Justaris

I feel that any character you're invested in and enjoy playing is a character you're likley to play well and a character that other players may enjoy interacting with (whether this is in the form of roleplaying or just playing the game alongside your character).

When a concept build requires significant deviations or concessions, I do feel it's only fair to inform one's team upfront about those concessions. This is not to defend or apologize for them - it's your character and you should absolutely build and play it in the way that is consistent with the concept if that is the focus. However, it is a courtesy to other players who may not share a roleplaying focus. I've known several min/maxers who called all their characters 'toons' and had names like FireKinMan and while these players weren't necessarily hostile to roleplaying as a concept it simply wasn't part of their approach to the game, so what they saw was a subpar build rather than a fully realized concept character.

So, the simple upfront courtesy of a disclaimer whenever you're at significant variance from the norm (in this case, that might be if you didn't have Light Form, for one) is all I'd say you owe anyone. After that you either go forward or if the group can't accept that then you part ways, likely save both parties some frustration, and everyone's happy.

I allow concept to rule my character builds to varying degrees depending on what the concept is and what the powersets in question are, but every character of mine has some kind of backstory and identity which his/her powers and appearance must match or else I really can't get invested in playing the character. I don't roleplay as such all that often, mostly because I'm not terribly good at thinking up dialogue on the fly, but all of my characters are just that, characters, and I make decisions based on what is consistent with their narrative as I've envisioned it.

I realize that for some players this is completely alien, and I have no problem with that (well, to be completely honest, it does grate on my nerves a bit, but I try not to allow that to color my interactions with the player in question just because the 'toon' before me is named TitanWeaponGuy). I would humbly suggest that you present yourself in a similar light if you should find yourself not in an obviously role playing-friendly environment.

Always get a good laugh when I see someone say Kheldians are weak. It's like those people who think Dark Armor isn't good or that the servers should be merged.

You know, pure, concentrated wrong.




But at any rate, on to the matter at hand. While a Kheldian, particularly a Warshade, would certainly benefit from the souping-up treatment described, it does sound like you're leaning more towards a control bent. Gravity is getting tweaked very soon and might be worth a look (I've always liked the set and it feels unique among the control sets, at least to me), or you might try Electric Control which has some interesting tricks to play with. Mind Control is a lot of fun and very handy in certain niche situations as well has having great ST damage - I'd recommend any of the above.

Happy birthday, Bug!

Be well.

Just a note, it's much better to use paragonwiki rather than the very outdated and very malware-infected wikia site. Here's the equivalent link on paragonwiki:

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Television



Back on topic, I'd second the vote for the several well-written arcs in Grandville. The Westin Phipps arc (40-44) is easily among the most truly villainous the game has to offer, and I very much enjoy the Vernon Von Grun and Viridian arcs as well (both of which are 45-50, though Viridian must be unlocked by having certain badges).

Good point, I'm still not used to thinking about confuse as it's so rare in most of the regular game, but that's quite correct. I actually run Tactics on one of my badge characters who recently did a UGT and I should have remembered this. Good catch, mea culpa.

None of the above, actually. The only one that would actually offer any protection would be Acrobatics (unless you count immob protection in CJ, but Shadow Cloak offers nearly as much). Dechs goes into a number of good tactics for dealing with mez in his guide and I heartily endorse it as it's not only sound advice but well-written as well.

I'd say it's less about angry and more about someone passing off bad information as some kind of secret ultimate technique. I'm sorry if that bruises your ego, but TwoHeadedBoy is quite correct that much of your advice was just poor and reflects a weak understanding of the game (particularly the concepts of mez protection versus mez resistance). To build in mez resistance is a poor idea and trying to run leadership or acrobatics on a tri-form build is nearly as fruitless. These are just not good solutions - perhaps on an all human build they might have some place, but here they clearly do not.

As for taking shields for when Eclpise is "not up or not enough", well, since you can easily cap from Eclipse alone I'm not sure what 'not enough' could possibly entail, and as for 'not up', making Eclipse perma is a near-universal goal of Warshade IO builds. Even if this is 'advice from the IO period', it's not particularly sound.

Unless you can make some kind of reasonable, civil defense of any of these suggestions, you may want to just have the maturity to admit you were mistaken and leave off before you dig yourself a deeper hole here. This isn't about people attacking you, cool_bagheera, this is about people finding fault with what you said.

Best bet is his website, which has some brief discussion on it as well as a very complete guide on tanking in general.

http://dechskaison.blogspot.com/2011...f-tanking.html
http://dechskaison.blogspot.com/2011...cks-build.html

You can also reference this thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=217233

I would probably reference Dechs Kaison's posts on the subject preferentially, as the guide linked is several years old now. I based most of my research for my Tanker on Dechs's posts on DA and I found them immensely helpful when I was still learning how to best build a DA Tanker effectively.

The Titan Network includes paragonwiki, and is clean

At the time of CoV launch -

No, someone with only CoH could not enter an SG base. This was rather unfair as he/she could earn prestige towards a base but could not make use of the spoils of his/her labor, and the same limitation did not exist for those who had only CoV. This has long since ceased to be an issue, thankfully.

Yes, SGs existed prior to CoV. Initially they served mostly a classic 'guild' function in that they provided a way of grouping large-ish numbers of like-minded players together for teaming and accomplishing tasks, and the coalition function extended the number of players that could be organized thusly by a considerable margin. In the modern game, global channels have largely assumed this role and even SGs/coalitions that do serve this function typically do it by means of their own global channel rather than via SG or coalition chat (or they use both).

As for prestige, it was introduced with bases.

I find that since Hover was *fixed* awhile back it's no longer an adequate route to protect from KB (in my estimation). Yes, the tumbling animation in flight is shorter, but the effect is still essentially the same and I find it's far better if you're going to be main tank to have real protection. I would recommend for main tanking. That is what I have and I can't recall the last time I was knocked back by anything sort of a geyser in the Renault SF.

My secondary was a bit more amendable to softcapping than yours is (Elec Melee) and I went for S/L/E/N rather than all types. As you did, I used a lot of Erads and KinCombats along with Reactive Armors. I have 45% in S/L/E/N and combined with a tier4 cardiac boosting my resists and endurance reduction, I do very well. Ageless ensures I never run out of endurance and provides a buffer against cascading defense failure from defense debuffs, and at tier 4 is perma.

As for acro, I can see the rationale behind it and if you do opt against working in more -KB then I would certainly keep it. You're going to want more than -4 if you're going to main tank on most of the higher-end TFs or trials.

A few quick things:

1) I would probably opt for -KB IOs rather than Acrobatics, especially in a build where endurance is a concern. I use three of them on my DA tank. Just find a few slots to throw onto two of the Defense powers, say Combat Jumping and Weave, and you're good to go. You could take OG in place of Acrobatics, which gives you a low-endurance control method which stacks with the stun in Follow Through. Alternatively, you could take Hasten.

2) Small point, but you can swap one of the generic EndMod IOs in Stamina for the EndMod IO from the performance shifter Set, which gives you the same enhancements but also gives you the 2-IO bonus. Not much, but no reason not to do it either.

3) The GladAmor proc is ridiculously expensive and you can softcap pretty easily without it - if you have the inf to blow, great, but you're looking at billions of inf just for that one IO. My tank is softcapped without it and does extremely well, so it's hardly necessary for a high-end build. The same argument applies to the large number of HOs in this build, though they don't represent quite as large an investment per enhancement.

4) Vigor is an understandable choice for an alpha - personally, I think Cardiac, Vigor and Resilient are the most beneficial options. I prefer Cardiac but I think Vigor is a good option as well. I would argue that there are better options than Rebirth for Destiny, however (though of course you can have more than one and swap them out). Ageless gives Recharge Reduction, +Endurance and (in the radial tree) Debuff Resistance - all of which are useful to a DA tank. My tanker has several Destiny options (Clarion for UGTs, for instance), but Ageless is what I use at default and it's very effective. Also on the subject of incarnate slots, if you do opt for OG you might consider the Spectral Interface for its immobilization effect to pair with the stun.

Boney Foot Jefferson

I'm a "D". Between lots of alts and the occasional player auction, I don't generally go much above that, and will occasionally dip a bit lower.

Wow. If you really care so much about having your opinions seen and considered, you might try to be a bit more civil. You knowingly posted in the wrong place as a stunt hoping to get Dev attention (if you had got any, it wouldn't have been favorable to you, so nice going there) and then you attacked those who didn't 100% agree with your views. Frankly, you did so in a rather juvenile manner to boot. As to the topic of your thread...

1) As has been pointed out upthread, Ice Blast is one of the better-performing blast sets in terms of pve content as BIB is very good. It's an especially good choice for Defenders as it uses the Blaster numbers for Blizzard, giving a stronger tier9.

2) Granted, it isn't FOTM for pvp play, but that alone doesn't necessarily mean it desperately needs changes given that many other blast powersets are similarly neglected in pvp - virtually everyone chooses psi, energy or fire as far as I've seen. While that's not a laudable state of affairs, it has at its root a problem that goes beyond just this powerset.

If this is more a complaint that your particular character doesn't do as well in pvp as you'd like, well, you have my sympathies but it's unlikely the pvp is EVER going to be 1v1 balanced even if significant improvements are made.

I'm not sure I understand your question. What is it you want to do?

Badge-Hunter.com hosts vidiotmaps, which has a downloadable map overlay for the game as well as picture files of maps of every zone - you might be looking for that. They also have badge listings by category if you are wanting to research how to get a particular badge or accolade. You can also register with the site and use HeroStats to track your badgehunting progress on the site itself as you obtain more badges and you can view the badge totals of other players' characters who are similarly tracked. There's also a forum.

There are many things to do on that site, and without knowing what you wanted to get out of it, it's difficult to know how to advise you.

I've been playing City of Heroes without interruption in my subscription since shortly before Issue 1. I go through some occasional periods of relative inactivity, but I feel I get excellent value out of my annual-rate subscription.

In fact, the only thing that would likely make me take a break or quit the game altogether is precisely what has been suggested in this thread. I know I'm late to the party and these arguments have already been made and made well by others upthread, so I'll just add my personal anecdotal support.

In a highly instanced game with a well-established community that is now used to global channels as a default communication medium, you cannot use /search or the number of players you visually happen across as an indicator of population. Now, while that perception issue could be a problem for new players that get the wrong idea, it nevertheless remains the wrong idea. Changes to a non-problem to correct a false perception of a problem where there isn't one is, well... dumb.

If you end up running this more than once, I may try to get in on it, but cannot make that start time. Good luck!

I have Musculature on my Thugs/Dark and I love it. However, he is heavily IO'd out, so if endurance management is a big concern for you then you might want to go with Vigor (or, alternatively, go with Ageless Destiny). I'm not sure if I just loaded it wrong, but it looks as if the build you gave just has blank slots, which doesn't really allow for a good evaluation of the build. It might be possible to help you fine-tune your endurance usage based on slotting, but only if we can see the slotting.

I find that with Thugs, enhancing the damage with Musculature means I kill things much faster (especially once you have a damage Interface on top of that), which equates to less endurance expended. I run full Leadership on mine and Dark Embrace, so I have about the same number of toggles you have. Since you're going to be vip and thus have Inventions available, you might consider adding just a few simple IOs to your largely SO build such as a -KB IO or two and a Numina +rec/+reg. Add in some Accolades and you might not need to go with an endurance management alpha after all. Also, Musculature boosts EndMod (makes Stamina work better).

That's my argument for Musculature, anyway. Hope it at least gave you some food for thought. I went with Reactive as my primary Destiny as I have good KB protection and plenty of breakfrees, but I do have a Clarion on backup for UGT trials, Carnies, Rikti, etc. I don't generally play Tankermind style on mine, however, and I note you've taken provoke so you may be adopting a different style of play than what I do. YMMV.