Laevateinn

None of you know a thing about min/maxing, do you? I can solo the entire TF, I don't need a team or support. There's no reason for me to be picky about team composition.

All attacks have flags that indicate what defense they check. You can see these under "attack types" in real numbers: e.g. Ice Blast is flagged ranged, cold, smashing.

When the attack is used against you the game checks to see which of your applicable defenses is the highest, and uses that defense. e.g. you have 0% fire/cold defense, 20% ranged and 45% smashing/lethal. Against the Ice Blast attack, 45% defense would apply.

Some attacks only have a positional or typed flag, but not both (e.g. Toxic attacks only have a positional flag and Mind Control attacks only have a Psi damage flag).

Melee and AoE defense are a bit over the top; you can afford to swap out 1 set of Touch of Death for Crushing Impacts and drop 2 slots off the Aegis in Tough. With the free slots, 4-slot Char with Basilisk's gaze and change your Fireblast slotting to 5 Decimations. This should get you another 18% or so recharge while still keeping you softcapped. Try to pull another slot from somewhere to add to Active Defense, and buy Membranes to slot in it if you can; it helps if you can doublestack it to make up for the loss of defdebuff resistance due to not taking Grant Cover.

Cascading def failure is something you have to live with, since Fire/Shield/Blaze is extremely tight. The way I handle it is just to preemptively pop a small purple insp whenever my defense starts dropping. Shield Charge will protect you from a lot of things by killing them (e.g. you jump into a spawn of DE, they lay their ToHit buffing emanators, shield charge and kill them all). I'll finish with my customary observation that you can substitute level 35 IOs for just about everything in this build and still get very close levels of performance.

Crafters are more slot efficient, that's why. If you're buying IOs you want to slot, and have to lowball 10 different recipes and all the salvage and wait for them to fill bit by bit, it's a huge pain. On the other hand, the crafter only has to craft 1 recipe. Lowball the recipes and salvage in stacks of 10 for just 4-5 slots (and since they're low bids they're immune to any spikes in the salvage price), come back tomorrow, craft and list high, place more bids on stacks of 10 with the remaining slots, repeat.

When I'm buying stuff for my own use I buy crafted, too.

You're comparing the buy-it-now price of the recipe and the buy-it-now price of the enhancement. Generally crafters lowball the recipe, so they do make a profit.

I've tried redside for awhile now (50 Corr, 50 Brute (deleted), 33 Brute, 26 Corr) and I find that I still prefer blueside. I enjoy the higher population, brighter scenery, superior epic pools, larger market and greater conceptual freedom. Heroside you at least have some leeway to pretend you're a freelance hero, but redside is more heavy-handed on pushing the project DESTINY thing on you.

I prefer the focused, specialist nature of the blueside ATs. Of their redside counterparts, only Brutes and Corruptors appeal to me. Stalkers do more damage than Scrappers on paper, but fewer AoE attacks means that in an actual team situation their real damage output falls far behind. Masterminds are theoretically the most powerful AT, but being dependent on pets is troublesome on things like speed ITFs and does not mix well with my fast, fluid and highly mobile playstyle.

I enjoy tinkering with IOs and playing the market, and most of my characters are blueside where I can draw on the resources of my vast marketeering base. The blueside market has a much larger transaction volume and provides more opportunities for a casual player. The redside market is less active and before AE, it also had the problem that salvage prices were abnormally low, making it hard for a new player to earn money, though this has since been fixed.

One area where redside clearly outdoes blue is in storytelling. A lot of contacts are well-written and have personality, starting in the early game with Bocor and Radio. Arcs like High Roller's Last Gamble, The Aeon Conspiracy, Khur'rekt Revenge and Oh, Wretched Man! are Paragon Studio's story team at their finest, when compared to a lot of relatively bland blueside content. On the other hand, I play task forces 90% of the time, and the lack of a way to level up from 15-50 on taskforces redside is a major turnoff.

I still enjoy playing redside, both as a change of pace and because i love my Corruptor, but I'm always going to spend most of my time on blue. I don't meet many incompetents who "need a tank" or "need an emp", since I don't waste time playing with stupid people; birds of a feather flock together.

Sonic is very light on AoE (with only one cone that does any real damage) and has the best secondary effect of any blast set (-Res).

Rad has lots of AoE (though they are a cone, a TAoE and a PBAoE, so getting them to all work together takes some moving), stuns with its T3 blast and The secondary effect isn't all that useful but gives you the nifty ability to proc it out with Achiles Heel -Res procs. Note that if you are used to fender Rad blast, the T1 attack doesn't have crazy short recharge like the fender version.

I've not soloed any of the Faultline arc AVs myself so I can't comment on them. However, a lot of late-game AV soloing fodder tends to be the Praetorian AVs which are generally quite easy with the exception of Malaise (nonpositional Psi) and Antimatter (who is much closer to his Freedom Phalanx counterpart in terms of power).

If you plan to dip into IO sets and have a sizable budget, I have a different perspective: the advantage of a high-end SR over the other softcap-capable sets (Invuln, WP, Shields) is that you can softcap without the Fighting pool much more easily.

SR is average as far as endurance consumption goes (3 toggles and a click), however people like to pair it with the Fighting pool and other expensive toggles which makes it very end-heavy. Fireball costs 19 end to fire, which will make things worse.

I can't say I won't ever play a set, because I've ended up playing some sets I thought I would never have any interest in (SS, shields, sonic blast). That said, a few things strongly deter me from playing a given powerset:

- Any set with costume-obscuring graphics that don't fit my concept (Ice armor, fire armor, stone armor)
- Any set with strong AoE but weak ST (elec melee, AR, spines); strong ST and weak AoE is fine
- Any set that underperforms relative to its peers (TA, energy melee, Blaster psi blast)

No, I can tell he's serious. Sometimes, when one plays a powerset that really clicks with them, they may enter a trance-like state of "this is the best! Why didn't I play it before?" Symptoms may include fervent proclamations of joy or "bestness" in-game and on the forums, jumping around in glee, rabid levelling up or making of alts with said powerset, etc. It's generally best to just smile and nod; the symptoms are temporary, although in rare cases they may become permanent.

Most of the time, enhancement values trump set bonuses; especially in key powers, you should match or exceed what you would achieve with SO slotting before you begin thinking about what set bonuses you want. You can very easily end up with an IO build that's worse than an SO build if you go blindly chasing set bonuses.

Major build goals for a IO build are typically either recharge and/or defense. Personally, I think for a Rad/ defender, you don't need large amounts of defense since slotted Radiation Infection already floors the chance to hit of anything caught in it that's not an AV/GM. Recharge is useful to to keep Accelerated Metabolism up all the time and make sure you can continually keep Lingering Radiation on a tough enemy like an AV, so I'd so for recharge.

A lot of the more exotic bonuses aren't worth chasing after. A -2% sleep resistance bonus doesn't do much when Accelerated Metabolism already grants over -200% sleep resistance. You have exactly 1 power that slows enemies, a 2% slow bonus won't even be noticeable. You'd get more mileage actually slotting Slow SOs in the power.


Radiant Aura: 3% heal bonus from Triage isn't very useful (you need to stack large amounts of it before you really notice the difference in your heals). 5 Doctored Wounds (all except the End/Rech would be better) for a 5% recharge bonus.

Neutrino Bolt: If you are going to buy purple procs, this is a good place to slot it.

Radiation Infection: You want ED-capped ToHitDebuff in here and as much endurance reduction you can fit in. The best is probably 3 Enzymes, but they're quite expensive.

For your single-target attacks, some good slotting choices are: 5 Decimations (recharge bonus), 4 Devastations/2 Thunderstrikes (HP, regen and recovery bonus), 6 Thunderstrikes (accuracy and ranged defense bonus). Purples are going to cost 200m to 400m per IO so I don't recommend lightly using them for frankenslotting.

Accelerate Metabolism: You want recharge first, endmod second. Slotting BotZs will increase the runspeed bonus which may annoy some people, so be warned. I would frankenslot it Efficacy Adaptor EndMod/Rech, Efficacy Adaptor triple, Performance Shifter EndMod/Rech, Performance Shifter triple. This leaves 2 slots so you can add BotZs for the ranged def bonus if you like.

Lingering Radiation: You want recharge (to make it permanent on 1 target) and accuracy (so it doesn't miss, otherwise it's a long, long wait till the next try - however as a /Rad you can risk skimping a little). Personally I would forget about sets altogether and slot it 2 Rech, 2 Accuracy common IOs, adding Slow IOs if you want.

Choking Cloud: Extremely endurance-heavy. The Lockdown proc is a good move but you should try and frankenslot more endurance reduction in here; I also wouldn't recommend taking this before Stamina.

Fallout: The 6th piece bonus in Positron's Blast isn't very useful; 5 of the set (all but the proc) is enough.

Cosmic Burst is your strongest single-target blast that also mezzes, and Neutron Bomb is your TAoE. I would try to take both of them ASAP, rearranging the rest of your powers to do so; more situational things like Fallout and the snipe can be left for later. In general I wouldn't bother slotting defdebuff in your attacks. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but look at the -Def values for the defense attacks; they're huge even without any slotting.

Here is probably how I'd do it without changing any of your power choices or order. You have much better recharge, minimal downtime on AM and Hasten if you use both together, better damage in all your attacks, a -KB IO, better recharge in your AoEs except Fallout, and ED-capped ToHitDebuff in Radiation Infection. This build is more expensive due to the LotG +7.5 in Hover, but you can take that out without major consequence. I include the purple proc only because your original build has it. In addition I gave you a Performance Shifter chance for +End in Stamina to boost your recovery a little.

CoH is very alt-focused, so there are constantly people making new characters and levelling up. Since in this game high-level characters can play low-level content and get rewards, there's teaming action across a wide level spread.

If you prefer playing in a high-population environment, of the US servers, Freedom and Virtue are the two most populated, and Justice is the predominant Aussie server, although there's significant populations across all of them. Heroes tend to be more crowded than Villains (heroside, there's a nice chain of high-population lowbie zones from Atlas Park > King's Row > Steel Canyon > Talos island).

Since CoH is highly instanced, chances are even on a high-population server you may not see large crowds of players standing about and it's unusual to see players fighting spawns in zones like you would in a fantasy MMO. Most of the community is centered around supergroups (guilds) and global channels. You can find information on what channels there are for each server in their respective server forums.

Please be cautioned that this community is very touchy about suggestions that the game (or indeed any server) has a low or dwindling population.

Against +4 normal enemies, you'll have 65% chance to hit with Heat Loss and Benumb.

They aren't permanent anyway due to the animation time (powers do not begin recharging until they have finished animating) so you may as well swap some of those recharges out for accuracies.

As a minmaxer, I'm not obsessed with softcapped defense. I don't like builds that cripple their power choice and enhancement percentages just to get the magic 45%; it stinks of blindly chasing set bonuses to me. On characters that have no native defense and no defense debuff resistance, I prefer to build for no or moderate amounts (20% - 32.5%) of defense while focusing on other build goals that benefit the character more.

Since I actually fight enemies other than CoT Behemoths, I know all too well that softcapped defense is a lot less invulnerable than it looks on paper. There is a reason that defense is the only mitigation you can stack such huge amounts of, not just as far as IOs are concerned, but also in the realm of pool powers/ally/team buffs: it is bypassed more easily than any other mitigation out there.

That's odd; the thumbnails should link to Photobucket. I'll give you direct links.


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Some time ago, I set myself a challenge of soloing 1 spawn of Vanguard Sword at +4/x8 with bosses, without inspirations, temp powers or click accolades.

I may try it again to see how I fare with a bigger spawn (this one seemed small, 4 minions 4 Lts 1 boss) but for now I'm pleased with the results.