Jazra

Okay, first off, you need to get the Static Field. It is the single most useful power that you have.

When soloing it lets you take any size group of enemies and switch them off, allowing you to take them on one at a time at your leisure.

Not only does it turn them off, but it also saps the endurance of any enemies caught in it and then directly returns it to you if you are also in it (which you will be to also utilize conductive aura), and any ally that is in the field as well. This makes it still useful in teams when AoEs are flying around breaking the sleep.

I have an Elec/Storm as well and got it up to 50 a little while ago. Lots of fun, and good synergy with Freezing Rain. The later storm powers are a bit less synergistic with the requirements of Elec, but that just means you have different tools for different situations.

My typical strategy in the early levels, though, would be to drop the static field on a group of baddies, then hit them with a jolting chain. While they are reeling, hit them with chain fences to make sure that whenever they do wake up they don't leave the static field, and then watch them fall asleep again as they stand up. Pepper one or two with your damaging attacks as you like, and repeat the above as endurance allows, which it should. I did all that before inherent stamina, and did not take anything from the Fitness pool. Even now I leave stamina unslotted.

You can use Snow Storm as a herding tool to group them up if they are far apart by casting it on the farthest back enemy, then ducking around a corner so he comes to you, bringing all his friends, right on to a static field you dropped.

I hope you're seeing a pattern here with everything involving static field....

Thanks Fritz and Ocasta. I guess I won't worry about it too much then, and instead concentrate on defense from set bonuses. Maybe I'll stick with Cardiac. I had a Tier 1 cardiac slotted before I started going down Nerve, and it meant I never EVER ran out of endurance. That's pretty nice.

Hi all,

I have a Fort that is currently sitting at softcapped ranged defense, just shy of that in melee defense, and about 25% in AoE defense (without Mind Link active). As I get more money to throw at recipes that will hopefully get better.

I have been thinking of going the Nerve Alpha route as it will help with defense buff enhancement, but it occurs to me that a significant portion of my defense is being supplied with IO set bonuses. Does anybody know how much of a difference the alpha will make for my defense levels? Would I be better served going a different route? I don't really need the accuracy bonus.

Right now it's very hard to die from anything except when I am fighting DE, but I haven't taken her on any of the new TFs yet and I'm worried that, if fighting level 54 enemies, she will get squashed.

I'm going to have to jump in here and agree that running the same TF over and over again isn't very fun.

I currently have 5 level 50s. Only one of them has anything beyond the common alpha. Doing the same thing over and over again really breaks the immersion for me. If I run a TF once I can think to myself "Yay, I saved the world" but then if I go and run it again, and again, and again, it just feels like grinding. It quickly stops being fun.

I ran the Kahn TF three times, and that was already far too much. I wanted to run a Barrracuda to balance it out, but nobody wanted to do that because it's harder and takes longer.

I didn't run a single LGTF this week. I wanted nothing to do with it.

I'll probably run a couple SP/SM TFs this week, because some of my characters don't have the badges, but I certainly won't be running several of them.

Also, out of curiosity, has anybody stopped to notice that the villain TFs will be getting a lot more action than the Hero TFs? There's a whole lot more Hero TFs to choose from. Fifteen Hero TFs, Four cooperative TFs, and just SIX villain TFs. There are 2.5 times more hero TFs than villain TFs.

/Storm isn't as bad as it seems at first glance, actually.

I rolled one up for thematic reasons and at first I was pretty worried about it for all the reasons stated above, but I've found that it works pretty well. Yes, many of the powers don't work well together, but they work very well by themselves. This means you have a lot more tools to work with for different situations, rather than always turning on the same powers in the same order and doing the same things.

Typically in normal missions I'll drop static field, chain fences, drop freezing rain and go to town. Yes, FR breaks the sleep but Static Field is feeding me and my team endurance. I think of it now as a team Endurance buff that can be used as a sleep sometimes as well.

Hurricane is for the mobs that I have a hard time mezzing. Push those Night Widows into a corner and put a static field on them. AVs are immune to sapping and holds, but hurricane and freezing rain still do wonderful things tot hem. Tornado comes out for AVs and EBs that are unmezzable as it is autohit and over time deals signifigant damage (great for Paragon Protectors as well). Lightning storm coems out for them too for some pretty big extra damage, and is also a great panic button when thigns get tricky.

Lots of tools for different situations. Be flexible. It's very rewarding.

What I often tend to do is hang out on a semi-large team. As soon as we get a mission in another zone, somebody will almost certainly drop an Ouro portal as a shortcut. They also tend to leave it open for people on the team to use it. Jump in. Done.

Huh, I was just thinking to myself "I wonder what happened to those CoP runs that were happening a couple months ago". There were a few attempts, some successful, some not, posted and organized on the forums. Haven't seen one in a while, and I'd like to try again. Sorry I missed it!

I have the Elec/Storm that Griff is talking about, and while she's really strong, there is a fair bit of clash between the two. Elec needs people nice and clumped together, while storm causes quite the opposite.
So far though she's a beast. Freezing Rain actually works quite well with Elec. Yes, it breaks the sleep from static field, but they spend all their time on their butts anyway so it doesn't matter much.

Hurricane I use for the tough enemies that are mez resistant like Night Widows, which cripples them entirely. Very limited use, though, as static field is usually much more useful.

I just picked up Tornado and haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I think that will be VERY situational. Probably for big nasty enemies that are resistant to knockback, or MoG-ed Paragon Protectors.

I also have an Elec/Trick Arrow which has been pretty fun. Glue keeps people in the area quite well and so far I haven't found any clashes at all. Maybe give that a whirl?

First hero was an Ill/Rad controller. Long before that even became a FotM.

She was collecting dust for a while because she had gotten as far as she was going to and there were lots of other new shinys to check out As soon as i19 hit, though, she was up and running. Didn't even have to respec, as she didn't have Fitness to begin with (she surprised a lot of people who thought that Stamina was a requirement for radiation).

Soloed the Alpha arc. Trapdoor was a chump. Had some issues with the Rikti mission with the Honoree and that other dude but handled it with aplomb and flair. She just got her Uncommon Spiritual, to bring her closer to perma-PA. About ten seconds of downtime now.... anybody have some spare Basilisk's Gaze IOs that they can spare? She isn't as IOed out as she could be.

Heh, I remember back in the day she had 80 million influence, and I figured that was more than she could ever possibly need. Now that won't even buy a single LotG 7.5% recharge recipe.

Ditto for playing my Warshade. He came into being about a week after issue 1 went live. Still a beast. Haven't gotten him his uncommon Spiritual yet for perma-Eclipse, but it's coming.

An interesting factoid -- My DP/Dark has to redraw after using any of her Dark powers... EXCEPT for Darkest Night. That toggle doesn't put the pistols away at all. This has always confused me, and it doesn't seem to make any sense why one power out of the set doesn't put the pistols away while the others do.

Also, I thought archery and dual pistols were given a slight accuracy buff to compensate for the redraw, no? Isn't the base accuracy modifier 1.1 for these powersets, rather than the normal 1.0?

Put my single-target hold in the 2nd space in my power tray. My fingers know exactly where to go to fire it.

Hum the music from Blyde Square when I'm walking around.

Always focus on "Spanky's Boardwalk" whenever I zone in to Talos Island.

Never consciously made a FotM. My first character, shortly after launch, was an Ill/Rad, but that was just because I thought it sounded nifty.

Still play and love my Ill/Rad.

Make almost exclusively Magic-oriented characters. That has only changed with Praetoria, as there are no magic-based enemies, and therefore no magic enhancements being dropped.

(Why are some people against making Science origin characters because of the Vahz?)

Play almost exclusively controllers, or characters that have some mezzing in their toolkit. (Warshade, Dark)

Have never made a SG base or done any decorating, nor ever use any of my base salvage for crafting back when that was possible. Is there anything I can do now with all this junk?

I'm a big fan of my Earth controller and Earth dominator, but my trip into Ice just left me cold. (pun intended, of course!)

Really though, Earth is great.

I second what Dechs says. ANY team is fully functional and very fun. I don't really care who or what comes on to my team when I am building one because, barring some stupidity, it's all going to work out just fine.

And after you've played a bit, try to get on one of those all-X teams he mentioned. My favourite experience in the game so far has been running a Statesman Task Force with an all-Radiation team. This means it was entirely composed of Defenders and Controllers, which in WoW terms would mean we have no damage at all and would probably be impossible. We ripped through the missions and archvillians like a deer through butter.

It's been a while since I did the initial content for my VEATs but I never got the impression that Kalinda was treating me the same way. As I recall I had a totally different initial contact who provided the story that I was very miffed at all these upstart punks just waltzing in to Arachnos territory as favourites of Recluse, and I wanted to get in on that action. The early missions had me running around trying to get my name on the Destined One list, and this all seemed reasonable enough to me, and provides for a mechanism to fit me in to all the other content in the game without having to rewrite all the dialogue trees.

Then again, I have noticed that Kalinda is a bit bugged in other respects. Maybe you talked to her when you weren't supposed to and she gave you her initial contact speech? She gave me that when I came across with a Praetorian and wanted to do my cape mission. Before I could do my cape mission I had to do the "Take out Operative Burch" mission. Very surreal having level 20+ longbow in there, but Burch and his contact were still level 4.

Hi all,

I was using one of my freespecs last night on a level 31 dominator to take advantage of the inherent fitness (yes, a bit late to the party. I know) and I went through the whole process normally, only to finish at the end and see all my powerbars unchanged, and a message in my chat window that "Respec Failed" and, scrolling up, a long series of "Unknown command: <ascii character>"

Now, this may have failed because my toon had levelled up, but not visited a trainer yet. I played for a couple hours, finished levelling up, and ended the night with a successful respec.

In the end, no harm done, but I may have found a bug. When I was first trying to respec most of my enhancements were outlevelled and red, so I didn't bother to slot them back in. I also didn't touch the enhancements that I had sitting in my enhancement tray that I couldn't use. The game told me about how much INF I would be getting for it, and I accepted it, and once the respec failed, I still had all my outlevelled enhancements slotted, but all of the enhancements that were in my tray were gone.

I'm not sure how much INF I had to start with, so can't say if I was getting free INF or not, but if I did get paid, then that could be a way to get an infinite amount of free INF. If I didn't get paid, then I lost a pile of enhancements that were in my tray. Either way, probably not something that would be considered "good"...

So has anybody had their respecs fail on them, or have any idea what was going on here? Any credence to my theory that it was blowing up because I had levelled, but not trained up?

I tried talking to Maros, but I hadn't done his story arc before and he wouldn't talk to me at all. Since he didn't talk to me, and I didn't have either of the other contacts either, I skipped out on all that stuff. I am now disappointed. Will have to try again through Orouboros sometime.

Also, anybody know if there's a bug with the mission where you take out the Legacy Chain army? I was duo-ing with a friend and we were doing all the missions cooperatively together, so we were both at the same point in the story arc, and both had the Coral temp power to make us invulnerable. (Cranked it up to +4s for giggles)
Both of us died a few times. I am okay with maybe a few getting through, and earth does a defense debuff, so dying once or twice as they get in enough lucky hits is fine. But when we came back in after hitting the hospital, my friend didn't have the temp power but I still did. My friend had to hospital it AGAIN and then come back and the power returned.

Known bug, or did I find something odd?

For the original question -- I played once a couple years ago during a winter event with a player who was being an overzealous, helpful sidekick type person who would run in to groups and fight like mad. He said he was modeling himself after an incarnation of "Robin".

He was extremely annoying. I'm not all about maximum xp/sec or steamrolling things, and I am happy to die here and there, but he was running in and grabbing the attention of the whole room, Snaptooth included, when we absolutely could not handle that. As long as he was on the team, we would keep faceplanting. The only times we could function was when he was eating dirt.

I'm all for having fun and being silly (and I'm usually a big talker in my teams, wasting time with chatter) but if we can't function at all together, I don't want you around.

Your toon sounds fun and I wouldn't mind playing with you, as long as we can keep it controlled and contained. If your antics wind up killing everybody over and over and over, well, that's not fun for the rest of us. It's only fun if we can keep our toons alive.

So if everybody survives, with the ocassional faceplant, then more power to you and I want in. If it's teamwipe after teamwipe, well, I'll stay over here thanks.

Wow, that's a lot of Radiation there. Looks good.

If I can bring my Warshade, I would like to. Tried last time with him, and we saw it fail spectacularly. If you want more rad, I can bring my Ill/Rad controller. @Jazra

As an aside, what's up with all the blue-side CoP raids? I haven't seen a red-side raid at all yet, and I have a couple villians/rogues that I either have not or will not bring over to blue-side yet that would love to take down a demigod or two.

What are people's feelings on how to spend the Alignment Merits? I have a couple H-merits and I am tempted to pick up a LotG 7.5% recipe directly, but might it be more economical to get the random recipe rolls? What do you lot usually do?

To me, the teams seemed very uneven in their ability to clear the Rularuu from the cubes. I was on team 1 and my cube was always cleared MUCH faster than the other two. My team and I would clear our cube, turn to look at the AV and see the other two cubes still having fights going on. I would run over to help, fight a bit, and then find that the Rularuu at my own cube had respawned already. It was often taking us two cycles of cube spawns to take down the shield, which is far, FAR too long.

I'm not sure what the composition of the other teams were, but we were obviously unbalanced.

Interestingly, when we were taking down the glyphs we had the same problem. My team almost destroyed our Glyph before the others even got started, despite a coordinated start. By the time the other teams were working their glyphs down, we had another spawn of enemies we had to defeat before we could destroy our glyph.

Another small concern I was having was the fact that none of the Rularuu leave bodies. I was playing a Warshade, and was unable to make any fluffies to assist. Now for the Storm AV it doesn't matter much, as the hurricane will render them moot, but I was still rather disappointed, and with the non-storm AV they would provide some much appreciated extra damage. I also faceplanted a couple of times when Stygian Circle would have been quite handy. It would be nice if in some future iteration of the CoP trial, the cube would spawn the occasional Natterling or Brute.

Well I will definitely sign up for the 2nd instance. I may not have time to bring my Fort over to Hero-side, so I will sign up with my Warshade.

I have never one one either, and in fact didn't even realise it was possible. I would love to see this happen, though who knows if I will actually be able to participate.

I'd love to be a part of this one as well.

I was in with my Ill/Rad controller last time, and can bring her again if that's the role I need to fill but would prefer to spread the badges around if I can. I would prefer to bring either my Warshade, or my Rogue Fortunata (if Rogues can participate).

Team 2 if there is space, as I have a couple friends in there. Not a big deal though.

1) I would be interested, as I can never seem to get to any or never know about them. If they are a regular event, then I might be able to participate sometime.

2) No, I can't lead. I've only ever been involved in two Hammy raids, and am not really familiar with what the process is.