Fury Flechette

Wow grats. First time I've seen a marketeer reach the caps selling commons. So you get the special edition ebil marketeer badge.

Excellent! Looking forward to this. I'd say you can hit the cap in 6 days. It's how fast I can hit it if I try. I don't think you'll do any worse.

For screen shots with the user interface, type /screenshotui 1 before taking any shots. You can edit as you like with paint, though I never bothered.

Go Katana/WP.

Hard to screw up a build like that. It's strong with just SOs so you don't have to worry about IOs and things like that until you're comfortable with them.

I'd take the following powers:

From the primary:
Gambler's Cut, Flashing Steel, Divine Avalanche (a must pick at level 8), Build Up, Lotus Drop, Soaring Dragon, Golden Dragon Fly

Slotting: 1 - 2 accuracy, 3 damage, 1 recharge or 1 end redux depending on how endurance expensive it is.

From the secondary:
Take all the powers except Resurgence (the self rez), Indomitable Will at 10, Rise to the Challenge at 16 and Quick Recovery at level 20 are must picks.

Slotting: 1 end redx and either 3 dmg resistance or 3 defense on powers. High Pain Tolerance - 3 heal / 3 dmg resistance, Rise to the Challenge 3 heal / 1 end redx, Quick Recover - 3 endurance mod

Pick a travel power, and take the fighting pool (boxing or kick, tough and weave)

Don't worry too much about slotting the build perfectly since Katana/WP has a lot of give in the build and it's hard to mess it up.

Day 13: Starting to Toughen Up

It's been a little while since I last updated. Real life put a damper on my gaming lately and I wasn't able to have any significant gaming time until today. When I last left Fara, she had hit level 33 and was able to slot up Crowd Control.

The only contact she had in her list was Operative Rutger, a rather unappealing one due to the fact that the missions take place in the far reaches of Nerva Archipelago, has two Vindicator elite boss/AVs in it (Luminary/Infernal) and a lot of defeat all missions. Still, it was better than running radios, and Fara surprisingly had little difficulty with most of the missions. Luminary went down easily enough with generous inspiration use while Infernal required the use a Shivan.

Finishing up Operative Rutger's story arcs and available missions, Fara reached level 34 and was without a contact. I thought of perhaps running a few radio missions but thought it would fun to test out the build by running the one-person Ouroboros TFs given by Mender Lazarus and Mender Tesseract respectively.

For those that don't know or haven't tried these TFs in a while, both TFs are full of elite bosses/AVs and can be soloed by a strong soloing character. Even at the +1/x1/bosses difficulty Fara used, the TFs weren't a cake walk.

Mender Lazarus' last mission faces you off against three Fifth Column elite bosses while giving you two of your own. The last mission is actually tactically challenging and rewards methodical play. Enter the last room, pull the large number of Fifth Column grunts as much as you can and then attack Requiem first, Vandal second and pretty much ignore Maestro. Of your two "companions", Nosferatu pretty much holds his own while Burkholder is pretty much fodder.

The mission actually went pretty well. As a precaution, Fara summoned a Shivan and then concentrated fire on Requiem after clearing the gathered Fifth. After Requiem went down, only Vandal remained. The mission ended pretty much after Vandal was defeated since Maestron was killed off by a combination of Venon Grenade debuffs and Noseferatu's Soul Drain (yeah, he's pretty ignorable).

A screenshot of Fara and company taking down Vandal after Requieum was downed is below. Of course, Vandal tried to ran away like a little girl and hide behind a huge group of Fifth that were summoned. Venom Grenade and Crowd Control was amazing in those clumps of Fifth soldiers.



After taking on Mender Lazarus' arc, Fara took on Mender Tesserect's. The odd thing about Mender Tesserect's arc is that the hardest mission of the entire arc is probably her first where you have to take on Ms. Liberty and her mom. Miss Liberty was downed pretty quickly but Ms. Liberty required a use of a Shivan. After, taking out those two heroes, downing the Prove Yourself to Arachnos elite bosses in the second mission, it's trivial for a Bane or Stalker to stealth your way to the roof and down a pretty easy elite boss (President Marchand).



So I was feeling kind of arrogant, and after leveling to 35, decided to visit Ghost of Ghost Widow Past (Sister Airlia) in Cimerora. I think the game must have thought that Fara was having too easy of a time with all the elite bosses she was beating up, so it threw me a curveball.



Level 40 Ballista Elite Boss with a level 40 Longbow Warden! Against a +5 elite boss, Fara didn't stand a chance even though she summoned both a Shivan and Loa Bone zombie and used as many inspirations she can chug. Of course with Ghost Widow being defeated, it led to my first failed mission in over two years.

So with that, my string of elite boss successes came to an end...at least for now. I logged off a little humbled but eager to see what the next few levels will bring. Level 36 provides more slots, level 37 allows Fara to slot her first few sets and level 38 brings Weave.

A++ for the guide RK!

Haha, nice try.

Try this instead: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/searc...archid=4787716

My personal build

The advice Swellguy just posted is solid and works pretty much for just about any scenario. You could easily double that 3.5M by running a few MA missions, grabbing 550 tickets and grabbing the most expensive rare salvage out there and sell it. However, I'd recommend that you just do bronze rolls, delete the junk, craft the usable and sellable stuff. That will usually net you considerably more.

Making 550 tickets will take you at most 30-40 mins even on the slowest character. And any MA story arc (set to MA awards not regular awards if Dev choice) will work.

Not a bad build. It can certainly be optimized, but it's solid.

A few things to think about.
1. Slotting Performance Shifters in Stamina is something I'd recommend. Not only does the proc have a noticeable effect but 6 slots gives you an AoE positional. The other bonuses it has are good too. I'd slot up Stamina and take slots from True Grit.

2. True Grit is better slotted as a hitpoint boost rather than trying to max out fire/cold resistance. Soft capping already provides good defenses and many fire/cold attacks have a smash/lethal component as well, which is covered by Deflection and Tough. It's not a bad thing to throw one or two Resistance IOs into Deflection.

3. Fireball is a keeper. You will definitely want it. When times when Shield Charge is not up, FSC + Fireball is your bread and butter.

4. Your positionals are at 46.5+%. It means that there is quite of bit of jiggle room in moving slots around. I try to get my builds as close to 45% as possible. Some players recommend going way over 45% to account for when you're debuffed. However, many of the debuffs lower your defense much more than a few percentage points. I'd rather just use the occasional purple to cover it.

5. Not too fond of Obliterations in FSC. FSC eats up a lot of endurance. If you can swap around slotting to put something else in here (like Sciroccos), it will be better for endurance management. However, some builds are tight and it's sometimes tough to get those melee defense bonuses.

I put together a build full of shield builds a while ago. Take a look at it and raid it for ideas. There's quite a few variations in slotting shown: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=216944

A couple of nights ago I got into a rather raucous argument with a person who belongs to the same global chat channel. He was going on and on about how Going Rogue will fail, how the developers don't know what they're doing and that current studio is using software development methodologies one step removed from card readers and vacuum tubes.

Having done some software development in my past (though not recently) and a fair amount of project management for software projects, I asked him how he knows this. Well apparently, this fellow is somewhat of a developer fanboy and obsessively follows tweets from BaBs, reads details from their blogs and scours the net in search of details of how the game is made. He also, according to a mutual acquaintance, works in hardware for some company and according to him "has lots of software developer friends who knows how things are done right!"

He and I ended with no conclusion to our little Internet squabble but it led me to this thought. While I have no idea exactly how this game is developed and published, I do know that this game is a commercial success in a field where there is significant competition. It's successful enough that the studio has grown from a mere 15 or 20 to about 80 developers. It's about to release it's second full expansion and it's 18th free update. Further, whereas many studios keep their fans/customers at arm's length, Paragon Studios goes out of its way to keep us intimately involved in many aspects of the game.

This doesn't mean that I agree with everything that the devs have done nor do I like every aspect of this game. But I like enough of it to keep paying a monthly sub, and I don't expect anything less than to be delighted with Going Rogue and issue 18. So, in sum, I trust that Paragon Studios will continue the same level of excellence that has kept me as a paying customer. I care not whether or not the servers are powered by hamsters and the developers design their models with etch-a-sketches. It's the finished product that counts, and it's generally been impressive for 6 years.