WumpusRat

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.

While an issue-1 server might be interesting to play on for an hour or two out of nostalgia, there's no way I'd play there for an extended time. Level cap of 40 instead of 50, no epic power pools, fitness wasn't auto-granted but you had to choose it as one of your four pools, travel powers limited to 14th level, the exp to level being about 4-5x what it is now...ugh. No thanks.

A kind of combination of those two is one of my D&D bard concepts. When the other adventurers who arrived in Paragon were out beating up criminals and establishing a place for them to all call home, she was out finding out what sorts of social places there were. She can into a bunch of bikers who started hitting on her, and so she started telling stories, jokes, riddles, and basically just won them over. Then they heard her sing, and were captivated. So they decided to stick with her and protect her.

I've done that. Still get the same error. Mids fundamentally broke something in my installation of the game.

I wanted to try using the Mids "copy build to beta server" thing, so I installed it on my main machine (I usually use Mids on my other computer, so I can have it and the game open at the same time). I went through the steps to try and get it to work, and now whenever I try to run HC it gives me a fatal error and crashes to desktop. File: bin/clientmessages-en.bin Unable to locate bin/clientmessages-en.bin Then crashes to desktop. Wtf. Sigh. I should have just left Mids off my main machine.

I pretty much never take assault on blasters, since it's such a small bonus compared to all their others. Maneuvers and tactics sometimes, mostly because of the fact that blasters have enough end management to easily run the toggles, and maneuvers is a good place for a lotg recharge, and as others have said if you don't have aim/buildup in your kit tactics can be decent. Usually the reason I end up taking them is to hit certain defense benchmarks, if I'm building a more scrappy blaster. The 4% defense from maneuvers and 1.88% smash/lethal defense you can get from 2-slotting tactics (rectified reticle) can sometimes make the difference in hitting the soft-cap or not.

I don't have a robots/time myself, but I do have a lot of other robots/ builds (FF, Electric, Sonic, and Traps). My main goal with any MM build is to make my pets as tanky as possible, and keep them alive. I'm not a big fan of the change to move the -regen off the assault bot and onto the MM attacks, since it eats into slotting that I prefer to put into other powers, and in order to match the -500 that the AB used to have, you need to take all three attacks and slot them heavily enough to ensure they connect. So at least 2-3 slots per power, which mildly annoys me. On the other hand, the repair bot has freed up a lot of slotting on my MMs that didn't have a heal built into their kit (all but electric), so I've been able to dump aid other/self/field medic, which does make it easier. With robots, the lack of a 'mule' power means in order to have all 6 auras you're going to need to get all your slotting done on the pets with only 4 slots, which definitely requires a bit of frankenslotting. I'm at work so I can't post a build or anything, but my general setup for those sets is something like this: Tier-1: Superior Mark of Supremacy (aura + one other, usually acc/dmg), Superior Command of the Mastermind (aura + 3 other pieces to aim for 70+ acc, 80+ dmg, 70+ end) Tier-2: Superior Mark of Supremacy (2 parts), 2 auras (doesn't matter which), 2 parts either Blood Mandate or Sovereignty (aim is for 70+ acc, 80+ dmg, 70+ end) Tier-3: Superior Mark of Supremacy (2 parts), 2 auras (doesn't matter which), 2 parts either Blood Mandate or Sovereignty (aim is for 70+ acc, 80+ dmg, 70+ end) Slotting the pets like that allows them to fight for extended durations without eating through all their end (although the new prot-bots still blow their end pretty fast, with the new attacks they have), as well as giving 40% global recharge (and for a /time build, will help out a lot towards trying to make Chrono Shift permanent if that's one of your goals). I've found that for the sets that don't have a 4th pet power, trying to work in debuff procs for the pets gets really finicky, as it drastically cuts into their offense, and the tradeoff isn't always worth it (at least to me).

I noticed this one too the other day. My first thought was "Wait, isn't he 45+? Why am I getting him at 43? Oh well." Then ran into a bunch of 45th level mobs, did the mission, and he stopped offering me more.

Kismet is actually a to-hit buff, rather than accuracy. It SAYS accuracy, but it's to-hit. Which makes it a really nice one-slot bonus. Accuracy functions on a multiple, rather than additive. To-hit is the additive. So against a +4 mob the base chance to hit is 55%. With +20% to-hit, it goes up to 75%. With 53% accuracy on top of that, you'd go to 114.5% (75% * 1.53), which caps at 95%. Mobs would have to have +20% defense (which a lot of the cimerorans have, with their shield stuff), or debuff you with -to hit to drop you below 95%. Depending on what you fight a lot, having more than enough chance to hit is a good thing. Especially for the end-game groups (Carnies, Arachnos, Cimerorans, etc), who all have +def, -to hit debuffs, or both. I've died far too often to groups of pissed-off Nemesis soldiers who suddenly gained a ton of defense, to-hit and damage when their majors dropped, and I didn't have enough acc/to-hit to compensate. 🙂