ClawsandEffect

If you don't have access to Going Rogue you don't have access to alignment merits in the first place.

It's much more common than you think.

I've done it myself with a Rad/Sonic Defender. (Granted, it was only Kraken, but a GM is a GM)

Bots MMs can most definitely solo one, but not at level 29. At 50 with the appropriate IOs it gets much easier.

The most common GM soloers are various forms of Illusion controller. Usually Rad or Cold.

I've seen video of it being done with a blaster, and I think someone pulled it off with a Dark Melee/Shield Defense scrapper as well.

With the advent of Incarnate powers, the variety of ATs and builds that can do it has dramatically increased. Even under the "no temp powers" rule, Incarnate abilities still count because they are not temp powers.

Edit: D'OH!

Didn't notice the necro, so I posted and said almost the exact same thing I said the first time I posted in the thread 3 months ago.

If I were the team leader I would have booted that guy for being a dick.

It's one thing to report someone, it's another thing entirely to report someone and then brag about it and say you "pwned" them by reporting them.

It's like the kid who'd get people in trouble in school and then get in their face like "HAHA I told on you and you got in trouble! I'm better than you!"

If you're going to report someone for something, just do it and keep it to yourself. There is no reason whatsoever to report someone and then brag about how it was YOU who did it.

Go redside and get Mu Mastery. Electric Fences and Ball Lightning will pump up your AoE damage output a bit.

You can fit several procs into Electric Fences and it will turn into a decent damage power.

Batman uses devices, and he's natural.

I look at it a little differently.

If the devices in question are beyond the scope of current technology in the world you live in, then they are Tech origin. If you could buy them off the shelf at an Army surplus store, they are Natural origin.

In a world where we have medical teleporting technology and the police force has regular access to power armor, the doodads in Devices are most definitely NOT beyond the scope of readily available technology for that world.

Really? Where? It IS very glowy, but the "huge knockback" just isn't true.

Energy Manipulation has exactly ONE power that has knockback. Power Thrust. There is not a single knockback effect anywhere else in the set.

I've been telling my wife the same thing for years. She hates Energy Manipulation because of knockback, and it has as much knockback as Martial Arts, and LESS knockback than Electricity Manipulation (Havoc Punch, Thunder Strike, and Lightning Clap all have KB)

This is a common misconception. Just because something is expensive does not always mean it is the best choice for your build. If your goal is extremely high recharge, then they probably are the best choice. But if your goal is soft-capping defense on an AT not meant to have high defense, then they are probably actually the WORST choice, because they are extremely expensive and don't give you any kind of defense bonuses at all. Whether or not purples are actually the best depends entirely on what your build goals are. Personally, I never use them, simply because they are so expensive and almost never have set bonuses I'm interested in.

Let me amend that:

I've never come up with a scrapper or brute build that soft-caps all types WITHOUT severely gimping other aspects of the build.

Willpower doesn't have an overabundance of defense debuff resistance. If you focus all your slotting chasing the soft cap and either run into something that bypasses your defense or debuffs it into the dirt, you're going to be in a world of hurt because the rest of your build won't be up to snuff to handle those enemies.

I like defense on a Willpower build, but not so much that I'm willing to ignore the other things Willpower is good at to get it.

In my experience, the last 5-10% to the soft cap is the toughest to get. If you're already sitting at 39% to S/L with a build, I would call that good enough and move on to E/N defense. (I focus on E/N first, but that's just personal preference)

Eradication is an AWESOME set if you're slotting a Willpower character. It gives you more max end, 3.13% E/N defense, and 2.25% Max HP (the largest HP bonus found outside a purple set). I actually like Eradication better than Obliteration for most applications, but again, that's personal preference.

My reason for shooting for E/N defense first is because of the end drain associated with electricity attacks. The first 3 TFs feature a LOT of electricity attacks (Clocks, tons of Clocks, and Freakshow respectively), and it really sucks getting tagged with a bunch of them and having your toggles drop because you've been spamming attacks. You'll continue to fight Freashow on and off for your entire career, and if you decide to switch sides....well, then you have Mu to deal with.

So, I consider Energy defense slightly more important than S/L for a Willpower. Don't ignore S/L completely, but I've found that 35% or so to S/L is enough for a large percentage of the game (can always pop a Luck if you run into a bad situation).

Also, aside from the end drain, pure electricity attacks will stand a good chance of outright killing you as well if enough of them are getting through. You resist probably 50% of Smashing and Lethal attacks, but it is doubtful your Energy resistance is above 10%. There's also the added (and annoying) fact that a significant percentage of Electricity wielders are reluctant to close to melee and fuel RttC for you (Mu Strikers, I'm looking at YOU!). Mu, some Freakshow, and Cabal will all hover outside melee range and continually nail you with pure energy attacks, so if your defense to them isn't very high, it's gonna suck.

For the record, I'm not saying you HAVE to build anything the way I'm suggesting. I'm just explaining my reasons for why *I* build my Willpower characters this way.

Oh, one more reason: E/N defense is usually cheaper than S/L if you're looking to buy it on the market.

And on the whole soft-capping to S/L thing. It's not as absolutely necessary as some are convinced it is. If all you have going for you is defense then it most certainly IS necessary, but if you have more than that it gets less important. The way I look at it is: The more layers of mitigation you have, the less crucial any one layer is.

Example: SR has ONE layer of mitigation; defense. That means soft-capping an SR is virtually mandatory. If you defense fails, nothing but a few seconds time is between you and a dirt nap.

Shield Defense is ALSO a defense based set, but it has some resistance and higher max HP as well. That makes defense slightly less crucial for it. A Shield defense character that is not soft-capped will perform much better than an SR that is not.

Then you get to Willpower. Willpower has: Defense, resistance, high max HP, and a metric buttload of regeneration. That's 4 layers of mitigation. Will a soft-capped Willpower character be a beast? Absolutely. But the additional layers of mitigation Willpower possesses means that defense is much less important for it than for SR or Shield.

If you focus so much of your slotting on defense that you gimp max HP, resistance and regeneration, your character will not perform as well as one who took a more balanced approach. If you can soft-cap while still building those things up as well, by all means do it. But if you start taking away from the other things that make Willpower such a good set chasing the soft-cap, it's probably not going to be worth it in the long run.

Don't worry about Fire/COld defense unless you've got your E/N and S/L needs met. Pure Fire or Cold damage is pretty rare, especially cold. The only pure cold damage attacks I can think of are Frost Breath and the rains. (and the rains you can just move out of )

Energy damage is the third most common damage type in the game and a significant amount of it is pure energy.

If your toon were a tank it would be possible to softcap all types. I've unfortunately never come up with a scrapper or brute build that achieves that feat. I can get 2/3rds of it, or I can get them all in the 30s. Jury's still out on whether its better to softcap a few types or get solid defenses to all.

I concur on the health side of it though (assuming Kractis is talking about Max HP here). A WP scrapper can achieve HP totals in the neighborhood of 2200 without compromising anything else in the build (scrapper HP cap is 2409, so 2200 is damn close)

I don't have a build on hand, but if I find some spare time I can slap something together for you.

You want everything except Resurgence. Strength of Will can be skipped, but I like to take it for a place to slot a Steadfast Protection Res/Def without having to add a slot to something else.

Willpower is a set that gets stronger the more of it's powers you add. Very much a case of the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts.

Also, yiou should be just fine at 39% S/L defense. If you slotted Mind Over Body and Tough you resist S/L damage pretty well, so the defense isn't as important as the E/N defense (which you get almost no resistance to at all)

Actually Elegost, the answer to the question he was asking is "Yes".

He was asking if Spiritual Alpha's heal enhancement affects his +regen powers, and it most definitely DOES. He wasn't asking about set bonuses.

The Alpha powers will enhance anything that will accept an SO of the correct type. So, Spiritual Alpha will indeed enhance any power that will accept a Heal IO.

It will boost Fast Healing, Health, Reconstruction, Dull Pain, and Instant Healing. It will also enhance Physical Perfection if you have it. It will also boost the +Max HP effect in High Pain Tolerance and True Grit.

I've confirmed this in game. My Claws/Regen's enhancement in Fast Healing is sitting at around 120%, which would be impossible if the portion of Spiritual that ignores ED were not working in it.

I think what tripped you up is the fact that +heal set bonuses are pretty useless for regen, which is true. But....Alpha enhancements are not set bonuses.

Hulk is one of few characters that actively USES Super Jump.

But, since all it is is a function of his leg strength, it is logical to assume that any character with super strength should be capable of it (assuming their super strength is not a side effect of them being particularly dense, which means they will be very heavy as well).

I look at it like this:

Does a change to a power change which enhancements you can put in that power?

If it adds an enhancement type without taking one away or doesn't change at all: No Cottage Rule violation. Energize would be a good example of this. It added the ability to slot Heal enhancements, but didn't take anything away from it.

If it changes an enhancement type while making the original type no longer valid: Yes, the Cottage Rule has been violated.

BUT......like I said earlier, the Cottage Rule isn't set in stone. If the devs feel such a significant change is called for, they will violate it.

So, since we have post-50 content, nothing else in the game exists anymore?

You seem to be forgetting that there is an entire freaking game between you and the ability to have Clarion Destiny.

Also, as noted, new players and returning players will not have access to IOs right away unless they choose to buy access. How exactly do you get significant defense on a Blaster, Defender, or Controller, while not using any IOs whatsoever? (Answer: you team with someone who can provide it)

Saying an entire powerset is useless because we have Incarnate powers (which we can't get until we are level 50), and because we have IOs (which not everyone uses, and free players won't be able to use at all) is pretty foolish.

Maybe Force Field is useless to you and your crew of IOed out Incarnates, but it is still plenty useful to the people who don't have or don't want those things.

I got a couple people interested in the game while they had the $1.99 sale going. They are going to be Premium players who will not be buying access to IOs for quite a while, if ever. I rolled a FF/Sonic Defender to run with them because defense is the most useful thing I can provide them that they can't do for themselves.

And there are Tip missions which are unique to Rogues. No other alignment will get those missions.

There are unique Vigilante tips as well.

I think there will probably be Rogue and Vigilante contacts eventually, but there's only so much the devs can release at a time.

*shrug*

When I have a bad customer experience, I take my business elsewhere.

As far as I can tell, the PvPers in CoH are gluttons for punishment. Any other group of people in this game, upon having the part of it they enjoy the most gutted, would have moved on to a game that gives them the experience they want. But PvPers here hang on in the (probably vain) hope that, someday, the devs might make it all better.

They will probably look at PvP again, and make changes. But, if the past is any indication, what they end up doing isn't going to be what PvPers want.

I'm not a hardcore PvPer, and I never claimed to be. What I am is a "casual" PvPer. I mess around with it on occasion just for fun, and I don't take it too seriously. I don't think I've ever made a dedicated PvP build (mostly because I don't want to farm my buttocks off to afford all the stuff I'd need for it), and I'm happy with where my PvP skill level is (honestly somewhere in the neighborhood of "mediocre")

So I guess since I'm not "invested" in PvP or "dedicated" to it, I'm not allowed to say anything about it?

And PvPers wonder why they're the red-headed stepchildren of this game. If you didn't come into a conversation with people outside your little circle throwing insults and derision at them, maybe you wouldn't be huddled your little corner and the REST of the game might actually care that you exist. I don't personally have anything against PvPers, but I gotta say, the attitude some of you have toward anyone who isn't one of you isn't helping your case any.

(The last part was directed at the guy who made his first post to tell me how I have no right to talk about PvP because I'm not invested in it)

After i21 I'd give a DM/Regen brute good odds. It will be damn hard to kill, and it has a damage type and secondary effect that Invuln is not especially strong against.

Street Justice might end up being a good PvP set. I don't know if anyone got around to testing it when it was still on beta, or what they determined if they did.

Basically, after i21 hits an Anything/Regen brute will be a fight clubbing monster.

Just like the game died when the majority of the PvPers left?

Oh....wait....it's still here.

Sorry, this game does not live or die by the PvP population. That has been conclusively PROVEN already. Every single PvPer could up and leave right now and the game would not even notice.

You know what else? The free players aren't going to like PvP either, because they won't be able to build the ridiculously expensive characters that dominate PvP in this game. Unless you think the free players are going to have fun being farmed by PvPers they don't stand a snowball's chance of being competitive against, let alone actually beating.

Edit: After reading some more of the thread ( I didn't read past what I responded to), I have to add: I really DO hope they give PvP some love. I enjoy doing it on occasion and I'd like it to be more fun.

I just think people frequently overestimate how important PvP is to the survival of the game in the big picture. Honestly, if the devs removed PvP entirely with no prior warning...a good 85-90% of the playerbase wouldn't even realize it was gone for quite a while. If PvP were particularly important to the game's continued survival, it's a safe bet the devs would have been trying to make it right this entire time. Since they haven't been, one can safely assume they've determined (via information we don't have access to) that the disappearance of the PvP population won't do a whole lot of damage to the game as a whole.

Balancing PvP seems to be an especially problematic dilemma. Ranged ATs will ALWAYS have the advantage over melee ATs, and there's nothing that can really be done about that. Getting rid of Travel Suppression and Heal Decay will help, but it's not going to fix everything by itself.

The devs attempted to make it so any build is viable in PvP. A respectable goal, but one that they will probably never achieve. The only thing that attempt really did is it changed which builds are the overpowered go-to combos. Remember how good Ice/EM blasters used to be? Well, now they kind of suck and have been replaced by Psi/EM blasters. Defense based builds went from gimped to overpowered and back to gimped.

Everything the devs change just causes a shift in which builds are the FOTM builds, and not much else. And honestly, we're not helping much with that. People interested in PvP tend to gravitate toward the "best" builds and never really try that hard to figure out how to make the oddball combos viable.

I don't envy the devs on this one. Their work is cut out for them and anything they do will be met with scorn and anger. Especially if it doesn't fix things to peoples' satisfaction.

I'll give you an example.

As we all know, Shield Defense is a very powerful set in the late game, once you get Shield Charge and have enough slots to get to the soft cap easily.

The balance for that late game power is the fact that in the early levels of the game, Shield Defense is pretty squishy, because you don't have a whole lot of defense early on, and you lack some of the powers that makes Shield Defense so good.

Enter powerset respecs. Now you can level a Regeneration scrapper, which is powerful in the early game. Few things level through the first 25 levels or so faster than a regen.

Suddenly, you can level your character as a Regen and switch to Shield Defense at a level where Shield Defense starts getting good, completely bypassing the early level squishiness that is the price Shield pays for being so good later.

Or leveling a Fire/Rad controller. Fire Rad is a good set early, because Radiation Emission gets most of it's good powers before level 20. Level it to 38 and switch to Fire/Kin when you can get Fulcrum Shift. Or you could switch to Cold Domination when you reach the level you can get it's powerful debuffs.

If you look at it, it is like that across every AT. Powersets that get extremely powerful in the late game don't have much going for them early on. That is the balance point for them being so powerful later. Conversely, power sets like Regen that are strong in the early game don't really get a whole lot better in the late game. Basically, once you hit level 28 with a Regen, you are not going to get much better than you are right then.

If you could level as one of the sets that are good early and switch to a late-blooming set when it starts getting it's good powers, you would be destroying part of the balance between those sets.

A lot of people also get confused about when something is breaking the Cottage Rule and when it is not.

I've heard many people say that changing Conserve Power to Energize is breaking the Cottage Rule. It is not. Energize gives you an endurance discount, just like Conserve Power does, they just added a heal to it as well.

Technically, one of the changes to Stalker Energy Aura IS breaking it though. Changing Repel to a stun aura is completely changing the basic purpose of the power.

The Cottage Rule isn't set in stone though. The devs WILL completely change a power if they determine that the power is broken enough to warrant the change. They won't change it just because the players ask them to though.

I think this is the key point.

If you drop to Premium you won't be able to run the trials, but you'll keep any of the things you earned in trials you ran previously.

At least if I'm understanding it correctly. You'll keep what you already earned, you'll just lose the ability to earn more.

I dunno about you, but I'll be getting every one of the new powersets without spending a dime extra.

I'd do it with a Traps Defender instead.

More survivability, and you don't get as many questionable powers (Smoke Grenade, I'm looking at YOU!)