ClawsandEffect

Well, if you pay attention it DOES indicate you can't use them yet right in the WW screen. If you are not level 50 and look at a purple recipe, the number 50 on the recipe is red, indicating that it is unusable at your level.

Yup, there's the forum signature I mentioned

You have to have a payment method selected in order to activate the account. Yes, your first month is free, and you will not be charged until 30 days after you activate the account, but a payment method is still required.

The game has a $14.99 subscription fee, which is pretty standard for any online game. This is because, unlike a console game, an online game is constantly growing and evolving, and it takes money to pay for all of that stuff. CoH is relatively unique amongst MMOs in that the majority of our updates are free, meaning if you are paying a subscription fee you do not need to pay more money for new content. An exception to that is being released soon, called Going Rogue, which is a paid expansion. Going Rogue will NOT be required to play the game, if you do not want to pay for it, you do not have to, and your gaming experience will be unaffected.

The payment method screen is to set up payments for the $14.99 subscription fee. If you choose not to continue playing after the first month, simply deactivate your account before your payment is do and you will not be charged.

Edit: I strongly advise you edit your original post to remove your account name, if someone finds out your account name and has a password algorithm, they could steal your account. my account name has nothing to do with my forum handle for exactly that reason.

Scrappers are very good starting characters. They survive well and their playstyle is very straightforward. I recommend playing a scrapper to all new players.

It's a lot easier to figure out what's going on and get to know the game world if you don't have to worry so much about strategy and using your powers correctly. With a scrapper, there is no wrong way to use your powers, just run up to em and hit em until they're dead. Technically there isn't a wrong way to use anything if it works for you, but some teammates will get annoyed if you start a fight with Rain of Fire at level 6 (Rain of Fire is a Fire Blast power, enemies hit with it tend to scatter everywhere trying to get out of it, since level 6 is before tankers get their agro control powers it makes the enemies harder to deal with)

While you can see the animations, you cannot see what the power actually does when it hits a target. For example: The animation of Psionic Tornado doesn't give any indication that it sends everything it hits flying up in the air, you have to look at the power info to see that. The animations of Energy Blast don't indicate that pretty much every power in the set will send things flying backwards. I advise against making Energy Blast your first character, learn to play before you start knocking stuff everywhere, your teammates will thank you. Knockback is fun, and useful, but until you know what you are doing with it, it's more of a liability. If you really want to play Energy Blast, create the character and don't team with it, spend some time learning how to aim knockback by positioning your character.

I won't give you any other advice in creating your character. It's YOUR character, if someone tells you you're building it wrong...well, they're wrong. Any way you build it that works for YOU is correct, no matter what anyone else has to say about it. later on when you want advice to make your character more effective, check out the Archtypes section of the forums. If you have a question about a particular AT, ask it in the appropriate forum, which is where the people who know that AT well tend to congregate. (I hang out in the Scrapper and Blaster forums, and lurk in the Defender and Brute forums)

Don't be afraid to ask questions in game, for every jerk you encounter there will be 4 friendly, helpful players.

That's about all I have for you, everyone else answered your other questions pretty good.

Welcome to Paragon City, hope your stay is as enjoyable as mine has been!

Just because something is reported doesn't always mean it will be genericed. In this case, it probably will. Your forum handle happens to be an offensive term. It doesn't really bother me, but it IS against forum rules. I see that you already requested a change, so you should be okay. Had a moderator found it prior to your request, the possibility of a more severe punishment would exist. Since they can see that you are being proactive about fixing it yourself they will probably just grant the change and that will be that.

I heard a story about an unfortunate choice of name that got genericed.

The name was "Force Kin". (If you don't get it, say it out loud quickly, blurring the words together) The character was a Kinetics/Energy Blast Defender, so the name was perfectly thematically appropriate. I kinda felt bad for that player because I looked at it and guessed that the name choice was not intended to be offensive. They probably didn't even realize what their name sounded like when you say it out loud.

I think it's science or tech that sends you to him, but I don't remember off the top of my head. Henry Peter Wong is the guy's name they send you to see. He's the guy standing right by the Hero Corps Recruit badge in Atlas, across from the reputation adjuster.

I heard a story once about a grocery store that had a promotion in which their loyal customers got goods for free if they could prove they'd been a customer for a certain length of time. It was a huge hit, people flocked to the store with their old receipts and loaded up on groceries for free.

The store was out of business in a week.

True story? No. But it does have a bearing on the subject here. If you reward long-time subscribers with the option of a lifetime membership, no matter what the cost is, you will eventually run out of money to support your product.

Do you think it's the people who play for a month or two and quit that keep CoH alive? Not even a little. It's the long time subscribers who have kept enough money flowing in to justify keeping the game online, with enough surplus to afford all the cool stuff they have added since launch. If not for us the game would have dried up a while ago.

The people who play for a month probably got that month for free when they bought the game, and then balked at the idea of paying to play more.

If they offered a lifetime subscription at this point, thousands of people would sign up for it, creating a huge influx of cash all at once.

Say it is offered at $150. Great, a lot of people would sign the check right away for that.

After 10 months, those people are playing for free and no longer contributing anything to the continued life of the game.

After maybe a year and a half, the company would start running low on funds because they lost the support of all the longtime subscribers who bought lifetime subscriptions. The game cannot survive on the "play for a month and leave" players, because they are not consistant.

It would have been a good idea when the game launched, for a limited time, but now a lifetime subscription, even to the veteran players, would go a long way toward the game shutting it's servers down. CoH does not need quick cash, it has enough revenue from continuing subscriptons.

In short, offering lifetime subscriptions at this point in CoH's life would be one of the dumbest business moves NCSoft could make. Yes, it would be cool for the players, but if the game is not making money, the game will die, because the parent company will pull the plug the instant it goes into the red.

You'd see an AWESOME Q4 report as all the income from lifetimes came in, and then next year's Q1 report would be dismal, because of the loss of all those subscription fees. Then as more people got to where they could get a lifetime subscription Q2 would be worse, and Q3 would be abysmal. By the time Q4 of next year rolled around, all that cash would be gone and NCSoft would start laying off or firing employees to stay in the black. When that didn't work, they'd call it quits and the game would be done.

So, it is actually NOT in the long term player's best interest for lifetime subscriptions to exist.

Joe (I figured it would actually be more polite than calling you Mr. Blow) What you're consistently ignoring here is human nature. Just because there is tons of stuff to do, doesn't mean that everyone will do it.

You can add 10 TIMES the content that is in the game now, but if people can still level extremely fast and get tons of rewards some other way, they will ignore ALL of it. The devs are actually doing everything in their power to encourage people to experience more of the game. Content takes time to make. You can't just say "give us more content" and expect to see it next week. Going Rogue, by the sound of it, is going to be at least as large as City of Villains, maybe bigger, and ALL of it is brand new content. Yeah, you have to pay for it, but for a 5 year old game to be just now releasing it's SECOND paid expansion, when everything else has been free, is pretty good.

But it doesn't matter, because as soon as people figure out the new exploit, they're going to flock there in droves.

A tank of some kind. A debuffer of some kind. Some one with some sort of heal (doesn't have to be a "healer")

Personally I like the combination of a tank and a Thermal. Thermal covers buffer, debuffer, and healer all at once. Add a Rad/Sonic or something for help with AVs and fill the rest of the team with whatever.

For villainside, just replace tank with brute, and Rad/Sonic with Sonic/Rad (because it will be a corruptor instead of defender)

With enough debuffs and buffs you don't even need a tank or brute to hold agro, but it does make things a little smoother sometimes.

You can achieve the Master badges with any team makeup, the only reason people put together specific teams is it is a little easier and everyone knows their role from the start. Or because they're of the mistaken belief that that is the only team that can do it.

My Spines/Fire only has 4 points of KB protection and he is fine most of the time. 8 points should be enough for most situations.

Good answers here. Just a future reference point for you. You don't need to delete the character on the live server in order to play it on test.

You cannot, under any circumstances, transfer a character from test to live, it is a one way trip. That, as Carnifax mentioned, is to avoid people cheating by loading one character down with a lot of good stuff and transfering them back to live.

Unfortunately, since you deleted your character of your own volition and it wasn't a glitch or anything, you're probably hosed.

My main blaster does easily twice the damage of my main scrapper, and dies far less often. Blasters are actually balanced quite well now.

There was a guy on Pinnacle who soloed the ITF with a Fire/Fire blaster. A FIRE/FIRE, with pretty much no mitigation at all!

My fire/fire is squishy, he doesn't solo well. But if I get him on a team with a competent tank, and nothing else, his damage output becomes jaw-dropping. My Sonic/Devices is approximately 10% ranged defense away from soloing AVs with relative ease. He already can if I pack enough Lucks to keep him over softcap for long enough.

I currently don't have a scrapper that can do the same. I have spent far more on my main scrapper than my main blaster. And my blaster blows my scrapper away.

Blasters are fine.

I won't be testing it, but I plan on building a Rad/Mental blaster for AoE carnage (especially in melee range)

On paper it looks pretty solid. Time will tell if it is as cool in practice.

Sounds completely awesome so far.

....actually, that's all I have to say on it, it sounds awesome. Not a single thing mentioned here doesn't sound cool. Hell, even Nightfall sounds cool for my DM/DA to eventually take (he's the only one that will get it though) My main will be getting Physical Perfection, as he did not take Stamina and has slight end problems in extremely long fights.

Regen is the lightest on toggles by quite a bit, but sadly is not available for brutes. Willpower isn't too hard on the end bar. Fiery Aura only has 2 toggles that are necessary (you don't HAVE to run Blazing Aura, but it is recommended)

My main's battlecry is "BANZAI!!!!!"

If I'm playing him, I'm in scrapperlock, it's a given.

Commonly heard:

Claws and Effect: You 7 go that way, I'll go this way, we'll meet back here.

I have a battlecry on one toon that consists of:

(insert clever battlecry here)

A toon that runs a lot of ITFs has:

Yeah, you're NICTUS, we get it.

And another toon has:

EEEEEEEEEMMMUUUUUUU!!!!!!

(long story)