Haldur

I'm looking for an active VSG on Liberty for my level 40 stalker, plus maybe some friends from my now very inactive VSG. I am a casual, mature (ie. 46 yr. old) player who hates pling, farming, etc. I'll do pvp, but its not my 'thing', and none of my friends are that much into it either. I like doing missions, TFs, badge hunting, and teaming with a fun group of people, in general. My philosophy in the game (and in most things in life) is its not the destination, but the journey that is important. I also like helping lowbies/newbies, willing to malefactor/lackey if it means more participation.

One thing I'm not looking for is an SG that has coalitions with lots of other VSGs. I won't bore you with the reasons for this. Let's just say I've had bad experiences with people who invite every VSG and their grandmothers (and worse -- their racist, homophobic, immature, and obnoxious grandchildren), rendering the coalition channel equivalent to and as useless as the broadcast channel on a really bad day. Sorry for the rant...

BTW, I am an altaholic, but if this is a problem due to SG size limits, that's fine. I can keep my alts where they are.

-Haldur
Shadowstrike: 40 Stalker
Phineas Nightshade: 30 MM
Shivver: 25 Dom
etc.

I liked this guide. I thought it was, overall, better than most I have seen. But i have a few minor constructive criticisms:

1. Your observations about stealth really don't belong in a dominator's guide, First of all, most of what you say is no longer true (that's the breaks of this game that all things must change). But second, and most importantly, there is NO ONE in the game that cannot make use of Stealth to do everything that you say that dominators can do with it. So even then, while it might have been true, (at one time) its just not the right place to say it. The only people who couldn't really benefit from the stealth pool in the ways that you mentioned, were people who already had equivalent or better abilities in their primary or secondary powersets.

2. At one point you mention that an advantage of (I think) gravity control is that it can bring down flyers, yet other powersets have the same ability. I'm mostly familiar with Ice myself, so the first thing I said when I read that is 'Hey I can do that too'.

3. My Ice/Ice dom is only 22, but I already see uses for having more than one AE control, simply because some fights can last a long time, and you can save the second for when the first one drops. I agree that this is not necessary for every fight. But to say that you don't need an AE hold if you have Ice slick is just a little worrisome to me (then again, I didnt' try putting 3 recharges into Ice slick, so maybe I'm wrong about that).

4. Another advantage of immobilizes (besides bringing down flyers ) is that on maps where there are lots of corners, pillars, and other obstacles, you can position yourself so that several of the immobilized mobs don't have a line of sight to you. This is as useful at low levels as it is on high levels. Admittedly, this is a situational use, but still, its a commnly available option. (You should ALWAYS use the available 'terrain' to your advantage)..

Last night, I had a Longbow Warden one-shot my 38 Nin/Nin Stalker. All of my toggles were up at the time. When I told my group what had happened, they didn't believe me at first. So I scrolled back a ways to see the damage -- it was over 1000 points (I only have like 850 or so hp).

Now granted, the mob was a couple of levels higher than me, and I have no real damage resistance. But that's just sick.
-Haldur

I have a 37 Nin/Nin stalker. I personally have no problems soloing Longbow missions -- the problem I have comes when I'm in large groiups, which can cause bosses to spawn in virtually every set of mobs in the missoin, sometimes 2 at a time.

I personally think that Certain longbow wardens are harder to solo than Elite bosses from other factions. But solo difficulty is largely controlled by your powerset, and the particular vulnerabilities (or lack thereof) of the specific foe you are fighting. The real test is in groups.

I had one Longbow mission that nearly caused me to lose two groups. The first time I tried it, everyone quit on me, after frequent wipes. The next day I joined another group. Leader picked my longbow mission that I warned was very hard. We almost had a repeat of the same thing that happened the previous night, until after 2 people quit, the leader got 2 friends who were like 2 or 3 levels higher than the mobs level onto the team.

I believe that missions ought to be challenging. And definately part of the progblem is that people do silly things on teams, like playing the same way they do solo. Maybe if pickup groups were better, I'd feel differently. But the Longbow missions are, overall, too hard for the average pickpu group. I don't solo as much as some of you, but some of my longbow missions have turned me into a soloist, simply because they are too hard for the types of groups I've been getting. So I largely agree with those that think that Longbow ought to be nerfed.
-Haldur

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The biggest portion of anti-PLer sentiment I've seen is from the same people who'd join the nazi's or the KKK based on what others have said

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I find this offensive on SO many levels.

Normally, I would not care how anyone gets to the end game, except for the fact that it directly affects my gaming experience.
1. I almost stopped playing one of my characters when more than half of the invites he would get for teams would be for bridging. Used to be, I'd also get invites to herd (the name of my character made him sound like a spines scrapper to people, even though he wasn't).
2. In the past week alone, I've quit two groups when the leader announced that we were going to farm a particular mission over and over and over again.
3. I keep running into new SG members who just assume that its the higher level's responsibility to PL them. It's bad enough when I get beggars who are complete strangers asking for this. And I don't mind SKing/LKing SG Mates, so long as they have a way of getting to the mission alive. I don't consider it PLing if the person is making a positive contribution to the team. But I won't tolerate someone who considers me obligated to do the work for him.

The problem isn't that some peopel got PLed -- as I said, I don't care about that. I care because its so common that its become part of the game culture that those who don't want to PL and farm can't escape their influence. These people WANT to turn the game into a grind. And want us to enable them to do it.

I've had so many unpleasant experiences with PLers and farmers, and so on that I can't believe that peer pressure has not driven these people off. I'm sure that not everyone is like the PLers and beggars and farmers that I have met They aren't all as pushy or rude or obnoxous as many of the ones I've met. But what I do know is that if it wasn't possible for these people to feed their habit, then my experience would have been a bit more pleasant.

And btw the only people who are LIKE nazis WERE the nazis. My best friend's parents are holocaust survivors, and although I know you dind't mean it, you insult them and all holocaust survivors with statements like that.

Problem is that you were attacking clockworks -- they have a very high resistance to lethal damage. Same thing with most, if not all mechanical enemies (Council drones and bots for example)

I know on my 34 Stalker, when fighting council bots, I cannot one-shot even-level drones, with 3 green damage SOs. I need to use buildup.

You probably didn't notice this because clockwork are a lot rarer in CoV than in CoH. -Haldur

We thought he had despawned also, but he really hadn't. I'm not sure if he was invisible or what, but we started clearing mobs that we had left alone (including ones around the burning ship) and eventually someone on our team found him.
-Haldur

It's not like there's an actual competition going on between SGs. The whole base-building thing is optional, after all. Complaining that you are in a small or solo SG is silly, since its practically trivial to get into a non-solo one (antisocial varieties of personality disorders preventing it notwithstanding). Just post something on your server board, saying what kind of SG you are looking for, and you'll probably get multiple invites.

As far as those SGs that have had to split into two or more parts, it would be a very nice solution if those limits could be expanded to more reasonable numbers, before or concurrent with the prestige system going live.

-Haldur

Evil is not an objective quality. I'm sure that Hitler rationalized his actions as doing good for Germany. It makes it a lot easier of you don't view the people you slaughter as being human beings worthy of empathy.

I'll give you another example, which is not as extreme, but is a lot more common that most people I think realize or want to admit. My parents were very liberal. When we lived in the Bronx, my parent's best friends were an interracial couple, and I used to play with Alex, their son who was just a year younger than me. I invited black friends to my Bar Mitzva. Hell, my dad once received some kind of honor from a church in Harlem and was invited to speak to the congregation because of work he did for them (we are a white Jewish family, btw, and my dad was an attorney, and my dad had done some pro-bono work for them). I just say that to give you some background. Hell, the apartment that we lived in in the Bronx looked like the UN, it was that diverse.

Later we moved to the suburbs, something happened which shattered my happy view of people I thought I knew == our neighbors. The suburban neightborhood we lived in was not very diverse at all. Sure, we had the token black family, and a couple of white protestants, but other than that, the neighborhood was about 95 percent Jewish and Italian (about equal parts of each). A rumore got started that one of the families was selling their home to a black family. And I found out about this because my dad was talking to my mom about it, because our lovely neighbor was upset about it and wanted my dad to help him do somethig about it. Of couirse my dad was not going to help, and thought by explaining that there was nothing they could do, that that would be the end of it.

But no, things were going to become a bit insane. The next day there was what best could be described as a race riot out in front of my home. Almost all of our white neighbors wre gathered there and there was a lot of yelling and screaming going on. My parents were scared and wouldn't let me or my brother leave the house. The crowd ended up throwing bricks at the home of the family that was selling, and breaking several of their windows.. The family that lived there started receiving all sorts of nasty threatening phone calls. There were bricks thrown at the cars of people driving through the neighborhood by blacks that I suppose they thought were the prospective buyers (at least one of which probably WAS the right car).

The deal fell through.

What was funny was that I was never really friends with the kid of the family that was moving out, mostly because his friends that also lived in the neighborhood didn't really like me. He was actually an OK guy though. And after that rough business we got to be much better acquainted (largely because he lost those other friends over those events).

And even funnier (though I regret that he left so soon after I became friends with him) the family ended up selling the house to another black family, this time in secret. And there were no rumors and no one even knew they were moving out until the day it actually happened.

And if you don't believe that something like that could happen in your neighborhood, just think that Germany was considered the most cultrually modern and sophisticated nation in all of Europe when the Nazis were voted into office. When the Nazis went into Poland, it was easy to round up the Jews there in large part because antisemitism was already rampant among the conquered nation.

My view of humanity has changed a lot since then. I now believe that there is evil under the surface, and in a lot of people's hearts -- all it takes is a little bit of the right kind of stress for it to come out. Never underestimate people's capacity for hatred. I'm not talking about Nazis or neo-nazis, or KKK members. I'm talking about average people that you may live next door to.

BTW, when I told that story to a friend of mine, a nice midwesterner, fellow CoH player, who hasn't noticed much prejudice in his life, by his testimony (I now live in the midwest) he said that it was probably mob psychology, and that people do a lot of things out of fear and they may not actually be prejudiced. I thought about that and realized that thats no excuse. Fear, at most, is only what drives people to act on the prejudice. The person who throws the second rock may have been caught up in the mob's actions -- it doesn't excuse his actions, but it may explain them. But the person who throws the first one is guilty as sin. IF it was only one loud-mouth raciest yelling, thats where the whole thing would have ended. There would have been no mob to blame it on.

I've been told by many people since I moved to the midwest that tehre is no racism no antisemitism around their parts. I think that unless you actually are born into a minority, that you inherit a kind of blindness to it, because it seems so normal to you, unless you are its target. That my friend is true evil.

-Haldur

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What level range is this TF?

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The Hess TF is 25 to 30, with mobs up to 32 (when playing at Tenacious). I think that the Moonfire range is something like 23 to 28 (please correct me if I'm wrong).

And btw, for the person who complained about there not being a badge -- you weren't doing the Hess TF, you were doing the Moonfire one. The Hess TF DOES have a badge -- I think its called Burkholder's(sp?) Bane or something like that.
-Haldur

The first time I did it, no one on the team knew anything at all about the TF -- that was the best way to be introduced to it. I raved about it to my SG, so I ended up doing it 3 more times after that, each time because people in my SG had complained that they missed the last time I led it (I was the only one in my SG who had actually unlocked Hess). Everyone in my SG just had to do it, even if they had to be exemplared. The last couple of times I had to shush some of the others in the group who were starting to give too much info (its more fun when you known nothing about it).

Bravo to everyone involved in designing this TF -- If this is the new standard for task forces, I can't wait to see what's coming next.
-Haldur

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No, I understand the combi thing. Im just saying that If you need a tank: Get a tank and likewise for any of your specific AT needs.

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Actually, this is a very simple-minded statement. In my experience, when you create a team, you don't have the luxury of picking and choosing this AT and that. More often than not, you try to create the best team you can with whoever is LFG at the time.

That said, if I've grouped with someone before and I know that that person is a really good player, I'm going to do my best to make sure that I make a spot for him or her on my team. That's how I feel about this one Peacebringer that I grouped with the other day -- she was awesome. Maybe she dind't have the dps or the tanking ability or whatever. BUT she is one of the few people that I've met in a pickup group that I know I can always count on. I saw her switching roles on the team as needed, and it was a wonder to behold.

No one here will deny that Kheldians are more challenging to play than the more traditional ATs. They are SUPPOSED to be more challenging. But I'd sooner take a Kheldian that knows how to play well over many of the tanks and blasters that I've recently had in my pickup groups that didn't seem to understand anything about tactics or agro management or even not to wander around on their own agroing additional groups on us.

I can't argue whether or not there are real issues. I don't know myself how much harder it is to get a team invite as a Kheldian. Only thing I know is that, I personally have no problems with having one or more of them on my team, regardless of what the mission is.

On my 44 katana/SR scrapper, I have not had many problems soloing missions with bosses, even on the invincible setting, so long as I was prepared for it. That doesn't mean that I NEVER died, just that I rarely died when I was prepared (as any SR scrapper knows, you can never tell when the wind is going to blow the wrong way).

HOWEVER, since I started doing the FBZ door missions, things have gotten quite a bit harder. Someone told me recently that he thought that carny bosses were the hardest in the game -- i told them that they must not have fought Rularuu bosses, because they will all too frequently two-shot me even with Elude, tough, and all my other toggles up. I'd hate to have to change my difficulty setting back and forth every time I want to switch from doing FBZ missions to normal ones or back again. Hell, even the minioins and Lieutenants are bad enough. and the groups so close together to each other that I've taken to using Elude and inspirations in just about every other fight, so that if I'm not careful, I can be all out of insps by the time I reach the boss.

Just call me a masochist, I guess...

Forgive me if I repeat any that others have mentioned:

RA : Recovery Aura
PA : Phantom Army
PP : Perez Park
SC : Steel Canyon (note that the I've never seen Skyway City referred to as SC)
IP : Independence Port
DA : Dark Astoria
TV : Terra Volta
ding: used alone to anounce that you just made a level, as in 'Ding!', or as a verb as in 'I just dinged 14')
Woot!: a type of cheer
gj : good job
gjt : good job team
snipe: to attack at near maximum range, using one of the few ranged attacks designated in the game as a sniper attack; Moonbeam and Psychic Lance count as sniper attacks; Fire blast and Lightining bolt do not. Sniper attacks have certain attributes which set them apart from other ranged attacks, but the main one that makes them useful to 'snipe' with is that they are less likely to agro the target's neighbors than other attracks, when used at very long range.
cc : Crowd control
dps: Damage per second, but also used to refer to blasters and scrappers (who are the 'damage' classes).
AE/AoE: Area Effect (AoE always seemed very wrong to me, but enough people use it that you should include it).
PBAE/PBAoE: Point blank Area Effect (360 degree area effect centering on the caster/user, as opposed to cone, or targetted AEs.
wth : What the hell or What the heck
jk or j/k : Just kidding (not sure why there's a slash there, but that's how I've always seen it).
meatshield : slang for a tanker
bubbler: a force field defender or controller
bubble: a force field buff
root: any ability which stops movement, or the use of such an ability.
snare: any ability which slows movement
mez: any ability which puts bad guys to sleep
dot: damage over time
spawn: how a bad guy comes into the game world
despawn: some bad guys disappear or despawn after a time
drop: any inspirations or enhancements you get as a result of defeating a bad guy.
end: endurance
exp: noun - experience; verb - to hunt for the sole purpose of gaining levels.
pl: power level
wife agro: this is self explanatory, but I've seen it used so often that it deserves its own entry
-Haldur