Gulbasaur

I actually disagree here - the VEATs are generally accepted as very good generalists. Three our of four VEAT post-24 builds are basically "what if you got your patron pools fifteen level earlier?". My fortunata is probably the character I feel most powerful on. Night Widows are the only one that I really think needs looking at, because it has the middling damage but no extra tricks to make up for it - fortunatas have ranged damage and control, crabs are sort of armoured masterminds and banes are basically ranged tanks.

Redside content is better than early blueside content, but less interesting than later blueside content. You also swing between working for to improve your station in a merciless world and chaotic dickbag, often with no warning. The Broker system forces you to grind to access story arcs - which is a major reason for me. To access the better content, you MUST go through arbitrary filler. That was a terrible design choice, in my opinion. Yes, you can do much of it via flashbacks, but it makes it quite disjointed from a storytelling point of view as you constantly hop between different storylines, whereas blueside tends to be more concentrated.

Mandatory butt capes for everyone ❤️

This is part of the reason why I play a lot of exemplared stuff. If I can take a load of single-digit teammates into Dark Astoria, run it on +3x8 and still thrive, then I think possibly I'm a bit too powerful. I can tank Mot and Romulus, maintaining aggro, on my fortunata. Even my defender has got to the stage that I can pretty much run into a group of enemies without any fear and I'm not even trying to build it for survivability. There's also a bit too much focus on end-game builds, which overlooks the fact that there isn't a huge amount of end-game content - you need to be able to exemplar if you want a decent range of activity, which means you need to be able to play without a functionally invincible tank and defence and endurance on tap. Resistance debuffs are always useful. Defence debuff much less so at 50 as so many people have tactics running that a team can end up with +100% ToHit by accident. Debuff toggles have a huge amount of use if you don't limit yourself to over-easy end game play.

I'm not entirely disagreeing with you either - peacebringers have been left behind the the power creep meta. I'd love to see them get a bit of a buff to allow them to be more competitive as they definitely peak early and plateau hard.

Possibly since the last patch, Irradiated Ground is doing Fire damage, instead of Toxic as described in the power tooltip. Observed on both Tanker and Brute powersets. First reported here.

You've made a couple of mistakes in your maths - easily done with a complex archetype with a complex inherent - and I think you've misunderstood the premise of my statement. Peacebringers can exceed blasters in damage, but they don't overall at end game. I didn't make that claim. I'm going to ignore the at-cap numbers, because they're not realistic of actual, consistent gameplay, being only available from level 32 and almost entirely dependent on a capable kinetics defender getting there before the nukes go off with both the peacebringer and blaster in melee range and that's not something you can predict will happen on every team. The inherent also gives a 10% bonus to damage for every tanker, defender, corruptor or mastermind, so let's be conservative and say there are two on my team (our above-mentioned kinetics defender and, oh, let's stay a stormie), giving me 20% of that 40 damage base - bringing us to 66.06. I mean it's slightly higher but also we're living in an ATO-ready world, so let's drop in Form Empowerment bringing us up to 69 damage (nice). If they've hit 50 and are using the superior version, that's 71. Not a huge difference, but in the average levelling team, blast-for-blast, a Kheldian in Nova form comes out on top by a margin of about 10%. The more support archetypes on the team, the higher the damage output - if you have, five or six of the damage bonus ATs, that's a 50 or 60% bonus, far above what Defiance can achieve. Their version of Build Up also has an effect over time giving them another 29%, but I've left that off. I've also left off the stacking Defiance bonuses that a blaster get because they're less predictable but a 10% Defiance bonus would bring the blaster version up to about 68 or 69 - pretty similar to the peacebringer, really. I'm not claiming that peacebringers do more damage than blasters full stop - I said they can out-damage blasters and that's because they can, although this golden age only lasts until about level 30 or so when nukes become more important and blasters have all their T7 and T8s to play with. It's similar with Dwarf form, really. In the 20s, without set bonuses, it's one of the sturdiest tanks out there, partly because they also get a passive damage resistance bonus from teaming inflating their large resists further, but they get outpaced in the mid-30s and certainly by level 40. If you exclusively play at level 50, that's another matter - but plenty of people don't and level scaling is built right into the core of the game. I'm not stating that peacebringers are this secret force of untapped power - I'm saying they are more competitive than you're giving them credit for, partly because you've omitted most of their inherent damage bonuses and partly because you're assuming an idea team situation (full damage bonus) and partly because you've taken my "can" as "always do". If you take them in isolation and are assuming that they're running with fulcrum shift at full capacity at all times, then obviously a blaster comes out on top. If you're relating it to typical levelling gameplay in small teams, there is much less between them than first appears to be the case. Anyway, give peace(bringers) a chance. They're excellent to level with, although they struggle to compete with end-game builds because those builds often replicate a lot of what made peacebringers unique. They exemplar very well and can under some circumstances, out-damage a blaster. The damage bonuses are situational, but so is being at the damage bonus cap at all times.

Do you have Auto/always-on powers hidden? For whatever reason, the power only shows up if you can see auto powers. If that's on, you should see a bright pink icon appear. The other way to track it would be to use the attributes panel and right click on the stats it raises (damage bonus and tohit) and track them in the little box that appears.

Yes! I loved that mechanic - it made blasters feel quite unique to play. I actually preferred it to the current mechanic. I'd love the SoA's to have a chance to proc Hide, as they have a weaker version of stalker crit mechanics. I think the epic archetypes need a bit of modernising generally (especially my poor peacebringer... I remember when they were genuinely something unique and valuable), but widows are just a complete mess (they don't even have the unique visuals the other EATs have) and a chance to hide proc would give Night Widow builds a lot more viability as they're primarily in melee. Fortunatas generally make the mess work, but Night Widows are basically pre-buff stalkers without any of the things that make stalkers great.

Comparing now to my first peacebringer, back before City of Villains was even out... they were definitely casualties in the Power Creep Wars. Back in the early days, the fact that they could run into a group, nuke everyone twice and then bang on some 85% resists was extremely valuable. I remember arguing with someone that I should pull a group of mobs and not the blaster because I would actually survive it. Everyone was more fragile back then. In Going Rogue, brutes took over their place as secondary tanks and IO set bonuses make everyone into a tank mage so their survivability had no added value. They had a niche that they filled really well and then the game invited everyone into it. They can still tank well enough and their damage output on the right team is comparable to a blaster (and can exceed it with Nova form). Their inherent gives them some quite large bonuses from teaming, so they're somewhat unpredictable in actual gameplay because you don't really know how powerful you'll be until you've teamed up. I think one thing that really holds them back is how limited the forms feel after about level 30 - everyone else is getting their T7+ attacks and nova hasn't had anything new since level six. They are very fun to play, though.

Honestly, City of Heroes is probably the reason I read comics now. I didn't read them at all back in the day... and now I have a standing order at my local comic book shop.

I'm about 50-50 on this. I love Peacebringers, but sadly they were the first casualties in the power creep arms race. In the early days of Live (we're talking pre-CoV here), their versatility brought genuine value to teams and their visual effects are easily my favourite in the whole game. My tanker literally started as "what can I make look like a peacebringer?" and oddly dark/dark with Soul Noir effects is really close. I've just rolled a Praetorian kheld-a-like scrapper who I might reroll as a stalker. My current storm/water defender came about because someone said storm does lot of -res and someone else said it needs a lot of recharge and water is thematically appropriate and a very proc-friendly (for recharge and endurance). My costume process was "I don't know, a wizard?" and then Storm Lantern was born. My Duchess of Droids literally came about because I wanted an old woman with a cigar hanging out of her mouth in a tweed jacket and the robots seemed the most feasible accessory.

I have a few heavily "Inspired By X" characters. They're not quite Clawverine, Eye-clops, Feline Female or the Incredible Bulk, but I've definitely cribbed a little bit from character design over the years in homage to characters I think are great for one way or another. Mother Blight, my rad/rad brute, is quite heavily influenced by the visual design of Mother Panic (a great little DC short run that sits on the extreme edge of the Bat-family - gets a little bit edgelord in places, but the rest is so good you forgive it). Corona Borealis, my dark/dark tanker, is basically DC's Apollo in backstory, but as an imitation Kheldian instead of an imitation Kryptonian. (Also, you should read the 2016 Midnighter and Apollo; it's a love story where someone punches a train golem and someone else headbutts a bullet into a demon's head and also talks a bit about the morality of super-heroics as well as being the most fan-service thing I've ever read without it detracting from the plot). I've done as many of the effects (soul noir is unexpectedly good in bright colours) and auras (glowy fists and eyes) as I can to be as Kheld-a-like as possible. Doctor Fortune, my fortunado, is a homage to 90s X-Men with spandex and a trench coat. (His doctorate in is architecture - all Paragon City architects are secretly working for Arachnos, which explains their counter-intuitive layouts.) So... whose design has influenced your design?

If you don't really read online guides and just go with what the game tells you... yes. You probably won't really have a decent amount of inf until you hit 50 and have been running incarnate content for a while. On a L50 , an hour of farting about with radios and tip missions with some lowbies in tow will get me about 5mil inf, give or take, from memory. The LFG is heavily geared towards powerlevelling (bleh) and task forces (woo) and if you go in as a newbie and get told to grab an XP boost and go and run some radios, that's what you'll do. I've played with people who are told that the best way to play is to go in and farm because it gets you to 50 quickly and gets you a lot of inf, leading to players who have a highly monotonous experience and then when they get coaxed out into the "real" game find it hard to survive because not every single enemy only does fire damage and how do I get to King's Row? Nowhere in-game does it really indicate that merits = £$€infdubloons. That's a thing you find out from other players, by asking. I've seen it happen a few times - I've helped more than a few newbies get started and told them that merits are a good way of starting up if you don't want to farm (and I don't want to farm). City of Heroes has a real problem with tutorials and the lack of them - the Mr Graves/Twinshot missions give you an incomplete tutorial, but if you miss them, which you can do because there is no indication that they're the tutorial, then you're left with no real idea of what to do. It's all word of mouth and sometimes those mouths aren't giving good advice.

That was the exact second when I realised why people often say redside missions have better writing. There's a sort of audacious silliness to a lot of redside content that I really enjoy. Early blueside story arcs often felt like filler, while early redside missions played like Saturday morning cartoons.

The best mindset shift I can recommend for DPS moving to support sets is to view it like this. You are responsible for the highest DPS in the game, but you outsource it to others. If a buff/debuff player goes down, the whole thing drops. Support aggressively. Tell people they're miles away from the debuffs. Tell people that you did not give them your permission to be defeated. Deny them the opportunity to fail. If you've got a scrapper off licking the wallpaper or something, reel them back by pointing out that their DPS will be much higher if they stay in the big chaotic particle effects cloud. I've been levelling a storm/water defender and I can do fairly substantial damage to a group of enemies over time. I can lock enemies down like a controller and nuke like a blaster. DPS players add value. Support players multiply it. I also make it very clear that my only heal is Vengeance, so if they go down at least their corpse will be useful. That usually drives the point home.

Sonic is let down by its limited proc opportunities, so your single-target damage might feel a bit flat solo. However, you end up doing a substantial amount of -res in your normal attack chain, which will passively increase your teammates' DPS, which generally more than makes up for the extra damage.

Honestly, it worked. I will remember it. "I tested this bug and YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT I FOUND"

My build is available here, along with a thread containing a few other builds and playstyle advice. It's a very strong generalist that can solo AVs and +4x8 content, although I mostly play in teams nowadays. Decent melee, decent range, decent control, good survival.

I respecced out of it - Hold is only one kind of mezz and I found myself stunned, slept or feared enough that I decided it was less useful than I though it would be. As with many things in City of Heroes, raising your defence stats is probably a better use of a power slot.

*Mutters gently under his breath, gesticulating vaguely at the post he did in the bug report forum six months ago* Amazing work as always Bopper. It's been a pleasure collaborating with you on this and glad it's been picked up by the dev team this time.

I wouldn't even say it's much slower - the focus on stability and back-end stuff has been pretty steady for the number of people involved. New story content, for example, is contingent on having volunteers who can write and code at a level of quality that's expected in the game - the new arcs released were excellent, but that's because they were written by an experienced game writer who volunteered their time. Also, a lot of the "publicised" things have been single-dev passion projects that aren't really available on any of the large servers at the moment. Several have been released to OuroDev, meaning they can go upstream to Homecoming an the like, but Homecoming isn't really "behind" in any real sense. There's a certain amount of reality checking that needs to go on: Thunderspy has mostly been balance updates and a rewiggling of how story arcs work so they're accessible at most levels. They do have extra costume pieces unlocked. Their quality standards are pretty high, although I personally think their strategy of only balancing the game around standard enhancements is just causing a different kind of power creep. Rebirth implemented, then had to remove, their new archetype because it caused problems and put a huge strain on the dev(s) working on it. They're still waiting to release a "big" update but want to get everything working seamlessly together before they do. Cake Evolution is "bleeding edge" in terms of development, but also they have parts of the costume editor that "may compromise shard integrity", to quote their discord directly. Also, last Tuesday they had to delete every character on the server for stability reasons because of a botched update. They have partially ported sentinels over, but released them in incomplete form. I think they also have the extra costume stuff, but I'm not sure. Homecoming has sentinels, new story arcs and unique IOs as well as a very steady stream of focused, tested balance patches. The servers are all in a fairly similar place in terms of new content. Rebirth has slowed down a bit (because they want to be sure different parts work together before releasing, after previous mistakes). Thunderspy has implemented the new costume items and Cake Evolution seems to be in a perpetual alpha state with new things being tried out a lot, but as I said there are currently costume options that might cause a server crash, so it's not going perfectly. Homecoming has focused heavily on stability and balance, although it is still the only server to have successfully had new story arcs in-game, as far as I'm aware. In the nicest possible way, they're all doing what they can but in different directions.

Yeah I... Oh. This is the bones of it. It's not optimised for solo play at all and I have never been a "softcap or gtfo" player because I think it's enormously overrated. I'm sure it could be improved, but it's fun and it does the job. Freezing Rain and Whirlpool are in almost perfect sync. Hasten isn't feasible without some fairly extreme measures to deal with endurance management, which is why 40-50 is bacially all endurance-focussed, but when it's up and running it's fabulous.

They're both broad-spectrum debuff sets with a few buffs thrown in for good measure and, frankly, they're both pretty decent. Time has a few clunky mechanics with the Delayed mechanic but is a very solid set all round, with a good mix of buffs, debuffs and a heal. It's hard to go wrong with time as it has a decent ToHit debuff aura, a heal and with defence added in later on. Rad is a very potent debuff set with one (fine) heal and one (great) buff. It strongly favours tightly clustered enemies and has a bit of a set up for the toggles, but once enemies are in the debuff field, they're not walking out again. I ran a something/rad MM for a bit but found it actually a bit overpowered for chomping through missions with. It also has a number of powers that are, frankly, very safe to skip over and is a very early blooming power set, so it's strong from the get go and lends itself well to power pools. Rad it notable for, I think, being able to use every single kind of debuff the game has. Rad/ defenders were known in the days before City of Villains as being able to solo pretty much anything given enough time. I'd say time is a set that needs to be played more actively, whereas rad basically has you use three debuff powers at the start of a fight and then you go into combat. They're both very strong sets.

That actually makes me want to play it. Why? Chaos. Storm's a bit of a late-bloomer, but good golly is it excellent at doing what it does. The knockdown and slow in Freezing Rain is so powerful it's almost a hold. Summon a happy little cloud and gently slot tornado for knockdown and you've got a very strong control set hidden in the support category. The -res in Freezing Rain helps you chomp through enemies very quickly and the whole set responds hugely to recharge. Chaos is fun.