Call Me Awesome

I have to agree that, based solely on the video clip, the set looks unattractive to me. Visually it's effective but the sheer length of the animations is a major drawback as far as I'm concerned... the length of animation is the primary reason why I retired my Stone/EM tanker shortly after the ET nerf.

Admittedly the clip only shows a few of the powers but unless there are some pretty major redeeming features I doubt I'd play it.

Basically I guess I'm saying that we don't know enough at the moment to really judge the performance but things don't look promising.

Here's how I did it with my BS/SD.

First, all single target attacks including Parry got a full set of Mako's Bite to build Ranged defense (excepting Boxing... it's an unused prereq)
Second, all AOE attacks got 5 Scirocco's Dervish to build AOE defense.

That slotting, plus BotZ two slotted twice, put me at 47% Melee (one parry), 45.8% Ranged and 44.6% AOE. This does include the bonus from CJ; loosing it puts me at 45.2% Melee, 43.9% Range & 42.7% AOE. By the way, those are the numbers with the nerfed BotZ, and I only slotted the travel and travel/end IO's skipping the KB protection.

I slotted all my defenses with 4 Gift of the Ancients for the endurance bonuses, and Deflection also got a pair of common resist IO's. True Grit got the Steadfast unique, a pair of common resist and three Miracle including the unique. Yes, it could be improved on but it's worked out for me.

I also have Grant Cover for the debuff resistance and as another GotA mule and One with the Shield for when things turn pear shaped.

No issues here, I've been running 64 bit Win7 for the last week or so and while I've had some issues with a few of my older programs CoH, Herostats, Mids, Skype & Vent all work just fine.

CoH runs MUCH better now, although how much of that is a fresh install (the old XP install was about 3 years and a motherboard swap old) and how much is the new 80GB SSD drive I installed the OS and CoH on is a good question.

Zone load times have been in the 8-12 second range since the reinstall and it takes less than 20 seconds to launch CoH and get to the login screen.

I didn't do anything special in installing either; since I'm the only user I always run an administrator account and didn't have to mess with any settings... just install CoH, launch the updater (I know, I could've bypassed the need to update but it was late and I just figured the thing could take care of itself while I went to bed) and it ran fine.

Well, I got off lucky with my BS/SD scrapper; all I lost was 8% regeneration from swapping two Pounding Slugfest frankenslotted in an attack with another pair of Mako's Bite to finish off that set. Since I hadn't needed the additional defense before I had Hack slotted 4 Mako/2 Pounding Slugfest.

It really does a number on my Fire/EM blaster build though... fortunately I'm still in the process of acquiring IO's for him and hadn't gotten around to buying the BotZ yet. That one's going to take considerable thought to work out.

Ack, double post

I think it's a bit too hard a nerf... I do understand the reasoning and for that matter agree that it was probably too high originally; I'd think a 50% reduction was probably in order, which would be 1.88% Ranged/AOE instead of the 1.25% value it's currently going to.

Personally it doesn't severely affect any of my characters; my BS/Shield scrapper can compensate by simply adding two Mako's Bite IO's to one attack, replacing a couple of Pounding Slugfest I had for the regen bonus. My Invuln build will loose a small amount of E/N defense that I'll have to make up somewhere but I don't see that being a severe problem.

It DOES affect my (projected) Fire/EM blaster's build, but at this point I'm still working toward his build and acquiring IO's so nothing's set in stone yet. I got a couple of BotZ KB IO's on merit rolls a few days ago and am very glad I sold them right away instead of keeping them... I expect prices to tank severely on those IO's. No, I'm not in the closed beta and I didn't have advance notice when I sold them; I just thought I could use the $70 million per recipe more than hanging onto them until my blaster could use them.

If you can it'd probably be a good idea to sell any BotZ you may have quickly before the market totally crashes on them, if it hasn't already.

In looking over your last build it looks solid; there are a few very pricey items there however... notably the Luck of the Gambler recharge IO's. Last time I bought one about a month ago they were in the $150-200 million range. If you've the inf that's fine; just realize how much you'll be paying for them.

A minor detail here but I'd get Hurdle instead of Swift... especially on a jumper. You'll really notice the effect of Hurdle in your jump speed and distance.

Multi Strike is cheap and gives you good acc/dam/endred but it's bonuses are lacking... I'll second the suggestion to frankenslot three Eradication in there... I might finish out with Scirocco's Dervish for some regen. Also the suggestion of adding the Kismet unique into Tough Hide is a good one.

For Weave consider 4 slotting Gift of the Ancients; it'll give you bonus endurance and a recovery bonus. Based on my Stone/EM tanker that's something you can probably use. A second set could go into Tough Hide if you need more endurance.

Personally I don't take Resist Elements; it's only a minor bonus to a rare damage type and frankly I haven't missed it. Unstoppable is a power I found useful... before I respec'd into a soft capped build. Since issue 13 I haven't once had occasion to need it, even in a couple of Master STF runs. Because of that I dropped it on my issue 15 respec. Dropping those two powers would open up room for a ranged attack or two in your APP... and give you a place to toss a Thunderstrike set.

In any case it looks like you're working on a pretty solid foundation there; there are a few things I'd do differently but then you're the one playing the character so you should build it for your playstyle.

It may not happen anymore, but a number of years ago one of the 45+ arcs had one door mission that had a chance to spawn on Monster Island in PI... I've only seen it happen once though and that was 3-4 years ago. I've no idea offhand which arc it was after all this time.

But for all practical purposes Monster Island is just there to farm the GM's for EoE inspirations and Monkey Island is there for the Rikti Monkey badge... I've spent many hours on Monkey Island working on that badge back when it took 10,000 monkeys

I'll echo the "competent players of any AT" sentiment, however if we're running a TF I generally do have some thoughts on what would most help the team. If we're already heavy on support I'm probably going to be looking mainly for damage... likewise a team of 5-6 blasters would benefit most from adding some control or buff/debuff over simply more damage.

Mostly I don't get too bent out of shape over team composition unless we're running something like a STF and even then as long as we have adequate damage and mitigation I'll give it a shot.

I like having three things on any team facing challenging content... Buff/Debuff, Control and Damage. For the buff/debuff portion you have Defenders and Controllers, for the Control portion you have Controllers, Tankers and depending on powersets Scrappers. Damage is primarily Blasters, Scrappers and some Controller/Defender builds.

The Bass Hatchery? Well, if that's what floats your boat well and good but that's probably the second most hated map in the game after the Layer Cake room on a blue cave map. Just a heads-up for you.

Ok, as to the flier respawn others have mentioned how that works... every 20 minutes the game spawns a new flier. Let's say you've killed the flier and it respawns a couple of minutes later. Ok, that happens, you killed it just a few minutes before the respawn timer popped. Now you immediately kill the flier again. Assuming that you probably took 2-3 minutes to kill the flier from the time it respawned you now have 17-18 minutes to deal with LR and the towers before the flier reappears.

It works like this:

• First person enters the mission and a flier spawns
• 20 minutes later a new flier spawns and the old one despawns
• This cycle repeats until the mission is over.

I always look at the clock when we first enter the mission, that way I know when to expect the flier to return. If we took 18 minutes dealing with the corridor and patron AV's we wait a couple of minutes for the flier to respawn... when it does it appears dead center between the towers. Once we see that respawn we kill the flier knowing we now have 15 minutes or more to deal with the towers & LR... and we take the towers in order of Red, Blue, Orange and Green. The tanker pulls LR back into the corner behind the Green tower so you don't have to worry about a flier respawn while killing LR.

Let's say we enter the mission at 5:00. At 5:20 precisely the flier will respawn... and it'll do it again at exactly 5:40 and 6:00. Knowing that it's a simple matter to plan your window of taking out LR.

On the repairmen, don't be absolutely sure you didn't knock one back to a destroyed tower... they can end up underneath the closed dome of the tower's base and thus be hidden from view. Try it sometime on a destroyed tower, you can jump down through the dome into the pit below the dead tower kind of like jumping into a chimney.