Wing_Leader

It also occurred to me that this is the sort of thing you do when you've pretty much done everything else there is to do in the game, and finding ways to eek out the last 1% of efficiency is all that's left. Of course, now there's new stuff with Convergence and more to come every month (or, I guess, every week in some cases). But I bet that once you start, you just can't stop with the min/maxing.

Exactly. When it came time for each of us to pick our Defender power sets for the team, I chose rad/rad because I had read an old guide related to the Hamidon Raid that was titled something like, "What 24 Radiation Defenders Can Do That 1000 Blasters Can't". The guide was extolling the virtues of resistance debuffs as a way of maximizing damage throughput, rather than trying to use maximal damage alone (against creatures like Hamidon with 99% DR against everything, or whatever it has/had). That made a bell go off in my brain and made me see the possibilities, not only for the Radiation power set, but for the very concept of an all-Defender team. You wouldn't believe how many people laughed at us when they saw us; I guess they never made the intuitive leap we did (with regard to the power of stacked buffs/debuffs).

I was able to take down Trapdoor on my own the second time through. I never saw a "clone" appear, so you can imagine my confusion when it came up in this thread. I don't know what the difference was the second time around, but I was able to take him down before a clone showed up I guess (gotta love Caltrops!). However, I had to scrap together a quick ad-hoc team in the Vanguard DPO to take down the Honoree. From there I was able to complete the rest on my own (including doing the Minotaur mission twice for some bizarre reason).

Anyway, I have my Alpha slot unlocked on my L50 Scrapper; thanks for all the great advice! Now it's time for me to go study the invention system and the consignment house and see if I want to get into crafting IOs or not.

Not at all! However, the in-game description of the AH and its mechanisms (to use just one example) still left me confused and did not instill in me a sense of how to make the system "work for me." I am grateful for wikis and forum communities like this one. It is these resources I turn to when I need help.

Maybe my enhancements aren't optimal, but both before and after ED my friends and I had done the math and figured out, more or less on our own, that optimal attack slotting was 3 Acc and 3 Dmg. Even before ED made slotting more than three of any one thing rather pointless, we realized that 100% acc + 100% dmg meant 4x the DPS, which was better even than 6 dmg pre-ED which was only 3x the DPS.

Anyway, the slotting strategy I've always settled on is 2 Acc, 3 Dmg, and 1 Rend. I can't always count on recovery buffs being on hand and so minimizing the gasping for endurance is big with me. 2 Acc always seemed ideal to me because there are so many sources of ToHit buff in the game. As far as secondaries, I usually slot 3 of a power's main effect enhancement, plus 1 Rend on any toggle. For things like Build Up or Rage or Dull Pain I usually slot 3 attack rate enhancements so it recycles as fast as possible.

I tend to like Scrappers and Tankers best, and my L50 Scrapper is DM/SR.

Working out optimal builds was sorta fun, up to a point, prior to the introduction of IOs and set bonuses. What used to just be a minor exercise in a little math became almost like a science with too many variables. I know some players like that (its why they love WoW and all those talent trees and finding Uber builds and debating them like religion with each other), but I can't summon any sustained interest in it. I just want to play the game and not have to worry that giving up 12% resistance in order to play a Scrapper (rather than a Brute) is going to make some huge difference in mission success, or worse, overall enjoyment of the game. Instinctively I find it hard to believe so little a numerical difference can really matter that much during play, but adherents seem to treat it like the difference between life and death. It is that intensity of caring that leads to the mistaken impression (on my part) that these issues matter more than, perhaps, they actually do in practice.

No, I don't overclock my PC. I guess I'm as casual in computer usage as I am in game play.
I also don't do anything special to my car; driving in L.A. is anything but recreational, and to me a car is just something I use to get to work and back home.

Most of my characters are on Virtue, and like I said before I tend to lean towards Scrappers and Tankers. I like the melee classes. However, there are times when I feel like being in a support role, and then I like to pull out my L50 rad/rad Defender. Before I stopped playing I found my 50 rad/rad in high demand, though in many cases the mobs were steamrollered so fast that I rarely had time to lay down a debuff much less fire off an attack. I sometimes wondered why they wanted me on the team so much. Maybe they didn't care about my AT so much and they were just filling in the ranks for maximum drops or something. *shrug*

I have always loved COH both for how solo-play friendly it is and for the incredible player community that actually likes to team up with total strangers. Ultimately I am hoping my old teammates will re-join the game when Freedom goes wide and we can pick up where we left off (we had an all-Defender team that rolled through AVs so fast it was embarrassing, but they quit while their toons were still at L40, and I kept playing mine to 50; now may be the chance to get them all up to L50 and beyond). We played the standard TFs but never did any Trials, and none of us has ever experienced the Hamidon Raid or anything of that scale that has been added since.

That explains it then! Thanks!

Dailies? I hear that and think of WoW {shudder}...

I seem to have quite a bit to catch up on.

No, thankfully, not yet.

However, it is not uncommon to be invited to teams that are trying to rip through end-game content at max difficulty and I find my poor little L50 surrounded by mobs that all con purple to me. I seem to be the only one on the team having trouble hitting without a steady diet of Uncanny Insights, and I seem to be the only one dying left and right because, unlike everyone else, I can't survive all the overflow aggro everyone deliberately generates in order to clear rooms/zones as quickly as possible. When Blasters and Defenders are exhibiting behavior that almost looks like classic tanking, it doesn't take long to realize the team is operating on a very different paradigm than I am used to (or capable of contributing to on any kind of equal footing). These guys don't always buff because their top tier passives/toggles/permas seem to make it unnecessary; the underlying assumption seems to be that everyone on the team is similarly equipped and shouldn't need special attention.

Back in the early days of COH it wasn't unheard of to be summarily dropped from a team if it didn't look like you could keep up. I know that sort of asshattery has largely faded from the game by now, but I still don't like being the weak link in the chain that slows the game down for everyone else. Maybe I was just getting unlucky with the teams I joined these last couple of weeks (I've just recently returned to the game after three years off), but unless the LFM call explicitly mentioned "all lvls welcome", I often found that teams composed of all 50 (+1) toons weren't really benefiting much from my presence (even my L50s).

Thanks again for the link, Grouchy.

Actually, I am already familiar with the basic benefits of IOs and how they "work" (including dual and triple IOs) since that's just an extension of the regular enhancement mechanism. But I am not at all familiar with all the set bonuses, which ones are best for this power set or that, the ins and outs of "frankenslotting", and so on. I know to someone who has already absorbed this knowledge it probably doesn't seem like much, but comparatively speaking, IOs are considerably more complex as a game subsystem than the basic TO/DO/SO system.

I mean, unlike SOs which you can just go and buy (for relatively low prices) from any appropriate-level vendor, obtaining IOs involves either paying extraordinary influence prices at Wentworth's (the free market at work, no?), or finding out which recipes you need, which ingredients those recipes require, obtaining all of those either through the random process of drops during a mission (good luck) or, again, spending obscene amounts of influence for everything at the AH (not to mention the sticker-shock of the influence cost just to craft the final item after the recipe and ingredients have been obtained). Hence my other question about "How does everyone earn the 2 billion influence it probably takes to do this without farming or buying influence from the Internet (a practice that will get you banned if you're caught, right?)" My guess is the answer will be that all I have to do is grind missions in order to obtain some combination of the salvage/recipes I need along with salvage/recipes I don't need in order to sell them at Wentworth's for the influence necessary to buy the salvage/recipes I didn't get from drops. I know this is the fundamental way crafting systems work, but it is also the reason I don't like them. No matter how you slice it, making it work for you involves grinding (or at least more of it than I can usually stomach).

By this measure, it is clear to me that the IO system is intended to consume a lot of gameplay time, almost for its own sake (rather than the sake of experiencing content and/or doing stuff that feels superheroic in genre terms). Either in the form of recipe/ingredient chasing, in the accumulation of influence, or both. At least back when SOs were the norm (don't even get me started on HOs), you could accumulate the necessary influence to become fully slotted just through normal, non-grind gameplay. Especially once you had your first level 50 and could transfer funds to alts to make the ascent a little smoother.

Okay, this is a fair question.

I want to do Trials. I love the idea of large multi-team missions. I love the notion of filling out the Incarnate trees. What I don't particularly relish is the thought that I might/will have to repeat the same Trials over and over again just to do so. I am almost axiomatically opposed to anything described as a "grind". The word itself tells you "this isn't going to be fun, it is just going to be tedious work." It certainly isn't why I play games as an entertaining pastime. Just to be clear, I do not consider doing the "work" of successfully completing missions to be a grind; but repeating the same mission(s) over and over again, regardless of the reward being pursued, is (for me).

This was something I considered to be a serious flaw in WoW and I was sort of hoping CoH hadn't fallen into the same trap. In the case of WoW it was clearly a bid on Blizzard's part to extort subscription fees from players with the superhuman capacity to endure the tedium of running through every max-level Raid dozens upon dozens of times. By that standard, I am most definitely not a hardcore player and never will be.

This is why I consider myself a "casual" player; I believe in the theory that everyone should be able to experience every single mission, TF, and Trial in the game without having to repeat anything along the way (helping others with missions/TFs/Trials you've already done excluded, of course). The way I prefer to see a sequence of Trials (or Trial missions) designed is to make it so that in the natural course of doing each step of a Trial you obtain all the abilities/upgrades necessary for entry into the next step in the Trial, and upon completing a particular Trial, you have everything you need to move on to the next Trial, without having to go through any of the previous content all over again (and again, and again, ad nauseum). If that's not how the CoH Trials are constructed, then I may have to consign myself to, yet again, never experiencing them (I pretty much missed out on them before leaving the game three years ago).

Again, just to be clear: my goal is not necessarily to reach a particular Incarnate tier. It is simply to experience the game's content, ideally all of it. I don't want to make filling out the Incarnate trees an end unto itself so much, but if that is the by-product of simply going through the Trials, then great! I just don't want to be "locked out" of any Trial(s) simply because I didn't run through previous Trials enough times to max out my build with IOs and Incarnate slots. WoW had the problem of Raids that simply weren't survivable, much less succeedable (is that a word?) unless your team had just the right combination of classes, with just the right combination of skill trees, and all the max tier gear obtainable prior to entering a particular Raid. This necessitated a mind-numbing campaign of grinding previous Raids in order for each character to get all the "drops" needed to proceed. Quite honestly, I can't think of a bigger waste of my free time.

So I discovered!

I feel a little silly for not anticipating that, I guess. Here I was hoping to get some insight into why I might choose to try a Brute after all my years loving Scrappers, only to find that none of the discussion pertained to me and my level 1 toon (or even the first 40 levels of his career). So much for getting a feel for which AT might fit my playing style better. Even when playing style was thrown into the mix in those threads, it seemed to be "playing style" only within the context of max-level-you-have-top-tier-IOs-slotted-of-course characters.

Casual as it pertains to me is this:

• Playing the missions, TFs, and Trials, ideally only once per toon (even doing them again at a higher difficulty feels like a grind rather than a new experience most of the time, at least to me).
• Learning smart ways to use TOs, DOs, and SOs and inspirations.

Everything else I consider optional, mostly because I've been told that it is optional, I want to believe them, and the new mechanisms that have been added since the Invention System seem needlessly convoluted to me. I'm not saying everyone will find them convoluted; I'm saying they feel that way to me, which makes them non-fun. Too much work for too little reward, if you will. Every minute spent chasing after salvage and recipes, whether through repeating mission content I've already done, or sifting through Wentworth's "inventory" feeling like an eBay shopper, is a minute I could be spending taking down bad guys and feeling like a superhero.

I have four 50s from before I took three years off from the game. I think I have one IO slotted between them all, and it is just an ordinary Reduced End IO (it might not even be a lvl 50 IO either). I don't even remember crafting it. The point is that a lot of interesting content has been added, so it seems, and I am just hoping that I don't have to be an expert in a crafting system that seems rather besides the point (for the genre the game supposedly represents) in order to experience it or enjoy the benefits of the single greatest aspect of COH (and the incredible COH player community): teaming up.

Really? It seems like a lot more than just theory being bandied about. In just a single thread in the Scrapper forum on "Brutes vs. Scrappers, which is better?" there were five pages of debate involving power/enhancement/buff interactions that were based on empirical data and what seemed like a pretty deep understanding of the numbers. It took a while before I realized that none of it was relevant to a player not slotting purples and "frankenslotting" in exactly the most optimal ways. And it took a while because it was assumed as the default approach without explicit mention, to the point where it was necessary for one or two posters to mention these assumptions explicitly only when the points they were trying to raise seemed to be falling on deaf ears.

I appreciate this insight (I really do, I'm not being sarcastic, I swear). But unfortunately it is all pretty much greek to me. You are assuming I know what tickets are or merits or what you get from them or bronze, silver, or plutonium "stuff" is or what it means to "roll" them, and so on. None of this is understood by me (or my friends who are thinking of returning to the game). None of the game's own player documentation explains this in an easy-to-digest form. Most of it feels like lore accumulated by people who have been following along with this crafting system from the beginning and know where to go to get minor updates to their knowledge.

Is there a comprehensive and up-to-date Player Guide on this you would recommend? Even if there is, I will have to decide if I want to get into it all. I mean, there's just something about this kind of "crafting system" that doesn't feel at all congruent with comic book superheroes (unless every character is meant to be Reed Richards or Tony Stark, which seems both bizarre and unappealing to me).

Well, that's somewhat encouraging to hear.

My regular playing group, who had quit before me a few years ago, are considering coming back. They are causal players too, and I don't want the apparent emphasis on maxing out top tier slotting to scare them away. And it isn't hard to be overwhelmed by this impression. Just hang out under the Atlas statue on Virtue and do an "Info" check on just about any 50 (+1) you find there with all the costume pieces and auras and power fx I've never heard of and can't find described in any of the normal power sets or wiki pages on standard items.

I'm certainly willing to believe you, but if this stuff isn't strictly necessary, then why are people so gung ho to fill their characters up with them? Is it bragging rights?

If slotting all purples does little more than make it easy to "steamroll" through the content, then what's the point? Non challenges sound about as appealing as insurmountable challenges. On the other hand, if the top tier end-game content is simply too hard to be very much fun without fully slotted top tier IOs and Incarnate powers, then it seems the barrier to entry to that content has perhaps been set too high because it is really only open to those players willing to be maximally hardcore.

I remember having lots of fun working out optimal builds when SOs were the norm and HOs were simply "gravy". Then came the Invention System and the game sorta lost me. Everyone kept saying IOs were optional, and so I pretty much ignored the entire system (I am not a fan of crafting systems in general in MMOs). I left COH for a few years and am coming back again with a renewed interest in my all-time favorite MMO. But I'm wondering if I've been left hopelessly behind because it feels like learning, mastering, and then exploiting the crafting/auction system to the degree necessary to "keep up" with the hardcore players is like trying to get an MBA. I don't remember that much post-graduate work necessary to take part in the Hamidon raid back in the day, and that was the pinnacle of COH's end-game content at the time.

I'm starting to feel so old...

Could be. But I never bought GR or any Booster pack, and yet I seem to have 2 extra slots for some reason.

My purchase history is pretty straightforward: CoH in 09/04, CoV at release (I was a beta tester). And that's it. I stopped playing, and let my account lapse, prior to the addition of the Mission Architect. There's nothing in my purchase history that would account for Freedom awarding +2 slots for a previous purchase; like I said before I don't even know why I had 5 "redeemable slots" available prior to the release of Freedom (I just did, two of which I used just before the 13th).