Bad Build Decisions You're Willing to Admit To

[oedipus_tex]

I don't know how I ever missed this, but I used to main Controllers on live, and would always wait til the 40s to take a single target blast, and was excited because I would finally be able to solo! Turns out, the whole time the Controller single target immobilizes have the same damage, with half the recharge, better accuracy, often a faster animation, and a Mag 4 immobilize that sets Containment on bosses. 😄  

 

What are the obvious mistakes you made or details you overlooked?

 

[SuperPlyx]

My main and namesake is a Fire/Temp blaster I played him for almost a year after rolling him without Blaze. I just skipped it for some reason, I have no idea what the hell I was thinking

[Peacemoon]

My first controller was Grav/Kin and I took dimension shift rather than crushing field because it sounded more powerful. Those early groups I teamed with were in for a surprise!

 

She also had flight, group fly,  +kinetic travel powers because it sounded fun and also because it seemed wrong to be a gravity controller and not have the ability to make your teammates fly or bounce around!

 

Not sure if these count as mistakes or not 😅

Edited March 3, 2022 by Peacemoon

[ZorkNemesis]

It wasn't until recently that I realized it was a pretty big mistake to not take Dark Pit on a /Dark Blaster.  As it turns out being able to stun groups is an excellent setup for Soul Drain > Inferno.

[Apparition]

Where do I begin?

 

1. I really like Dual Pistols.  IMO, I think it's one of the better ranged damage sets, but a lot of people think it's "bad."  I strongly disagree with that, but c'est la vie.  It's only bad compared to Fire Blast and Ice Blast, but every ranged damage set is bad compared to Fire Blast and Ice Blast.

 

2. I like Force Field.  Granted, more out of nostalgia than anything at this point as it was my most played support set on live, but still.

 

3. I strongly dislike proc builds.  Too gimmicky, too reliant on others, and they unbalance some ATs and power sets, IMO.

 

4. Related to #3, the vast majority of my characters use the Agility Radial Paragon Alpha.

 

5. Every single character I have in the game takes both the Fly and either Super Speed or Speed of Sound travel powers.  I use Fly outdoors, and Super Speed or Speed of Sound indoors.  Super Speed or Speed of Sound is a necessity for speed running.  I also take Fly because I'm a big Superman fanboy, and personally I don't see the point of playing a super-powered character without some form of flight.  I may as well play one of the thousand other MMOGs without flight.  It takes away one power pool choice that may be better for the character in a min-max sense (like Leadership or Combat Jumping), but I'm okie with that.

 

Now, it's debatable if these are "bad build decisions" (IMO they aren't), but I know that they make quite a few eyes twitch.

 

Now for actual bad build decisions I've made:

 

1. My first character on Homecoming was a Thugs/Sonic Resonance Mastermind.  I soloed him red side from level one through 50, turning XP off every five levels.  Got him accoladed, grinded and grinded to get all of the enhancement sets, got him all tier four Incarnated out... The combination itself turned out to be a bad build decision, IMO.  They just don't mesh well.  C'est la vie.  Masterminds didn't get Sonic Resonance until about a year prior to sunset, and I never got the chance to see how it paired with Thugs or Robots.  Now I know. :D

 

2. Back on live, I generally didn't take Hasten until level 47 or 49. 

 

3. My first Thugs Mastermind, a Thugs/Dark Miasma Mastermind back in Issue 7, skipped Gang War.  IIRC, it wasn't respecced in until a couple of years later.  I don't think I truly understood the power and thought it'd be as useless as your typical Mastermind personal attack.  Big mistake. 

Edited March 4, 2022 by Apparition

[Cancrusher]

The only bad build decisions are the ones that result in a character you don't like to play.  Ice Sentinel is the one that comes to mind for me.  I  love Ice blast on blasters, but it's dreadful on Sentinels.  Also, most anything with Regen, so far.  Still determined to figure out a way to enjoy Regen, though (even though I realize it needs a serious buff).

 

I play and enjoy other kinds of Sentinels (Beam/Nrg, Dark/Dark, etc), which many might consider to be a bad build decision.  🤷‍♂️

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, Apparition said:

personally I don't see the point of playing a super-powered character without some form of flight. 

CoH being one of the few MMOs that doesn't have the "You're literally forty feet from where you want to be, but because there's a 20' high obstacle between you and it, you have to go two miles out of your way to get there, because you can't climb or jump over it" map design fetish. I thought SWOTOR would be different, with the Jedi Force Leap, but while there are classes that can leap more than a hundred feet, even straight up, they can only do it if there's a hostile target to leap to.

[Luminara]

Hurdle six-slotted with 50++ SOs.

 

After ED.

 

First character when I started playing again 18 months ago... Hurdle three-slotted with 50+5 IOs.

 

You can all stop looking at me with your eyes twitching like that.

[Naraka]

2 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

What are the obvious mistakes you made or details you overlooked?

 

I never overlook details. I just have to retroactively realign the character concept to make it a concept build.

[Placta]

My first character I made the mistake of not putting more than one enhancement of a given type into a power, and kept her that way until level 50. Fortunately this was a character who got by just fine with a single slot in Stamina. I learned just in time to stop myself from putting knockback enhancements in knockdown powers on a scrapper.

 

That first character was a blaster, and I was adamantly "blaster = ranged" in the Live days, so I got used to thinking of the secondary as not particularly important. Playing a scrapper quickly made me realize blasters were special in that department.

 

I slotted AIm and Build Up for tohit rather than recharge.

 

I built a bots/ff mastermind as an entirely passive character who did nothing but summon and buff pets and walk from enemy group to enemy group. I got it to 15 (my goal, one of the characters who existed to be repeatedly whacked by my main to get PVP reputation), and recognized along the way that the combo had potential but the way I was playing it would bore me to death. The version of the character I have now on homecoming has the pulse rifle attacks; not because they're any good (but every little bit, yeah?) but they give me something to do.

  

2 hours ago, Apparition said:

2. Back on live, I generally didn't take Hasten until level 47 or 49. 

 

Hasten's a "when I can fit it in" power for me. Usually that's 24 or 30, but I've got characters who don't have it until near the end.

[DoctorDitko]

Hasten depends on whether I like my current powers or not.

I grab it right away if I like what I have, skip it if I'm still waiting for the fun powers to show up.

 

As far as bad choices... Whatever fun-hating demon possessed the Devs to implement ED is both an example, and the reason all my choices up till then turned out to be bad.

 

Edited March 4, 2022 by DoctorDitko
OT

[Aracknight]

In the long ago live times, oh around I8-I9 when I started, before alternate animations, my MA/SR Scrapper made some interesting choices.  At the time, Cobra Strike did no damage, it only stunned.  So I replaced it with Jump Kick since I was taking Super Leap and IDGAF then or now about Combat Jumping.  I also didn't like the "smell my foot!  Now smell it again!" animation of Crippling Axe Kick.  So I took Air Superiority instead.  Without Fly.  My Attack chain was something like Storm Kick-Air Superiority-Jump Kick-Dragon's Tail-Eagle Claw-Crane Kick.  I didn't do a lot of damage, but I thought it looked awesome. I also had no idea about "Real numbers" yet, so I slotted my SR passives higher than my toggles because toggles used END and if my toggles ate my END, what was I gonna attack with?

 

What I learned most, though, was how some of my gimpy attacks were better for defense/mitigation than my  (unknown to me at the time) gimped-out armor set.  I learned that if a mob was knocked up, or down, or away, it couldn't attack me while I stomped it to death, and instead of dueling with RNJesus over defense, I dueled with it over my knockaround powers.  I think that experience is why I don't "get" why everyone hates knockback.  I loved it because at the time, because I knew so little, it was better than defense for me.

 

Oh, and a level 40s ish team playfully yelled at me for not taking Practiced Brawler. 😛

 

 

 

Edit:  I just realized I could replicate that chain, except for the Crane Kick, on a Blaster with Martial Combat now.   And the first thing I ever did was learn how to play it with crappy defense.  Huh.  I might have a weekend project in making a Blaster version of my main as a change of pace from the Scrapper/Tanker/Stalker/Brute version.  Neat.  

 

GOOD FORUM QUESTION!

Edited March 4, 2022 by Aracknight

[Redletter]

I dont make mistakes, Im perfect. 

 

But. If I did...

 

• Playing Mercs/Empathy, assuming the medic pet was in fact, a medic, instead of just clicking on the pet's details to read for myself WHAT and HOW it heals.
• Playing a Sentinel
• Playing a /War Mace tanker
• Making a goldsider character, thinking I could use Null to change my alignment, not knowing that you are actually hard locked there until level 20 and you CAN NOT enter blue or red sides AT ALL until youve completed the level 20 mission for goldies. (There MIGHT be ways to get into PvP zones or places like Dark Astoria where villains AND heroes can coexist but I havent checked)
• Playing an Arch/TA blaster, when I should have played a TA/Arch defender...
• Taking fly trees on my peacebringer, thinking i would start flying faster

 

[monkeygodbob]

9 hours ago, Cancrusher said:

The only bad build decisions are the ones that result in a character you don't like to play.  Ice Sentinel is the one that comes to mind for me.  I  love Ice blast on blasters, but it's dreadful on Sentinels.  Also, most anything with Regen, so far.  Still determined to figure out a way to enjoy Regen, though (even though I realize it needs a serious buff).

 

I play and enjoy other kinds of Sentinels (Beam/Nrg, Dark/Dark, etc), which many might consider to be a bad build decision.  🤷‍♂️

You really outta try a staff/regen something.  It's a ton of fun, even if it is a lot more work just to survive when literally any other defense power set would work better.  :)

[Hyperstrike]

With Hyper, I originally played him into his late teens...TOTALLY SANS-ENHANCEMENT...
Couldn't understand why it was getting so hard...

What?  Nobody PAYS ATTENTION in the tutorials!
I was there to kick ass and chew bubblegum!

And there's no gum in the game...

Then there's the time I slotted the Kismet unique IN PERSONAL FORCEFIELD.
Okay, so give myself an ToHit boost...ONLY when I'm "affect only self"....
I swear (every damn day!), I was dropped on my head (extensively) as a child...

[SeraphimKensai]

I leveled up a beam/traps corruptor to 50 and realized how slow it is to actually use all the traps in combat in today's game. It's still a fun solo too n and can solo av/monsters but I don't really team with it as I don't like slowing the party down. Perhaps it may get dusted off for a relentless Dr. Aeon TF to see if it's more useful there.

 

[AerialAssault]

One of my first characters when I started playing when I was a wee boy was a Rad/Rad Corruptor.

 

I skipped the debuffs because they weren't a heal or a buff.

 

Yes, I was one of *those* people.

 

In the modern day my biggest build sin is slotting 4 Run Speed increases into Speed Boost on my Kinetics Defender. I apologise for nothing.

[Marshal_General]

11 hours ago, Cancrusher said:

The only bad build decisions are the ones that result in a character you don't like to play.  Ice Sentinel is the one that comes to mind for me.  I  love Ice blast on blasters, but it's dreadful on Sentinels.  Also, most anything with Regen, so far.  Still determined to figure out a way to enjoy Regen, though (even though I realize it needs a serious buff).

 

I play and enjoy other kinds of Sentinels (Beam/Nrg, Dark/Dark, etc), which many might consider to be a bad build decision.  🤷‍♂️

Look up the thread on the brute forum that I did for an ice/regen character and the suggestions people have given. I haven't implemented the latest suggestions, but it can solo 4/8 missions without hitting the big heals the majority if the time.

[tidge]

14 minutes ago, AerialAssault said:

In the modern day my biggest build sin is slotting 4 Run Speed increases into Speed Boost on my Kinetics Defender. I apologise for nothing.

 

Join me at this table. A couple more and we can start a game of pinochle.

[Snarky]

I came to CoH late, right after Good vs Evil dropped.  
 

I ran Redside on Liberty for 6 months and I was piss broke.  I used only SOs.   
 

As I migrated to Freedumb and acquired funds I started getting Enhancement Sets.  
 

Once I had a storage base and a few hundred enhancers I could keep 2-4 toons kitted out.  Crushing one for the next great idea.  I enhanced with sets as early as possible from there on out.  

 

It turns out Enhancement sets are not a good idea pre 30 or so.  Your toons do not have the slots to get the bonuses and the Set bonuses are of less vale than SOs.  
 

Just recently did I really examine this and stop dropping sets on a toon asap.  Instill pit in a few globals and procs, but sets come in after 30 now

Edited March 4, 2022 by Snarky

[Andreah]

I made a Petless Mastermind., and leveled it to 50+tier-3's. Mistake on purpose! :O 

[cranebump]

PI’m running a Fire/Savage/Sorcery Dom right now, and it has just got to be a bad idea, because, even tricked out with nice sets, dude is still so winded.:-)

 

It’s a theme toon...undead cowpoke left to die in the desert, made a deal for revenge, gave up soul, yaddayaddyadda...idea of carrion animals  and “soulfire” seems interesting, but it’s weird to play [probably because I never play Doms]. He’s just getting into his 30s, so maybe this weird idea will start to shine (or at least be less of a chore). I still like the idea. 

 

Btw, pretty sure I can list a ton of my characters as “bad” builds, since I don’t bother with mids or anything.

 

i do remember an early toon back in the day where I 3-slotted sprint. Yup. He was almost quick.

Edited March 4, 2022 by cranebump

[Coyotedancer]

I like my Sentinels... (Thay solo pretty well, and I'm mostly a soloist. I couldn't care less if "OMG. They have NO ROLE on a teeeeaaam!!!1one!") 

 

I enjoy playing KinMelee... (On Stalkers, anyway. It annoys me on anything else.)

 

I have a great time with my Peacebringers... (I've never had a Warshade that I liked, though. I've tried, but... nope.)

 

I don't always chase soft-caps,... (I'm as likely to have a regen-monster. But not going for uber Defense is pure meta-game heresy, I know.)

 

... and yes. I habitually have *two* slots in Fly or Mystic Flight. (What? I like my Winter's Gift special and that's an easy place to put it. Glue patches and caltrops are annoying, yo.) 

[The_Warpact]

Kin/Regen broot...ugh why?! Why?!?

 

Ninjas/Storm...ninjas are so sucktastic..

 

PsiMelee/Nrg broot...I so wanted to like this build...

 

Sentinel anything I just get why ppl like this AT. 

 

Now on the plus side, I have a Merc/Traps MM and he us really good in RWZ stuff. So +1 for Mercs.

[golstat2003]

15 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

I don't know how I ever missed this, but I used to main Controllers on live, and would always wait til the 40s to take a single target blast, and was excited because I would finally be able to solo! Turns out, the whole time the Controller single target immobilizes have the same damage, with half the recharge, better accuracy, often a faster animation, and a Mag 4 immobilize that sets Containment on bosses. 😄  

 

What are the obvious mistakes you made or details you overlooked?

 

 

I was today years old learning this. 

 

*in yoda voice* Ashamed, am I. Controllers, suck at do I.

 

😑