Katie V

Trademark doesn't work like that.

Copyright doesn't either.

Trademark is about protecting symbols used to represent particular goods or services. You can trademark absolutely anything if you're using it to represent your goods or services so long as it isn't a generic term for those; trademarks can be "for all purposes" (rare) or "for a particular area of commerce" (common). Consequently, DC can (and has) trademarked "Superman" in the following fields: candy, amusement park rides, the internet, comic books, shower curtains, handbags and purses, underwear, and numerous others. It has not trademarked it in the field of philosophy, and probably cannot because of Nietzsche's prior and better-known use.

Trademark is "use it or lose it", so you cannot protect a mark that you are not using. You must also actively defend it to keep it from becoming a generic term for the goods or services; Otis Elevator, for example, lost their trademark on "Escalator" this way. This is why Marvel and DC are so aggressive about people re-creating their characters in CoH: a desire to keep "Superman" from becoming a generic term for a man in blue spandex wearing his underwear on the outside.

Copyright, on the other hand, does not need to be actively defended. Failure to deal with an infringement you know about may prevent you from suing later over that particular infringement, but it does not invalidate your copyright or prevent you from suing over other infringements.

70% resistance (or, properly slotted, 78%) is nice, but at 20% defense, you're nowhere near the survival potential of Granite. 30% defense is about a 50% increase in survival; Granite + Weave is twice as survivable if you've slotted Granite for defense. Additionally, damage resistance provides no protection against secondary effects (such as recharge debuffs), whereas defense does.

A softcapped Granite tank is the most durable character out there: as long as you're not facing significant psi attacks, you're not fighting above +2 or so, and the rest of the team isn't trying to sabotage you (eg. pulling sixteen bosses into the fight while you're tanking Romulus and his pets), there's almost nothing in the game that represents a serious threat.

I've never played a brute, but my understanding of the change is that it reduces peak performance, but improves average performance. Since most people spend most of their time dealing with "average" situations, the net result is a buff.

I'm not talking about effort here, I'm talking about psychology. To the average player, three hours of running missions falls into the mental category of "fun", and is a good thing. Ten minutes of marketeering falls into the mental classification of "work", and is a bad thing.

You're missing one thing: psychology. For most players, three hours of running missions counts as "fun". Ten minutes of marketing counts as "work". Guess which they'll prefer?

There is nothing in the game that can one-shot you. There are things that look like they're one-shotting you, but if you check the combat log, you'll see that they're doing damage over time or otherwise splitting the damage into multiple hits. Those pylons you mention? The damage is spread across six hits, which gets around the "no one-hit kills" rule.

Other than seeing Spooky pop up from time to time, I didn't really notice them. That means they were either very competent, or very incompetent.

When I'm playing my Kinetics defender, I love teaming with an incompetent fire/kin. Vengance is on a three-minute recharge, which is about how long it takes a fire/kin to go from one faceplant to the next.

One who knows how to play. I've seen it done well by Dark Armor tanks and Shield Defense scrappers; I've seen it done poorly by Invulnerability tanks. I've heard of it done in hilarious fashion by a team of eight Mind Controllers (apparently, if you Mass Confuse Lord Recluse, and he'll assist you in taking down the towers).

Competence is essential, but the Statesman Task Force is one of the few things in the game that benefits from specific builds: Ghost Widow is much easier to fight if you've got Empathy with Clear Mind, Kinetics with Increase Density, or Sonic with Clarity to protect the tank from Ghost Widow's mag 100 hold.

That said, there are all sorts of combinations that can work. For example, I was on a successful run where my scrapper, who had taken Web Grenade for thematic reasons, immobilized Ghost Widow while the tank kept her distracted from range and two blasters defeated her.

I'm not too happy with the layout of this mainboard. If the only expansion cards you're ever going to install are one or two graphics cards, you'll be fine, but if you go beyond that, it's got problems. In particular, one of the PCIe x1 slots is blocked by the northbridge heatsink, the PCI slot will be blocked by a second graphics card, and installing any card in the bottom slot will reduce the bandwidth to the second graphics card slot.

If you're careful with your build, there's a skippable power you probably haven't thought of: Stamina. You get Power Sink at 26, which lets you completely refill your endurance bar every 30 seconds. I haven't tried it on a tank yet, but my Katana/Elec scrapper does just fine without Stamina.

Tactics three-slotted for to-hit can sort of replace accuracy on a Defender: tactics will give you a 95% chance of hitting an even-con opponent. A single accuracy SO will give you 99%, but this is capped at 95%. The difference comes at higher levels: the accuracy SO will keep you at 95% when facing a +1 opponent, while Tactics won't.

On any other archetype, Tactics is weaker, and cannot replace accuracy enhancements.