UberGuy

I tend towards being satisfied with a middle ground of big orange numbers and pretty hard but not maximally hard to kill. That means I usually can't run on the game's absolute highest settings without unsustainable inspiration burn rates, and often can't do things like solo AVs. To do otherwise is too limiting to me in what ATs and powersets I play, and sometimes in how I would play them. I therefore am satisfied with being pretty darn bad-***, instead of being extremely bad-*** in very specific ways.

Here's the thing. None of this stuff is hard. Fundamentally, what people are arguing about are their preferences, which vary from person to person, and to some extent, from group of people to group of people. What's important to remember is that people who tend to play the game together regularly tend to share the same playstyle preferences, or to at least tolerate some playstyle common to the group.

A number of people have expressed satisfaction with the idea that Battle Maiden explicitly disallows traditional "tank & spank", because you can't simply pig-pile the team on her and beat her down, which is a common tactic for teams operating under high-order buffs. It's not important that it's actually meaningfully harder, what matters is that it s conceptually different. (Of course, a number of other people despise it for that very difference.)

I don't find any of these things hard in the absolute sense. The only one I find somewhat challenging in an absolute sense is the Sewer Trial, because you can't actually directly buff the amount of damage you do the Hydra head, and the timer is not actually terribly long compared to the best times you can pull off - one of the only cases of that anywhere in the game.

"Challenge" for most of these tasks is defined almost entirely in terms of elapsed time, with the only risk of "failure" being that the task takes so long that the team gives up, or individual people quit and the team ends up too small to ever succeed. There's usually no true risk of failure except for this kind of essentially self-imposed failure. Trails are unique in that they actually impose a time limit. I find that the time limit is extremely gracious on all of them except for the Sewer Trial.

The problem in my experience is that people don't like a real risk of true failure, because that means they can spend however long doing something and, from their perspective, the time is wasted. I see this regularly with pre-I19 "Master of" badges - most people don't want to do them unless they're all badgers looking for the badge, because the "Master" approach is slower and the time can be "wasted" if the attempt fails.

(It's an aside, but I find the Eden Trial is one of the most trivial fights in the game. Ambroisa is a magic bullet - if you don't have it you're (probably) screwed, but if you have it the Titan is no harder than any other big sack of HP in the game.)

I actually agree that the Sewer Trial is quite challenging, given the "peer" content it was created alongside at the time we got it. I would actually like to run it more often.

But therein is the problem. Everyone I know hates it. There's something about the style of challenge it represents that they consider a slog, and don't want to deal with.

In contrast, things like the Apex and Tin Mage TFs are basically becoming nightly occurrences. (Which I don't mind at all, I like them also, but I'm not the one forming them.)

You know, I wondered as I was typing that if WP did have any some debuff resistance given that the devs have been somewhat liberal with granting it to powersets that have some in-powerset defense. I did also figure that even if it did, it probably wasn't enough to significantly change the prognosis. So at least I got that part right.

Sadly for your OCD soul, there is no hard and fast answer here. Since you're talking about a WP character, you have no defense debuff resistance, and so defense debuff that does hit you is going to take a good chunk out of your defense. Typcial debuffs from things like sword sets are on the order of -8% per hit from an even level minion, and more if they are higher level and/or higher rank. (Higher level and higher rank combine to even larger debuffs.)

That means that going from 45% defense to 55% defense is going to protect you from, at absolute most, one hit taking you below the softcap to L/S defense. The real question becomes, what alternative benfits (if any) are you giving up in your build to buy the extra 10% defense when it provides such relatively meager added protection?

Airhammer covered most of the basics.

• The foe must be level 47 or higher to have a chance to drop one.
• The foe must not be in a Mission Architect mission.
• Because it is how most of the drop mechanics we do know work, it is presumed that the chance for a LT to drop one is higher than the chance for a minion, and the chance for a boss is higher than that for a LT.
• The odds of any given foe dropping one is very small. The most optimistic number we've seen estimated is on the order of one in three thousand. That number was actually averaged across ranks (minion, LT and boss), so the odds for a minion are probably lower than that).
• Play solo. Every defeated foe that drops an invention gives it to one random person on a team. That means your average chance to get a purple on a team of N people is reduced to 1/N of its usual chance. While 8-man teams typically defeat more foes in less time than someone solo, only very good teams are going to consistently defeat X foes in the same time one player could defeat X/8 foes.

While it may seem that finding a way to fight level 47 foes all the time is probably your best bet for optimal chance of purples, it may bore you to death, and any other rewards you get along the way will be sub-par. For example, those mobs will likely drop other non-common recipes at level 47, which sell for a lot less than level 50 versions (for a variety of reasons). Trying to optimize the whole experience, I would recommend fighting foes no lower than level 50.

So, to summarize, fight stuff that's level 47+, and defeat lots of it as fast as you can. If you can, solo on +0/x8 team size setting.

Edit: I'm not sure where the Ouro badge fits in.

Or, you know, Soul Drain or Siphon Life.

I would never take offense at someone pointing out grammatical errors or misspellings in my characters' Description entries. I want them to be correct. (As far as I know, they are, although they sometimes contain constructs I wouldn't prefer because to do otherwise takes more words, and we have limited space.)

No reason has been given, but we were told by Castle that it was intentional. It's only DE, and it's only the ones found in level 45-50 tip missions. (In the interests of clarity, it's actually the case that their base toHit chance is elevated, by which I mean that instead of the 50% base hit chance that mobs have, the DE explicitly have 64%. They don't, for example, have a power giving them a +toHit bonus, though functionally the effect would be identical.)

I haven't used it, but I know a fair number of people who have used it. Very few if any of them have soloed something that was "leading" a pact. Most ran team content on one of the characters and used it to bring the other to 50.

Yes, people here do like comic books, but clearly, a lot of people here are here because they like MMOs. Very broadly speaking, I think you are looking for people who have some role-player in their soul, and honestly, an awful lot of people don't. Just to be clear, I don't think that's a bad thing, but it sounds like maybe it's not what you expected with this being your first MMO.

First, let me explain a couple of things about the game. There is nothing meaningful to do in the open zones. All the goals and actions are in missions, which are instanced. So most of the people playing are not in the common areas. This is both a good and a bad thing. One bad part is the thing you've noticed - that makes the common areas look dead. One good thing is that no one can interfere with your instances. There's basically no such thing in CoH as someone "stealing" your kills or other objectives in a mission. It also helps keep load under control in the various zones.

The monster heads and most of the spikey "dark" costume pieces you're seeing were added specifically for City of Villains when it was a completely stand-alone game. They were then proliferated to both sides if you owned both games. So what you're seeing are villainous costume pieces that people have outfitted on what I am presuming are heroes. More, better animal heads have been requested for a long time, and are actually planned to be coming sometime in the foreseeable future as a micro transaction pack (which usually cost around $10 or less).

Remember, this is, first and foremost, a video game. Most of the people on the forums are there because they're engrossed in the game. Lore and role-playing are only a part of the available scope of the game. Moreover, most of the people here on the forums are probably more obsessed with the workings of the game than most. It's why a lot of them are here. However, there are sections of the forums fairly dedicated to roleplay concepts. In terms of role-play in-game, the Virtue server is the unofficial role-play server. Be warned, that may not mean the people there are more comic focused. Role-play means a lot of things to a lot of people, so you may be as likely to find someone playing a vampire as a golden-age super hero.

Finally, don't assume that because you met someone rude that most people here are rude. This is, by and large, one of the friendliest MMO communities out there. (In fact, if you stick it out and still think people are rude here, my advice is to stay away from most MMOs. ) Stick around and try to ignore people doing stuff you don't like, because odds are you can find people who do stuff you do like and hang out with them instead of those ignorable people.

Anyway I hope that helps. Welcome to the game, and here's hoping you find something worth sticking around for.