Kidou

I use AE. Just put in some enemies without any powers, or another enemy that can't move.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=3127914

These are pretty much my opinons and mirrors what a lot of people say in this topic. XD

The reason why Ball lightning does more damage is because it's damage is back loaded... it has an initial burst, then a DoT.

Fire ball does not aside from it's secondary effect, so it does less damage.

I still want some more opinons, cause I'm not sure and I REALLY want to do this concept.

YOU GIT, YOU CAN NEVAH HAVE ENUFF DAKKA! ER, AE OH EE.

In a more serious note, I think that if your already killing all the minions with two or three AoE powers, that's enough. If your other AoE power is recharged by the time you fire off your last one, that's enough.

There are THREE diffrent versions of Zaxo.

Axis Zaxo(My first one): Dispite the name he is a hero. Originally a 'well intentioned extremist' within the rebels. He grew up fearing and hating the government, but realizes there is good in some people and realizes that Paragon is diffrent.

'Prime' Zaxo: He was one of the first soldiers to follow Lord Recluse and has been in his employ ever sense it's inception. Fiercly loyal and protective of Arachnos.

Praetorian Zaxo: A soldier during the Hamidon wars who is mad at the world due to the way he and his friends where treated. (I came up with this story before I met Vagabond. xD) All the Zaxos have some form of Psionic ability, but Praetorian Zaxo is the strongest, he can numb pain and allow his men to fight harder and longer.

I think the best way to think of a Praetorian version is to take your character first and put him in the world, at the same time. (In Zaxo's case it was the Hamidon wars.) And how events would affect them diffrently.

With the concept I have in mind, (A mage who uses solar energy and magical short ranged blasts) Either one can work very nicely, but which one is better in practice?

I'm kind of leaning towards Fire armor due to it having more damage with the new Fiery embrace and Burn, giving me some more punch and AoE.

I don't have a lot of experiance with scrappers though... Mostly Blasters/Defenders.

Do we still have access to the Mother Mayhem map? I recall using it a while back.

Maybe you can make an all Elite boss/AV Patrol that isn't ment to be killed... I dunno how well that'd play out in gameplay though.

Making a balanced enemy group in MA is a challenging venture... most people just hit Extreme/Extreme on everything and move on. This annoys me to no end. It's possible to make a balanced group that gives full experience without resorting to just hitting extreme on everything. Custom settings are more fun too because even with the same powersets, you can have Villains focused on different jobs. Say for example, an Energy Melee minion group, both have Energy Melee, but A has Stun, while B has Bone smasher.

Before we get started, let's talk about costumes. Identifying enemies before you jump into a group is important. It's possible to make variations, while still remaining within a theme. Try to keep this in mind when designing your costumes. This also has the benefit of being able to easily pick out an 'annoying' minion or Lieutenant within the chaos of combat.

First off, let's start with the Minions. Mooks are the most common enemy obviously, so you want to make them the most balanced and least annoying.

Avoid the following powers:

• -To hit powers
• -Perception
• Mezzes (Except as an 'uncommon' minion.)
• Most debuffs (Remember as the most common they are VERY easy to stack.)
• +Defense (Nothing is more annoying than an unhittable Minion.)
• Summons (Except as an 'uncommon' minion.)
• -End powers
• Mezz protection
• Self buff +To hit and/or +Damage

This list may seem like it cuts out a lot of powersets, but remember that the Minions are supposed to be cannon fodder and weak. The best combo for minions would be Attack/Defense. Some of the best sets to use for minions are Dominator's assault sets, as they have both Melee and ranged, and Mastermind attacks, which while on a Mastermind sucks, on a Minion they're good, and people don't see them too often. Limit the minion's attacks to a maximum of 2 ranged 1 melee, or 1 ranged and 2 melee, with one possible AoE. Defense sets tend to allow minions to last a little longer, but don't go overboard. Take the S/L shield and a few of the autos.

A neat trick I discovered with minions is making some spawn less. This is extremely easy to do, simply pad your minion group with copies of your 'main' mook. For example, if you want to make a group of soldiers with a medic, make 4 Soldiers and 1 medic. Solo, the medic won't spawn all the time, and in large groups there might be 2 or 3 at max. Consider this VS 1 medic and 1 soldier, where every other enemy is a medic. Annoying AND theme breaking.


Next up is Lieutenants. Now for them you have a bit more freedom as they're less common, and also the most versatile of the classifications. You can set them up in almost any way and they won't be too awful overpowered due to having much less damage than a boss and less health.

That said, I still recommend avoiding the following:

• -Perception
• Self buff +To hit and/or +Damage
• +Defense
• Mezz protection
• Too many mezzes (One is fine, Under Lieut numbers, they can't perma hold anyone.)
• Fear and Confuse (Protection VS these two are uncommon for most defense sets.)

Lieutenants are fun. As I said, you can set them up in almost any way, a tank, a buffer, a ranger. Same trick for making one less common than the other applies from above, but it's less of an issue with Lieutenants and barely noticeable except in large teams.


Last is Bosses. Bosses are the hardest to balance due to their numbers with our powers. Some powers hit as hard as Freak Tanks and recharge in 4 seconds. Patience with your bosses. Fight them over and over and over again. Add one power, remove another, just be careful. A hard boss can make your arc unfun in an instant. Especially if they can appear in regular spawns.

That said, I tend to go more attacking with my bosses rather than support. Being bosses, their support numbers are fairly high, and they have a ton of health. Having a boss keeping the entire spawn alive while they and he kills you isn't fun. For bosses, I'm not really going to tell you to avoid any particular power, just use your best judgment on what you think is too annoying. You don't want to make your boss Master Illusionist annoying do you?

I'll briefly cover AVs and EBs too... with these less is more. An AV can get by with one or two attacks and still be fairly deadly. Remember with our powers, some can very easily one shot tanks if your not careful. With normal NPCs, sometimes mobs have special AI written to cause them to not use these attacks so often, but our mobs WILL use powers all the time as they come up. And for the love of Pete, don't EVER Make an Extreme/Extreme AV.

A few other miscellaneous tips:

• Have a boss or minion that you feel is strong enough on it's own without a secondary? Give him Regen! Pick Fast Healing, Quick Recovery, and maybe the S/L auto. All this does pretty much very little on it's own, but gives it a tiny bit of help.
• Again, putting multiple minions of the same kind in the minion group allows you to make 'uncommon' minions. Much like how Sappers where.
• Try to have a theme! Another annoyance I have is people who put all sorts of powers in a group without really giving a good reason.
• Avoid Mezz protection. Controllers and Dominators will thank you. Giving anything mezz protection can make your mission unsoloable by them.
• Avoid too many Dark powers. Yes yes, your group is TOTALLY EVIL. But try to think of something else evil for powers besides dark. It's really annoying to have so much -to hit stacked on you.
• Test test test. Make a basic, straight forward mission at first and run it with your characters. Try all sorts, not just your IO'd out main, from squishies to soloists to teamers. If you can get a group going even better. If your at +3 and having no issue, maybe you can turn up the powers just a hair. On the other hand if your at +0 and dying every other group maybe you should consider toning your group down. Identify what's causing your team to die so much and change it.
• Don't make it too hard. Not everyone has the same standard as you. You can solo +4 AVs? Great. How about that Defender over there that has trouble soloing Elite Bosses? If worse comes to worse and you really want to make your group THAT challenging, make a 'lite' version of your group and upload a second version of your arc, linking it in the description if they feel it's too hard.
• Consider a wide range of protections. While your Electric Aura character might not have issues with End drain, or your Dark Armor might not get feared, not everyone has those kinds of 'rare' protections.
• The EXP% while creating enemies is a fairly good indicator of how tough it'll be for that level. Don't use this as an absolute though.
• *Above all: Is your group 'fun' to fight?

It seems like CoH is really the proper medium to write a horror arc. Other than storytelling through the contact, it seems rather hard to create the sense of suspence and fear.

Anyone got any ideas?

I would love to roll a SS/Zerk brute.

Rage + Fury + The damage toggle as you get low health, yummy.

So I'm at the point in my Inv tank's life where I'm thinking about getting set bonuses. Problem is, I'm not sure what to shoot for. I'm not sure if more defense would really be a sound investment... he's already unkillable on everything I've fought up to that point aside from Psionic enemies.

Secondary is Dark Melee btw.

1: Power customization for your critters. This is a HUGE want and something I've been asking for ever sense Power spectrum.

2: Do away with Primary/secondary. Let us take whatever we want with whatever sets we want.

3: In addition to number 2, add a number of 'Generic' powers. Stuff that a lot of mobs tend to have like the Sub machine gun and pistols of lower leveled gangs.

4: A cutscene generator. Even something as basic as 'Focus on Mob A while he talks to Mob B. Mob A emotes at 2 seconds into the cutscene and mob B emotes 4 seconds in.'

5: Add a 'Spawn at level range...' option for custom groups. So that someone could make a truely balanced villian group for 1 to 50.

6: Giving old mobs new powers. Say I want to take a Freakshow Juicer and make him a boss in addition to diffrent powers. Mobs use the same skeleton as a whole, so why not? Exemp from this rule would be the odd robot and anything else that wouldn't look right.

7: Map Generator. A lot of tilesets seem fairly basic and straight forward. Being able to make your own maps would be awesome.


Sigh, if only. I'm not really demanding any of these things, (Execpt 1), but they would be REALLY nice to have.

Arc# 436731.

I've tested them with all the characters I have, but I'm still unsure if they're really balanced or not. I need your opinon. (And this arc is just filler to showcase the enemy group alone, no story yet.)

I've tried to make sure they're not complete pushovers, but not too tough either if your aware. I've also mixed in some standard 5th Column enemies to produce a little more variance too.

Another important thing I attempted to do is to make the various enemies identifiable without looking at their names. This includes the boss enemies that use super powers, each one has a toggle of some sort to identify them.

Oh and here's a trick, pad your Henchmen group with copies of your 'main' henchmen to make the AE not spawn your medics, mezzers, or whatnot too often. Most I saw in a 8 man group was 3 Medics.

Is there a way I can get a refund back on my GR purchase and paid time? I thought I might want to play again, but playing again made me bored to tears and I don't think GR will help with that...

As somewhat of a Scirocco fanboy... I have to wonder at the end of "Hammer of the World" Patron arc.. What WOULD have happened if he had succeded? And as a follow up question, what happened to the Malleus Mundi?

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The real issue, imo, is that the normal dev missions need a bit of a reward boost. Right now, player don't see them as worth doing mostly due to the travel time and low xp per mission. Bump the xp given by dev missions so it's a bit above the average AE (non-farm or non-exploit farm) and you'll see more activity in the rest of the game.

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No. We don't need leveling any easier than it already is. Just reduce AE Exp somewhat. If we keep boosting EXP gains eventually we'll get to the point where we get to level 50 from one hellion kill. (Excageration of course.)

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Leveling from 10-50 needs to be a bit faster. Maybe 10-20% Especially 10-14 and 40-50. The massive reduction in leveling speed you hit just after 40 is ridiculous.

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Also no. Did you already forget level smoothing? The pace is perfectly fine.

So I've been fiddling around with an idea of a villianous arc for a while... one Centered around the banks of the Rogue isles.

It starts off simple enough, your character finds his bank account emptied and he of course goes to his bank to figure out what's up. What follows is a discovery of other people having their accounts wiped, and a large pyramid scheme. Your character at the end, takes it down, and ends up siphoning all of their stolen assets, into your own.

My plan is to use as little custom characters as possible, and try and focus on the story. Right now I have the end and begining planned... though the middle is a little harder to figure out. I had an idea of your character setting up a 'trap' to try and trace the people that took your money.

Any comments? Suggestions? Your reaction to what I have so far? (I'm posting this because I want to have a good idea of what I should do before I actually start on the arc.)

Increasing recharge is okay as long as the DPS in total remains about the same.

Inbetween your gaps in your attack chain, you can throw out controls. Remember that doms have a pure dual purpose now: Damage and Control. Do both. All the time.

SR/ would be really freaking overpowered on a Tank I think. Under tank numbers I think it could pretty much soft cap with no help at all.

EDIT: Checked the numbers, maybe not really that overpowered. With SO slotting you'd have 41.4% Defense to all positions. Without set bonuses, that's pretty darn good still.

Katana is prettier. =^-^=

I've thought that Vigilance should be an inherent that perhaps makes your secondary effects a little weaker while solo, but buffs your damage? Like a slider effect based on how many people are in your team.

Hmmm.... Kat/DM Enemies in AE with a Red Talorsian Katana?

Also /signed.

There was a story arc that I had ran that the boss was just a regular 'Boss' class enemy, but after you beat him, he was supposed to 'transform' into a stronger demonic form. But it was immersion breaking to have to hop around trying to find him.