UltimateXao

Good. Real good. Bit more difficult to use than other sets, as it's very click heavy, but unlike Regen you do get some toggles. Unlike other oddball defense sets that interact with enemies (I. E. Dark Armor) it's actually been modified properly for a ranged AT. It's also one of the few options that helps some with the anemic sustained damage of Sentinels... Mind you, if they go through with the proposed changes for Sentinels, that wont matter so much any more.

CO did a lot of things that blow CoH out of the water, stuff that the superhero genre absolutely needed. Shame they built the entire thing on top of the corpse of CoH's design, both the bad AND the good. CoH is a game that, in a lot of ways, didn't age well. There's a ton of stuff that feels incredibly dated, mostly because it IS dated (conventions that came out of more limited technology, mostly. Some design stuff, too, though). But the few things that did age well are things incredibly fundamental to making an MMO work properly. Such as allowing very easy mission coordination where everyone gets rewards, very easy team building and PUGing, especially once all the ATs were open to both sides, which fixed the cookie cutter trinity design blueside. CO's regressive design on that front is one of the two big things that actually killed the game. People DO solo in MMOs. Frequently, even. But few people solo most of the time. And most players want to team up where possible. Especially if it increases XP! CO made coordinating this a dumpster fire, and any other games in the genre should be very careful to emulate CoH instead of CO in this regard. Honestly, almost all team based games should try and emulate CoH when it comes to this. Warframe, for instance, more or less uses similar design, and it puts a PUG matchmaking queue on top of it. Back to the sad story of CO, though.. The other problem being the developer's complete and total obsession with nerfing, and the weird half baked design that was seen all across the powers and build systems. The freeform system was terrific, but it became a bane of the game because people min maxing got so many things nerfed that pretty much everyone had to min max just to get an effective character. They did start to fix this eventually, but then they brought on a developer that fancied himself a WoW dev wannabe, who started nerfing again, designing really, really broken bosses (one shot damage everywhere) and was obsessed with emulating the endgame gear grind other games have (CoH developed this problem too, if I'm being fair, but they mitigated it better). Blocking was a nice addition, but the way it worked was really clunky and half assed. It didn't stop crowd control, so the moment you let go you were instantly stunned. Enemies didn't experience blockstun or any kind of parried state, regardless of how well you timed it, so mechanically its functionality was flat. You can't "block and punish" enemy shtick attacks like you can in a proper action game. Block was functionally just a damage reduction that lasted as long as you held down the button. Bit underbaked. There was a lot of stuff in the game like this, many powers and upgrades had interesting concepts that just didn't function well or were underpowered to the point of uselessness in practice. There are these little inklings that they wanted to better integrate travel powers into combat, the fact they used no energy and auto suppressed down to something comparable to running hover or combat jumping, so there was no need to switch between travel powers constantly, it was brilliant. But they short changed what could be done with that, Superspeed had this interesting upgrade that was supposed to allow you to deliver more damage from an attack if it was executed after moving at high speed, but there was no meaningful system for building speed (it was all or nothing, like in CoH) and the ability didn't even seem to do anything (it probably did, but was so weak it was difficult to see what it was doing). ...I say all this to make a pretty basic point: The CoH relaunch seeing such success is one part legacy and nostalgia, and one part complete incompetency on the part of its competition. You can tell a similar story to the one here about CO for DCUO and probably any other bit competitor that came out. Which I actually say to make another pretty basic point: There is a vacuum in the market to capitalize on here. Anyone who wanted to make a new Superhero MMO right now would be facing virtually no modern competition. Hint hint. If Homecoming can snag the licence, and they have the talent to do it right, considering an actual CoH2 might not be a bad idea.

That massive overestimated asspull of a number aside, what I stated does nothing to contradict this idea. It was an explanation as to how efficient farming directly leads to less played sets getting more attention. Please respond with all context considered and included. Thank you. Disagree. Some of the options look quite nice. Thorns always looked cool. I like how you pivot back and forth between complaining about the effectiveness of that specific combination, to the look of Spines, by itself, to devalue it conceptually. As if that's somehow a cohesive point. Just so people wouldn't start naming off other Spines builds that have solid concepts behind them and look the part. Or so you didn't have to throw Firey Aura's FX under the bus with it. I'm not sure if you did this on purpose, but it seems kinda slimy. I'd pull out a screenshot of my Ice/Spines tanker Sno Globe, but I'm not currently on Windows unfortunately. These statistics actually show that a lot of things we thought weren't worth playing, people are playing. You said that yourself. ...Then there's others of course, that it shows are as unused as we thought. My point was popularity statistics don't actually tell you what is or isn't strong. I don't really want to go into DA, because it's a strong but hard set and I don't have recent experience with it (I used it on a few characters on live). It's not as gloomy (hah) as you think. You can manage its end adequately. But you need to... HINT HINT ...Farm up a good and moderately expensive build for it, and you're probably going to want to speed level it out of at least the first couple dozen levels. You'd be surprised how long heals hold out. There's more and more exotic damage, massive damage spikes, debuffs, etc, in high level content. ...And Empathy does more than just heal. Even if it is the main thing the set does, Empathy has strong single target buffs, including one that increases defense, and several options can help with endurance management against enemies that... Y'know... Aren't pushovers and have things like nasty endurance drains. Wont save you from a Sapper, but it'll help you recover from it after it's died. Same goes for Carnies. Also, as a general rule of thumb: Almost any set that has both mitigation and healing is going to be good. When you combine those two things, you're able to push whoever you're buffing over the immortality line. I actually really hate defending Empathy because of how overrated it is, as well as the stupid "HURR DURR EMPS AREN'T H34L0RZ" meme... But... It's not a bad set. At all. I really just wish CM was AoE. CoH is an MMO. People team. Frequently. Especially when leveling. You can also turn up the enemy count when you're solo. Also, there are other reasons use to Shield Defense on a Stalker. Lots and lots and lots of people team. And yes, Fulcrum Shift really is just THAT GOOD. Fulcrum shift is so good that I've often wondered if it might be better to just up the damage multiplier for all the ATs, nerf Fulcrum Shift by something crazy like half, and then do some work on the rest of the set. Because when you start getting up in the levels, it really does feel like Fulcrum Shift becomes completely make or break. Yes, this is from a teaming perspective, but if you're not... Well... I'd say farming, but even when farming it's actually more profitable to team up with a kin and duo farm. I will admit I never understood why we don't see more Fire/Kin Corruptors. It wasn't actually meant as a nerf. I disliked this solution too, but it was actually a lazy way of fixing +recharge completely breaking pet AI. Maybe the AI really is that hard to work on. Maybe it's not, and we'll see pets get recharge again.

Eeehhh... Not really. What we learned last time from the sheer amount of SS/Invuln is that theme or concept actually is a huge factor in deciding what people roll and actually play. This is the problem with nerfing based on popularity, though anyone with a basic understanding of what constitutes fallacious reasoning could have told you that. Argumentum ad populum is basically a noob logic trap. Believe it or not, this all fits neatly together with Spines/Fire. The abundance of Spines/Fire and strangely high numbers of power sets you wouldn't expect anyone to actually play points to the classic Path of Exile meta taking place in City of Heroes. I think Diablo II had a similar meta, too. If you don't know what that is, basically it works like this: At the start of a new season, people roll up MF characters. MF is "magic find," these builds are designed specifically for the purpose of rapid farming. The point of them is to fund EVERYTHING ELSE people play during that season. Here's a quote from a page on PoEvault that sums it up nicely: This is because many builds in PoE that don't look that hot on the surface are actually insanely good with the right items, but how well they level, how expensive they are to gear for endgame, etc, varies greatly. It's similar to how, for instance, Invuln is kind of a mediocre set with gaping holes until you start applying the right IOs. In PoE, these builds also have the desirable side effect of driving supply up and in the process bringing prices low enough that you don't have to dedicate your whole life to playing the game to get gear for your characters... The same thing seems to be happening on the AH in CoH. Especially because CoH seems to have a demographic of people who enjoy playing the game as a farming simulator the most for some reason lol. I can see the appeal, too, but I prefer radios to the AE when I just want to veg out and beat stuff up. EDIT: Wait, crap, I posted this on the wrong account. Eh, no matter.