HolyEvilAoD

I would suspect any of those combos (except perhaps the controller, I don't know them too well) would be able to solo an AV. AVs have ~95 HP/sec regen or so; the main thing is doing enough damage and staying alive.

The Ice/Fire tank would probably be the cheapest for it, since it can soft-cap defenses fairly easily and it should do enough damage to whittle down the AV.

The Fire/Dark corruptor would have the easiest fight, assuming you can get enough defenses to be survivable, since Fire is plenty damaging and Dark has some -Regen and -Res.

Yes, please. I'm tired of having any female characters in tights have dark muscle lines all over their backs. It looks bad. None of them are body builders.

I had this problem as well. In order to fix it, completely close the NCSoft launcher (you have to go to the icon on the taskbar and select Exit to do this, not just X out of it). Then go to the CoH Folder, delete the ~PS folder, and the two Patch files in the main directory (they have very long names). Restart the NCSoft launcher and it should download and patch normally with no issues.

I tried numerous things to achieve this; using a bunch of tricks to try and keep Stygian Circle and Dark Extraction in use included. I found I simply couldn't do it with the AE or any mission currently in the game.

If there was a way to set up continual ambushes such that 16 minions constantly were coming at me, then I could do it easily. Unfortunately, the AE limits the number of ambushes in a mission and when they spawn, so I can't set it up.

Plus, the Extracted Essences would be somewhat counter productive. There's no guaranteeing they'll fire at the AV and not the Buff Batteries. In fact, with 16 targets to choose from, chances are they'll fire exclusively at the Buff Batteries and only hit the AV with AoEs, which may not be often because I believe the pet AoEs have a 10 target cap. And it's likely that the Buff Batteries who aren't aggroed on me will go kill the Essences anyhow.

That said, if I could have out 3 Essences constantly that I was assured would fire on the AV exclusively and wouldn't get killed, I feel confident I could have killed Bobcat in half the time.

Eclipse. A power that caps your resists to everything with a few enemies in range, refills your endurance bar, can be made Perma, and has no crash? Yes please.

The video is at about 3x speed (it's somewhat over that) . The full fight took around 12 minutes or so.

Yes. Yes they can.

As far as I can tell, it's working as intended. He always spawns with the Vampyri Comandant. That's the way I've been able to find him. He has a cloaking device that's always on until you aggro the spawn that's with him. +Perception does seem to help somewhat, but he's virtually invisible even with it thanks to the Cloaking Device making him nearly completely transparent.

You can get Hover Speed to the flight speed cap. It took me all my slots, but I did it. You need a Crab Spider and must take three ranged attacks (5 slot with Thunderstrike for 4%), the 2 powers from Soul Mastery with -Acc (2 slot with Siphon Insight for 4%), 5 melee attacks (5 slot with Focused Smite for 3%), 4 +ToHit powers (2 slot with Gaussian's for 5%), Stamina (2 slot with Performance shifter for 5%), and take 3 pet powers (5 slot with Brilliant Leadership for 2%), Fly (3 slot with Winter's Gift for 6%), and Hover and Mental Training (6 slot with Fly Speed), and Swift (5 slot with Fly Speed). Add in the Nerve Paragon Radial.

This will put you exactly at the Fly Speed cap of 58.6 MPH.

I have hasten on most of my characters, especially once they reach level 50. I often do leave it out until late in the build, unless there's an early level where there are no powers I want to take OR it plays a vital role in making the build immediately stronger and I can withstand the downsides. A lot of characters, even with inherent stamina, are too endurance thirsty at low levels to make use of it except for short bursts.

The only level 50 I don't have it on is my Mercs/FF mastermind who has virtually no use for recharge. I also have it on a level 50 BS/SR scrapper though it serves virtually no purpose. Its sole use is to shave a few seconds off his Build Up recharge time, as he has so much recharge via purple sets and LotG: +Recharge that the extra recharge from Hasten does nothing to speed up his attack chain.

This reminds me of the Councilor Program in UO and the STAR Program in EVE. The only difference is both of those are monitored and require people to submit applications and go through tests.

If this is just an open-to-everyone program, I can see how this might be a tad problematic. Aside from people deliberately trolling people needing help, there's a lot of misinformation the average helpful person could possibly spread around without realizing they're giving out bad info.

An easy way to tank Recluse is to take advantage of him being tethered to whichever tower is taking damage. Taunt him and run down into the trench on the same side as the tower being attacked. If you go back far enough, he'll keep chasing you until he reaches a certain distance and then will teleport back to the center of the platform.

Assuming your taunt effect is still active, he'll charge back down into the trench after you. If your taunt is slotted up with taunt duration and you have decent recharge, the taunt will stick on him long enough to run him all the way back toward you. You just need to keep taunting him and he'll keep running down and then teleporting back.

You do have to move a bit once each tower goes down (if you do the standard red->blue->yellow->green rotation, you'll move back a bit once the red goes down, then switch to the other trench when the blue dies, then move about 20 yards forward once the yellow drops). But aside from that, he'll rarely attack you, and if he does and he hits you, you'll have plenty of time to pop a green or hit your heal.

It also wins on pure humor value. I imagine Recluse is thinking "Grr, that guy said my helmet looks dumb! I'm gonna get him! Oh crap, they're destroying the tower that's making me a god! Gotta go back and get them. But, grrr, that insult was really uncalled for!" over and over.

The only real horror story I have is from this Saturday evening. I was on my Warshade and my SG Mate wanted to run a STF. I agreed to form one up, since my Shade needed the Notice anyway. I should point out here that I'm not a great leader, but I've run the TF plenty of times and have led it successfully a few times, so I know what to do at least.

We had my Warshade, my SG mate's Fire/Fire Blaster, a Dark/SR Scrapper, a Psi/Emp Defender, a Ninjas/Dark MM, a Fire/SS Tank, a Rad/Rad Corruptor, and another Scrapper (can't remember what he was).

The first mission goes fairly fine, though some people seem to be having a hard time following orders. But we make it through with few real issues. The second mission also goes fairly smoothly, a few deaths due to carelessness but nothing crippling. Though it was an omen of things to come. The third mission also goes fairly smoothly, with us just clearing the vines and no real deaths.

The 4th mission is where things get dicey. We luck out by finding the security officer in the 2nd group, so we clear off the ambushes and head inside. The first two AVs go down easily.

Then half the group runs right past the 3rd AV. Repeated calls for them to come back fail and eventually I have to TP two people back to the room before we get started. But once the AV goes down, we move on and take out the 4th with no problem, though we're still getting rather scattered as people are running on ahead without warning.

We get to Aeon's room and clear one side and the tank just runs in and starts attacking Aeon while the rest of the team is still busy clearing. Take note that I held the temp power, so it's not like the tank was doing anything useful but causing Aeon to spawn clones.

The team mostly wipes, but we pull back and set up again. We go in, I hit the temp power, and we manage to take Aeon down.

Then there was the final mission. We clear the left side and start trying to pull singly. No matter WHAT we do, we always manage to get all 4 AVs. Sometimes they don't all come at once. A few times, we would get GW or Scirocco by themselves for like 3 minutes, only for Mako and/or Scorpion to mosey on up and join in the fray a bit later.

This wouldn't have been a problem except for one thing... The tank had NO idea how to hold aggro. His concept of holding aggro was spamming taunt on one of the AVs in front of him and ignoring the rest. This naturally caused the buffers and debuffers to die, which then meant the tank quickly got overwhelmed. Plus, we had squishies wandering into melee range constantly, so they could get held by Scirocco's EM Pulse. And the Ninjas MM appeared to simply set his minions on Aggressive and use his personal attacks over and over.

I tried to get people to follow orders, but no matter what we kept having the same issues, especially with the tank holding aggro on the AVs and keeping them from running off and pounding us.

Finally, after about a dozen wipes, the entire team gave up. Which is unfortunate, because we COULD have done it if everyone had been doing what they were supposed to do.

Minimum level Numina's: +Regen/Recovery, Miracle: +Recovery, Celerity: +Stealth, and LotG: +Recharge tend to sell for right around 150 million per crafted enhancement. There's some fluctuation (I think Celerities go for around 140 right now, with occasional spikes to 150), but they generally fall right in that level.

My sole level 50 MM is a Mercs/FF MM, so I know a thing or two about Mercs. The reason people say they suck is many-fold.

1) Damage, as mentioned. They don't do a ton of it, for a couple reasons. First, they seem to just do lower damage in general, but I'm not sure of that entirely. The lethal damage is a big component as well, though they are not alone in this (Ninjas and Thugs do a lot of lethal damage, but no one really complains there).

2) Pet AI being insufficient to properly leverage Mercs powers. Mercs use a lot of cones that aren't very wide for their AoEs. Both the Soldiers and Commando use Full Auto and Buckshot and the Commando uses Flamethrower. Because they don't try to line up the cones, they frequently only hit a fraction of available targets. Compared to other primaries, which mainly use standard AoEs, it means they do less damage. Though the Commando also has LRM Rocket and M30 Grenade and the Medic has Frag Grenade to add in traditional AoE.

That's not the only problem, however. Spec Ops have several mez/debuff powers. But the powers are on fairly long timers, don't have amazing effects, and either don't have a very large AoE radius or have small numbers of max targets, because they also rarely hit the entire group. Additionally, the AI doesn't know how to stack them or anything, so you'll rarely get holds to effect bosses or the debuffs to have significant effects.

3) Bad non-pet powers. Your MM attacks suffer the same drawback as the Mercs attacks, being all lethal/smashing. Additionally, your pet buff power, Serum, is easily the worst of all the MMs, with mediocre effects.


However, despite this, Mercenaries do have some benefits, such as the ability for all of them to slot the Achilles Heel chance to debuff proc, their decent toughness, the Medic usually keeps you mez protected with Stimulant, and their exclusive ranged attacks (though the recent bug that forces all pets into melee negates this somewhat). They're probably the worst MM set, but even the worst MM set is still very good overall.

So, between September 9th and October 10th, I ran three level 50 characters through 5 tip missions a day and did random A-Merit rolls in the 35-39 range. I then recorded my rolls. I originally planned on recording the crafting costs and sale prices for all the rolls as well, but I forgot to do it after the first day and decided not to, since it was too much work. Plus, I wanted to keep a bunch of the recipes for myself, so it wouldn't work anyhow.

Today I decided to do some very rough calculations on how much I could have earned, so I just looked up the sale price of the crafted recipes, took an average number for anything that had some price variance (usually erring on the side of low prices). Then I subtracted a rough crafting cost # for each recipe (3 mil for recipes that require 1 Rare salvage, 5 mil for recipes that require 2 Rare salvage). I multiplied that number by the number of recipes I'd received, then added all that up, then subtracted 10% for market fees. Then I divided by the number of rolls I'd done (47 in total).

It wound up being rather surprising to me, with the rough average coming out to 72.25 million INF in profit per roll (or 14.45 million in profit per recipe).

Of course, this is all done with a grain of salt since I didn't actually record exact crafting or sale price numbers (and I didn't sell anything anyways). But I think it gives a decent general idea about how much you can get from rolling A Merits at level 50 on the 35-39 table. And I'd say my luck was pretty average, as while I rarely got TERRIBLE rolls, I never really got GREAT rolls either.

I've been recording my merit rolls over 3 characters for the past half-month, just to see how it stacks up versus straight buying minimum level LotG: +Rech. I'm gonna order it all up once I get to a full month. But so far, I've had very few actual vendor trash recipies (I consider something vendor trash if it's cost of crafting + listing would net me less than a million in profit). A lot have fallen to selling for 5 mil or 10 mil, so there's a lot that's only getting me 1 to 2 million. But I still get a good deal of 30-50 mil recipes.

As for worst rolls ever, I once snagged 2 Ghost Widow procs and 1 Malaise proc, with the other two being unnotable. It was before I started recording though, so I don't have exactly what the other two were.

As far as I know, they've always given the full 10% buff (so if you had 115 End, you'd get 11.5 per proc). I guess they fixed the text to actually show the full benefit now.

Hallelujah. It's about time.

Now my Inv/SS tanker can pick up Hurl and Hand Clap. My BS/SR scrapper can grab Hasten. My Dark/Dark brute can take Taunt and Soul Transfer.

This is just pure joy.

There's also a few missions that are tedious to complete, especially depending on the character. I always drop the ones to Rescue Sister Jocasta, Rescue the Debutantes, and Rescue the Corrupt Cops. Mainly because all three involve escorts, which means you can't just blow past the NPCs.

My favorite is the Jar of Flesh mission, since all you need to do is kill 2 Arachnos Lts on the lowest difficulty setting. It takes like 2 minutes to finish.