Wing_Leader

In all honesty I don't.

But I sometimes find myself on these teams that do and was wondering where my understanding of the game was failing me. I think I was merely underestimating the impact of the higher difficulty settings. Unfortunately, I get the feeling from some of the team chat that anything less than +4/x8 is deemed unworthy of their time, as if only amateurs play at lower settings. Which is fine except I always knew CoH as a game where playing smartly trumped slotting (unlike other MMOs in which having top-tier gear means everything). I am learning quite a bit about how the game has pushed its own boundaries, here and there, over time, and consequently how my understanding has become outdated.

As I've stated in a previous thread, I prefer to play "casually", which is to say I don't want to obsess over min-max builds. I'm willing to investigate set IOs a little, but I'm not interested in becoming an expert, as it were. If that means I'll always be woefully outclassed at the insane difficulty settings then I'm actually okay with that, and I'll just try to avoid those teams in the future.

It was particularly confusing to me because the leader of a recent team of 50s was a dual pistols blaster, and he was jumping in and taking every alpha as a matter of course. My old--and clearly outdated--notions of the limitations of blasters was perhaps doing me a disservice in terms of setting my expectations for what I could survive or achieve as part of this team. "Well if he can just jump right in as a blaster, then I should be able to join him and survive just as well!" I couldn't have been more wrong.

This is a fair question.

My brute has Willpower, not Regeneration. But be that as it may, the build for this character is aimed mostly at character concept rather than min/max goals. I was not planning to take anything from the Fighting set since I don't need any more attacks and I don't want any more toggles. I was planning to take energy mastery in order to take the powers that add health and end recovery, but that's it (along with Stealth and Invisibility for concept and situational utility).

The idea behind this character is not to make her an off-tank, but to make her merely a more survivable scrapper. The DPS part of this plan will evolve from here on out as I start to slot up her attacks, and will eventually put Crushing Impact sets in five of her attacks, along with a Ragnarok set in Spinning Strike, etc. But all that set IO stuff will happen at L50.

At L32 I don't yet have my self Rez or the Last Stand power from 38. But neither one of those is used during normal combat routines. All my other defenses are already slotted the way they will be when I'm 50, it's just that they aren't slotted with L50 IOs yet (obviously), but with L30 IOs instead, which are the equivalent to green SO+ enhancements, which at one time in the game's history were considered pretty effective.

Everyone's advice has been very helpful, at least insofar as it helps me to scale back my own expectations as to what I should hope to accomplish when on these sorts of L50 teams. I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds his characters whiffing constantly and faceplanting without much warning.

And I've learned not to try and survive the alpha, but these teams of 50s do not seem terribly opposed to aggoing two or three x8 mobs at once, especially Arachnos mobs. Being overwhelmed is probably part of the fun for them, but for me it just means more time chewing on the floor. Oy veh.

This is certainly a problem on Virtue and Freedom, and to an extent I sympathize with you. But as much as I wish some of those old, dead accounts would just get name-wiped, I'm also glad they weren't because I returned to the game after a 3-year hiatus and I'm very pleased to have all my old characters, names intact, still available to me.

Sounds to me like the GMs were being racist, since they were unthinkingly jumping to a racist interpretation of that name. They must not have been aware, for instance, that the nickname "squint" has been used for over six years on the television show Bones to describe scientists and scholars.

It also recalls to mind how Bob Dylan tried to stop Apple from naming their component software language Dylan. All Apple had to do was state that it is an abbreviation of Dynamic Language, and not named after anyone at all, to have the whole matter swept away legally (other options would have been to claim it was named after the poet Dylan Thomas).

If asked, I would simply have said the name Zerg was inspired by Mitch Zerg of http://mza-usa.com/.

I solo'ed the Roy Cooling story arc with my brute at level 30, set at normal difficulty (no AVs). I had to take on two EBs in succession: the Sky Raiders captain followed by the Malta Zeus Titan and got through it thanks to a healthy diet of small, medium, and large insps.

Are the SSAs of comparable toughness?

That's really good to know! Thanks for that info.

My tray was completely empty the entire time. We fought nearly every mob in the Posi TF. We fought every single Council mob in the Citadel TF. Random is random, yes, but the odds of not receiving one single enhancement drop during either TF feels to me like it should be zero.

You solo the SSAs?

What level is your toon, how is s/he slotted out (any IOs?), and what Incarnate abilities do you make use of (if any)?

My main toons right now are a level 36 ice troller and a level 30 SJ brute. My brute might be able to solo it, but an ice/storm troller is definitely a team-oriented toon; soloing anything with that character is painful in the extreme.

This is genius. Best post yet, IMO.

Yeah, it's awesome.

I'm not sure I see the logical distinction. If the server transfers and PP stipends are not given out unless you subscribe, then in what way is it incorrect to say the monthly subscription is subsidizing them? Just because you can't opt-out of these bonuses--and therefore there is no explicit reimbursement for doing so--doesn't mean that NCSoft doesn't internally consider (and calculate) the market-value cost (as a portion of the subscription fee) to provide them as "perks".