Carnifax

Have to agree here that the Dominator really seems the least powerful AT out there. Not by much and some builds are pretty good but having played one Fire / Thorns 14 and one Fire / Rad controller who's now 18 the difference in survivablity is staggering. I know Dominator != Controller but really my Dom is the weakest char I've ever had at 14.

With Domination up its a different matter but the brief shining moment of uberness doesn't really make up for feeling puny most of the time.

I'd say raising normal damage and dropping Domination damage is a good start to addressing the problems. And/Or maybe giving them a chance to do a rare "Magnitude Critical" on a hold, for PvPers.

Big grats Eci.

Mercedes has been doing some amount of grinding recently

You could take Dark Miasma as a primary. There's a powerful heal, two debuffs and a lot of tricks (a res thats useful soloing as it also does an AOE disorientate, a cone Fear and a single target hold). You could combine it with Dark Blast to floor accuracy and the two blasts & snipe would give you good single-target damage (for a defender). In teams you become a debuffing monster with a more powerful heal (that needs an enemy to hit off).

Storm is a good set but doesn't provide as much defense as Rad or Dark. Its big hitter is a Snow Storm & Freezing Rain combo to slow them down, apply a bit of knockdown & debuff defense & damage resist. But you wouldn't really be a soloer, even with Hurricane. Plus Hurricane can get you killed quite easily with the aggro it picks up, accuracy debuff or no. If I was to be a Storm defender I'd pick up Dark Blast to go with it (Tentacles & Freezing Rain) but again thats a Team based set. And and a Stormie the last thing you'll be doing is Healing really. O2 Boost is a quick top-up heal. You'll be able to save Squishies but there's no way you'd be able to keep a team standing on your own.

There were two or three of our Soloer Fire / Rad builds posted up Thurs / Fri last week, why not just do that? I did mine in one of the Heroes builders.

To be honest at that low a level whether its double or triple Siphon Power doesn't matter too much does it?

I reckon Fire / Kin would start having problems in the early 20s trying to continue this soloing. Plus of course there's the question on why a */Kinetics would even be soloing? Especially once they hit 20 and can start handing the Speed Boosts out.

To be honest you should be fine. You'll probably need a little bit more resting than the Rad version but you should be well able. I actually was stuck between Fire / Rad & Fire / Kin when I was creating Mal. Chose Rad because although Kin will probably be more lethal at 38+ Rad will have an easier time getting there.

One good tip is to start your street hunting in the Hollows. Why? Because you can constantly load up on Blue & Red insps from the contacts in there. Start with Wincott and clear the 6+s from around the Atlas gate. Then get Flux as a contact and do the same around his area for the higher levels. In Galaxy I had a contact just outside the Perez gate who provided the same service.

Once you get going you can rely on a constant stream of new insps from the carnage, just pop / delete any lesser ones (non blues & reds basically).

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Wonder if this tactic of soloing till the early 20's could work for fire/kin aswell

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Should do easily, I only occasionally have need of Radiant Infection when hunting them and a kinetics should be able to heal back any extra damage since they'll be in melee anyway.

Plus you should have Siphon Power double / triple stacked most of the time. Nasty

So you don't want Fire, Ice or Energy?

Go Rad so. Dark is probably the least damaging (although not widely resisted) but most controlly Blast power.

For Damaging seconderies Kinetics is the obvious winner once you get to 38 thanks to Fulc Shift. Rad secondarys debuffs make things safer though.

Hi Ashen.
Yeah I've a level 16 Fire / Rad doing the exact same thing at the mo. Was clearing blue council mobs from Boomtown yesterday for a while. I actually go with : AM, Hotfeet, Flashfire to open combat, Fire Cages and toddle in, holding anyone thats not disorientated as I go. Then RI on one lieut and start bashing the second with Air Sup.

My build is basically the same but with Air Sup taken at 10 and Fly at 14. Air Sup is great with Containment and makes soloing missions much less End intensive given the smaller enemy spawns. In missions I rarely use Hotfeet unless theres more than 4 or 5 enemies.

I'm thinking of getting Choking Cloud in my 20s at some point too. I know its an End hog but I like the idea of the PBAOE nastiness that would be choking cloud & hotfeet.

I also can't wait until level 21 and Zombie bashing in DA

The only good thing is that there was a post yesterday from States apologising for this and promising a fix, I assume in a boost to the effectiveness of End draining powers.

It is very annoying though. For the moment I'm forgetting about End Draining as a tactic and revert to buff / debuff / single target blasts & snipes on my defender.

Heal them...

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If you want to kill bosses safely Air Sup is good in any build, flyer or not. Hover is for.......... um......... kinetics with no ambition??! I dont know really, I dont think hover has much use these days

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My Kinetics went Air Sup too and hasn't looked back. With Haste & and couple of Siphons up you can have a mob constantly tumbling in the air.
Hover I wouldn't bother with. Yes knockbacks are annoying but Air Sup is so much more useful

Any time I end up on blaster heavy teams bad things happen. My Kinetics defender has been picked up by Blaster heavy teams a few times and it always seems to go wrong. But these are always Pickup Groups who seem to contain members who don't know Rain Of.... is a terrible opening move. "YOU'RE LEVEL 24!! WHY DON'T YOU KNOW THIS???"

A well co-ordinated Blaster team would be godly. Uncoordinated = horrible nasty mess.

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O_O that was unexpected ...

I didn't think anyone was reading it ^_^;;

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Which is why I posted

I love em. Keep them coming!

Seems pretty good. Nothing there thats untoward. I got Aid Other instead of Aim & Air Sup, Haste & Fly instead of Inertial Reduction & the Fitness pool but thats down to preference. I like being able to set him on autopilot and go for a cuppa. Haste & a couple of Siphons is a lot of fun though...

The only bad thing is the Endurance Boost bosses & lieuts got last week means Short Circuit took a fairly hefty indirect nerf. So don't be planning to be able to sap too well.

Hopefully they'll counter / soften the blow soon.

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Bases are recent additions, I can only assume there is room for improvement, so give it a little time or a couple of patches.


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Sorry but that doesn't wash really. They've already been live for 4-5 months. Plus all the time they spent designing and beta-ing them. Didn't someone go "Hang on. Other than plonking things down theres no actual content these things provide".

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The complaint from most is 'Daddy, I want a big base & I want one NOW!' I say, chill, what's the rush, build it as you go, make it an ongoing project. Otherwise we'd all have uber bases with an absolute build, which would equal a trip to Yawn City. "oh you've got 6 plasma cannons, 10 turrets and rabid fish guarding your vault too.... that's the 53rd base I've seen like it today"

I do however, agree with the rent quibble. What purpose does it serve? It's the SG's base, we've paid to keep it powered & controlled. Why the rent? Literally throwing away money to a registrar despite the fact we've saved his behind from countless villianous plots!


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I'd just like them to be of use for something. I get no benefit from them at all other than the occasional quick trip to a hazard zone.

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Finally, so far I've found the base pretty useful for transport (incl the reclaimator's = same zone arrival) and holding meetings and the like. I do not doubt they can be improved however... *coughs SG mission computer* *ahem some missions please*

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Agreed. Or at least let us play Puzzle Bobble on the stupid thing

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The entire concept is half baked and not very well implemented..

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Bases are pretty laughable. Currently a glorified way of getting from PI / Founders to Hazard Zones and thats it. The Salvage system seems meaningless and to have something this poor as one of the main selling points of City of Villains (all the articles I read touted it as one of the reasons to get CoV) doesn't bode well for the game.

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What gets me is how i imagined bases from all the talk is just widely different to how it is. Is this the same for anyone else?


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Yep, I thought they'd be far more accessible (as in easier to build / mod). To be honest the entire Bases thing reminds me most of the anti-climax over i4 and the arenas.

i mean I'm a member of a decent SG, I team a lot with them and any char I play is generally in SG mode but the entire base thing seems mostly pointless to me just like the poor old arenas did when they appeared, about 12 months ago.

It might be fun to mess around editing it but I don't get that opportunity. Anyway I could just fire up Neverwinter if I feel the urge to lay down tilesets on a grid.

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...Sure it's not as nice looking but the concept is the same.

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Aye I just wish they'd take a sec to steal some of Adobes interface ideas like the Paintshop crowd did.

*edit* Oh, just got some of the dialogs working. That improves things rather a bit. My next point still stands though /edit

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Surely you aren't "stuck" without PS installed on a pc?

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Well i'm not stuck anyway because I'm a programmer so I rarely need em. The GIMP is fine for image resizing and the like but its like "Why did you decide to do it this way??".

I mean the Menus system alone is bizarre. You get File, Edit etc for the application and then every image you open gets its OWN file, edit menu system with all the other command on it. WHY? Why do this differently to every one application I've seen? Whats the point of that, theres no clear advantage and it just leads to confusion. A prime example of overcomplexity in the interface for no real reason.

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Of course Photoshop has the king of interfaces. Once you've used it everything else pales.

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Yes.

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Yep its terrible. You can create layers but I can never figure out how I'm supposed to switch between them. And I've about 7 years Photoshop experience.

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n00bz00r! XD

it's really not that hard..

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I'm sure its not. I can't be arsed having to go and look though. The point is the interface is bloody awful on it. You can always tell the products where the interface was designed by hardcore techies because they're always obtuse, almost deliberately so.

Which is why the GIMP (and Linux until relatively recently) aren't as widely used as they could be.

They go to all that trouble making a pretty good image processing system, with all the complexity that involves, and then fall down because they can't arrange the interface properly.

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You can get The GIMP for Windows as well - never liked its interface though.

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Yep its terrible. You can create layers but I can never figure out how I'm supposed to switch between them. And I've about 7 years Photoshop experience. Of course Photoshop has the king of interfaces. Once you've used it everything else pales.

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I really like the second one. I wish I had photoshop! How much does it cost to download/buy?

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Couple of hundred? I think they have Student packages if you're in college which are less.

Paintshop Pro and, for Linux users, The GIMP are two shareware / open source alternatives though. Paintshop would let you mess around for a month anyway.

Had the pleasure of teaming with a decent low level Ice tank over the last 2 nights. First night was me (lvl 10/11 Fire / Rad troller) a defender (11 Rad / Rad) and an Ice Tank (level 11 too). We were fighting +2/3 trolls (orange / red minions).

Talk about effective tanking. They run in and as they were doing so we'd double RI on one lieut. They didn't just run in and start bashing, instead they did the Aura herding thing properly, I'd threw in Fire Cages and a hold on the non-anchor lieut and stand beside them with Hotfeet on and everything would die, anchor last. Every time.

So nice to work with a Tank who knows the trick isn't being the first one running in and basically scrapping, its to grab all the aggro (well enough so even Fire Cages could safely be deployed) and hold it, including grabbing aggro back off the squishies.

Especially when its a low level Hollows pick-up group. Did Frostie with the same player yesterday and it got me completely from 11 to 12.

Ice seems to be the flavour of the month in CoX though. The amount of Ice Tanks & Controllers running around...

Illusion / Rad is very, very nasty. Although you can't buff Phantom Army goons you can debuff the guys they are hitting for much the same effect. Thats nasty.

I don't know if I'd call it "support" but you'd certainly be very useful on a team and very very good at soloing post-18.

I've a level 41 Illusion / Storm. Basically Storm is a bit of a box of tricks. You'll be slowing em down with Snow Storm & Freezing rain and Hurricane is situationally brilliant for fun herding of mobs, especially in confined spaces when you can keep em upended against a wall (oo-er).

Nothing like the feeling of dropping Phantom Army, Snow Storm, Spectral Terror, freezing rain and Thunderstorm for flashy effects. Ok your Endurance is gone after all of that but you won't need to do anything, your pets will do it for you.

You've plenty of room to experiment with Illusion Storm too as theres a few powers that aren't great but can be lots of fun.

Didn't want to interrupt the Cosmos thread itself but I've been waiting 3 weeks for that latest update so I was delighted when I checked this morning and a fresh new part was available.

Kudos Jakey_k. This is easily one of the best written Creative stories I've read with brilliant character development.

Just wanted to let you know and can't wait for more.