Adeon Hawkwood

Great, they got NarfMann. Well time to test the deprogrammer. This will hurt you more than it hurts me.

I hope the bots have good emp shielding.

In general though a TA Defender will increase the teams overall damage more than the Blaster would. The Blaster will do more personal damage but the one thing TA does do well is debuff Resistance which increases the teams damage.

I've got a hammer we can use. It's dual purpose, we can use it for both capture and deprogramming.

We showed them, we showed them all. *maniacal laughter*

Maybe we should be encouraging swine flu there then. It worked on the martians.

It's very unlikely that your ex-teammates would've cared. Staying in should keep the mission open for you but marked as complete for the team.

Indeed, asking questions is generally the best way to go about it. Some people like to micromanage a bit when forming a team but I find that most of the time it's better not to say anything unless someone specifically asks or the team is struggling. Most people know how to play and letting the team go without direction will generally result in the team finding a natural strategy that works for them. If we have trouble or some people are being idiots I'll step in and say something but most of the time it's unnecessary.

A good example is if I'm on a team that has two tanks most of the time someone will ask who the lead tank is. My general procedure is to select one almost at random and say that they're lead but the only reason I do that is it seems to make people feel better that we have a Plan (with a capital P). The truth is that the lead tank is the one in front. Pick any team with two tanks and you will invariably find that one is more aggressive than the other. They're the one that slams into a new group first and picks a direction at intersections. The thing is that on a new team I have no way of knowing which tank that is (baring the occasional case where I'm familiar with one or both of them).

Safeguard missions (and probably Mayhems as well) are in my experience the number two killer of teams (the number one is the leader quitting). The problem is that there are a lot of different ways of doing them and everyone has their own preference. I enjoy doing the side missions but I also use maps so that I know ahead of time exactly where they are and can limit the street sweeping required. Some people like to street sweep the missions to get to the sides and others like to skip the sides entirely. At the same time when on a team it's important to consider the opinions of everyone not just the leader. I'll generally ask if people are ok doing the sides and go with the majority opinion. In the case you stated if I was the team leader I would have sent you a tell asking you to exit the mission and then kicked you if you didn't. The team can't move on until everyone exits the mission so if the decision of the team is to not do the sides if you aren't willing to go along with that then you don't belong on the team. It's not a matter of right or wrong it's a matter of not fitting with the team style.

In my experience the Striga arcs are a pretty good choice for this. They're mid-level so it's reasonably easy to find people in a decent level and they're all in one zone so travel is more limited, additionally it's a good way to get credit towards the Atlas badges. The RWZ ones can also work especially since you can do a mixed team for most of them (I think). Aside from that picking arcs with popular enemy groups is also conductive to maintaining a team. For example people tend to like fighting Freakshow and Rikti because they give better than normal XP, doing an arc filled with them will generally make people stick around better than an arc filled with Carnies (despised by most melee ATs) and Malta (who are just plain nasty).

Stabilizing prices wouldn't destroy the market's capability as an inf sink. it might decrease it a bit since fewer items would be flipped but it wouldn't be a huge impact.

Interesting, I don't recall seeing any patch notes on it, I'll have to check it out sometime. Given that though I would generally agree that Expedient Reinforcement is a better choice.

Unless they've changed something Gun Drone can only take Ranged Damage sets, I'll admit I haven't checked this recently in game but the wiki agrees with my memory.
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Devices#Gun_Drone

As others have said this simply isn't the case. While we don't have a full list from the Devs on what constitutes a Blaster Secondary there are some obvious design decisions that make them VERY different from melee sets. For example the Tier One power is always a low damage power to keep a target out of melee range. In most cases it's a single target immobilize stolen from a control set although Energy Manipulation has a high magnitude melee knockback power instead. Thunder Kick doesn't really fit the profile, you could probably make a new power that's a re-skinned Power Thrust though (basically Crane Kick with much lower damage and a 100% knockback chance).

Stop and ask yourself though, would a Blaster support set actually get any of the Traps powers that aren't already in Devices? Triage Beacon and Force Field Generator are both team buffs so I can't see them getting included. Poison Gas Trap and Acid Mortar are both extremely powerful debuffs which seem outside the scope of Blaster support sets. Seeker Drones might be viable but they fill the same basic combat role as Smoke Grenade (overall I'd say Seeker Drones are better except for the rare occasions when you need a perception debuff without drawing aggro).

Finally I'll note that Devices is the support set based on Traps; yes I realize that they were created in the opposite order, but thematically Devices is the "Traps Manipulation" set. Using Traps to make a second manipulation set would be like making a second Energy Manipulation set, sure it might have different powers but in has the same basic theme.

I tried that for a while, it was ok but the target selection was to erratic for me to really feel that ti was worth it. I ended up sticking in a Thunderstike set for the defense.

Well Dark Melee and Traps doesn't (to me) make a whole lot of sense, especially when you could do a Dark Manipulation set using Dark Melee and Dark Maisma pretty easily.

Martial Arts and Traps would make a reasonable combination except that Blasters already have Devices. As I mentioned above you could do a set that combined Martial Arts with powers drawn from Traps/Devices and Weapon Mastery bit you would basically end up with Devices with the explosives replaced with Kicking. Basically replace Taser with Cobra Strike, replace Trip Mine, Time Bomb and Gun Drone with three Martial Arts powers and reorder everything for a more sensible progression. The problem is that still would feel like a minor variant of Devices rather than a unique set. In fact if you made a /Devices Blaster skipped the last three powers and instead Kick and Boxing from the Fighting pool you'd end up with something very similar to what you're proposing.

If you can see a way around this please suggest a power progression but I don't see it.

I agree it would require quite a bit of animation work (at least if you want to avoid redraw issues). But the question is if you aren't going to combine the two what would you combine them with that doesn't involve new animations? Manipulation sets are a mix of melee attacks, control powers, self buffs and weak debuffs. Not all sets have all four power types of course but to make a manipulation set using either Martial Arts or Trick Arrow you've got to bring in powers from somewhere else to flesh out the set.

I proposed combining them since I think they make a logical pairing and while animation work would be extremely desirable to deal with redraw issues it wouldn't strictly speaking be required. In fact the only primary set where alternate animations would improve the capability of the pairing is Archery, for everything else you'd want the default kick animations anyway and only have to deal with redraw on the debuffs.

So the question is what where would you draw the filler powers from to avoid additional animation work?