Gulbasaur

No, some of the clickies/mechanics were changed. Several that used to involve coordination now can be done by one player at a leisurely place. Things like the obelisks in the Hollows trial. The Abandoned Sewers Trial is, I think, the only one that escaped untouched. While I agree that most of the game should be soloable, the fact that some things can't theoretically be beaten by one strong player is something I miss. It takes the bite out of some of the trials.

I wish not everything was soloable. The task forces where you used to have to coordinate can now be done by a single player. It's a small thing, but that's a change I wish they'd reverted when the server went public.

I'll back this up - storm solos very well. It applies constant pressure in an area and suits a sort of hover-blaster style of play really well. Once you get Lightning Storm and Tornado you move from safely chipping away at enemy health to just wrecking things. It scales really well with knockback as you can game that for recharge, which has the downside of nuking your endurance bar.

Honestly, I'm not too surprised - I have never felt that fortunatas were particularly balanced. They have a good amount of AoE and sustain as well as having Dominate, which bypasses positional defence. Nice to see the side represented, though!

I've had a dual pistols/devices blaster and a traps/beam rifle defender. Dual Pistols is a fun set to play, although I wish there was a "we get it, you like twirling, now stop" alternative animation set. I couldn't help feel like it was a bit underpowered, though. Beam Rifle might be a bit too overtly sci-fi, but it's a very fun set to play that does a little bit of a lot. Devices has a good range of damage/utility and suits a solo blaster very well - caltrops are great and the mines are excellent for solo play. Traps is a bit of an odd set but great solo. It's a bit of a late bloomer (so arguably better on a Defender for solo play because you get several key power much earlier if you're playing slowly and pausing XP), Force Field Generator is amazing because it gives you a lot of defence and mez protection at level 8, although it does occasionally get lost and you can outrun it if you're not careful. Poison trap also lets you fight AVs more efficiently because of how hard it debuffs regen. Defenders also get a damage buff playing solo or in small groups, so they're more viable than they seem whereas Corruptors are pretty linear in their damage. If it were me, I'd go for a traps/something defender and proc out the secondary for damage just because of how much sooner you get the key traps/ powers, which is important if you're slow-road levelling.

Oh, it definitely has its uses, but I just don't like it. Storm/water, if you're abusing recharge, haemorrhages endurance so it's another toggle I can live without. There's also the visual noise issue that storm and water are already guilty of. My brother actually plays a /storm corruptor and I do hang out in his hurricane often enough.

Try /macro PA "powexec_name Phantom Army$$local Oh look, a Phantom Army!" OR for an image (no timer, though) /macro_image "Illusions_PhantomArmy" "Phantom Army" "powexec_name Phantom Army$$local Oh look, a Phantom Army!" You ca replace powexec_name with things like powexec_location target (if you want it to drop on a target) and then replace Oh Look, a Phantom Army! with something less cool.

Worm, a really, really good free superhero novel (seriously, it's outstanding) has a few shoutouts in the power classifications - terms like blaster and brute are used directly in terms of classifications. Master is basically a mastermind. It also uses the terms hero, villain and rogue in more-or-less the same way. It might be that they're all drinking from the same reference pool, but I think the start of the novel was at least inspired by CoH. It's it own thing, and I really recommend it to anyone who likes doorstopper fiction... it's very long.

That's good of you to say, @NetWraith I do try to plug it every now and again but I don't want to be annoying about it. Any feedback is always welcome - I've definitely missed a few things out that are worth doing. I've also got a Redside guide here:

Hope you enjoy it! There is a bit of a lull at about level 11/12 because the Hollows has unusual level boundaries for contacts, but I actually reran it recently, enjoyed myself and found it easy to pull teams together from the LFG. Have fun!

Generally, use ones that drop or ones that are cheap until about level 22. At 22, go to the University and work through the tutorial mission there, it teaches you the basics. Crafted standard invention origin enhancements at 22 will generally last you until level 50 because they scale nicely. You need a crafting table (the universities all have them, as well as a few other places) and a recipe. You can get recipe drops from playing, or you can buy them. You'll also need the ingredients, which also drop or can be bought from the auction house. Generally, when you can afford them. Personally, I prefer to buy them off the auction house for two reasons: they come attuned, which means their levels scale automatically; and I am lazy. There are some "special" enhancements that give you a flat effect, like the two that give you 3% defence, of the perfomance shifter one that gives you extra endurance - I'd prioritise those over getting set bonuses first because they give you a lot of bang for your buck.

I had a lot of fun with water blast - it's a very defensive powerset, having a lot of soft-control, reasonably good damage and a self-heal. It's more rounded than sonic and can take a lot more procs, meaning you do more damage overall. Sonic is a fantastic damage multiplier on teams, but I think it's a bit mediocre solo. Radiation emission is the traditional "solo anything" powerset, having one of every single debuff in the game, but poison is also worth looking at because of the sheer strength of its debuffs. Time is also very good solo.

I think Psi damage was always meant to be "different", hence the non-positional psi attacks. There's also the slightly off fact that there are two clear effect sets for psi purple woowoo blasts and white rings -maybe they changed their mind? Maybe they made two sets independently? I suspect early on that psi damage was meant to be endgame/elite damage but I have nothing to confirm that. In early game powersets, psi resistance was one of the harder ones to build up. I think toxic damage was originally untyped damage, but I could be wrong. Toxic resistance is also attached to a lot of early game heals, so it also worked differently to s/l/e/n/f/c damage. Basically, they're "miscellaneous".

Fortunata main... I can scrap, blast, mez, stealth, survive and buff without dipping into the pools... and Presence makes me into a viable tank. I had a mind controller back on Live. It's like that but with knives for hands and it's glorious.

I just played with this a bit and it's a vast improvement, without being overpowered. Thanks!

You'd never make it in Arachnos with an attitude like that. Use the tools available to you. Influence, infamy and information all buy you an advantage. Few worlds were dominated on the flight back from the hospital.

My one wish is the ability to crit at range, just because crits on psi wail would be absurd. That and the ability to edit my knifehands into the energy melee blobs. I like the blobs.

I can mystic fly slightly faster now and the Recall Friend that isn't called Recall Friend anymore feels much smoother, so I am not complaining.

Some support powersets really don't benefit you solo. Debuff sets tend to solo well. Time, Dark and Rad are excellent solo-friendly sets. Time can tank quite reliably and Rad is historically the "punch above your weight" support set - illusion/rad is still recommended as a "solo anything" set. Dark does good debuffage, a pet that does more debuff and also has a huge heal. If you compare that to a very team-focussed set like Empathy, Sonic or Force Fields, there's a big difference in solo-ability. They can do it, but a lot of their value is in bolstering teammates. Kinetics starts off with a very strong heal and a damage buff/debuff but the mid tiers are focussed on utility or teammate buffs, so a solo kineticist can struggle to level (from experience - my first character was psi/kin before the Defender inherent was a thing). Poison is great against single targets, but the small AoE means that spread-out groups can be really hard to go up against.

I play pretty much daily and have a nice guild I do events with. Looking forward to the expansion!

Defenders can build up defence like it's nothing. I've seen both corruptors and defenders tank really capably, although it depends a lot on the powerset.

Sadly, this is what Batwoman must be doing because DC basically forgot she existed after a really strong launch into Rebirth. She's probably there with Renee Montoya and Midnighter (who's an affiliate of Dick Grayson, so sort of counts) and other DC/Extended Batfamily characters who have been given short runs but then sent back to whatever island they keep their "we'll give them their own publication, win an award for representation, then cancel it" characters (Lesbos, presumably). Seriously, the Batwoman and early Rebirth Detective Comics were excellent and the 2016 Midnighter and Apollo was one of the best short runs of in the past five years. It's like there's something connecting these characters that keeps them out of the main storylines recently. What could it be? Grumbles in homosexual.

Absolutely this - some people love min-maxing every aspect of their character and some don't. I vastly prefer the smoothness of 5e, although some of the silly builds you could do in 3.5e were very fun. 5e has problems (I find it doesn't have a lot going for it in terms of non-combat stuff), but you 3/3.5 had game balance you could break with a toothpick. FATE is amazingly newbie-friendly and I really recommend giving that a try at some point. It has quite a different flow than D&D does and I think I've become better at one by playing the other. It's an excellent game system for running pulp fiction or saturday morning cartoons type games. Don't Rest Your Head is probably the other system I know well and that is fun but absurdly hard to balance as characters are either invincible or rapidly spiralling into madness with no middle steps.

Hmm. Dick completely outgrew his sidekick status. The Nightwing/Greyson stuff is really good. Supergroup mate you used to play with a lot but haven't seen for a while. Jason went vigilante and is more a coalition mate. He's been in a different supergroup for a while. Tim, I'd argue, doesn't have the same level of definition (his shtick is being clever and, formerly, being dead, and that's hard to write well). I'd argue that for a while he was actually a B-character in Steph's story arcs, but he is back now. Damian is either awful or fantastic, depending on the writer. Good day: sidekick. Bad day: Flambette Steph, whose tenure as a Robin is somewhat debatable because continuity was all over the place even before the flashpoint/rebirth thing... barely even a mission escort at the moment.

It's the optional introduction to Curse of Strahd that can also be run as an independent module. It's a lore-light taster of the main campaign that sets the tone and introduces the ideas without fully going into it. It's definitely well done, although I'd look for how other people adapt it as it can be brutal at the end. It's basically a horror module (as is CoS generally), but, I mean... it's D&D so you either lean into the silliness or you don't. We ended up not really doing the main campaign because of the way we're doing it - we have a main DM and I pick up the ropes with a second mini campaign when he needs a few sessions off, which lends itself to dungeon crawling more than something complex like CoS. We then went onto The Barber of Silverymoon as our next "intermission" and that was a lot of fun too, although there a few things from the module I had to fudge to make it work. I think a staircase is missing from the map, leading to things getting a bit confusing.