Winza

I'll be honest, I'm putting money aside for both the pack and 3 months of subbing from the paycheck in my pocket. Since my wife never reads any forums (she referred to one as a thread site recently), I should be ok pulling it off.

Brutes WILL NOT EVER EVER EVER get Ice armor or Ice Melee.

They won't get them because slows cause a MAJOR drop in fury gain. Notice not a single current brute set has a slow in it? THAT'S WHY! It was in CoV beta and they found the major problem there. Ice powers would work a lot better on a scrapper or stalker, but brutes need to be attacked FAR more often so they can keep their biggest damage buff as high as possible.

Actually, if I were to add in a new AT that used an AE powerset combo that isn't already available, it would be Assault/Buff-debuff. It'd have MM debuff values with tanker damage modifiers. It wouldn't be the best at anything, but it would definitely be fun to play. It also wouldn't be over or underpowered, just neutral.

My only MM, Rending Flesh, 50, Justice.

Zombies:
Jimmy Ray
Billybob
Clem

Grave Knights:
Ezekiel
Malakai

Lich:
Bubba-Ho-Tep

Ghost (When I still had it...):
Casper

Thank you for both posts. All I needed was one "yes" and I got 2

The difference between my guide last time and the others out at the same time was mine was easy to follow with detailed instructions for even the most beginner of users so even someone on their first week would be able to at least make some binds to add more personality or functionality to their characters.

Coming soon to a "Help Section" near you: Winza's School Of Binds 2: Electric Boogaloo... ok, maybe not that, perhaps this?: Winza's School Of Binds 2: /bind University!

PS, it will also have a lot to do with making macro commands too. I'll be posting it some time mid-week since that's when I get a day off.

Widows can, Wolf on the other hand, cannot. You "might" have seen a widow with Soldier basic colors.

Ok, for those on the forums who've been here a long while, you might remember my old Bind Guide that got eaten by the thread hungry beast a while back. Well considering it was old as dirt and half of the old binds in it are no longer valid (anything involving commands with < and > in them like chat and MM pet emote BINDS), it seems like I will need to compile all the information that's left and start a new one from scratch.

The thing is, in this stage of the game, should I even bother? Is there a fantastic, "new user" friendly bind guide already on the forums that is easy to find and follow for even the least tech savvy? Essentially, I would like to ask you, people of the Justice server where I have played in CoH for the last 5 years (after moving from Virtue the first year I played) if it is worth my time and effort to begin writing a new "Winza's School Of Binds" or just save my time?

Before someone claims I'm doing thread necromancy, I have a level 50 necro/dark mastermind who was not only my first CoV 50, but the first CoV character I made after it came out... Needless to say, I have experience with necromancy.

Second, I really have to say that your guide brought back tons of good memories I have of playing my warshade (DJ Winza, 50, Justice). I would also like to thank you for giving me the idea of slotting mine a little better. Now if only I could get more time to play him so I could get the IOs.

If I recall correctly, Scrappers have a BASE damage for melee set at 1.0 or something like that, Tankers at 0.65 and Brutes at 0.60 (though the exact decimal may be wrong).

Sure, Bruted have a damage cap of 850%, but that's 850% of 0.60. Scrappers with their 400-500% (not really sure if it's 400 or 500) damage cap are boosting 1.0.

At absolute top end, Brutes pull ahead as long as their fury is full and they either pop red skittles a lot or have a pocket kin and a whole pile of set bonuses.

Scrappers are far more consistent not even counting in critical hits. They may not have as high a top end, but they also don't need as much help to get there.

Using the same powers, un-buffed, no insps or anything: Scrapper does more damage.

Same powers, buffed, all in: Brutes do more damage.

Why scrappers? Preference, duh. If you prefer scrappers, play them. If you prefer brutes, play them. They're both good, both fun to play and I loved both enough to get to 50 with them. (Winza Nakimaru, DM/REG/DRK scrapper, Tarnak, DM/DA/SOUL brute both on Justice)

MA, as someone who stalked an MA/NIN to 50 and couldn't find enjoyment in any other primaries, it's damage is decent. It's focus is single target, more or less like Stalkers themselves are.

I like it a lot on my stalker, but I didn't enjoy it on a scrapper. The most important factor isn't it's overall comparison numbers wise to other sets, but your personal enjoyment of it. I liked it because I could change the attack animations with each of my costumes to add more depth and variety in battle. You may love that too, or you may want energy melee or dark melee's 2 damage type per hit attacks.

MA does have one advantage over some of the other sets and I had to do research after someone pointed it out to me and I didn't believe them. It has an inherent accuracy bonus like weapon sets, or more accurately, more like Archery's in my experience. I almost never miss when my feet go flying at the other guy's face.

Ok, the mechanic says healed other heroes, but I will tell you now from personal experience with my regen crapper, dark armor brute and stone tank, self heals also count. They honestly shouldn't, but they do.

Now don't go setting your heals to auto or anything, it only gives credit when you actually healed damage, so if you're at full or have max HP boosted and you're only healing the boosted part, it won't give credit. That's why you don't see that many melee characters with healing badges. None of the 3 characters I mentioned actually have the healing badges, but they have a lot of credit since they heal themselves often. Actual regen doesn't count either, only green numbers from click heals like Reconstruction, Dull Pain, Dark Regeneration, Siphon Life and Earth's Embrace (and any other click heal used when you are actually damaged).

Edit: I forgot, inspirations also do it.

I have no problem with inherent fitness. It means I can fit recall friend into more builds just for the heck of it and at least where my regen scrapper is concerned, 2 "Oh Carp" powers for if things start to go south.

The PPs from 30-40 come in 3 flavors:

Claws with Unstoppable

Spines with Elude and...

Energy Blast with MoG?

At least the first 2 kinda make sense, but I think the Energy Blast PPs would be better served with the Elite Paragon Protector style of last attacks, Nova.

Both Elites use their respective blast set's big bang (Inferno and Black Star) and I believe that giving them Nova instead of MoG would make them at least more challenging for Controllers and Dominators who recently got their pets and Masterminds who recently got their top tier pet buffs. Also, having a Nova go off in your face is never fun for anyone.

It'll probably never happen, but it'd be nice.

I am not going to bother with reading all 4 pages, I am simply posting my opinion on why I like kheldians.

Kheldians allow me as a player, to be the most versitile member of any team I join. If I'm teamed with tanks and defenders, I glide to nova form and suddenly there's damage on the table. If there are only tanks and blasters, I bust out the Dwarf form. I'll admit they aren't as powerful as the real deals, but they aren't meant to be. They are to be (sorry for the wow reference) Druids in that they can be psudo-tanks and psudo-dps and still have a few other tricks up their sleeve for a rainy day.

That's all I'm going to say for now other then I've seen just about every build at some point be both outstanding or retarded. It depends on the player, their play style and what they know about their abilities.

There's more then just this, here's a little diddy about the multiple petitions that I've sent that involved missions not completing when everything's dead or being trapped in a TF because a leader went afk... FOR AN HOUR...

So far, in the last year and a half, any petition I have sent has been ignored. I wait for hours and don't hear a peep. I was part of Arckmage's ITF the other night. I was also the first one that had to go to bed because I work in the mornings.

I waited with the team for an hour before a GM even responded to the first petition. After that, I hear from the member of the team who was getting tells from the GM that they want us to be patient, and to be honest, sitting for 30 minutes WITH THE GM THERE, I'd say we were pretty patient.

Total time waiting for a responce for from a GM= 1 hour
Total time waiting for an answer from GM for issue= 1 hour 45 minutes
Total time waiting for resilution for our issue= How long has it been since we sent the petition?

Customer service has gotten pretty shoddy to the point that I don't even get GM responce to important issues and when I get the little survey they give you, I can't even list a blasted GM name because no one responded 90% of the time...

Ever since they added the multi-builds, it turned my *EATs into my favorite characters to play, all 4 of them. I can have a total of 8 different characters in 4 slots. My Widow switches more often then the others, but that's because I enjoy changing it up.

there ya go, thank you both. I was using binds (master of any and all binds here, lol) so that's why they weren't working... perhaps we could brainstorm a new way for pets to do their emotes in a bind? Perhaps change it so to do a pet emote, you type the following...

/petsayall (em victory)The mastermind we work for has a decent idea... Hooray!

parentheses could make a good substitution, or even brackets [] or... whatever these are, lol {}, could work. One of the main reasons I played my mastermind up to 50 and took him around afterward were the pet binds involving emotes. Since they broke the commands though, my mastermind has been collecting dust in sorrow with pets who no longer have personality (yes, my zombies had it :P).

I'm not saying I want a petition or anything, but I am proposing a fix for the pet emotes so I can once again bring life to the undead. A simple change in the icons used in the pet emotes commands would do wonders... lest of course the change to chat was made due to MM pet emotes being some sort of exploit, if that's the case, then I fully understand. But I couldn't think of a possible thing having a zombie eat a donut by pressing the "P" key could be damaging...

I just logged on to my necro/dark mastermind and even though it mentions in the patch notes that they should be able to, my pets still do nothing when I try to use pet emote commands other then say "&lt;em (whatever emote I'm trying)&gt;" in the pet channel.

Did they change the commands to do pet emotes and not place them in the patch notes? If so, can someone link me to where I can find the changes or new commands?

Thank you in advance to anyone who can actually answer this. I'm sure other mastermind players who have had the same trouble would like to know as well.

I've been in game, did you remove me from global? Anyhow, I also play another game on the side that out of respect for those who love CoH/V as much as I, I won't mention it's name. I play CoH mainly though since I've been playing it for 5 years and still love it.

&gt;.&gt; Um, I'm a celeb? sweet!

Play as: Any AT, I've brought almost all of them to 50 so far and enjoyed playing them there. I can honestly say that last night in fact, I had a 3 defender team where we had a TA/Archery who was SKed TANK 3 AVs, the other two were myself as an emp/dark and another as an emp/sonic. All the ATs are fun in my eyes and in the right hands, any AT can do amazing things.

To team with: Again, any as long as they enjoy themselves and I enjoy myself as well.

I have one arc and one mission. The arc is admittedly self serving, not too rich and not too bland. It's more or less an introduction to my most linked characters.

simply search @Winza and you should find them no problem.

The single mission is NOT a farm, it's a monster fight. It's far too annoyingly difficult to farm. It's all the monstrous regular mobs in the game all in one large cave (the Atta cave). I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but if you are mid-level, it'll spawn 46th level snakes :/

I'm sorry I don't have the arc IDs, I noticed this thread during server down time and my global is unique enough to be search able.

Here is a list of "Why they DIDN'T add a specific set to ATs over what they did."

Tanks: No elec/elec for one simple reason, Tanks are built to survive massive damage and still come out swinging. the base for SCRAPPER and BRUTE Dark Armor is 30-40%, tanks get a minimum of 10% more, meaning 40-50% UNSLOTTED. Dark Armor has a heal, 2 mez shields (Fear and stun). All that adds a lot to survivability and they're more useful to tanks then brutes.

Tanks will also be getting Dark Melee, previously, they had no attack in their secondary that could be a heal or end recovery and have EVERY attack do -acc also adding to survivability. The only drawback I can see in DM for tanks is it's severe lack of good AoE damage.

Scrappers WILL NEVER get Energy Melee, Brutes and stalkers prove that if a character with Scrapper melee base used it, it's be beyond overpowered. Remember, brute's base damage is lower then tanks and stalkers base are between tanks and scrappers outside of assassin strike/hide.

Fire/fire looks VERY nice for scrappers in the fact that they now have an elemental attack that isn't negative energy (most things strong against neg are strong to eng as well in PvP). Imagine if you will, 2 crits in a row on GFS and Incinerate. If you think AS on a stalker's a beast... That'd 2 shot anything short of most tank/brute/scrappers... actually, the scrapper may be killed too.

Firey Aura has the same 30 second base heal tanks get, just like reconstruction from regen, but with much better resists and a built in end recovery power that if no one has realized, Brutes have been able to pair with dark melee's since brutes started existing.

Blasters, well, I can't really say they have any problems with what Psi is adding for them, but all of the complainers need to realize, Brutes, Stalkers, Scrappers and Tanks all have 2 sets in common, all with very, VERY good psi resist, Dark Armor and Willpower, 44% resist on the scrapper/brute sets and that's BEFORE enhancements if I remember correctly on Obsidian and WAY higher on willpower... I'm not going to guess the totals when tanks get DA but I know Psi doesn't make WP tanks bat an eye. Dark Armor will finally have a place in the PvP field and that's a good thing.

Defenders getting Cold Domination/Ice Blast... Ok, yeah, they can get Power Build Up to boost their buffs/debuffs... cold doesn't grant them stun protection, hold protection, sleep protection, immob protection or protect them against slows (I'm sure the corrupters with those sets can agree with that part) It only really helps their allies. Ice Blast with weaker damage and better slows, not too bad, decent trade off. I was thinking maybe giving defs traps/ar, but well, there aren't enough debuffs in AR and traps doesn't seem like much of a heroic set to use... (traps/ar was my prediction)

Controllers getting plant/thermal. I more or less expected either thermal for both def/con or cold for def/con, instead they got one and the other got the other. Either way, yay, Thermal will be very nice for folks who like the fire control set but don't want to have sonic or emp. I'm actually a little scared of seeing a controller's pet with Forge and the shields and then the controller says "Say bye to your defenses!" and uses HE and Melt Armor.


Now on to the villain side!

Brutes didn't get ice for one very good reason: Fury is gained NOT WHEN YOU GET HIT EVER, it is gained when an attack is made (hit or miss) by the brute or any thing (player or mob) aimed at the brute. Ice has Chilling Embrace, a 40% some odd slow that also is a -12% dmg debuff as mentioned earlier. Slowed foes means fewer attacks being made, meaning much less fury being gained... MUCH less. Ice melee has the same drawback with the slows. Broadsword and Axe are more or less the same powerset only with KD instead of a weak -def. Axe would do just as much damage as Broadsword with a scrapper's melee base. Mace? It's all about stuns in the early powers and about KD (thanks to the changes they're making) in the powerful AoE attacks in the higher end. Both sets will be very nice on a brute.

I listed why NOT Ice, but here's why it's yes to SR, If the elec aura brutes have taught you anything, faster attacks = more fury (same deal with more enemies attacking you) and SR has Quickness and it'll make your brute's attacks recharge like mad equaling much faster fury gain and add the ability to avoid being hit in the first place and still gain fury and you get a pretty beastly brute who can do back flips.

Stalkers getting Elec/elec from brutes. Honestly, there isn't anything that stalkers can do well with offensively that they don't already have (the best smashing set, the best lethal set, the best energy/neg sets and they even have a toxic set!) and now they have elec to spice things up. Defensively, elec isn't too hot for stalkers if it's still a resist on them. They have better survivability if they don't get hit to begin with from what I've seen since they have the lowers personal HP other then MMs (without pets). Broadsword is covered and so is Katana if you look at the Ninja Blade set. Ice armor would just be SR with different gfx on a stalker, the best powers involve AoE slows and stalkers only want their target, not a group (no offense, AoE loving stalkers, it's just how I see how you work)

Corrupters and MMs not getting Empathy. Um... Hello, a villain who feels your pain and it willing to take the pain in your stead?! You're kidding, right? Not just no, but hell no. On a corrupter, it might fit if they removed Absorb Pain... maybe. On an MM though? If anyone hasn't noticed, the ONLY AoE heal available to MMs is Twilight Grasp, a heal that ONLY works if you use it on a foe... oh, and it actually has to hit as well. An MM that could heal his pets constantly like the emps/rads/thermals already do? HA! The only thing that DOES fit is what they actually got. I think Elec blast on corrupters will be an energy damage alternative to well, Energy blast. It already meshes well with kinetics on defenders due to stacking end drains and storm will make you able to be the bad weather bad guy you always wanted to be! (You can call yourself South Florida Weather :P)

Masterminds getting storm was something I didn't expect. I was thinking Sonic (it's actually balanced if you make the +res of the shields as low compared to controller sonic's as the force fields are and the same with the -res debuffs) but storm on an MM?! That was something I thought would be OVERPOWERED. An MM that can totally lock out most melee characters? Storm has that in Hurricane. An MM that can shut out ALL melee characters? Hurricane and Snowstorm does that trick nicely! Ground flyers with Snowstorm, batter them with Icy Rain, Tornado (another pet), Lightning Storm (a psudo-pet) and make foes go flying with your level 1 secondary, Gale!

If you are wondering why I am saying Storm is overpowered, I have an Illusion/Storm controller who's only weakness is having his PAs disappear mid battle. If he had living pets that weren't on timers, he'd no longer have a weakness and he wouldn't have to use his hold or spectral wounds!


Dominators getting Earth/Elec. I'm not sure what to think about this other then if you think having placed powers is a weakness, remember, the immobs are a -fly and if they land on the affected areas, they get slapped with -jump as well... and -def, +held, -run and damage (fire, not smashing). I have no idea what powers elec assault will have, so I can't comment (dodged that bullet with Psi Manip as well) other then it WILL NOT have Power Sink since you already have access to that in the Sirocco PPP. It might, however, have Thunder Strike, Voltaic Sentinel, Short Circuit and if dominator lovers are really lucky, Lighting Rod (doubtful though on the last one).

All in all, if you look at it, none of the sets being exchanged are bad in their new homes if you actually know how to use the powers in them. There aren't any BAD powersets (other then brute/stalker Energy Aura, now that one needs work) so stop with the whining, learn to play something other then FOTMs and you may just find out that there's more to the game then Fire/Kin controllers, Emp/Psi "complete }{3410r build" defenders, Spines/Regen scrappers, Stone/Energy tanks, Ice/Energy blasters, Energy/Ninjitsu stalkers, Energy/Stone brutes, Ice/Kin corrupters and Bots/Dark masterminds. There's a LOT of power combinations and a lot of them have great synergy with eachother if you actually learn how to use them.

Anyway, I look forward to this offering from the devs with wide open arms and have already deleted 3 characters I didn't like playing as a result to make room (one non-epic vill AT and 2 spaces for my arachno-lovelies). Cheers, everyone!