Chonos

Most people over 20 are fine for Smash alerts. The problem is the difficulty varies *wildly* to the point on nonsense; on some, I could bring in a level 15 character with a decent build and tank it and we could probably finish with no character being much above level 20. Others will find most people below level 30 being more of a liability than anything else. However, both of these give the same rewards and they change randomly through the day; while someone who is new to the game or relatively inexperienced might be fine doing one Smash alert, suddenly it changes and they're now dying repeatedly and doing virtually no damage. You have to know the powers of the various bosses as well as how much difficulty the scenario itself adds, which is silly to ask of people who may not have even seen some of the rarer bosses. In addition, there is very little incentive for level 40s to even be running those alerts; the bosses have a tiny chance to drop costume items, but that's about it.

Then there are the Nemesis alerts, which suffer from blatantly poor planning; scaling up a Nemesis sometimes results in an easy target and other times results in something nearly unkillable for a lot of people. Of course, then there's the other issue where, if there's anyone in the group who doesn't have a Nemesis it will still sometimes choose them and create a generic (and fairly irritating) Nemesis instead of using the Nemesis of one of the four other people who should have one. On the upside, at least those *do* attract 40s properly, but even that's not enough sometimes if the boss has a health drain or the like. I ended up changing my tank's Nemesis because it was almost silly how few groups could beat it even if it couldn't even dent my health bar.

Finally, this assumes the Alert team up tool doesn't only give you four people due to either crashes or other bugs. Also, it's possible to make one of the smashes-- Trainstopping-- impossible to complete. Basically, I'd take DFB/DiB any day of the week over the Alerts. It honestly looks like they released a proof of concept build as the final version given the lack of balance and thought put into it.

Which is a shame, because I'm actually kind of curious what kind of powers/powersets she considers to be useful/good combinations.

CO's character building is this really weird mix of extremely simplistic-- I have characters who have two attacks they use, period-- but oddly complicated as I try to figure out everything I can reasonably/within a character concept use to make these one or two powers hit as hard as possible as often as possible, made more problematic by the numbers the game gives me being apparently subject to DR behind the scenes.

The best example I have is one of my character is built entirely around making Conflag hit as hard as it can according to concept. My main function during combat is just holding down the button I have it bound to as often as possible, letting up to reapply debuffs, active offenses, and a miscellaneous attack I use to keep my energy up without needing to ever touch my energy builder. All that just so one main attack hits as hard as possible as often as possible, regardless of how many targets there are (I do the same thing for both single and multiple targets).

On the other hand I've got an Elec character who actually has four different attacks, but to be honest I'm not even sure if two of those are a DPS loss or gain when I'm only hitting one target. Granted, one of those two is Orbital Cannon with Anvil of Dawn, so it's kind of hard *not* to want to hit the button that calls a giant beam of death out of the sky onto my target. Of course, Gigabolt is also pretty fun to both spam and charge.

It does, at least, have some outright silly things you can do with spec trees that I like to see in games. They aren't entirely optimal, but doing things like taking both the hybrid tank trees to get your defense to offense twice, or taking a hybrid tank tree and the vindicator tree and watching your defense be applied to offense, which then applies 20% of the new value to defense, which then applies to your offense, which then... you get the idea. Things that are fun to talk about with other people who don't necessarily play the game. I just wish there was more to actually *do* with characters once they're 40.

It worked out pretty well in zombie PvP on either side; plenty of distractions if you were a zombie, plenty of targets if you were still alive. However, given that it relied on killing things fast and people in level-capped PvP were somewhat absurdly sturdy while still putting out roughly the same amount of damage it didn't work out anywhere near as well in, say, Stronghold.

There were several powers (especially AoEs, weirdly) that acted like that. In fact, I had/have (I don't even know if they work anymore) multiple characters who basically spammed AoEs or single target attacks that returned more energy than I would need to use for most fights. I know Electric and Fire were two big ones for the whole "what energy builder?" thing. My Fire character didn't even *have* dedicated single target attacks, just a ton of AoEs which worked so well I never needed to use anything else. Plus, with Presence being useful for Fire I also had a strong shield and heals. In open world missions I'd not infrequently end up tanking the boss in spite of the fact I was specifically using the stat which was supposed to reduce aggro when used in Avenger mode. Then I'd stay in Avenger mode to tank it, because hey, I have unlimited endurance and this powerful heal and bubble right here...

It was one of the few characters which felt like a CoH character, oddly. On steroids. Playing at -1 when I'm a +3 incarnate. More amusingly, it wasn't even a particularly optimized character, I'd seen much stronger.

Dark was mostly just because having a ~20% heal on a fairly short CD even with SOs just sounds so fun paired with SR. I wouldn't be getting any awards for holding AoE aggro or speed kill competitions with that power combo, but I'd certainly be difficult to kill for most of the game.

Can we please lay this terrible argument to rest? Virtually all characters, in SOs, can take on above-default settings to some extent given proper play (even if it's just slightly above default) and a reasonable build. Many can be outright incredible even before adding in IOs. Once you add in IOs? Even cheap ones? It's like the past 50 levels (assuming you even wait that long; I usually start getting some cheaper sets in the 30s) were being played with unslotted powers. Then you get into incarnate powers in addition to those IOs, and it starts feeling like not only had you forgotten to slot your powers, but you were accidentally using Brawl in place of some of your powers. Yes, even the heals.

Most games I play I'm lucky to take on a few mobs at once if they're meant to be an even challenge; once I get going on a character, CoH lets me mow down hordes (or, if I want, just focus on smaller but significantly harder groups of targets). I have a Elec/Shield Scrapper whose entire thing is running headlong into a big group of mobs and using every single KD attack I have not because it's effective (it is), but because of the sheer fun I get out of seeing LR->SC->TS go off and everything around me bouncing up and down if it isn't already dead. This quite often leads to said character ending up faceplanting, but hey, I just tossed around a huge mob of guys like they were toys. Imagine what that character could do if it was actually using IOs in any meaningful fashion and actually hit 50. Let's not even get started on how much fun I have when a teammate faceplants when I'm on my Dark/Dark Corrupter, who has Vengeance, an AoE res, virtually all the IOs I want short of purples and the only thing holding me back from going ahead and trying to take down entire spawns on Incarnate trials is the fact that it's built towards thematic play instead of min-maxing and I don't even have anything but the most incidental amount of defense because Soul Storm looks so awesome on that character I can't *not* take it.

While I can't say I necessarily agree with the idea that all defense IOs bonuses need to be halved in strength, there seems to be a notable train of thought by a chunk of forum posters that if your character isn't nigh-unhittable to at least S/L you've done something horribly wrong with your build. Why? Because it's absurdly easy to do in a lot of cases. While yes, the defense sets have defense debuff resists, what this actually seems to mean is that devs begin putting in some actually kind of silly levels of defense debuffs and/or accuracy on some things just to challenge those people specifically. This is quite unhealthy for people who, for whatever reason, aren't aiming for or haven't hit the soft cap yet. I imagine it will only get worse as time goes on, as more people begin to clamor for a challenge as their characters who long ago looked at the soft cap and decided they'd been aiming too low as far as character power levels went. The upside is, at least, that it both forces and allows the devs to push more towards using things that aren't just attacks to challenge people to stay alive, but then you get people complaining that they're just using gimmicks, and just want something to try to hit them like it usually does.

I suppose all I'm saying is that, "But I won't feel super...!" is an argument based on very little aside from personal opinion, but it's frequently used in such a way that implies that you're the only one who has the proper opinion in the matter.

No, it really doesn't. If they are already modifying it so chance to proc is based on the modified recharge, then they're already accounting for what happens when procs are put in a high recharge power that gets modified by a massive amount of recharge. That's the entire point. *If* they left it at base recharge, then it might make sense to add a cap. Though if they just left it at base recharge, an internal CD on the proc would be preferable to yet another random chance for something to not work.

If the chance was previously 100% and is being brought down by anything but the change to account for modified recharge, then yes, it is a new chance to fail. If I'm using a power that recharges once every 20 seconds with a PPM of 4, that proc should be activating 100% of the time because it cannot proc more per minute, on average, than it is intended to be. At most (well, a bit less accounting for animation times) it can proc 3 times per minute if you're doing nothing but using that power. So going below 100% does, in fact, make it a chance to fail on top of the inherent 5% chance to miss that all powers already have. If said power is, for some reason, now recharging in 6 seconds due to large amounts of recharge then the power should naturally not be procing every time the power goes off *anyway*.

There is absolutely no point in adding in a new cap in addition to the (needed) change of accounting for the modified recharge of a power. It's messy design that doesn't add anything to the system that lowering the intended amount of procs per minute won't do in a more sensible fashion while not adding more cruft to the system than makes it hard to explain to people. We're already going to have to consider the PPM rate of procs to decide which power would be best suited to take it based on the amount of recharge we have and powers available, so is there a point in adding another layer by saying, "oh, if you think a power will ever go above X seconds to recharge don't bother slotting this proc in it because you'll get nothing more out of it than if you put it in a power that gets the same number of procs on average but can't go above X seconds to recharge."

I wasn't evening considering those, and I realize they're a different beast.

Please stop with things like this. A random chance to fail is not enjoyable and does not add anything meaningful to the game aside from frustration. If it wasn't a PPM type but just a 90% chance to proc, then I'd be fine (probably pretty happy, in fact) to throw that into any power, depending on the proc itself. But when I'm throwing something into a power on the idea that because this power takes a long time to recharge-- even with good levels of recharge-- that the proc goes off basically every time, then I really must strenuously object to it now having a chance to fail. You're switching fully to a PPM system to, I assume, smooth out the rate of procs; don't ruin it with a miss chance. It just seems arbitrary and somewhat poor design, honestly. We already have a constant chance to miss which prevents the proc from activating, we don't need a second one on top of it.