Extor Prime

Ill/Cold is best without a doubt.

You also must name your Phantasm "The World" and have a macro for putting "ZA WARUDO!!" into local channel. Your costume colors also must prominently feature yellow and green. Otherwise you just aren't doing it right.

Thanks for the backstory. The reason why I figured the character was male is because Russian is strictly gendered (there are 3 genders and everything, including inanimate objects, has a gender). The word ulan (uhlan) is male, so it would be somewhat of a mismatch for a female character. Her name is a bit odd too, first name being VERY uncommon in Russia (particularly Soviet Union), and her last name looks more like a paternal than an actual last name. I would spell it Zinovina; unless she is meant to be of Ukranian or Polish descent perhaps? I would also use "novobranetz" rather than "novichok" for a new recruit. Good story overall though! I know you weren't asking for an opinion, but I do natively speak the language and those are things that stood out to me fairly starkly.

That was in CO, not CoX. And that's as much as I remember.

Umstvenny Ulan made me smile 🙂 He should have a gravity controller teammate called Gravitatzionny Gusar.

Malta is the "training pants" group for soloers. Its intent to teach you that the game, in fact, has the capability to punish you for charging into every spawn headlong and hoping to facetank the whole thing. And of course some characters - in fact a lot of characters - can do just that, but when your blue bar dips unexpectedly because you didn't find and prioritize the sapper, it still should (at least in theory) serve as a notice that there are special mobs out of there that can ruin your day if not prioritized. Once you learn how to account for sappers, Malta becomes ezpz.

Aggro leaking can be managed by: - Spectral Terror - Strategically placed Phantasm (even if he dies, his decoy sticks) - Something from the secondary and epic (in my case it is sleet because it causes KD, not sure what TA has).

Degen core, all day every day. Diamagnetic too I think.

Make a second account, make storage alt, an SG and an SG base. Park the storage alt near the SG portal in the zone of your choice. When in need of storage, launch the client twice and log on the storage alt in one copy and your main in the other copy. Dump the stuff on the storage alt/retrieve the stuff from the storage alt via trade (which is fairly fast). When out of space on the storage alt, shift excess stuff into SG storage. Bonus points for forgetting WTF is in SG storage, finding it one day and going "holy balls I am rich".

Titan/Bio or Rad/Bio for sure. There may be a few others.

First rule of soloing AV/GM: "there ain't nothin' a Bots/Traps MM can't kill." Just below that is Ill/Cold controller and a number of scrapper and brute combos. Start on those subforums.

Aboot illusory damage. One thing to keep in mind is that the healback constitutes only a portion of the base damage value of the power. Any damage gained from enhancements, buffs or procs is permanent. So even though those green healback numbers are positively infuriating, phantom damage powers pack a respectable punch that sticks.

End of the ITF, you most assuredly want Romulus separated from his balls.

Why yes, it was a callback to 40K (and it amuses me to no end that it took someone this long to get it); however, the following is also true: I am a pessimist and a misanthrope who lived long enough to firmly believe that the world is a terrible place filled with terrible people doing terrible things to each other. I make no apologies for it (Edgelord accusations in 3... 2... 1... LOL). In context of "hopes for 2020", while I give all the props to the HC team for soldiering on this far, I also acknowledge that they are a handful of unpaid and undoubtedly overworked enthusiasts with lives, obligations and problems far beyond CoX. And god only knows what is happening with NCSoft, who could substantially escalate said problems if they wanted to... And even if the proverbial hammer never drops, none of them will make a dime off of this shindig. It's not beyond the reasonable doubt that sooner or later the toil will take its toll. Therefore hoping for major changes, game-changing development, etc., could very well be the first step on a road to MAJOR disappointment. Do not forget also that CoX isn't the neatest-coded game out there, and reworking it without accidentally unraveling the whole damn sweater is not trivial. That's something that usually gets done with substantial compensation, not unpaid enthusiasm... Me, I'd be quite content if donations keep flowing, servers stay up, NCSoft stays in its lane, and nobody essential on the current core team says "screw it, I'm out" - at least not without properly handing the reins over to someone equally dedicated and talented. So yeah - you want hopes for 2020? There you have it. Anything beyond that is gravy and unnecessary pressure on the HC team.

CoX is just about the only MMO in existence where an orange drop can elicit a "meh" response. Took a while to adjust to that.

I don't know. In case of using a self-res as a one-slot-wonder, maybe I'm not imaginative enough, but I personally can't picture a build with 1, much less 2 "free" power picks that could not be spent on something else that does not bank on me being dead to work. Self-res powers always struck me as an ingame version of an extended warranty.

Any self-res. You can buy self-res from AH or P2W. Or you can waste a power pick on it. Choose wisely, grasshopper.

Bio is like sex and pizza: it goes with everything. Erm. I think it sounded different in my head. Oh well, you get the gist, and I'm drunk.

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

Never a sentence was ever coined that reflected the game design philosophy of CoX more precisely.

Just use threads and merits. If you get lucky to get enough shards for an alpha component by all means go for it, but don't bank on it. Unless you are building multiple alphas, savings from using the shards are fairly negligible.

Mostly flavor.

There will never be another Kil Skulz. Let it go.

Long story short it sucked for everyone except scrappers until you got Stamina (which was not inherent, you had to spend a power pick) and got your upper-tier abilities. Jack did a great job making sure that almost nobody felt particularly super for the majority of their leveling process.

Bio has taunt aura, Fire has "eek run away" aura. Enemies stick to my rad/bio scrapper like I am a tank or something. So that's a big one. Bio is a bit clicky though. It's not "set and forget" set, if you want maximum performance and survivability you have to keep an eye on your two cooldowns (AC and PA) and remember to be in appropriate adaptations depending on what is going on on the field. It's still simple, but you can't just let it do its thing and just go through your attack chain rotation.