FashionSense

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- Lanaru wasn't that bad. In fact, I felt that Ruladak was more difficult than Lanaru. And I was teaming with almost the same people in the two TFs.

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The two present very different challenges. Ruladak is all about the AoE nuke for 2100 energy damage followed by a constant supply of punches for 900 smashing damage, plus he has some kind of buff that can boost the damage of his minions. It takes quite a lot of resistance or defense / acc debuff to stand up to all that. Lanaruu is tough because he's a storm defender AV and can debuff anyone near him quite severely.

Overall I agree that Ruladak is harder - Lanaruu is easier to counter by just staying out of his hurricane and snow storm.

An excellent guide. There is almost nothing I could add, except a few little clarifications:

<ul type="square">[*] The Quarterfield TF can be done relatively quickly with a solid team that focuses on keeping up a consistently fast pace. I personally have completed the TF on teams of 6-8 in 4:15 and 4:30. It can be done![*] For the sewer trial, there are 3 level ranges that are important. In order to get the mission from the contact, a player must have a real level of 38-40. In order to reach the mission door, a player must have a real level of 36-50. In order to get a temp power from a crate, a player must have a combat level of 36-41.[*] The Cathedral of Pain trial does not appear to ever have been activated during CoV beta. We very little about it except that it apparently involves Rularuu and the reward is an item of power.[*] It is customary to do the Justin Augustine TF on invincible difficulty, as that increases the mission XP bonuses for the outdoor hunt/delivery missions without changing how hard the missions are (since they are in an open zone). However, I hope you like level 54 Death Mages.[*] In the Justin Augustine TF, any named boss whose name ends in "?" or begins with "Archmage" is basically an elite boss. They have more than normal HP and resistance, but only boss-level hold magnitude.[/list]

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I tried the Tank Mage team tonight. I came REALLY close to dying once, but that's because I was the lowest level char and I was leading.

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Actually, I think the close call happened because we waited too long to refresh buffs. Also possibly because we were fighting a +2 Bone Daddy, and no one had Insulation Shield yet.

Our defense was great but endurance, accuracy, and damage were just okay. Damage should get a lot better when the sonics get their resist debuffs, and having 2 kins using siphon power would be nice. Endurance will get better when the kins get speed boost but it looks like this team won't be at peak effectiveness until stamina and/or transference. Accuracy is a bit of an issue - stacked tactics is going to be a must-have to fight the kind of deep purples that a rad team can.

The change in power order for Sonic Resonance will help, since the sonics will get a res debuff at level 1. However, I'm thinking that only having 3 people on the team with res debuffs isn't going to be impressive enough. Maybe having at least half the team take sonic secondary would be more effective? It's short on AoEs but the -res would overwhelm single targets quickly.

I think the combination of sonic and FF has a lot of potential, although it may be a problem that a team has to have a certain mix rather than just "everyone has radiation, get as many people as possible".

Endurance management could be a problem if everyone is trying to run leadership and the status protection bubbles. Kinetics is probably a good choice to cover that.

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There's no way Stateman is dead. In the first comic he was shot repeatedly after everyone lost his powers. That didn't kill him. In the second comic Manticore shot him in the sternum. I'm sure Manticore knows that the human heart is over on the left a bit, or a little over on the right from his firing perspective.


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Reading the comic, I'm pretty sure that Manticore has some kind of trick lined up. Once Prometheus coughs up the assistance it's going to be revealed that States is not dead and Manticore will have to rely on the re-powered Statezeus to protect him from the pissed-off god he just conned.

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Statesman said it was helping him meditate. This is cut and dried folks. Statesman is a masochist. That's a fact. He's going to be dating Pin-Head in the next issue. I GOR-ONE-TEE.

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Well, Tyrant has Dominatrix who "serves him faithfully in all capacities"...since he's Statesman's alter-ego, it's not surprising that they have the same, um, hobbies.

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Slotting most debuffs for accuracy is a waste in comparison to Debuffs/end redux.

That said, out of your list the only power that I think Lysosome is ideal for would be smoke grenade.

Smoke grenade isn't even used very much anymore and often goes unslotted. Couple that with the incredible frequency of lysosome drops and you have a pretty worthless enhancement in comparison to every other HO that could have dropped.


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Lysos are a good filler for some places where I don't have enough of exactly the right HOs. If nothing else it's a 50% ACC SO. They're definitely ideal for smoke grenade - 5 or 6 lysos in SG is a very respectable debuff.

My rad/rad has 3 enyzmes and 3 lysos in rad infection. I had 6 enzymes but I put 3 in enervating field (for the 50% endrdx) and made up the difference with lysos - the diminishing returns from the endrdx on RI mean I wasn't giving up very much.

I think most sets with debuff secondary effects have one power that debuffs more than the others - for /rad it's irradiate. So before slotting lysos for an attack with a debuff, it might be worthwhile to figure out if there is one attack in the powerset that would get a less trivial benefit.

I like the art but the story doesn't make any sense.

There's a spell on the city that "suppresses super powers". It evidently doesn't do anything to the war walls (some pretty elite tech there), the guns wielded by the thugs, or cars. This means that it's very, very selective. And what about natural origin MA/SR scrappers who just know kung fu? Why would they be at anything less than full effectiveness? If guns work, why can't AR blasters just keep shooting? What about heroes whose powers are inextricably linked to their existence, like magical entities or androids like Bastadel (ok, they're probably just dead)? Why is Positron still generating anti-matter if that was his superpower?

Then we're told that 6 weeks later, the city is happy and peaceful and being cleaned up by "Arachnos drones". Life for the civilians is completely back to normal, but the only heroes in the city are hiding in fear of their lives. Super powers work everywhere else in the world but not in Paragon.

What?

Exactly what kind of drugs are the government and the civilians smoking? If I lived in that city, I'd be RUNNING for the exits. There's an unknown spell on the city - does that affect my cancer treatments, my cell phone, or any of the reverse-engineered Ritki tech being integrated into commercial products? If I was the president, I would scrounge up whatever military I had left from the war and send it to secure the place and get everyone out. If I lived anywhere else in the world I would drop everything and figure out how to make sure what happened to Paragon doesn't happen to me next. Superpowers get suppressed, a bunch of people die, some Arachnos guy sends in robots to control the place...and it's business as usual?

I don't buy it.

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When large portions of your subscribers skip everything under level 40, why bother making more content for the lower levels?

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Because with the exemplar feature (or better yet, flashback or content with an auto-exemplar feature), all new content is available to high levels as well.

I would like to have a new level 50 trial. But a level 14-20 Faultline trial would be almost as good...it would still give my 50s something to do.

Hmm, this thread is getting off topic. I don't think the XP range changes have made much of an impact on live, positive or negative. There's no one standing at the trams leveling up (real PLing takes place in missions, just like it always has), but on TFs with outdoor hunt missions I get screwed out of some XP. Not much difference really.

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One team made up of 4 stooges taking a PL and 4 people actively fighting earns XP slower than a team of 8 fighting. You want good xp everyone contributes.
A level 6 sked to a level 40 does not fight as well or as fast as another level 40.

If you really want to be efficient and level quickly, the people on your mission who increase the spawn size should be able to contribute well.

Justifying someone's place on the team as being there for the spawn size is bunk. Even the hard core leeches know this. Stooges slow the game down.


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This is not necessarily correct.

A level 50 teamed with another level 50 (or someone sk'd to 49) will receive less XP per kill than a level 50 teamed with a level 41, no sk. The only difference is that having another 50 may make the killing go faster - but since AoEs scale perfectly, it is entirely possible for it to be more efficient for both characters in the 50+41 case.

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Let's let the forum give her or him a cool handle.


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Hmm...

GenericDev001
GenericHero8237
DevWithoutCoolHandle

I never had hover or fly on any character until I got my warshade to level 6. Flying around blasting stuff was an interesting experience, and I finally got to see the city from the air. The nova form fly is pretty decent, but I don't actually use it to travel much since I have other travel powers that are a lot faster.

If I had to spend a power choice to get a version of fly that had no acc penalty, no end usage, and so-so speed, I would do it. But the actual fly power, no way - too many downsides. I would consider 6-slotted flight speed hover as a better alternative, but that's a lot of slots.

My fastest-traveling characters have super speed and teleport, usually with one of the two picked up in later levels. SS/TP and SS/SJ are amazing combinations - I can go anywhere at very high speed. However, the pause when dropping from a teleport to start running is quite annoying. As anyone who has done a Shard TF with me can testify, I usually get to the mission first and port everyone.

If the point of a travel power is to get you from point A to point B without a bunch of downtime, fly fails horribly. Some people want other things from their travel powers - I just want to get from a contact in FF to a mission in Crey's Folly without getting bored. It's probably safe to say that most players are not hardcore min-maxers so they are attracted to fly because it lets you....FLY (which is cool, I know). The lower rate of xp/hour caused by travel downtime is not a consideration.

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This rocks. I think I can also infer an ulterior motive.

1) PLers will have to follow their PL people around, because of the 300 foot XP thing.
2) PLers will not be in missions. They will be in the streets.


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I don't understand why #2 would be the case.

Serious PLers will be in missions just like they have always been, where the PL'ee doesn't have to follow the PL'er anyway.

PLers in the streets will be in exactly the same position they were before this XP change. It only has an effect relative to being in missions.

I just tested super speed with a travel Hami-O and various SO combinations.

My numbers may be a bit off but I measured each combination the same way so the proportions should be correct:
SS off: 13.5mph (no swift or sprint)
SS on, unslotted: 59.3mph (this is SS at level 50)
SS on, one 50++ run SO: 76.5mph (37.5% bonus, corresponds to a 33% from even-level)
SS on, two 50++ run SOs: 84mph (capped out)
SS on, one 50 Hamidon travel/endrdx: 72.4mph

The Hami-O benefit was approximately 28% in this test, so the real number could be 30%.

It is indeed less than a run speed SO.

I would just like to say that an arena league consisting entirely of level 1 characters would be really funny and potentially a lot of fun. Everyone runs around using their 2 powers plus brawl, and running out of endurance because they don't even have rest.

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If people didn't care about this mission, if they really had "moved on", then why are the exploiters here complaining that this one exploit got closed down?


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Well, we can't play CoH at work...

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If people were herding other missions, as you say they were, then why was there a constant stream of shouts for "wolf-herding" but not for "Malta-herding" or "Carnie-herding" or anything else? Why was the barrage of blind-invites I got between levels 42 and 45 exclusively from people looking for a "bridge 4 wolf herding", but not for something else?


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Wolves had a number of advantages that made them the easiest mob to herd:
1. No ranged attack. Herding melee-only mobs is laughably easy.
2. No mez attacks, no trump-card attacks like psi or end drain.
3. They run fast, so it's feasible to pull an entire map.

Even after #1 and #2 got taken away, reason #3 is a really good reason to herd wolves. People who haven't tried herding probably don't realize just how tedious it is to herd things that move at normal speed.

Personally, I have a legacy wolf mission on my 50 tank and I would probably use it if I felt like herding. Since I think herding is boring it's unlikely to see a lot of use.

If I lose that mission I would start looking for a good replacement. I assume people who are into herding have already done so. Probably something with Council, Freaks, Family, Crazies, Bobcat minions, Battle Maiden minions, Marauder minions, or Nemesis. Maps with dumpsters preferred but negotiable.

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Now you're just going to get tells "herd freaks?" "herd ninjas?".

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Let's play a game! Predict the l33t shorthand for alternate herding missions!

Freaks: not a lot of room here, probably just "freaks"
Crazed: bums, or crazies
Bobcat's minions: furries
Battle Maiden's minions: ??
Council: we could call them nazis, just for old times' sake

Seriously, it is naive to think that lv50 tanks, lv50 devices blasters, and lv42-45 middles are going to stop getting tells from people making herding teams, or that PL begging in PI is going to stop. There's a pause right now while the kiddies figure out what to ask for. The elite players already moved on, but they're not the ones sending blind invites and begging.

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I feel as though I will now miss something that the game offered. I never PLed on Wolves and I feel that I missed out on some of the content that was in the game.


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The funny thing is that this is actually how I felt when Kora got nerfed. I really wanted to level my emp def on kora once I got to 40. I have leveled my various characters in different ways, and I was hoping to have one character who was a fruit farmer.

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Hmm... I have certainly seen Masks in Talos, but not enough that I wanted to hunt them there. I'll have to investigate more. I expect to post on this in a day or two.


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During the day there are basically zero mask spawns. The only masks you'll see during the day are ones that spawned just before sunrise and haven't been killed or despawned yet.

It's pretty decent at night. I suspect that being in a large team may cause more frequent mask spawns since the zone spawns are dynamic.

The grassy area near the DA gate doesn't seem to have many masks even at night - it's up on the roads around the large buildings where they really appear.

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So the hydra is broken, check. I guess everyone should go exploit the heck out of it before it gets fixed, as usual.

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This has been publicly known to be broken for a long time but no changes have been made and apparently no post describing how to do it has ever been deleted. As exploits go it's pretty weak - it gets you a trivial amount of mission complete xp and a trial enhancement that boosts multiple things by a pathetic amount and gets outleveled very quickly. Considering that you can still bring lv50s along, exemplar them to grab the weapons and then unexemplar, or just forget all that and farm the krakens for amazing xp, I wouldn't even put this at the top of the list of things to fix.

Even with holding the head it isn't easy...it still takes solid execution to make it happen.

If you want XP, farm krakens. If you want to complete the trial for a badge and enhancement, bring over-level people and hold the head. If you want a challenge, keep your entire team at 41 or below, clear the entire pit on the way down, destroy the generators, and kill the head. I've done it that way several times...it's fun and not really hard with good teamwork.

Talos is the best place to find masks. The office buildings near the DA gate have spawn points all around them (and some further west along the bridge as well) that frequently spawn masks - but only at night.

So basically you can hunt there at night, and move to DA during the day.

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That being said, I'd love to get the devs-eye view on the Winter event, what went as they expected, what surprised them, etc. Not as any kind of apology or explanation, certainly not because I think it was a failure, just because I think it would be very interesting to get their opinions.

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I would also second this. I don't understand what was intended and why things played out the way they did.

The first thing that happened was giant monsters con purple regardless of level (but are by no means equal difficulty regardless of level) and their XP became the same for all levels regardless of monster level vs. player level. This means that for a 50, killing a lv50 monster is difficult and gives terrible xp. For a 50, killing a lv5 monster is easy but still gives terrible xp. But for a lv1, killing a lv5 monster or having a 50 kill that monster for him is the JACKPOT. Initially, one giant monster kill brought a lv1 to lv8.

The only possible interpretation is that this was a bug / mistake, as it destroys risk vs reward for both a 50 (who can't get worthwhile xp for beating very difficult opponents) and for a 1 (who can get multiple levels per kill).

But the patch was to cap xp gain from one kill at half a level. Not even half a bar...half a *level*. This doesn't fix anything for a lv50 (killing monsters is still a complete waste of time xp-wise) and arguably doesn't fix much for low levels as the flood of WL leveling demonstrated.

It doesn't make sense. Either the devs intended WLs as a means of rapid advancement but didn't test the rapid advancement and accidentally made it a little too rapid at first, or the devs didn't intend it that way at all and totally failed to fix their error.

I did the trial yet again last night and had a very tough time. We fought the rock wall for 20+ minutes - the damage output from 2 blasters and 1 scrapper was having trouble fighting the wall's regen rate, aided by occasional cairn drops that took a few seconds to locate and kill. All the other members were heavily occupied with boulder spawns...of which there were a LOT.

A similar problem happened at the mold wall. It didn't have the cairns to protect it so we made steady progress, but the number of mushrooms and greater devoured that spawned was staggering.

I have done this trial and had the walls produce 2 relatively small waves each before they went down. But last night the spawns were huge and happening very often. Both times we used crey pistols on the wall - from the good results before I thought that was a major help, but now I'm not sure. The spawn rate just varied so much.

It would be interesting to figure out the resistances each wall has to different damage types...that might have something to do with the problems we ran into.

After doing the trial a couple more times I have some new tips.

- Crey Freeze Pistols make the walls easy. If all team members with pistols shoot the wall at the start of the fight, the stacked slow effect decreases the frequency of mob spawns by a lot. Pistols don't make too much difference against the titan.

- In the acid lake room, there are Devouring Swarms all over the ceiling. They are tougher than regular swarms. Their sting does a -recharge -fly -tp debuff that lasts for a very long time. Anyone with superjump or fly needs to stay away from the ceiling.

- In the titan's room, you don't have to clear the crystals in the entry area - only the main room. It's hard to tell where the dividing line is.

- The fastest way to reach the rock wall room from the mission entrance seems to be the hole at 1 o'clock as you come in. It leads to a room with 1 hole, which leads to another room with 1 hole, which leads to the rock wall room.

- I'm pretty sure that Ambrosia lasts for 1 minute. Use the mission timer to track the time.

- Bring 8 people - almost nothing scales to team size. I think the wall spawns do, but that's it. A controller is useful, as is someone with empathy, but it can be done without either. At least one person with recall friend is practically mandatory - if someone dies under the feet of the titan, you certainly can't rez them where they are.

I can fill in a couple of blanks from my experience with the trial.

The Ritki spawns when the head is at 50% and around 25% health appear with 2-3 on top of each player in the area. I never count how many since they just get hit with some kind of AoEs right away. So they spawn in direct proportion to the number of people you have.

If one generator is up, the shield is up. My theory on how the generator repair works goes like this:
When the first generator is destroyed a timer starts (about 90 seconds I think). When this timer runs out, all 4 generators will respawn if destroyed, and all 4 generators will get a repair crew of Ritki.
If all 4 generators are down, the shield is down.
So the time you have to shoot the head is the time between the last generator going down and the timer running out.

I have been told that using the thermite guns actually prevents the tentacles from splitting when killed. Don't know if this is true - I usually just fight them.

With issue 3, the increased XP on Ritki bosses should make this trial even more lucrative, assuming the increased HP doesn't wipe out the gain.

The Hydra enhancements are kind of disappointing since they get out-leveled so fast.