Doc_Reverend

Probably the big one for me was Virgil Tankross. Since the ending of his Strike Force has him flat out saying that he used you and, more importantly, you're not getting paid.

... so when I ran it with my RP group, I'd thrown together an extra special AE mission to deal with that little detail of what happens when you screw with half a dozen brightly colored superpowered sociopaths. ^_^

And the entrance to Pocket D is nearby, with the portal to Praetoria there, so maybe you do need to know if it's raining in Imperial City! TPN's just trying to expand that coveted interdimensional marketshare.

I'm really regretting clicking this thread. C'mon, guys. Spoilers! You didn't have to leak this for the January sig arc.

I think this counts.

This was around Issue 18 or 19. Didn't have Alpha Slots yet, but the Praetorian stuff was out. So our team was running I think the Maria Jenkins arc, and we had the mission where we had to go fight Nightstar, a pile of Warworks, and Resistance that were in the way. The team was a mix of levels, with me on my Inv/Energy giant robot tanker (seriously, he's about eight feet tall, made of metal, and wears pants). I forget what the rest of the team was, there were maybe 5 or 6 of us, and I'll mention that most of the team was probably using SO's or generic IOs instead of IO sets.

This is an important detail.

So we get to Nightstar, having a bit of trouble with the Resistance (that cloaking thing they do is annoying). And everything kind of goes bad. She's an AV spawn with an extremly large spawn of Warworks protecting her, plus Resistance. It's also at an annoying bottleneck, coming right out of a hallway past a turn, so we end up walking right into her. The fight... well, did not go well. A lot of the team, being blasters and I think a mind/ff controller and maybe a scrapper and a fire/fire tank, get torn apart.

Which leaves me. Alone. While half the team hosps and I pull Nightstar and her half dozen or so remaining Warworks off the rest of the team and end up having to hold them off the entire time. This is harder than it sounds, since I'm taking a lot of energy damage from the Warworks and my energy defenses wasn't quite up to snuff (it was still heavily generic IOs). But I managed to keep the AV busy long enough for the team to regroup.

It just felt very epic in a "You shall not pass!" kind of way.

Hey, I've been wanting one of these little guys to follow me around for ages. They're cute! ^_^

Tiny Snowbeast: Rawr!

I actually grab Acrobatics on my squishies when they're already jumpers. Not for the KB protection, but for the Hold protection. There's a fair number of late game enemies, like Malta and Nemesis, with these insanely obnoxious little AoE Hold gas attacks that just ruin you, as well as some other enemies with weak hold attacks (I think CoT have them). Two points of hold protection helps at least keep every little one point three second hold off your back.

I also can't quite tell, but it seems using Combat Jumping with Fly gives you extra mobility, or at least tighter controls. I have nothing to prove this with beyond that when I use the two together, it feels different.

I'd think the Musculature Radial path would also be viable, if for the extra damage and end effecting powers. And, y'know, more damage. Either one works.

Or even, as an example, for him to point out that sometimes Malta has a point. Disagrees with it's methods and goals, but they're not entirely wrong either.

Oh, I forgot something: Super Jump.

Seriously. Even more than Fly, Super Jump is my favorite power ever. I love using it around the city, bouncing off power lines and whatnot. It's just... fun jumping 150 feet in the air, or over a building, or onto a third story balcony to punch bad guys in the face.

Well, let me put it this way: my main on CoH has been at 50 for about 3 years now and I still play her more than all my others. She's been Dual Blades/Willpower since the day I rolled her.

So yeah, I love powers with a visual oomph. I love my Earth/Fire dominator because of the stomp with Stalagmites, and my plants/storm controller for the visual chaos of Creepers and lightning and tornadoes everywhere. I like my powers big and beefy and feeling like I just hit someone hard or I'm doing cool stuff.

I pick powers based heavily on the visual effect, both in me doing the attack and in how it hits things. I love Knockback, almost as much as Knockdown/up. It's a guilty pleasure. One of my favorite things in Dual Blades is when my five foot three scrapper dives into the middle of a full swarm of Rikti and does Sweep. Watching a dozen seven foot aliens all fly off their feet at once is awesome.

Similarly, I quickly become bored with powers that use the same animations over and over, or just don't have that visual oomph. Mind control is a good example. I've tried mind controllers... I just get bored with it. It's much waving my hands or staring hard, not enough explosions or giant vines or earthquakes or knocking a dozen guys in the air.

Though in some cases, a good look can work with the animation. My giant robot character is inv/energy, and I find Energy Transfer is great for kind of a "powering up!" attack (I still want a Big O style mega-punch Judgement attack ).

A big reason I play? My characters are mine. They're my creations, my concepts, and I put them together. Sure, someone might have the same power sets as my dual blades/willpower scrapper... but they're someone else, with their own look going on. I find that so rarely in MMOs, where everyone feels so cookie cutter most of the time. Everyone's the same mage/smuggler/whatever. Being unique helps me stay interested.

Additionally, the community. On the whole, the CoH crowd, including both the devs and players, are generally pretty nice and well behaved. Sure, there are jerks. There are jerks everywhere. But I've met a lot of great people here and made some great friends.

Generally, I first go for what fits my concept best. I'm not overly concerned about what's "best."

So my dual blades scrapper who's only powers are being stronger/tougher/faster than an unpowered human can be (think Captain America or so level) I went with the Reactive Core path, playing the -RES effect as her sheering through their armor and stuff. I originally went with the Diamagnetic Core path on my plants/storm controller and later switched to Degenerative's Toxic DoT because it fit the concept and powers better. Same with my others. The new DoT procs are nice, just because they give us some variety that go nicely with concepts. Is there any real appreciative difference between a Fire DoT or a Negative Energy DoT? Not really, but one fits the concept better than the other.

If I can't find anything that really stands out on a concept, I go for utility. That, and some of the debuffs are easily explainable. The -Damage proc on my inv/energy tanker? That's just an effect of getting a giant robot fist in the face.

There is an exception to this. I almost always go for Diamagnetic's -ToHit effect on my defense based characters.

Like others have said, they don't send heroes to investigate nice places. If it's the world of Puppies and Rainbows and Ponies, you don't need Hyperman to go punch things in the face. It is mention, however, that Primal Earth and Praetorian Earth are two of the strongest versions of Earth in their particular corner of the multiverse.