Halon

I wouldn't say pointless. They do want to do what's most interesting to help keep or gain customers. Offsetting this is the consideration of difficulty to implement, and a reasoned consideration of what would truly be fun to play. Many people might want XXX, but it might just sound cooler than it actually is.

Personally, I'm dying for the dual wield. Quite frankly, I'd like to see these two offensive sets:

Dual Wield

Big 2-handed sword

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Actually, it's because one of the dev rules is that soloing an AV is supposed to be IMPOSSIBLE - PERIOD. Not with temps and insps, not without, just flat IMPOSSIBLE. It's one of the surest ways to call the nerfbat down... especially if someone brags about it.

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What if the AV is only orange to you, or yellow? Post-ED, I have solod yellow and orange AVs.

I did a purple one the other day, but had assistance from a "pet" who was part of the mission. I had a bunch of purples and since they were only +4 to me I could hit decently, and the "pet" did good damage too (the one who's a dominator with 2 Arachnos Rikti knockoff floaty droids, pet's pets, so to speak.)

But later, (mid-early 20's missions) I had that chick tanker in the Indiana Jones hat as a "pet", and was totally wiped twice on the AV. In this case, though, the stupid tank runs into the final room whenever I start to pull away the monsters to strip the AV to themselves, dies, and now I'm screwed because I'm truly solo against the AV again.

Will try again in another level. Plus I'm quite far from being "filled out" with SO's.

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I'm the Neighborhood Scrapper. Domesticated when I feel like being spoilt a bit, and Feral when I don't.

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I'm much the same, I'm as savage as they get, but have no problem (or lack of skills) being in a group. I turn on lft and then start soloing things and missions. If someone invites, I join, if not, no big deal.

The other day, I got invited into a group of 7 that was currently in the middle of a wipe. When I got to the mission (which happened to be in my zone) all but the defender was dead, and they were orange and running the other way. I blew by her and laid a quick couple of boots upside the head of the orange lt. following her, and then shot on further upstream, before she could even get turned around.

The death ground was just past one of those tiny circular areas where you can go either way then join up 20 feet further ahead. A yellow, three oranges, and a red boss. Didn't even blink an eye. By the time I was finishing off the yellow (hardest -> wimpiest, see?) the defender was healing me (even though "I was gonna make it!") and two others had returned from the grave and joined in.

Ahhh, life is good...

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I think the poster was referring to the fact you can't BOTH spay AND neuter something.l

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You've never seen my claws scrapper out of control.

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As a team we chose the power sets we thought would be best, and then we picked the characters we wanted to play. For most of us it was to try something different, for example this is my first tank, overboard’s first blaster, our scrappers first DA scrapper, etc.

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Hehe, once you go scrap, you never go back.

Everyone on the scrapper boards would smile at your comment, as it's almost an in-joke over there. Everyone tries something different. The scrapper tries a different scrapper primary, as to him that's wildly different.

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Do you want awesomeness or challenge? If you want the second, I'd say un min-max a bit. One tank and 7 fire blasters running on invincible could be interesting. A lot of defenders or trollers will make things easy.

Heck, one tank, 6 fire blasters and a TA/A on invincible sounds like my kind of fun.

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Why bother with the Tank or the Defender? Everything would die within the first few seconds.

I remember running a team with two or three Fire Blasters and two other Blasters. As a Scrapper, all I really did was mop up the bosses. Everything else was on the floor before I could even jump into the spawn.

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Reminds me of EverQuest, where the baddest team I was ever on (as a necro) was 4 necros, 1 mage, and a paladin who mostly sat around healing himself. We were high teens and were pulling cyclops after cyclops in Rathe Mountains by the gypsy camp. Only the level 45 named Cyclops drove us away, and that was after we got it down to half health. Live is very good when you have 5 pets on the thing and just spam up a new one when one dies.

Of course, even though that was logically the best type of group for battles (lots of throwaway tanks + decent blaster backup) it was hard to get together such a group given most people weren't playing pet specialists.

Those were the days you could give your pet daggers to speed up their attacks to dagger speed. "Warriors" running around hoping for god drops that were half as good as a pet's slices for 80 damage at dagger speeds.

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i have a feeling that cov regen and coh regen will play really differently. i'm already formulating builds that would look simply assinine in CoH that may or may not be effective in CoV.

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Playing differently because they have different powersets is logical and OK.

Nerfing CoH regen to make sure its "balanced" with CoV regen would be not OK and illogical ... which of course increases its chances of happening.

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Actually, if you're the company, you want the CoV classes (sorry, archetypes) to be a little bit better than the CoH ones, in order to draw people to buy it. Not enough so people complain, but a little better, cooler, etc.

For example, they appear to have real pet classes. Presumably this will put them 1 up over Controllers.

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and even Parry became useless as it didn't matter what hit you (even Hami!) you could regen faster than they could dish out damage.

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How did you do this? In I4, my claws/regen scrapper could not survive one hit from the AV, even with dull pain. Hence regen rate meant nothing if my HP were not enough to survive the max punch.

Then again, I didn't mess around with tough and weave. Now I did, on test server, respec such that the monsters on the northern islands of Perrigrine could not kill me in one hit (if one at a time), but even with 6 SO ++ damages, I could not damage them fast enough to kill them, so I still could not solo a monster.

Ok, so I slice a villian to pieces. He's teleported to the hospital and healed, same as me, then put in jail. This is "arresting".

That's fine and all, but what about Praetorian Earth or other planes only accessible thru Portal Corp. portals?

They can't be teleported the way I am -- after all, it requires a Portal Corp. massive portal to get there. So what happens to them?

There is only one conclusion: I am killing them.

And how would we be "arresting" them, anyway, since we are invading them?

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my broadsword/regen scrapper soloed an equal level vahzilok. he was 17 (21), I was 17. took me a while, but I found a nifty trick. I had superspeed, and a contact right outside. I'd grab 4 enrages, 4 lucks, 2 CaBs, and pound, retreat. my haste and dull pain recharged fast, and so I taunted over his fallen body.
He might have nice guns, but nothing is a match for my lazer beam swords, which are sword powered.

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My scrapper solo'd Dr. Vahz, too. Not a TF, just the end of a mission tree. He was orange to me, so that tells you relative level.

A bunch of shield insprations (luck? the purple one) + a few acc, and he went down pretty good, had some health left, was almost ready to click a heal insp, but didn't need to. He wore out my hasten by quite a bit (not slotted with recharge red. beyond just the one). Saved some shield insps for the second half of the battle, btw, and needed them.

I suppose if you clicked like 8 purple inspirations you could last longer against a purple AV, but you'd never come near enough damage to it because of level differences before you ran out of inspirations. I suppose if you had a buddy to feed you more inspirations, but who wasn't in your group (not possible in a mission, I believe, unless they quit after entry) then you might do it, but that's not really "soloing", is it?

And "Jo Jo" is for dog-faced boys.

There is one bit of lameness in all this.

The invaders are completely leaving bad guys like Outcasts alone. And no, don't give me this "outcasts are in on it" crap.

These are freakin' invaders from another plane of reality! They don't give a crap what kind of crazy costume a human is wearing. Kill all the humans!

So if they pop thru and a group of outcasts or Tsoo are there, it would be much more realistic, and cool, if they attacked the "normal" bad guys.

It's highly lame, unrealistic, and most importantly, immersion-busting to see some Outcasts AND some aliens beat down on you at the same time. (Not that it hurt, I was a well-slotted 23 tank in Steel Canyon, taking their pathetic level 16 hits indefinitely.)

Still, EQ had a similar problem in one of their very rare invasions -- the guards did not attack the invaders, nor vice versa.

Pathetic!

I sure hope they're holding off. It's an hour to go before I can even dream of cutting out early.

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Broken may equal fun to players who get the vastly overpowered skill (smoke grenade) or find the levelling loopholes, but fixing it isn't a nerf no matter how you break it down.

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That's true. Fixing something clearly broken (infinite stacking of smoke grenade or whatever) or ending an unforseen loophole is not a nerf.

A nerf is when, say, EQ lowers the top end necromancer pet by 7 levels because it, alone, was about as tough as an equivalent-level, well-armored warrior. They could have toughened the warrior, or the quality of the armor or weapons (boosting a class) but no, they nerfed another class.

Don't confuse the two. Yes, it can be painful to see a bug repaired or a loophole closed. But that's not really that bad since you understand it is something that should be done.

There have been nerfs -- the Purple Patch is one, from the descriptions I've heard. (Ironically, EQ also had a similar nerf patch limiting the level to +6 that you could "stick" a spell on.) There's really no reason a ball of flame shouldn't burn a +20 level, but otherwise normal human, just as much as it does an even one. You don't "dodge" an all-encompassing ball of flame that fills the entire space. You don't "dodge" a lightning bolt that has found your body.

But it gets done for balance reasons, or to slow things down. These are nerfings, the true nerfings.

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However, with the guarenteed death due to lag and the fact it sticks with ya, I think I'll pass and stay safely hidden in my home until it passes...

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Meh.

Invasions are the best thing about a game like this -- the excitement of not knowing what's happining. Knowing there is chaos going on out there.

And you want to miss it? For what? Because of the debt of a few deaths? I suffered six deaths in a row trying to kill the Clockwork King, and that was just to get (failed, btw) a SO drop.

It's like skipping the Olympics because you might twist your ankle in the 100 meter dash. WTF is all your play for then, if not this?

If we don't get stuff like this, there's no reason not to move on to WoW when it comes out, then EQ2 when that comes out, and so on, and so on, until one comes around that does have this kind of excitement.

You and this guy from the EQ boards a few years ago should be locked in a room together. He complained that the rare EQ event "messed up his levelling plans". Well, hell. I don't even know what to say.

My jaw just lays on the floor.

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I think a better solution would be to have an alternate, AV-less mission to choose whenever an AV mission comes up

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Only if you get a permanent hit to your influence for "being a coward". Seriously. Who would hold in high regard a "hero" who made other heroes do the dirty work.

This is especially true for those who do the mission, then get a level 50 to kill the AV for them.

Some sort of anti-badge, a badge of shame, should be awarded, and it should show up on the person's info when in the targetting window, like their supergroup, so you can see it immediately on targetting them.

Eh, there also should be badges of shame that so-and-so never fought any tough monsters, just went around AOE-blasting blues and whites, running away from lieutenants.

"OMG, you're the loser from the stats kiosk!" When will that go live?

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I really want to know if there is a AT that can take down a +2 or +3 AV solo...

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I was level 17 doing the Positron mission with the Clockwork King at the end. (I started it at level 16 and leveled during the task force as part of normal task force xp.)

The King was only orange to me, but our whole group got wiped out multiple times (I had on the order of 4200 debt when we gave up. That was about 6 quick death's worth.)

We gave up, but just quit rather than end the task force. We agreed to try again the next day at 11 AM (it was a weekend.) I logged on at 11:15, and two others were there, having cleared out the repopulated mission of almost everything but the AV. I helped them finish it off. We tried again (defender, controller, and me, a scrapper.) I hit hasten, clicked follow up, and started wailing away (very well-stocked scrapper, btw.) Wiped out very quickly. Tried again using pets first (my bad, didn't know the controller had 'em.) and did much better, but still got wiped.

We went outside to do street monsters for awhile to try to level up the 3 of us and try again -- so close, just one monster to go for the SO.

Didn't level up, but while doing that, a fourth logged in, and was surprised to see he was still in the TF. "What the hell", he said. A tank, fortunately.

This time we went back in. I had bought six heals with me, along with two acc, one damage, and one shield inspiration.

This time, we did it. I died though, just before the AV was killed, er, arrested. I got the xp, but did NOT get an SO.

1. Do SO drop for Positron's task force?

2. If so, do they always drop, or just sometimes?

3. Does being dead, but still in the mission, mean you won't get the SO? Does it have anything to do with it, or was I just unlucky, my death having nothing to do with it?

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I TRIPLE dog dare ya! (Now he HAS to take the challenge!)

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Now he created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping
the Triple Dare and going straight for the throat.