Fulmens

Archetypes: City of Heroes doesn't require any sort of "perfect team" of given roles. City of Villains has characters who are even MORE of generalists. Here are my [very personal] opinions.
THE HEROES:
Tanker- 10+ times tougher than a "generic character" in sheer punching-bag ability to take abuse without any external buffs. In fact, if support has to heal someone, it's usually not the Tanker. On the mid to low side of damage output, and the really good damage powers often show up late in the game [level 28, 35, or 38]. They are pretty good at grabbing aggro just by doing what they'd do normally, but if you're a good tanker [as I am not] you can and should work it harder.

Scrapper- 6+ times tougher than a "generic character", but more and faster damage output than a Tanker. Has criticals, more common on tougher opponents. Scrappers get hit running into fights, get hit running out of fights, and believe they WILL get the crit they need. The mechanics of the game therefore support statements like "If you run, you don't go to Valhalla."

Blaster- this IS the "generic character" on toughness. There are active mitigation powers (single-target holds) but the main protection has to either come from teammates' buffs or from hitting things so hard they don't GET to shoot back. Blasters are delicate. But when I first got a Fire/Elec blaster going I posted something on here like "If there's any bigger damage-dealer in the game, I don't know it." I took out over 20 enemies (white to orange-con) in under 10 seconds once on Fulminator. They startled me and I may have overreacted.

Defenders- this is an essay on its own. Storm doesn't play like Empathy doesn't play like Force fields doesn't play like Rad doesn't play like Kinetics. Generally they're kind of mediocre solo, but generally they help the team as much or more than they help themselves. Want to double the team's damage? Want to make the entire team Tank-tough? Defenders can do that. The blasts are relatively weak, but many people make the situation worse than it has to be by not taking blasts or not slotting them for damage. Some Defenders are really bad solo, most are pretty good.

Controllers- I don't play controllers. But the general idea is that this is where your big mezzing lives, while being "close to as good" as a Defender. There is, of course, the problem that you can do only one thing at a time, so if you're Defending you're not Controlling and vice versa.

Kheldians (peacebringer and warshades)- I'm even less expert on Khelds than I am on Controllers.

THE VILLAINS: These sort of seem like they were designed around concepts that people tried to make work as "hybrids" heroside, or something that just didn't fit into heroside. Most of them didn't 'click' for me until level 20 or 22.

Brutes- Brutes are not tanks. Brutes are not scrappers. Brutes do not care if they live or die, except that their Fury bar goes to zero when they die. Mechanically, Fury means that the more you hit and get hit, the more damage you do- The madder hulk gets, something something. The fury bar adds a LOT to your total damage and if you sit around for a few seconds it drops distressingly fast. Brutes do not fight by the spawn, they fight by the entire instance. I have had actual spittle flecks come out of my mouth playing a Brute with some buffs. Brutes feel like "Let's Have A War " sounds.

Stalkers- Sneak up on people and kill them. Hard. You're the single target specialist. If every spawn has one guy in it that makes the rest of the spawn really tough, you turn that into "zero guys." Stalkers have a different rhythm than almost anything else in the game- they're moshing and you're knitting- but they can be very, very effective when things get tough. Soloing, it's kind of relaxing, and there's a creepy power trip in walking down the street knowing that everything you target lives only because you let it.

Corruptors- generalists. Kind of like backward Defenders- significantly more damage and significantly less buff- with "Scourge", an ability that hits people harder when they're low on hit points. Kicks 'em when they're down, does extra damage to the people that are extra hard to kill.

Masterminds- you have pets, lots of pets, and you can actually tell them what to do and they [probably] listen. I have about ten levels of mastermind, total, in this game, so you now know what I know.

Dominators- direct damage plus holds. No reliable hard defenses, so you're safe exactly as long as you can keep everyone stunned, held, confused, slept- doing anything but attacking. I've only played one to level 22, but it's a very "juggling your priorities" playstyle. Now serving number 31!

Night Widows and Spiders (epic villain AT's)- I don't know enough to discuss them.

Type /search. This will initially show you all the characters in your zone. Then hit "enter" and it will show you all the characters in the game. (you can then select by level range, archetype, etc.) Greyed out names are on a team, blue are not.

I'm not saying you DO or DO NOT play in a ghost town, I'm saying this is how to find out who and how many so you can decide for yourself.

I made a Sonic/Mental blaster that made me happy. But, yeah, it feels a little "defenderish" to me even when I'm playing a blaster.

I suspect that "prices in general" will go up on low-priced items and not come down. When we lost access to the markets for a couple days, rare salvage went up by about a million and kinda stayed there.

Ag is the chemical name of silver. Fe is iron.
AGent FEnix or similar? (My first thought was "Fe...ag... no.")

I was thinking someone hit 72 months, 11 starting merits and wanted to know how fast they could build stuff to roll level 10 rares. [assuming they do the tour of Atlas and, say, Steel.]

I'd be impressed if anyone could get there in less than half an hour, but I've been impressed before, frequently.

I don't care who gets the kill sticker on their plane. I'm happy it happened.

Or, at 25, go to Ouroboros and pick her up through time travel. I hear she likes antiquing and bouldering.

1) Are you a soloist because of bad experiences, or because you philosophically prefer it? (if the former, I may have advice; in the latter case, I respect your preferences.)

2) The usual cure for really tough enemies is inspirations and lots of them. Take four purples [or if you buy from Wentworth's, two mediums will do the same] and when those run out, take four more. That's two minutes of bulletproof. There are also a lot of temp powers that may help, but those are potentially expensive. (It's easy to make money, but you didn't ask for that particular sales pitch.)

This has been mentioned before, I think, but I'm going to emphasize that buffs and debuffs are much stronger than you're used to and much stronger than "healing." It is possible for a properly built and buffed character to be one HUNDRED TIMES tougher than an unprotected character. It is common for a character with no outside buffs to be ten or twenty times tougher than an unprotected character. It is common for one person on a team to make nearly everyone else on the team five times tougher with buffs. That's aside from things like "30% to 70% more damage on the hard targets" and "unlimited endurance".

In comparison, it is very very hard to heal someone for five times their HP every fight.

Also, when you get to level 14 you will be able to get a travel power IF you get a "prereq" power- so if you want Fly, you should get Hover or Air Superiority sometime between level 6 and 12. Each travel power has their advantages and disadvantages- Super Speed is fast, it FEELS fast, it has built in stealth and it looks cool- but you will sometimes have to go around three sides of a square to get up on top of something. Fly is relatively slow but entirely troublefree- and some people just love flying. Pick the one you think you'll like and realize that it will have a downside.

Welcome to a game where "fast travel" is 80 MPH.

I'm no expert, but this thread suggests ticket & market farming. Problem with purples is that they're very jagged- "1 in 2000" may mean you go 4000 baddies with no purples, may mean you get two in your first 500.

... if you want to make more than 100 million a day, I don't know if we can help you.

809,000,908 . Goooo team!

It's a ... casino night. For education and firefighters. Yeah.

The more I read it, the more it just looks like "Black market and Wents have access to the same pool of goods."

And, yes, cleaning out the old databases seems like it would make building the new one fairly trivial.

I'll take a fire/en blaster, myself.

You show 'em, anvil.

Throwin in a 2.21B guess. I don't think it will pay off, but nobody seems to have the high end staked out.

Thanks for the info! (ClawsandEffect: do stalkers get any 360-degree AOEs?)

One nice layering synergy- Rad/Psi defender lets you, if things get a little hairy, throw down two large -Rech effects at once, flooring enemy recharge and giving you four times as long to get your feet back under you.

Rad usually has enough protection without flooring enemy recharge, but I may have been spoiled by playing on teams with several players who were competent and awake.

A million per merit wouldn't do it. If I were a dev and I wanted to do this, I'd do two things:

1) 21 hour timer on the buy
2) Five fixed-price items available: First Merit (100K), Second Merit (1 million), Third Merit (2 million), Fourth Merit (5 million), Fifth Merit (7 million) .

You can get a merit a day for practically free, three a day for around a million each, four a day for 2 million each, five a day for 3 million each. If you were one or two merits short on something you could get it. If you wanted to build up a stable of alts and roll recipes every week, you could do so at a reasonable price. If you were five merits short of your LoTG, you could get them but it would cost ya.

If that was too complex, I'd sell single merits for 5 million inf.

My feeling has always been, with stalkers, "first and last month is free"- you don't count the first and last guy in the spawn because you're AS'ing them. Which makes "bump level but not number" the way to go.

But I'm not a Stalker expert, so take that with a pound of salt.

I haven't done much Stalking for a long time- just started out a couple of new ones.

I've noticed I get occasional criticals even when not Hidden. I'm sure this is a years-old change, but what's up with that?