Intrinsic

I'd buy real estate. The prices in Paragon City must be near rock-bottom with all the metanormal activity going on, so I'd swoop in and snatch up all of those cheap properties. I'd apply the old market rule: buy low, sell not-quite-as-low.

Actually, I'd do what I'm already doing with my current sum of inf... nothing. My characters' builds are done for now, and there's really no other good use for excess inf. It's why I've scaled back my marketeering activities; I have no motivation to earn.

I'm fully convinced that people play MMO's while stoned or drunk. I have no other explanation for some of the behavior I've seen.

However, I'm starting to reach the belief that the handling of acids and grenades on Lambda is poor game design, because it's adversely affecting too many of the runs to just blame on a few bad players. Maybe we need to have a separate power tray for mission-critical temp powers, or something similar.

I've been on 2 MoLambda attempts, and each time some moron tossed a grenade at Marauder after repeated instructions not to do so. I'm not trying for it again, period. The devs can fix the badges, but they can't fix stupid people.

I would make it random, with two influencing factors:

1) Minimum participation threshold. Ideally, this should be just high enough to discourage doorsitters or /afk autofollowers. Fall below the threshold, and you get nothing. Above the threshold, you get the same chance for a reward as the rest of the league.

2) Completing objectives that currently give astral merits and accomplishment badges would also increase the chance for getting a better reward table. This would give incentive for leagues to go for the 'hard' objectives in a trial beyond just getting the 'master of' badges.

Little do you people realize, that DangerWoman35 is actually the evil villain FourEyes in disguise, perpetrating her dastardly schemes on the forums to inflict eyestrain upon readers everywhere! Muahaha!!!

This is my fire^3 dom's current build. I enjoy running TF's/trials/raids, so I've tried to keep that in mind. It has permadom when exemplaring as low as level 25. At 50, it has enough global recharge to maintain domination without Hasten, which means I don't have to worry about going afk. I was able to solve endurance issues through slotting, which allowed me to use core musculature for the Alpha slot. I don't know if it can do quite as much single-target damage as Frosticus' build, but it looks to have better AoE damage and better selection/slotting in the control powers. There's probably more room for optimization, but I've been pretty happy with it so far.

Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.92
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Nice

How long did the fight take? Did you use anything to suppress its regen, or did you just out-DPS it?

Or maybe a longer trial gives you more time to 'participate.' Especially if the metric is number of times powers have been activated. That would be a real kicker for the folks who are trying to speed through the trials.

Up until tonight, my scrapper found 2 very rares total while my dominator found none. Tonight when I ran a couple of BAF trials with the dom, I did something a little different from my previous runs during the last stage. I got a very rare each time. I switched leagues between runs, so I didn't go with the same bunch of people twice. At the time I thought I was the luckiest bugger in the game, but in light of this thread I'm wondering about that. I'll have to see if I can replicate my good fortune tomorrow.

I remember paying 40 mil for Hecatomb too. Prices on purples made a huge jump after I14, when the farmers moved to AE farms. They're still going up steadily though. I just paid significantly more for an Apocalypse set a week ago than I did 6 months ago.

I'm seeing some opposition to the idea that's framing the argument as an either/or proposition. That doesn't have to be the case.

Deus mentioned Everquest, and buff durations aside that game is a good example of buffs that evolved as more multi-group content was introduced. When EQ started, all buffs were single-target buffs. As new expansions were introduced, the devs started giving players some group buffs as well as the single-target versions, to reduce setup time during raids. Eventually they implemented a separate ability. When a player activated this ability, the next group buff he cast became an AoE buff. At no point did the devs remove any buffing options. They simply introduced new ones.

CoH could have the same options. It could be easy as giving some of the powersets a new toggle switch. When the toggle is on, shield buffs become AoE buffs. Add whatever penalties you think would be appropriate: increased endurance cost, can't affect the caster, etc. When the toggle is turned off, the shield buffs become single-target buffs again, just like they've always been. You can still use them to buff stragglers and players who have been defeated. Players would not lose any flexibility in buffing others. They would simply gain new options, and hopefully make the process of buffing a bunch of people at once less tedious.

How about sonic?

Heaven forbid there should be any learning curve to new content!

It hasn't even been a week. Give folks an opportunity to figure out the new trials. For what it's worth, all of the trials I joined in yesterday were successful.

On an individual level, corruptor damage can be competitive with blaster damage depending on the corruptor's secondary set. On a team level, a corruptor can pull ahead when you consider the corruptor's ability to act as a force multiplier and boost the overall team damage output. Defenders have lower individual damage, but can make better force multipliers in a team.

Personally, I have a hard time trying to play a blaster now, after having played a corruptor and a dominator (which you didn't mention but can also be competitive damagewise). IMO, when compared to corruptors and dominators, blasters just don't bring enough to a team.

Mmf, the Interface abilities are looking a little underwhelming. Any idea what the duration is on the proc debuffs, and how much damage the fire DoT does?

*edit* D'oh, just re-read the thread and saw that you answered the duration question earlier, but thanks for answering it again.

Try replacing the endurance IO's in Lunge, Slash, and Shatter Armor with Mako's acc/end/rech. I use that slotting in Lunge and Slash for my NW; it gives very nice enhancement values.

*edit* Also, consider slotting 3-piece Miracle or Numina in Aid Self if you want more hit points.