WumpusRat

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.

Hm, sets that I'd love to see... Masterminds: Arachnos, Longbow, Carnival of <X>, Family, Wyvern, Legacy Chain, Devouring Earth, Rularuu, Mirror Images (Phantom Army without the taunt), Shriekers Ranged sets: Physical blasts (offensive force fields, mostly ranged smashing damage) Defense sets: Offhand weapon (could be just an appearance mod for the shield set)

If you don't count superior ATOs, I think I have a single character with purple sets. Everyone else just uses normal stuff. 🙂

I think if I went through all my alts and pooled all their cash on hand into one pile, I'd have like 200 million. Ish. But that's what happens when you have a cycle of coming up with a new concept, leveling them to 50, getting them all kitted out and incarnated, and then moving on to the next concept, rather than parking at 50 and farming. 🙂 Though I do have somewhere around 4000 merits sitting between characters, and my three bases split between my various characters that have around 200ish rare salvage in each one. I try to keep about 4-6 of each type on hand, as well as 10-20 of all others (common and uncommon), so I can make anything at a moment's notice.

Yeah, oddly it's a lower-level pick for them, but for dominators, masterminds, blasters, and controllers you can't pick it up until you're at least 41st AND you have to take another power first.

I know there are probably some people who like the current order of power selection for the Leviathan Mastery APP, but is there a reason it's different from all the others? Shark Skin requires you to take another power first before you can get it, while all the others allow you to pick up the armor as your first choice. Why is Leviathan different? I'd like to see it the same as the others.

Master Brawler is the optional mez protection within the set. Instead of being a click power, it adds mez protection to your first two toggle powers, as well as giving you the clickable absorb shield. Clickable mez protection has its advantages (in that you can't lose it by being detoggled), but it also means having to pause now and then for it to activate, as well as not having any mez protection at all if it's on cooldown if you die and get back up after activating it. Personally I always opt for Master Brawler, as running so low on end as to get completely detoggled is such a rare occurrence.

The moment you can use the miniature form on kheldian squids, I'm going to start calling every one of them Tinkerbell.

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. 🙂