Call Me Awesome

You're very welcome; new players entering the game is always a healthy thing. Without new people things stagnate and as older players slowly leave the game we end up with fewer and fewer people playing and paying the bills for Paragon and NCSoft. Let that happen long enough and they'll pull the plug and we'll all be looking for another game.

After over 6 years here in CoH I don't look forward to trying to find another community like this one. I've played WoW, Champions, DCU, D&D online and others without finding anything like this community.

I've been wondering about this myself, I have 5 different email accounts that I check constantly; right now I'm using Outlook '03 and have each account going into it's own folder. Does Thunderbird have that functionality also? How about calendar, can it sync with the Google Calendar (I have to use that in order to sync with my Droid)?

I recently upgraded to Office 2010 but found that the new Outlook sucks in it's handling of multiple accounts so I've been using the old 2003 Outlook instead. I have my email set up so that messages from my personal account go into one folder, the messages from my gaming account go into another, my business account goes into a third and so forth. All of these folders are in a master email folder so I just have to sync one folder between my desktop and laptop.

Whew, and I've been impressed with the performance boost I got by putting an Intel 80GB SSD in as my C drive. Too many other things to spend the money on right now but I'm wondering just how much real world improvement you notice moving from one SSD to a RAID 0 of SSD's. I noticed a fairly massive improvement going from a 7,200 disk to the SSD.

Severe, have you thought about slotting FE with Adjusted Targeting tohit/recharge, recharge and a common recharge? It ED caps the recharge and gives you another 2% damage bonus. That's the slotting I use for Build Up on my scrappers and blasters. It's not much but it's also cheap.

That build looks effective, but massively expensive. What is it, about 5-6 billion in today's market? Did you go for the Cardiac alpha for the endurance? My biggest complaint with the Oblit set, aside from it's cost, is the lack of endred in it.

I seldom use it, but the few times I do I have a real good reason.

5 star - the people I regularly team with. This is generally redundant since they're all on my global list as well. There are about 5 people with this rating; they're the ones I team with most nights.
4 star - players I don't see often but who impress me with superior ability.
3 star - I haven't used this rating
2 star - players I've teamed with who were poor players or incompetent at playing a character. There's actually one player I've noticed who rated a 4 star from his blaster and a 2 star from his tanker. Great blaster player but incapable of surviving 20 seconds against an AV with his 50 tank.
1 star - true idiots who are grossly incompetent.

The rare abusive jerk simply gets /ignored, possibly /petition as well if it's really extreme. I've only had two players ever end up in the latter category.

Ok, you're overslotting Health; that last heal isn't buying you very much and the slot could be better placed elsewhere.

The Obliteration set is nice for melee defense, but it's pretty light on end reduction... I'd consider using a mix of Eradication/Scirocco for the end bonus and regen bonus.

I'm not a real big fan of using powers as set mules if you've a choice so I'd move the extra slots out of Boxing into Whirling Hands... WH is your only AOE and you've considerably underslotted it. I'd consider slotting the mix of Eradication/Scirocco into WH as well.

Bone Smasher deserves more slots, I'd go with 4 Smashing Haymaker or Kinetic Combat (depending on your finances... the Kin Combat is VERY expensive) and either a pair of Pounding Slugfest or one Acc/Dam/End from Crushing Impact. By themselves both the Smashing Haymaker and Kinetic Combat sets are light on accuracy... so I use 1-2 extra slots in the attacks to solve that problem.

I'd question the slotting of Touch of Death in ET; it's giving you a good melee defense bonus but most of your other slotting is going for S/L defense. You're better off building either positional or typed defense as high as you can (up to the 45% soft cap) than spreading it around.

Along the same line you'll want to get the Steadfast Protection resistance/3% defense unique IO into your build; it's 3% defense to everything in one slot.

I would also move slots out of Char into Fire Blast and Fire Ball; as well as adding at least one more slot to Total Focus. Personally if you aren't slotting out the regen/recovery uniques in Health I'd stay with the base slot there; those slots are more useful elsewhere.

I assume you're intentionally waiting on a travel power until 49; I'd consider getting it at a more traditional level just so I'd have it when exemping down for lower level TF's.

All in all it's better than before, but there's still some rough spots that can be smoothed out. I don't know what your inf finances may be... this will be an expensive build. Many of the Kin Combat IO's sell for over 100 million each, that's why I generally spec the MUCH cheaper Smashing Haymaker set... it only provides half the defense bonus but you could slot 5 full sets of it for much less than a single Kin Combat IO.

Good luck!

My basic solution is always to deal with the problematic mob first, and of course a mob that's problematic for one character may be cake for another. In the case of end drain I take out that mob first, if I'm on a squishy and there's a mezzer in the group I take out that mob first and so forth.

There's ways to handle problem mobs, you just need to think about your advantages on a given character and play accordingly. In some cases that solution will be your inspiration tray, in others it may be taking out the problem NOW before they start getting the better of you.

As an example, Carnies are a problem for a lot of characters thanks to their mez and death-drain. Some characters I make sure to kill them from range to avoid that drain, for others I rely on high energy/positional defenses to avoid it. My BS/Shield scrapper for example actually gathers them up into large groups for my AOE's and Shield Charge since very few of the drains end up hitting.

Play to your strengths and always focus on your problem mobs first.

Oh my, are you familiar with ED (enhancement diversification)? The short version is that the enhancement values are SEVERELY reduced after you reach 95% enhancement... the equivalent of 3 SO's in a power. You're wasting a lot of slots on very marginal improvement slotting 6 resistance IO's in your armors. The first three provide ~95% enhancement while the last three are only providing 5% EACH... those slots need to be moved elsewhere.

There's lots I'd question about that build but the single biggest problem is your slotting in your armors. 6 slotting for resistance went away as a valid choice in issue 6 about 5 years ago. You're also slotting some extremely expensive IO's in the Hecatomb and Numina sets but poorly slotting commons in the armors.

Without Tough an Invuln tanker reaches ~70% S/L resistance; with Tough he reaches the 90% S/L resistance cap. That means that you'll take three times the damage at 70% that you'd take at 90%... an attack that does 1000 points of damage would do 300 points to a tanker with 70% resistance but only 100 points to a tanker with 90% resistance.

Weave is needed for defense... the more defense you have the less you get hit. From your post you seem a bit fuzzy about the mechanics of defense and resistance. Let's break it down into the layers of protection.

Your first line of protection is your defense... an enemy attack must roll above your defense or the attack misses and does no damage at all. The higher your defense, up to the "soft cap" of 45%, the harder it is for an enemy to hit you. Due to the way defense and attack mechanics work if you have 45% defense you've reduced most enemies chance to hit you to the absolute minimum; most mobs would only have a 5% chance to hit you at all. LT and boss mobs will have a somewhat better chance but you're still reducing their chances to the minimum possible.

Your second line of protection is your resistance... any attack that makes it through your defense will have it's damage reduced by your resistance. As I mentioned above if you have 90% Smash/Lethal resistance then any attack dealing that kind of damage would only hit you for 10% of it's damage value.

Your third line of protection is your hit points, regeneration and ability to heal. Dull Pain is the mainstay of this allowing you to boost your hit points and heal massive damage when something truly nasty makes it through your defense and resistance.

What all this boils down to is that Tough makes a dramatic difference in your Smash/Lethal resistance (the most common damage types in the game) and Weave allows you to raise your defense closer to the soft cap. In both cases the more you have the more effective it is... the difference between 0% and 5% defense is nearly unnoticeable but the difference between 40% and 45% is immense. Each percentage point of defense is more important than the last up to the 45% soft cap.

So while Tough provides the same kind of resistance that Temp. Invulnerability does it stacks to provide still more resistance. While Weave provides defense like Invincibility and Tough Hide to it likewise stacks to provide still more defense. Until you reach the caps more resistance and defense is ALWAYS valuable, especially to a tanker.

I'm assuming that the numbers you gave were for defense? If so you've quite a bit of room on S/L to swap sets around; anything over 45% defense is of very limited use to you... swapping out the extraneous S/L set bonuses to get something else useful, like more regen, more recharge, HP or endurance in place of the extra S/L defense would give you a stronger overall build. Obviously I have no idea what your build looks like now but you may want to look over your slotting and see if dropping 13% of S/L bonuses would let you include more valuable bonuses in their place. Um, this does presuppose that you're basing your numbers on only one foe in Invincibility.

I did pick up Unstoppable in my last respec for the inherent fitness; more as a "carry an umbrella and it won't rain" thing than anything else and as something that would be perfectly functional with only the base slot. So far I've used it once, on the Apex TF dealing with the toxic damage from the Hydra tentacles. Since there's no defense for toxic and your resistance to it is minimal... AND those Hydra put out really massive amounts of it I did find Unstoppable useful for that specific situation. We cleared out the pylons in less than the 3 minute Unstop duration so the crash wasn't a factor.

I tend to think that Unstoppable is a useful emergency button power that since it needs no slots may make sense to pick up with the freed power selections of issue 19. I don't think it's by any stretch a "must have" power but now that builds have more room for extras it may be worth having for the very rare time when you may want it. The Ethereal Shift temp though is a fantastic "oh crap" button on any character and I have it on every one of my upper level characters. My Blasters do seem to get the most use out of it though...