Gulbasaur

I ran Death House last year to give our DM a break - it's a nice module for someone to start off in, although the end is a bit chaotic if your don't want to be a killer DM. My advice is to lean into the Scooby-Doo aspect of it and just enjoy the ride. It's an incredibly well written module for people who like exploration and roleplay. My party were a four-piece girl band (each had a level in bard) and they all had roleplay prompts to work towards. It was one of the most fun one-shot campaigns I've ever done. (And the characters had a sequel the next time the DM needed a break.)

I got a dark/dark corruptor. Not my favourite, but it certainly works. If something like kin/sonic is your "dps go brr" combo, dark/dark is its "everyone is invincible" cousin. The heal is massive, you have an AoE rez (if you have good timing, you can use it to self-rez and bounce back up) and you debuff ToHit so hard that you rarely need to use either. Dark's ToHit debuffs make it very good at soloing - things just don't hit you very often, which means things like mezzes are less of an issue. You can be fairly blasé about defensive skills. Defenders actually get a damage buff when soloing, meaning that if you plan to solo you could do a lot worse. The cones will either bother you or they won't. There's no real synergy between the cones so stand back a bit and hope for the best. Dark Servant is a bit of an odd power for a support set, but it's a useful one. It more or less duplicates a lot of your support/debuff powers, so you basically get all of the good stuff twice. One thing to note is that at endgame, -ToHit is of limited use because of the obsession with the defence cap and the sheer number of ways of boosting defence. In those cases, you'll mostly be applying -RES, -DMG and -regen and keeping the heals pumping out, with the occasional group resurrection.

First of all do do you need the Fighting power pool? Widows have scaling damage resists that don't show up in the build planner so are sturdier than they appear - as your health goes down, you resists go up. It's like the Reactive Defences IO, but much better and you get it twice. From another post, to illustrate: (CT:O should say CT:D) At 50% health, you'll be getting about 20% global resists from CT:D and Foresight together (with a further 5% from Reactive Defences). This is from my blood fortunado build - it's worth reading that whole thread as there is a lot of good advice, even if most of it leans towards fortunatas. Speaking of which, having played both I found Night Widows to play like old-style stalkers, whereas Fortunatas are definitely more their own thing, playing somewhere between a dominator and a scrapper. Do have a look at fortunata builds - they trade out some of the big-hitting melee attacks for a lot of utility, notably holds and confuses. You're slightly limited by the slim choice of "humans with training" pool powers, I realise. Canonically, all Soldiers of Arachnos and Widows are psychic (SoA's basically brainwash themselves), but you could look into the Experimentation power pool for buffs, or the medicine pool (high defence means you rarely get interrupted). Welcome to Arachnos!

Ah, sorry - I though I read it off mids but I also wasn't looking very hard (and mids isn't 100% true-to-game). Thanks. There's also the point that Defenders get FS much earlier than Corruptors, and it exemplars lower still. I think people overlook that. It really depends on what the goal of the build is - skip early levels and spend the whole time running Council radio missions or work your way up slowly with story arcs and task forces? Personally, I don't think they work that well together - kinetics favours being up close and personal (or at least mid-range) and sonic works best when you can stand back to use the cones. You're right about FS effectively making you hit the damage ceiling on either. Dark or Rad (or even sonic) might be better support sets to pair with sonic blast than kinetics. Traps can do some pretty crazy things and poison is pretty sick (pardon the pun) in the right hands.

Sonic blast is a reasonably fun set with a focus on -res as a secondary effect. There's also a cone sleep power, which is very useful solo. A bit of a downside of sonic is arguably that it's quite hard to add damage procs tp, meaning it can be hard to make your own and eke extra damage out of. I'd say the effects are also a bit divisive - you'll love it or hate it. Kin/sonic on a defender is a very strong damage multiplier for teams. Sonic from the stacking resistance debuff and kinetics from the +DMG buffs, endurance management and recharge powers. The standard -res debuff is 20%. Kinetics is a good offensive all-rounder with a strong AoE heal and an endurance heal power as well as getting some major player powers earlier than corruptors. Sonic/kin on a corruptor does more of the same, but the buffs and debuffs aren't as strong. The standard debuff is 17.3%. If you're in a fast-moving group with large enemy spawns and fulcrum shift firing off every time it's up, it may not make too much of a difference if you're constantly up against the damage, but you lose about 20% of the buff value of kinetics. The defender vs corruptor thing can usually be summarised as "well, it depends". Strictly speaking, defenders are stronger on the buff/debuff side. Blaster debuffs are a modest 13%, but obviously have a higher damage scale. tldr: Play a blaster if you want to play a blaster. A defender is stronger support than a corruptor, but if you're hitting the damage cap then it doesn't make too much of a difference.

I have run it a few times and filled up a team from the LFG easily. I'd barely even call it a raid, it's just a giant monster with extra steps. A team of eight can take it down without flinching. My advice: stick it in the LFG. People will come to get the badge if nothing else as it's a slightly rare one.

Okay, so the earliest I can find directly calling the Rogue Isles "red side" is on the March 2008 City of Heroes Podcast. I've had a rummage through the old forums, but the Wayback Machine doesn't really like forum software and a lot of the topics haven't actually been archived, or not in a way that doesn't involve being on exactly the right version of the archive that it needs. There isn't much for "Kings row best row" or variants that I can find, either.

This post might help you - Crabberminds don't really play like masterminds because you have no control over the pets and is mostly viable by abusing recharge, so be prepared to drop a lot of inf onto the build. I think the line for permanent pets is 190% recharge or thereabouts. You can get 90 from perma Hasten + Mental Training, so you've "just" got to make up a hundred elsewhere. They also don't get any pets until level 35, which is also worth knowing about. Until then, they play sort of like sentinels. Also note that up until level 24's forced respec, you'll play like a somewhat middle of the road corruptor. SoAs are tanky, having very high defence, some of which they share with allies and pets. Team Tactics: Maneuvers provides a fairly silly 10% defence, unslotted. They also do a lot of AoE damage, but can struggle a bit against single targets if their pets are off doing other things. Edit: SoAs have a lot of debuff, which means they attract aggro reasonably well. Nowhere near tanker levels, but okay. It's probably worth investing in the power pool AoE taunt if you want to do actual tanking. Welcome to Arachnos!

The future of this incredibly niche bit of information depends on you provided your memory of events is correct!

I am both a historian (well, doing a history MA) and a linguist (from a background in historical linguistics with some training in corpus searches) so this should be something I should be able to find. Now, as a historian I know that what we can access is on a fraction of what was archived and what was archived is only a fraction of what was recorded and what was recorded is only a fraction of what actually took place... Some things are just lost to time. For example, we do not have any access to any of the ingame chat logs, the roleplay sagas that took place at the feet of the statue of Galaxy Girl on Union or the bizarre nonsense that took place on coalition chat. For things to be found, they usually have to be archived and maintained in a readable format - something the online world is genuinely quite bad at. It's likely that chat logs etc just do not exist at all but if there is some drive somewhere in NCSoft Towers (or someone's attic) then it's certainly not accessible to us. The old forums are on the Internet Archive, albeit in a sort of piecemeal way - links often don't work and the Search function certainly doesn't (even when I can find a Search page that opens, it asks for a six-digit code from an image that fails to load, probably linked to a server that hasn't been switched on in nine years so I doubt the functionality is there). The earliest dated reference I can find online referring to redside at all is this Reddit thread, which is early but early enough and not contextually specific enough. Using Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. "Redside: Best side" was a unique entry until you posted this. It now has two results. Some playing with spacing and terms shows a few variants on it included occasional references to League of Legends (a game, as far as I can tell, people play because they hate it) and AMD (presumably Intel is not-redside in this analogy). There was one reference that was clearly related to City of Heroes/Villains, dating from some time after 2010 (based on other games named in the thread). Twitter was useless, and a search of more period-appropriate social media led me to the late, great Robotech_Master's Livejournal, written shortly before his untimely death. The GameFAQs forum was interesting (and nostalgic) but didn't turn up much of use. It tried to find early gamplay footage, but that led to a dead end. DeviantArt was fun, but not helpful. I'm stumped. League of Legends came out in 2009, so it's conceivable that it appeared in that community and was adopted as a saying by our villainous community members, but that's not conclusive. I can't find any textual evidence of it being used before 2010 in reference to CoX. If someone has a timestamped copy of the chat logs (which I'm sure they shouldn't have), I could do a corpus search of it and try to get something earlier.

So they still try to get out of the patch that follows them? That's all I want. It's my "Look, I'll deal with you in a bit so just go on a little jog or something" power for when I pull one too many bosses on my defender.

That's a shame because that was why I take it - it's a great power for when you're getting overwhelmed. Being able to tell enemies to just bugger off for a bit is very useful if you're soloing or in small groups. It's a very rare crowd control power (it makes a crowd disperse - really powerful if you're squishy) available to anyone. It doesn't fit in the "AoE tank and spank" meta, but surely not every power needs to? It was a unique power among the pools and seeing this loss in utility is a shame.

For reference, it's the ones from mind control (thin white rings effect) or illusion control (sparkly flash effect). Purple psi blasts follow positional defence rules. I'd echo Omega Force's advice, though: purple and orange inspirations cover a multitude of sins. You can also get your psi resistance up pretty high with a few special IOs if you want to be proactive rather than reactive, though.

This sent me down a wonderful internet rabbit hole. Thank you! Also, brutes are scrapperlock: the archetype and I think their inherent discourages antisocial play, making it a poor choice for a first character. Good players outnumber bad ones, though, it's just that a bad tank can often have a worse consequence than bad DPS and brutes are a tanking archetype.

I love that Everlasting has a roleplay focus, and I don't even particularly roleplay. It adds a layer of fun having a clown who only communicates in HONKs and I've met an in-character dog in a mecha suit. In-character play adds such a nice amount of silliness to the game and I'd be put off if all servers were scooped in together as I fear the RPers would be lost in the noise. Having a discussion about whether lost limbs due to half-arsed teleportation is covered by insurance policies is the sort of magic I feel would be lost if the servers were unified. I teamed with him once or twice - definitely started in Pocket D... we both went "Hey, I've read your guides!" and that was a nice moment. A gentleman.

That's what I meant - door-sitters and AFK-ers. I like lowbies coming along for the ride, but if they don't say anything and just door sit then I don't really have time for that. I regularly run level 50 tip missions in Atlas Park specifically to help lowbies so they have an option other than running DFB for a quick boost. Also, it's fun because keeping them all upright becomes a mini-game of its own.

I disagree on both your first two points - I've rarely teamed with AFKers or incompetent people while levelling. I find it can happen a bit at top levels. You get what you give with the LFG - if you say "not a farm" then you don't get XP leeches. Scrappers and brutes who can't take the heat are a bit of a recurring problem at low levels, but I've never encoutered anyone I'd call incompetent. Redside teams are easy to get together on Everlasting, which has always had one of the better villain ratios. "Redside missions team: all welcome" usually gets a little squad together. Goldside is actually not that hard to get people to join you for because of its rarity (particularly past about level 5 as I think everyone has started and stopped Goldside). Once you get to the second zone, it's very easy to put a team together. Getting them to Praetoria can be a bit tricky if they don't know how.

I've been levelling a warshade recently and there seems to be less awareness that quantums are a genuine risk to Kheldians. I've been splatted by more quantums on HC than I think I ever did on live. That said, back in the bad old days they did unresistable damage...

At the moment, Nova has a duplication of existing powers at a higher damage scale, plus flight. The increased end recharge matches the endurance cost, so that's negligible. I thought it would be good to keep the positive aspects (higher damage scale, ToHit buff, flight) but mitigate the thin spread of slots. I have to say I didn't put a huge amount of thought into this, but I thought removing duplicates would make things easier on builds, not harder. Anyway, open to feedback on the idea.

Consolidate the Blast, Bolt, Detonation, Scatter and Emanation powers on Nova and the human forms so that they can either be picked as a human power or as part of the Nova toolkit to help with the slot drought! Alternatively, make it so you have to pick the power, but it's shared between the two forms - this would add progression to the forms and prevent the limited slotting for endgame builds.

I'd definitely give it a go - I'm all for added ways to get the game more interesting! What I'd really like is semi-random enemy buffs/player debuffs. I really like how GW2 uses instabilities in fractals - basically, there's a list of difficulty modifiers and 1-3 are added onto the instance. They can be simple things like "Players are smaller and have 30% less health, but move 25% faster" or "Players will be pushed away from one another" but there are also horrible ones like "Enemies explode upon dying if not stunned. Stunned enemies apply protection and stability to nearby allies.".

I think, level for level, Kheldians get early and mid-level advantage. In the teens, Nova is very strong. In the twenties, Dwarf form is one of the stronger resist builds until you hit the T8s. There's a brief window at about level 40 when Kheldians get a second wind allowing them to blast and tank... but then they sort of drop off. I don't think they should be on a par with blasters, but also there's a secondary problem there that blasters aren't anywhere near the highest DPS class, despite nominally being a pure DPS build. I think the "ranged advantage" idea was exaggerated in the original planning phase, partly because tanking is so strong and partly because a lot of buffs are in melee or mid range.

My point was more that as character build progression is largely build from set bonuses, they are at a disadvantage because they have something like ten extra powers to deal with so slots are often quite thinly spread. Kheldians remain stupidly good fun to play, but they plateau at about the same place that other AT's begin to broaden what they can do. They're very good for flashbacks, though. The rest was all "if I were designing the game from scratch" ideas. I still enjoy it and am less salty than my post implies.

Sorry to bump an old thread, but does anyone have any data on the empowered Brawl from the fighting pool?

I said bad tanks, not bad players. Brutes are fun, but it's easy for forget that sidekicked up teammates probably can't cope with the two +4 bosses you left behind after jumping into a new group causing the aggro cap to overflow.