Father Xmas

You didn't go for the obvious choice, Sharktopus.

While that's true, clicking on her name doesn't give PMing her as a selection which only appears if you are VIP.

I do agree with the premise of having a choice between an offensive and defensive power as your first choice. But the idea of cherry picking just the "defensive" powers bothers me.

From my point of view excluding the 4 travel power pools and Concealment (because who doesn't want to be invisible, on purpose), the other sets were for granting powers to ATs that normally wouldn't have such abilities.

Leadership is about team buffing, like what some Defenders and Controllers could do. Presence is taunting foes and soft control, like Tankers, Scrappers and Controllers. Medicine to help heal your teammates when you don't have any healing powers via your main sets, again like Defenders and Controllers. Fighting was to give players something better than just Brawl, back when Brawl actually used endurance, and some damage resist or defense that Scrappers and Tankers had. And since we are talking about the old days, Fitness gave movement bonuses and HP/End regen ability that was only available at the time to regen Scrappers.

It was all about a way to dabble in types of powers that other ATs had in spades. It was also a way to flavor up your character so it's more unique. The Ancillary Power Pools even more so since they are more AT unique.

That's my take. Maybe it's based on something I read in the old CoH guide from Prima back from the old days.

Yes I did mean defense in the general term of damage mitigation and mez prevention, the opposite of offense which itself is a damage mitigator of sorts.

Personally I gave up even looking at the fighting pool back in 2004 once I found out how weak boxing and kick was. Still I can see the logic in providing one offensive and one defensive skill as the initial choice.

However it bothers me at a fundamental level that players are starting to design their characters not on concept but by what powers they could take, slot but never use just to softcap their defense or make Hasten perm once again. Which I consider silly since once you add that much global recharge you've exceeded what perma-Hasten originally bought you so now you are Ultra-Hastened on all your (general you all) attacks and now the problem is endurance, hence the begging of giving everyone Stamina for "free".

And while it's annoying to get Mezzed in battle, you learn not to take on a room full of Tsoo ink men all at once soloing with an AT with no Mez defense. It's called adapting to your enemy by use of a strategy. Or team with people who can give you Mez resistance and can take Mezzers head-on, like the ATs that are designed for that purpose.

Does it annoy me when my character is seeing stars while their hit points are plummeting and there is nothing I can do, sure. But it doesn't happen often anymore and usually after switching for an character where it's not a problem to one that it is. I don't curse that the game is just too hard and beg the devs to make it easier to harden my "glass cannon" into a "tank-mage".

Still that doesn't change the OP's reason for suggesting this which is to take the defensive powers of the pool without taking an attack. And you, me and the 800lbs gorilla in the room know damn well the reason for that is just for IO set bonuses. The boards are all a twitter over Issue 24 adding damage resist bonus sets so players can build resistance godlings and the plotting and scheming is already in full swing looking at how to "break" the game by making all combat trivial.

At some point the devs are going to push back and make some new or existing critter group challenging to godling characters and we'll start seeing threads about how hard the game has gotten and how the new content is "broken" because they can't watch a movie while "playing" this game by following a teammate and have an attack on spam.

And when that happens it'll be players like me who don't have billions on every character to spend on ultimate tricked out slotting who will be facing mobs so overpowered relative to me that the game changes from enjoying content to spend an excessive amount of time designing my character simply to play. One of the big pluses for CoH is how difficult it is to build an unplayable character. I don't want to see that go away but I fear the arms race of building elite characters is going to bite the rest of us in the rump someday.

Hate to say it but Jack may have been onto something by not releasing the hard numbers on powers.

So most people die by 70? What third world country do you live in?

Easiest example to see Character Detail in action is turn it down all the way and visit the Freedom Corp store in Talos. You can watch the employees "puff up" the poly count as you approach them, it's not a subtle gradual reduction in polygons, it's switching from one model to another. Or you could simply stand still and play with the character detail slider and watch NPC models swap. In the past certain signature costume pieces would disappear at a distance on critters, like Sorcerer's hats or spiky shoulder pads. A bug at one point made skirts disappear (not the skirts in water bug).

Also all NPCs are displayed at the same distance, neither character or world detail (which is draw distance/fog) affects when you see them, with the exception of a max number of NPCs display limit in which case I believe it's closest are displayed until the cap is reached. Last I looked an example of this could be found in Founders Falls around the sky scrapper north of the ICON with the huge mob of NPCs walking around the base of it. The number is/was (haven't been there recently to check) so high you could watch them pop into existence at a relatively close range. You can also see that world detail doesn't affect NPC draw distance by turning it town in an indoor mission and see critters that are obscured as you approach them by intervening walls/crates/rooms.

No Dave.

Scrappers, Brutes, Blasters, Corruptors. The first two are melee the last two range. They all can do a lot of damage.

Yes. There is a choice in the tutorial to rescue or defeat a hero which determines if you start blue side (hero) or red side (villain).

The game is very soloable with only a few bits of content requiring teams. There is a difficulty setting NPC that you will be introduced to around level 10 that allows you to make your missions easier or harder by increasing the number of critters per encounter, increasing/decreasing their level relative to you and whether you encounter Boss class critters while soloing or not. There is also a setting to turn opposing Arch Villian/Hero class enemy into Elite Bosses which are somewhat easier.

A good resource for this game is ParagonWiki.