ninjas oni, robotics assault bot flamethrower, demons tier-1 fire demon Cold - demons demon prince attacks, beast mastery dire wolf attacks, demons tier-1 cold demon Energy -- robotics all the lasers Negative -- necro all the undead pewpew Toxic -- necro zombie barf, demons tier-1 toxic demon Psionic -- ...nothing? So a set that focuses on psionic stuff could be interesting, just to fill the niche that has nothing in it. Another energy-focused set could also be good, to have something other than robotics. Same with negative, as only necromancy deals with that -- though to be honest there isn't much in CoH that uses negative energy that ISN'T undead/necromancy. Or maybe a set that focuses on cold, or fire. The simplest (in terms of models and such) would be picking from existing groups and summoning up versions of them. Though the MM stuff is all "generic" rather than specific, so that might be stepping into an area the devs just don't want to deal with. After all, the moment you add ONE existing group as a MM set, people are going to be demanding the others that they want to play, and arguing that "if you did it with that one, these ten can't be that much harder, right?"

Alt-itis isn't something to be ashamed of. Embrace it. My current project that I've been working on for the last 6 months or so has been my group of D&D/Pathfinder characters who were punted into Paragon. It's been a lot of fun coming up with builds for each class, and making sure I don't repeat any powersets, unless it's a slightly altered version of one of them (Sentinel Regen vs Scrapper regen, for instance). I was GOING to just make the "standard" 12 classes (barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, warlock, wizard), but along the way I kept finding more concepts and classes that would be a lot of fun to build in CoH. So now I've got a dozen more that I've leveled up. My rule I made for myself was that I had to get a character to 50, fully unlock all their incarnate abilities (just at tier-1, didn't need to get them all to tier-4) and fully kitted out before I'd let myself work on another character. Helped me figure out if I really wanted to stick with them, too. A bunch ended up getting abandoned in the 30's and 40's because the build just didn't feel right for that class, or it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped. But it's definitely been fun. Especially coming up with their little quirks in the bio. I have a fairly standardized "here's how they got to Paragon" that is in every bio for them, and then their stat block. Alignment, stats (str, dex, con, int, wis, cha), race, class, etc. It's fun coming up with them all. Once I'm done with the latest few I think I'll be "done" with the adventurers. Then I might start working on the group of elementals idea I had. All four main elements (air, earth, fire, water) and the quasi-elements (smoke, mire, lightning, ice).

And stuff like this is exactly why I stock every type of salvage in my base. "But why keep common salvage? Just buy it on the AH if you need some." Yeah, no thanks. I'd rather be able to just step into my base, step over to the crafting building, and make anything I need without having to go in and out of the base to buy salvage. I've got about 20 of every type of common, 10 of every uncommon, and 6-8 of every rare. I can make anything I need. If I DO manage to run out of rare salvage, I've got a couple dozen characters with 9000 AE tickets who can just hop up and buy a bunch and restock.

I haven't quite been "one-shot" by any of the mobs (though I've mostly done my ToTing on characters who are 30+), but I HAVE been two-shot a couple times. Mostly by the Arisen Mummies, who do HUGE amounts of toxic damage. I was door-knocking with my fire/fire sentinel, who was breezing through it for the most part, and out comes a mummy. "Okay, let's see how this goes" I thought to myself. He punched me in the face and took about 70% of my health. I used my heal, and got back up to about 90%. Then he used KOBlow and insta-killed me. I couldn't even be mad. My toxic resist is like 10% or so. He hit me for somewhere around 1600 damage. Got my revenge, though. I sent my necro/pain MM out to knock on doors until I got another mummy (and I'm going to pretend it's the same one, out of spite), and curbstomped him. 🙂

I have a macro on one of my alternate hotbars on all my MM's that I just label "GO". It's petcom_all dismiss, which makes all my pets stop what they're doing and immediately leave. I use this all the time to just abandon my pets out when I need to do something like sneak around, or don't want them trudging along aggroing everything behind as they try to catch up to me.

Yeah, all my D&D/Pathfinder characters that wound up in Paragon don't have powers granted to them by "the well of furies" or anything like that. They're just gaining epic levels. 🙂

Which ones in particular? Most of the merit rewards seem pretty average. The only one I can think of as "a lot" is the mothership raid, but I don't tend to do those. Though there are a couple of story arcs that I think don't reward enough. One that springs to mind is Mr. Bocor in Port Oakes, who gives you a 4-mission arc (3 kill-alls and a hunt) and gives you a paltry 2 merits for it.

She is. When you 'defeat' her, she doesn't crumple or pass out, she just ducks back underwater. Everyone just keeps interrupting her peaceful swim.

Well, I've never used two 3-part sets that both have procs in them, so it hasn't come up. But if it did, it would end up being like AAA-procBBB-proc Having the three set pieces together overrules the procs always being in the rightmost slots. However, they'll still be in the right slots of that series of enhancements.

I would be very leery of doing something like this. Given that MMs on HC get a MASSIVE reduction in recharge on the pet summoning abilities, the ability to just churn out fully-upgraded pets when you start losing them would be a bit imbalanced. I've had plenty of fights where I can just keep throwing out pets in tough fights that eventually the constant replacement of them ends up tilting the odds in my favor and I win. And that's without them being upgraded, as I'm too busy trying to just get more pets into the fight. If they popped out fully upgraded it would be way too easy. I believe the devs have stated before that they have zero intention of auto-upgrades for pets. I do agree that they need a bit more run-speed though. Maybe let +movement bonuses affect the pets, too, since a lot of times I'll end up with like +30-40% runspeed, which puts me pretty far out ahead of my pets.

I'm at work so I'll probably be slightly off, but off the top of my head: 97%-ish recharge in the power itself (4 x Def/Rech enhancements) 70% from Hasten 4 x 10% recharge from ATOs (splitting Superior Mark of Supremacy amongst the three tiers of pets, 4 parts Superior Command of the Mastermind in one) 2 x 8.75% from full sets of Preventive Medicine (Healing Aura) and Reactive Defenses (Maneuvers) 3 x 6.25% from 5-part Decimation in Aimed Shot and Single Shot, 5-part Positron's Blast in Fistful of Arrows 2 x 5% from 5-part Doctored Wounds in Heal Other and Adrenaline Boost 5 x LotG 7.5% globals I THINK that's about it. So in all, around 194% global recharge, and 97% in the power itself, for about 290% recharge total. 120s duration, and around a 22.5s or 23s recharge 15.5s recharge. Enough to keep it on 6 targets if I don't slack off. And if Secondary Mutation gives me Quick Reflexes, it becomes easier. <edit> Oh, duh. I had a brainfart and was calculating the recharge time on it being 90, not 60. With 60 it recharges in about 15.5s.

Keeping your pets alive with healing works fine at all levels as long as they have good resists or defense or both. I have a ninja/empathy MM and she works fine even in incarnate content. I have enough recharge in the build that I can keep fortitude on all six pets if I stay on top of the cooldown, which pushes their defense up to around 45% for range and melee, and 60% for aoe, though their resists are somewhat lacking, having only 35% from the three +resist auras, so when they DO get hit, they get hit pretty hard. But they have enough defense that it's not frequent enough that they're dropping constantly, unless I'm trying to go up against bosses at +4. Regeneration and recovery auras have a recharge of around 130 seconds for her, so with 90s uptime, they can be maintained about 70% of the time, and I'll always pop them before going into a big fight. While the pets not having a ton of HP means regen isn't quite as effective on them, being able to give them around 1200% regen heals them enough that combined with spot-healing and their own self-heals I only occasionally lose minions.

I've done all my trick or treating solo on my various characters so far. On the first one, I got all the vampires really quickly, and the rest kind of staggered in over time. On the second, I got all the werewolves quickly (like 5 out of the first 8 EBs I got were werewolves), and the rest over time, though the last couple spectres took forever. On the third, I got all the witches super quick (3 doors in a row had a witch EB), and the rest fairly average in distribution. On the fourth, they were pretty average in distribution. On the fifth (which I'm working on now), I've gotten 4 vampires, 2 werewolves, 2 witches, 1 spectre, and 2 mummies (but only 1 kill, as the first mummy popped and killed me in two swings).

This is where specific attack commands come into play. For instance, you can order SPECIFIC henchmen to attack, while keeping the others in bodyguard mode. I generally keep the tier-1's in bodyguard mode and order the tier-2 and 3 to attack in this case, as it keeps enough of them in bodyguard mode to split the damage effectively, and the tier-2 and 3 tend to deal the most damage. /macro T3at "petcom_pow Commando attack" (for instance) That will make your commando start immediately attacking the chosen enemy, while the rest of your pets remain in bodyguard mode. You can set up others for the other tiers of pets, and make them selectively engage various targets. It's useful to try and focus-fire one or two pets onto an enemy to attempt to peel them off of you. I use specific-command frequently when I'm playing mercenaries, as the spec-ops gain a 150ft range sniper attack with the tactical upgrade. You can order just them to attack from long range, and they'll engage with snipe. Then immediately pull them back into defensive-follow so they won't try to move closer to continue attacking. You can do this to pull and split spawns, or just try to pick off stragglers. You can also order pets by specific name (petcom_name <petname> <command>) if you don't want to order all the pets of a particular type to do something, or want to order just one (such as the mercenary medic or thug pyro) to hold back from attacking.

It would probably end up being one of my masterminds. Maybe the necro, I don't know. Though if I WERE restricted to one character, I'd end up getting bored of the game and uninstalling it after a few weeks. No variety = no fun, to me.

I always make sure my enhancements are aesthetically appealing to me. Like if I have 3 of one set and 3 of another, I make sure that the two sets are AAABBB. If it's 3-1 it'll be AAAB. Etc. Procs always go in the rightmost slots of a power. Same for mastermind auras. If any of the enhancements are attuned, they ALL have to be attuned, so they match.