Glowworm_Nexus

I think it would be great if all your powers were out of commission while you are a Rikti monkey EXCEPT for Psionic Dart, which would be added as a temp power. You would still suck, but you could do something and it would be a great flavor effect.

You don't have stun protection available to you when you solo. However, you can layer your debuffs and controls so if DN drops for a second you are not auto-screwed. Use Fearsome Stare (enemies attack less often and at a significantly lower ACC), Fluffy (who has his own slew of -ACC debuffs and controls) and Petrifying Gaze (have to stack that to get it to work on bosses but it can take out Malta Sappers which are similarly problematic).

This is more of a problem for Rad defenders, since their -ACC is in one toggle. But the answer there is similar; proactively control the enemies that are likely to stun/hold/sleep you.

The only toons I have who use their vet pets very often are my psi/ff controller and ice/cold corrupter who can both bubble the pets and my defenders who have -acc debuffs. Those pets stay around a little while usually. They are just too fragile for my other characters to get much use out of them most of the time.

I mostly shelve my 50s but I do play Kid Trance (mind/ff cont), Ms. Impala (emp/elec def) and Red Helen (dark/rad def) now and again. Kid Trance would be the closest to something I've played all the way through since I used to run a Tuesday night group that hit a lot of content over a wide range of levels and I still play him at least once a month. Favorite build would probably be my ice/SS tank (Frost Fist) but it varies from day to day. SR can be a lot of fun when you are in the mood for it.

I encountered the endless box of gears in boomtown, too.

I agree with Strato. One KB protection IO will stop the vast majority of the KB you encounter. Fake Nemesis and a very few others will still punch through but it will stop all the KB that minions and Lts do (and most bosses too).

I get this to a much lesser extent and I'm on a PC. My cursor will randomly jump to the upper left or right corner every now and then. It's not a huge deal since it doesn't keep jumping but it is annoying.

Deleted post--just read that the toon was level 47.

"Clever" has a negative connotation for some people i.e. a superficial intelligence. I hope no one reads it that way in the above post. I mean "cleverness" as "mentally quick; witty". I really enjoy some of the clever dialog in CoX a lot and don't want to sound like I'm damning with faint praise.

The plots, however, are by-and-large sucktacular. If I never read another Nemesis plot where everything he touches is screwed up BECAUSE HE PLANNED IT THAT WAY, I'll be OK with that. The same goes for that homeless drag queen with the gray turkey-feather stole and the colander on his head--I don't need another "I let you blow up my billion dollar base to cull the weak from my organization"--couldn't he just run some aptitude tests?


Edit--I guess if it has turkey feathers on it then it is a boa rather than a stole. Sorry!

I believe that Defender Ignite is the same as blaster Ignite so that might be something to leverage. Traps has an immobilize and a -resistance so that would match up nicely with Ignite and the traps set is a natural thematic fit AR.

Biospark, I slot Short Circuit with some damage to go along with the drain. The thing is that mobs take two applications of SC to drain them regardless of whether you enhance the drain by 60% or 90% so I frankenslot with Efficiency Adapter, Performance Shifter and a cheap couple of AoE Damage sets. I end up having near max recharge, good ACC and end drain is buffed about 80% and damage is buffed about 45%.

Also, I put Energy Manipulator (chance to stun) proc in everything*, including Sparky, once I got my main slotting taken care of. It helps noticeably.

Oh, Electric epic has a single target hold too, in case you don't like psi. Either way you can stack your holds to take out bosses easily.

I get Shivans for EBs; otherwise they are a pain in the butt because even if you can stand up to them they still take a LONG time to kill.


*except SC, since I'm already slotting it up for multiple purposes.

Nice guide. I've been using Frost, Freezing Touch and (because I have to) Frozen Fists as my main attacks and supplementing them with vet attacks when they are up (relying on set bonuses and invincibility to boost ACC). I'm almost up to 38 and looking forward to Frozen Aura. However, I am thinking about proccing up Frozen Fist with 3 procs (taunt/psi damage, slow/smash damage, melee/lethal damage or KD). Similarly, I am planning on plopping in the "chance to heal" sleep proc into FA. Any thoughts or experiences with this kind of thing?

I suppose I could swap the slots out of FF once I get Epic attacks but I hate to waste a mandatory attack. Do you think it's a waste to try to get some proc-use out of FF (I was thinking of the way that */rad defenders proc up Neutrino Blast since it does crap damage)? For FA, giving up one slot to get a 5% chance to heal per mob seems like a good idea for a tank so I'm going to at least give it a try.

On my fire tank I found the immob+Burn to not really be worth the trouble. On a spine/dark scrapper, I would think you would run into the same thing that I did--the minions and Lts pretty much melt very quickly without using Burn and the bosses require stacked immobilizes. So the guys you would most want to use Burn on are the ones that are the most difficult to immobilize.

Of course the set bonuses may make it more valuable and you're using an AoE immobilze too. But the basic immob+Burn is not worth the trouble a lot of the time since I doubt you're having trouble killing minions or Lts.

Hubby and I are packing the car now for the trip to Atlanta. Not sure if we'll make it to the meet and greet though since we are going to meet some other friends up there and I'm not sure if that will be on Sunday or what. But hopefully I'll be able to make it or at least bump into people roaming around (I know, there are A LOT of people to bump into).

Have fun, BB, and everyone else who is going.

Have you guys been practicing your Thriller moves?

Ciao!

On a related note, my controller just got Acid Arrow. It recharges very fast. I was just going to throw an Accuracy and End Reducer in it and call it a day since I have lots of slot-hungry powers. Will that work well? I mean the main aspect of it is the -DR and you can't slot for that so is there much point to tricking it out? I'm not running into a lot of stuff I can't hit so maxing out the -def aspect seems like overkill.

Oh. Procs. I should probably proc it up, huh?

Caveat: I'm not very familiar with trick arrow.

For solo survivability, you want a -ACC power so you don't get hit much. That's rad, storm or dark. For damage you want /sonic, along with whatever +damage (effectively) power you have in your primary (Enervating Field, Tar Patch, Freezing Rain). Storm gives you even more damage through pseudo pets (lightning storm, tornado) where as rad gives you a self-heal and a recharge/damage/endurance/etc buff. Dark gives you lots of control which is probably overkill on most solo missions.

So I'd go storm/sonic, rad/sonic or, if it appeals to you, dark/sonic. Again, dark/sonic is great but the layered controls are pretty overkill if you are usually just facing 3 enemies at a time--very nice on teams though.

Empathy, Sonic and Force Fields are more team-oriented that you want. Some of their best powers would be wasted if you solo a lot. Kin is OK but it really doesn't have an immediate "you can't hit me power" and since defenders lack mez resistance or armor that is a big problem when soloing. Cold is similar to kin in that regard--no big, reliable -ACC power.

Of course, all can work. I solo with my emp/electric but she is certainly not speedy compared to my rad/dark.

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I think it doesn't really matter what the set is called.

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It apparently does since they nerfed the hell out of moment of glory. Because it wasn't a moment...

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MoG currently works much better with Regen that it ever did when it was "several minutes of not being able to regenerate at all". It lets you eat alphas like they were snack cakes. It wasn't changed because of the name; it was changed because turning off regeneration is really bad when all your secondary is based on regeneration.

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Malestrom - a lot like Chamber of Gen X (marvel)

Desdemona - seems a bit like Magik (iyanna rasputin) of New Mutants (Marvel) -

I get the blaster thing, what I don't think I can follow is a demon summoning anything using that power for good. Just my two RP cents but if you are talking "demons" in the classic sense then why would they want the souls of those already "dammed" as it were.

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They don't have any choice. What they want is only relevant in as far as they can act. Presumably Desdemona makes them do whatever she wants them to do regardless of whether it makes them happy or not. It sounds like she's on their number one hit parade anyway.

On Build Up and Aim, you want 3 recharges. The to-hit buffs you have there are very skip-able. Both powers offer you a big bonus so you want them to recharge very fast where as increasing the bonus is largely irrelevant since you should be extremely accurate with just the base effect.

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MMOs are about balance and even if you take farming out of the equation, AE is not balanced.

-Regular missions have contacts you have to earn/find, then continually travel to until you get their cell. AE puts the contact right next to you.

-Regular missions have doors that can be on the other end of the zone or even in another zone entirely. AE always has the door right next to you.

-If you want to go to the hospital in a regular mission it could put you hundreds of yards away from the mission door, the AE hospital always puts you right next to the mission door.

-Random missions give you random salvage and recipe drops. AE tickets allow you to more selectively choose your drops.

-If you're having to buy enhancements with influence you will have to find a vendor selling your Origin, then you'll have to wade through the sometimes oddly named inventory list (curse you Magic Origin). If you use AE tickets you travel a few feet to a single person who offers not only every type of regular enhancement, they even have a nifty menu that lets you select the type of enhancement you're looking for.

These are just a few of the examples of how convenient AE is compared to regular content. Why does AE not have ANY downfalls to balance all of its amazing features that dwarf the regular content?

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This person asked "why does it not have any of these disadvantages?"

I suggest that it would be better for everybody if the regular content were made more convenient. The hero SO stores are pointlessly inconvenient, and before AE the tendecy of doors to be locataed at distant locations in other zones already led many teams to use scanners as their primary content.

I've attempted to run the basic hero content before and it seriously is not an asset to the game as is. Not only that but it is just about solo exclusive beause it's hard to find people willing to do that rather than scanners or whatever.

And seriously, what was Atlas Park before? Sewer teams. Trying to get a PUG that will do the super inconvenient level 5 maps is hard to start with. The team is of little use to those who aren't the person getting the maps, and rarely are any of the team willing to stay long.

I think it would be worthwhile for the devs to go through those, some of which are pretty neat and would make cool team content, and bring gameplay up to villain standards. In any situation that makes sense to the story, move the doors to the same zone as the NPC. Most importantly, set them to give out phone numbers after 1 job.

I'd also give the newbies some sort of 1-hour charge self-rez that they can use until level 10.

That inconvenience was intended to keep people playing longer, but I think that most everyone would agree that removal of such annoyances, and opening content that many would not do otherwise, would do more for subscription times.

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Agreed. Annoyance as a game-balancing factor is a bad idea. I routinely auto-skip arcs that I've done at least once till I get the contacts cell and some of them don't give you their number till you have done a lot of missions for them. CoV handles this much better.

I didn't read all the replies but here are a few things you can do to contribute damage.

1) Ice Storm & Blizzard are the same powers that blasters get so get them and use them. Frankenslot them so you get some slow added to the damage and they provide a lot of mitigation in addition to damage. They do cause scatter so use them intelligently but really the scatter is minimal due to the slows. In conjunction with a teammates slow/immobilize (or Ice Storm with your own Force Bubble) they do great damage with no downside.

2) Frost breath is a pretty good AoE.

3) You are not going to be a damage god but you will contribute a lot of defense to teams and will usually add significantly to the over all damage if you use your AoE's as often as possible.

So slot up those AoE attacks because even if they only did 25% the damage of a scrappers single target attacks (made up #, btw) they would still provide a lot of damage if they are used frequently on max number of targets over the course of the mission. The bits I read about tank damage vs defender damage seemed to skip this--defenders generally get more, faster recharging, large AoEs so they can contribute significantly to the team's damage over time. Standard caveat--this may not apply to all teams. You, a kin and 6 fire blasters on a team is going to be a team where you really aren't contributing to damage much.

You are offering a lot of defense and decent control (KB, single-target holds, slows). Your damage isn't going to be great solo (although with the holds you should be safe enough) but a constant stream of AoE damage will help most teams significantly in the long run.

If you can get End Mod to go over +1000% you can use it on blasters/corrupters with nukes--it lets them recover immediately after the nuke during the -1000% recovery period. They still crash but immediately start filling that bar again. That's pretty much the only reason I'd consider End Mod in Pain Bringer.

Hero-side, our PUG blew through the TF very quickly and easily till we got to Reichsman at the end. We used the dimensional whatever power (hopefully it did something, we couldn't tell) and also used a variety of pet temps and nukes. It was a very long, very boring fight that was not particularly challenging other than do the players have the endurance to keep smashing their attack chain buttons.

It was fun and interesting till the final fight, which was just tedious.