LostHalo

Nothing in this game needs a specific AT. Having done sub-30 minute ITFs that happened to have three Tanks (And hey, two of those Tanks? They changed off their Brutes), I just don't see any AT disappearing in favor of another.

Perhaps you'll run into that on the "gotta have Stone, gotta have 'heal0rz', gotta have radiation" teams but you know, they get ridiculed for being blind fools for a reason... Seeking specific builds/ATs because they are somehow guaranteed to be "superior" is the hallmark of a bad leader, a bad team, and a bad player.

Spines, please. And leave it intact on the way from Scrappers.

Hardcap for Defense varies for each AT, sitting at ~225% (Tanks, etc.) to ~200% (EATs, Scrappers, etc.) to 175% for the squishies. Granted, it's still pointless to get that high (although it is amusing to see your defense in a blue number) and otherwise impossible without a team or hordes of purples.

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If it's been a while since the AI has taken a risk, it would make sense for the AI to have a greater chance of taking one, especially if the potential payout is impressively large. If it's taken more than a couple risks and they haven't panned out, it should be less likely to take a risk.

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You can sort of see this in action with games that feature troop desertion. Sort of.

One game that actually comes closest to pulling it off (but not quite, your people can do some boneheaded stupid-AI actions) is Dwarf Fortress. Considering that's an ASCII art game that can manage to slow down high powered PCs in the right situation due to the hideously complicated systems of interaction the creator has constructed, you can imagine what would happen to an MMO server that tried to do the same.

You can still get mobs to stack, it requires a little finagling and luck though. Mobs that have a resistance to moving also tend to be friendly to stacking as well (Council/5th Column soldiers, etc.).

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And on that "until they split the atom" [censored]... See that big 'ole glowing orb out there? "About the size" of the moon? Yeah, that one that hurts to look at? Yeah, think about that object, then realize why your claimed story is stupid as hell. Now wait for night and look at all those twinkling lights in the sky. Now realize why you should be fired for such a stupid story.

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Stars do fusion, not fission.

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That is missing my point but hey.

The point I was making was that any effect "splitting the atom" could have caused would have been applied long beforehand due to background radiation just from the rest of the universe.

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If you persuade, say, a 3 person team or a 4 person team to enter the first mission, every single one of them will quit if you don't have a 6-8 person team by the time they finish the first mission ... and they expect you to carry your weight on the team while you're scrolling through the /search window and corresponding with 10 or 15 potential team recruits via simultaneous tells.

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*Raises hand, opens mouth...*

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There are people who can multi-task that well. I'm not one of them.

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Ah. Nevermind.

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People care a great deal about XP efficiency, reward, and risk avoidance. They also resent 5 minutes of travel time more than they resent 45 minutes of standing around while the team leader recruits. As a result, it's possible to recruit a team for AE boss farms. It's possible to recruit a team to grind /newspaper and police radio missions, if (and only if) you promise to stick to Freakshow when you can get them, and Council as your only fallback. It's usually possible to recruit a team for task or strike forces. Zone story arcs? Double (at least) your expected time to recruit. Classic CoH story arcs, mayhems, safeguards, Ouroboros, street sweeping in hazard zones, anything in a PvP zone? Forget it, never going to happen, period, no matter how long you spend trying to recruit.

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You have to prepare beforehand.
I pretty much have a perpetual tab of 'ParagonWiki' open so I know exactly how far along a contact is, whether the contact will have more to add, and where the contact will take me if they don't have more to add. Write it down. Same thing with an AE team--build a list of ArcIDs you intend to run ahead of time and outright state that you have a list ready.

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That said, I dislike having to make my own teams but it doesn't mean I won't do it. That's not to say I'm necessarily a leader or a follower, I'm more of a loner. However, I hate inefficiency more than I prefer being a loner--so there the teams come in, i16 with two dimensional difficulties probably won't help this.

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And in regards to "worrying about team balance"...

Learn to shotgun your mitigation and support needs. How? Well... Make assumptions.

Red-side: Assume ALL untried...
1) Brutes are sissies, regardless of buffing you have guaranteed to provide.
[---]a) Subset, if the Brute is Energy Aura, it will not be a sissy, however, it will also have negligible aggro/grouping control.
2) Masterminds will NOT buff the team. (I also ignore them because I will not fight with MMs and their worthless pets to get through a damn door. There are additional things but I won't get into them here.)
3) Corruptors will only have one shield at most and they will use it at the beginning and maybe during a lull before an AV or something.
4) Stalkers will be played and built poorly.
5) Dominators will be incapable of permanently mitigating an entire spawn by themselves, EVEN IF they are Earth Control.
6) VEATs will not have TT:M or if they have it, they will not use it. They will also have a habit of taking alphas and proceeding to die. Be very wary of Crab Spiders and Night Widows because of this.
[---]a) Fortunatas tend to be clear of the most egregious of these sins. I think trying to craft them in Mids' scares most people away.

Blue-side: Assume ALL untried...
1) Tanks will be woefully incompetent in how aggro control and "group flow" dynamics function.
2) Scrappers will have all of the Scrapper forum confidence but none of the competence.
3) Controllers must be the parents of both idiot MMs and idiot Doms. You will not get buffs that aren't AoE or green number generating and even if they are Earth Control, they will not be capable of mitigating an entire spawn. Additionally, as they go up in level, they will, without a doubt, immobilize 16 mob spawns in such a way that a Fireball (or equivalent) will hit a MAXIMUM of 5 targets.
4) Defenders... Well, I'm just going to use the word "heal0rz" here and leave it at that.
5) Peacebringers will use KB in all the wrong ways.
6) Warshades will single-form, most likely human. Their performance will thus reflect this.
7) Blasters... Honestly, it's hard to screw up a Blaster. Even if their build or playstyle is moronic, they still generate what you want from them, which is damage.

So how do you solve these problems?
Well...
- If a single Dom or Controller is incapable of handling a spawn by themselves...get two.
- If you are stuck with nothing but Stalkers, Scrappers, Night Widows, or Banes that fulfill the above descriptions, drop the difficulty and grab more of them. Idiots en masse can be a force to be reckoned with.
- Etc., because I'm bored and I'm tired of making this wall of text. If you get this far, well, I'll just say figure it out yourself.

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"You can't write this story. Neither can anyone else."

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I'd imagine the only way to hand wave away the stupidity would be to reveal that the original, human Nemesis died long ago and the reason his current activities have been so bogus is because a "less cannon fodder-y" Fake Nemesis robot took up the reigns, albeit poorly.

*Or it's his incompetent son or something.

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*Edit* And I've wanted to say this for awhile Venture: You are a monster. Never knew about that site beforehand. Thankfully, the appropriate xkcd comic is already mentioned.

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Hero Version
Villain Version

Each person you speak to tells you a short story, unless you're the same origin as them then which they'll tell you a lot more. Overall when you look over all of the extended stories they all imply that every origin owes it's existence to magic.

What a crock.

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I basically took the whole thing as "none of these people know what they're talking about," after the mutant contact flat out invalidated some people's concepts with the whole "no mutants before they split the atom" garbage.

[/ QUOTE ]Invalidate concepts? How about invalidating the entire theory of evolution? Kinda a big deal, especially since said theory is how mutants as a concept arose in the first place.

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I thought of those arcs as being the rambling of retarded college students that are using the equivalents of ultra-biased web sites for their primary sources and that they should get kicked out for such poor scholastic competence.

Whoever wrote their particular stories should be fired. They are just that bad.

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And on that "until they split the atom" [censored]... See that big 'ole glowing orb out there? "About the size" of the moon? Yeah, that one that hurts to look at? Yeah, think about that object, then realize why your claimed story is stupid as hell. Now wait for night and look at all those twinkling lights in the sky. Now realize why you should be fired for such a stupid story.

Black Scorpion should have Fury. He's such a joke compared to the rest of the Patrons it's almost painful.

Granted, the whole Patron encounter is a joke. Their lackeys should be used there rather than as silly cannon fodder early on.

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As for his fluctuating tohit I think it comes in pulses from Blue Tower, I don’t believe Blue gives a constant +30% tohit as stated in the Wiki. We usually go Blue then Red not the way listed on the Wiki, just for that reason. Use a few purples for the first 3 minutes of the fight and when the Blue tower is down you can use standard buffs from your team ( Fort from the Emp glued to you )

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The wiki guide to playing the STF is horrible and needs to be removed.

That said, the Blue Tower, at the introduction of the STF, used to function in the way you described. Except the +ToHit portion of the pulse was a 1 second buff instead of the 15.25 seconds it was meant to be (resulting in "WTF!?" moments for some people before it was fixed where LR would suddenly hit them with a 95% chance) and currently is.

It basically looks like a big pink halo is surrounding your character. I'd use shell but it doesn't actually cross over your toon.

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If you really want to or desire every bit of regeneration you can get. To be honest though, the difference between two and three level 50 gIO enhancements is not very much, so if you need the slot elsewhere but still want a strong effect, just two Heal gIOs should be sufficient.

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If you use max level IOs you can slot Miracle Heal, and the unique, Numina Heal and the unique, and get pretty close to the ED softcapped bonus for regen AND the benefit of the uniques AND the first set bonus in each set all in 4 slots.

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If you bother with that (I figured, slot what you have, figure out what to do if you get the extras), you may as well go for the gusto and stick a Regenerative Tissue in there, either replacing the Miracle:Heal or adding another slot. Either would be adding to the total.

If you really want to or desire every bit of regeneration you can get. To be honest though, the difference between two and three level 50 gIO enhancements is not very much, so if you need the slot elsewhere but still want a strong effect, just two Heal gIOs should be sufficient.

Not really relegated to just new players. My play time is in the 'old fart' territory and my biggest barrier to making a new character is endurance management.

I had been leveling a WM/Inv Brute for a bit but I eventually broke down and decided, even though the final build was logistically sound, to go with the alternate WM/WP version simply because I hate running out of endurance that much.

Auto powers like Health actually have a cycle where they reapply themselves before the power wears off. The cycle varies but according to Mids' at least, Health's buff duration is 10.25 seconds, which suggests the power probably reactivates every 10 seconds.

So, every 10 seconds, the Miracle buff will reapply itself with Health. Every usage of Transfusion will also reapply the Miracle buff (although it won't stack it).

I use S/HOs actively in my builds as well as g/set IOs (heh, my AR/EM Blaster has some of the most innovative slotting schemes I've come up with yet).

I personally get annoyed by the lack of HO choices. I'd kill for an Endurance/Recharge S/HO for the very reason of better enhancement values on something that is ridiculously hard to get a hold of through IOs. Dam/End, Dam/Rech? Acc/End, Acc/Rech? Etc. Positron's Blast freaking sucks (Who is the idiot monkey that decided damage enhancement HAD to be on every [censored] IO, really?!) for enhancement values but if I could easily get the remainder through an HO of some sort (as an example)...
But since that dream will never come to fruition, I just get by by being snarky when they fix (oh, and key term: fix, not nerf, please recognize why I use that when I make the snarky post) something that makes the S/HOs interesting.

God forbid they allow HOs to actually be useful in a manner different from IOs.

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This reminds me of how single tracked Deadliest Warrior on Spike is.

They turned all the would be combatants into roman gladiators whether their native techniques matched that format or not.

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I couldn't stand the show for that very reason.

"The vaunted ninja was a master of subterfuge, stealth, misdirection, and craftiness, where the majority of their mythical properties and rumors of sorcery were likely perpetuated by them for the purpose of scaring their opponents into submission, easing their goals of assassination and infiltration!

Now let's watch us pit the ninja against your average, run-of-the-mill Roman grunt in pitched, close-range, arena combat--you know, the kind of combat scenario a ninja would never let itself get stuck into in the first place!"

I don't know how to fix it but you can work around it (I got pretty pissed one day and [censored] around with it until I finally got something to stick).

Basically:
1) Create the new "set," ignore the complaint by the editor.
2) Click "Re-Sort" under the middle boxes.
3) You should see a set that "doesn't have" a set name, if you click on that, the text under the middle box should still say "Controller_Buff.Cold_Domination" (or whatever you wrote in the box for "set name"--I don't know if the underscore for spaces is necessary but that seems to be the convention the program follows, so go with it).
4) Pick the version of the set you're going to copy--Corruptor being the obvious choice.
5) Copy each power to "Controller_Buff.Cold_Domination" or "Controller_Buff.ColdDomination" or whatever you want, just make sure you're consistent with the "set name" you wrote earlier.
[----] a) Copying: Click the Corruptor power, 'edit', 'copy', exit out, then click 'add', and then 'paste'
[----] b) Select/type in 'Controller_Buff' for the Group, then the set name described above.

It's annoying and a bit tedious but hey.

*Edit* Gah, you bugger, I was typing it in. Didn't know about that link, though.

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I grabbed a Shivan + Bio/Chem nuke with some tier 3 reds and took down Tyrant in 1 minute 13 seconds. (This was... years ago) but if the healing nictus was kept on the caster and the debuffs/damage focused on Rommy I could see a 60 second defeat for the 1 AV especially if a shivan, Vanguard and Freedom Phalanx Heavy were involved in addition to nukes. The trick would be more getting the pets to focus on Rommy and not all the pets/ AV nictus floating around.

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You don't get my objections to the claim.
The claim is specifically four Romulus defeats in 60 seconds. With each rez costing approximately 5 seconds (and I'm thinking this is conservative), you're looking at roughly 11-12 seconds per Romulus.

I don't doubt taking down Romulus....I hesitate to call it solo....but it's pretty dubious to claim that you can keep all of the different pets attuned to specifically Romulus, especially through each Rez Stun to pull off a 60 second encounter time.

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1 minute sounds a bit unrealistic, but I never had a nuke buffed pet army on my side either.

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You think? Without counting any healing by the one Nictus, the damage output required would be somewhere just under 2000 average DPS. Shivans and Heavies can do some pretty high numbers but I'd be pretty skeptical you could luck out enough to get all the pets to focus on just Romulus...and get them out of the way of his Stun, then refocus him, etc. Heck, just him rezzing will cost a total of 15 or more seconds, making this closer to 2500 or more DPS.

OP:
Someone's padding their numbers or pulling yer leg.

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While this may be true, you're trying to tell me that you can deflect an object that is traveling faster than the speed of sound, generates enough kinetic energy to break bones deep within your body even if it does not pierce flesh, can knock you clean off your feet, and is only the size of a dime.......but you can't parry to save your life against someone wielding a slow...and heavy...sludge hammer?!? How the hell does that make sense?

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It makes about as much sense as some moron swinging a sword around to arrest people using guns.

Yeah, I'll be sticking with mine, lol.