Montaugh

I got my Paragon Points early as well, I'm not expecting my reward token until the 24thish of the month as my reward token dates have always been at the end of a month. The paragon points are about 10-12 days off in my favor.

Zwill could the dropping of points early be because of bulk time that was applied/purchased before the paragon reward system dropped? Paragon Points might continue to drop early until that prepaid time expires as the intial paragon reward point drop could have flagged all of that prepaid time to drop their paragon points at a set time rather then on its normal monthly time..basically resetting the paragon point reward date to be different from the billing date.

Just a thought.

I'll give it another episode or two but I was rather meh about it last night.. I kept falling asleep. Overall I didn't find it even remotely scary or creepy... just weird in a meh way. I'm almost expecting another The Others reveal at somepoint..

First thing I would do is reorder the powers..
It should go..
1. Crush (level 1)
2. Gravity Distortion (level 1)
3. Crushing Field (level 2)
4. Lift (level 6)
5. Propel (level 8)
6. Dim Shift (level 12)
7. Wormhole (level 18)
8. Gravity Distortion Field (level 26)
9. Singularity (level 32)

Altering the powers to be set in the above order not only helps controllers but has a drastic effect on Dominators. This allows for people to skip Lift and Crush should they decide to do so, as of right now you are forced into taking Lift or Crush which is fine for controllers but largely redundant for Dominators. This is something all other control sets but Gravity and Mind have as options. Neither gravity nor mind can take the single target hold as their initial power pick. That first pick of a ST hold option opens up more potential build options in a very subtle manner and improves both controllers and dominators. So its a good bang for your buck.

Moving Crushing field earlier into the set also opens up additional build options for controllers and Dominators. This also makes the powers standard for the first three intitial picks.. ST immob, ST hold, AOE immob. Fire, Earth, Ice, and plant all follow that pattern as immob/hold sets. Gravity should keep with that pattern, there is no reason it should break that pattern.

The Dimshift/Wormhole/GDF.. is about improvement of control. AOE Holds are the peek of control as they limit both movement and attack and should come later in the set. They also have very long recharge times and short durations.. they are not a main form of control but rather are sudden bursts of control for when things go south. You need your bread and butter control powers first.

Wormhole and Dimshift are problems with the set. Dim shift does too little or too much being a phase power, its loved by some, hated by others and feared by many who don't understand it. Wormhole as a power does too many things. Wormhole teleports, knockbacks and distorients all in one power. These two powers cause gravity to have good control solo but poor control on a team as you don't need a phase all that often, and relocation of the mobs isn't always useful to the team. Either power used at the wrong time can make for a poorer play experience not only for the player using these powers but for the team that they are on as well. These two powers are the reason gravity is seen as one of the worst control sets in the game simply because they are hard to use powers and the hardest thing to accept as a player is when NOT to use your powers, which is backwards when coming from other control sets and other ATs as well. It needs more team friendly powers.

Break up wormhole into two seperate powers. For years people have said they wanted a reverse knockback sort of effect added to the set.. something that draws targets to a specific point sucking them. I have an idea to make that possible.. Wormhole summons an invisible pet(pets) that teleports a group of mobs to its location and traps them into a knock up field ala earthquake/ice slick or it could just teleport the mobs into a knock up field. The point is to make the power into a teleport and knock up/down power that mimics sucking/attraction aspect of gravity as a force. This keeps the flavor of wormhole while at same time making it much easier to use.. it would largely work by setting down on a targeted location and then the pet would take the rest of things from there teleporting mobs into its knock up field. The player wouldn't get shot for using the power as all argo would go onto the pet that was doing the actual teleportation and sucking the mobs into its field of effect. It would keep the teleport and knock up powers so could take those sets and would be a 90s recharge, 30 second duration. Its a bit like illusions fear power.. summoning a pet that causes a fear effect for you.

Dim Shift would then lose its Phase and Immob but is turned into your typical AOE disorient effect making it a bread and butter controller for the gravity controller. Again improvement to the overal power and overall set.

Lift/propel.. This is a hard one and I'd personally not touch them. Changing lift into levitate could potentially break gravity in terms of single target damage. One of the reasons that lift is the way it is.. is because gravity has propel in it. If propel didn't exist as a power then I could see lift and levitate being the same power but it wasn't oversight on the dev's part but part of the initial design of gravity going all the way back into beta. You drastically increase the damage of lift by making it levitate and at the same time the usefulness of Propel in providing that oomph of an attack lessen. Lift as levitate would be up faster then propel, do compairable damage to propel, and have a much faster animation time then propel. Why have propel at that point? Altering propel into an AOE or even a Cone would alter its IO sets as has already been said but again could break controllers in terms of damage. Ultimately as a controller or a dominator you don't need either of these powers as neither radically improves control and the damage aspects of these powers has been decreased with the inclusion of ST and AOE damage powers in the epic powers, let alone the assault powers for dominators. Potential does exist to make lift levitate and propel into a targeted AOE power.. but it may break gravity controllers.

Building an expensive build isn't all that hard. Just fit in 5 purple sets and you will have an expensive build. Actually I think you can fit in 7 purple sets..

Need.. Melee, Hold, Stun, Immob, PBAOE, AOE that's for the purples with the recovery bonuses/acc bonuses

Pet, Ranged are for the regeneration/imp damage sets

Take 5 of them to 5 slots for the bonus recharge. Take 2 of them to 4 slots for the bonus damage or the bonus acc (would take the pet/ranged to 4 slots for the bonus damage myself, and then use the other 2 enhancers in another pet power to futher improve regeneration rates).

That leaves a lot of other avenues opened for building up other aspects of your character.

My Grav/Kin/Primal controller is a multibillion inf build.. though you can easily take blasters, defenders, corruptors and such into the multibillion inf builds as well.

Perhaps an Elec/Energy/Mace Blaster. Ranged, PBAOE, AOE, Hold, Pet in the primary. Stuns, melee, utility powers in the secondary. AOE immob, S/L/E def shield, addition aoe cone attack and second pet power. It offers a bit of everything and will get better with incarnates as well as purple recipes/pvp IOs.

Make a Rad/Energy blaster Uni... or a Rad/Elec blaster. You can get S/L defensive shields later and it can potentially hit soft cap. And blasters can use the T1 and T2 powers from the primary and the T1 from the secondary if they are under the effect of a Mez.

One of the things about /Rad on a defender that I found out when I made my Sonic/rad defender.. The damage is wicked bad until you get cosmic burst for single target damage. But the blaster doesn't have this problem at the T1 and T2 in the primary sets were standardized to the rest of the blaster sets.

For Kinetics Melee I like the idea of a sorcery/magic like idea... and whenever I use focus burst I am often finding myself going RASENGAN!.. but back to the sorcery/magic idea.. Its like that whirling and gathering of magical energies and feels very magicy to me.

For Kinetics (the buff/debuff set) I always saw it as equal/opposite, cause and effect reactions and such. Like repel is taking the attack they hit you with before the repel can fire off and you are redirecting it back at them blowing them backwards. You slow something down.. and speed other things up. Now granted it makes more sense if Siphon Speed and Speed boost were the same power effect.. drain speed and boost speed, drain recovery, boost recovery at the same time as that works better and similiar to how siphon power and fulcrum shift work and feels to mesh overall with the set but its not.

I think I figured it out and it has to do with July being 31 days and having been subbed in June.

In july they awarded everyone that was subbed in the month of July for even 1 day 400 points. But if you resubbed in the month of july you would have gotten another 400 points for resubbing. If someone wasn't subbed in june and resubbed in July for the 400 points they would have just gotten those 400 points. So June/july awarded 800 points. July only rewarded 400 points.

So your june payment comes do. You resub. July comes around and on july 1st every account is awarded 400 points. You resubbed in the end of July gaining another 400 points so basically double dipped in July. I did the same thing, I'm guessing anyone that was subbed in June and resubbed in july did the same thing as well. August doesn't double dip because the system is working as normal by this point in regards to point rewards and you get 400 points. All of this is awarded on september 13th so you get 1200 points when you think you should only be getting 800 points.

On or around September 14th they give everyone their september rewards. For some accounts this was late (september 1-13th), for others it was normal (september 14), and for some it was early (15th-30th). This causes confusion as you would not normally have gotten the reward until later in september. So your bill date rolls around and you don't get the reward because it was already rewarded earlier that month (again same boat as you, I would have gotten my around the 25th but it was actually awarded on the 14th).

My guess is that they rewarded everyone on the 14th to allow those that had a september bill date of (1st-13th) to get the rewards for september otherwise they would have missed the september reward entirely as they would have technically fallen under the old reward system/billing plan. Its a funky little thing as they opened everything up in the middle of the month rather then the start or end of the month. It all makes sense in a weird sort of way/logic when you look at it and why some accounts got 1200 points, and others 1600 point or even higher do to being a tier 9 on september 14th.

Everything from this point on will be rewarded as normal come october as you will get your reward on or around your bill date.. the reward date can be a few days off of the billing date for some accounts do to timecards being a static 30 or 60 day option, and NCsoft may just call every month 30 days regardless of actual numbers of days in the month for all accounts, so you may see a few funky bits do to that and bill/reward dates may be a few days off but otherwise everything is working as intended.

You wouldn't have gotten 2 server transfers for september but would have just gotten the 1 transfer on or around the 14th as I beleive it came a few days later. So you should have 1 for september I know my account has 1 transfer on it. Again this is normal. You wouldn't have gotten another on the 28th as it was already rewarded on or around the 14th.

Your reward token, the 550 paragon points, the server transfer were all rewarded on the 14th rather then the on your sept 28th bill date.

Hope that cleared everything up and why you had an extra 400 points and didn't get an extra server token. That was from being subbed in june and having to resub in july.

I hope all that babbling made sense...

...haha 9th and you get dried mud in the shape of a bowl. Bloodspeaker gets off easy this year. haha

Happy anniversary though.. enjoy your pottery.

....everything is very confusing and lot of information needs to be seriously updated. Go through the game information on the main page... bases still list base salavge which hasn't been in game for years, contacts list the old AP contacts which are now defunct.. Why it doesn't link directly to the Freedom information I don't know... No meantion that controllers and Masterminds need to be purchased or have a min reward tier.

Look at the Going Rogue site.. under game info and you will see an incarnate overview. But if you look at the main page under game information you will see no meantion of Incarnates at all. That to me implies that incarnates was a part of going rogue.

All of this is confusing not only to new players but to returning players. The website is very much out of date and needs an update. The information is all there but its not all that easy to access and is only known to us to be out of date/useless as we know the difference between all of this stuff.

Angus McQueen: Its a good arc... just needs to be more update and be more about the connection between the lost, the mu, and the rikti magus. That part of the arc is awesome, once you move onto stopping the invasion the arc falls apart in my opinion. It no longer needs to deal with stopping an invastion but can be used to really link The Lost and The Rikti as well as the Rikti's ability to start learning to use magic and how they went about learning it and the friendships that got torn apart along the way. That is the true meat of this arc and that's the story that characters become emotionally invested in.

Indigo: I ran this a long time ago, I ran it again a few weeks back. That caused me to remember WHY I hadn't run this arc in a long time (like precov long) It needs a rewrite badly. It needs to not involve crimson every other mission, I'm running an arc for Indigo not for Crimson, if she goes to him it should be for something REALLY HUGE. You just stop paying attention to what is going on after a while and forget the point of the arc while you are doing crimson's little filler mini arc contained within the arc and you come to understand what a dick Crimson really is and its no wonder that Indigo is located in another zone just to get the heck away from that guy.

Crimson: Its just a really REALLY long arc and could/should be chopped down and retold. Its so long that you stop caring about the overall plot of the arc after four or five missions.

Additional thoughts... Try to keep the arcs more in contact zone contained unless as part of the arc the characters need to go to a specific zone for a specific purpose. Like you can't stop someone from blowing up a Bridge in IP while taking the mission in Atlas park. But if you are going to generic baddies hideout looking the for the clues that continues the storyarc that mission doesn't need to be on the far end of Eden when you are in PI.

I've been here since the prebeta forums as well. I used the name Druid back in those days, but changed to Montaugh during beta. I was playing jumpgate at the time and someone meantioned that CoH was being made. I joined the boards in the begining of october back in 2001 and have been here since then.

and for those that want to see what it was like back in the day.. Wayback machine go

That is just around launch of the website.. and man were we ravenous for information to be given to us in those days. Definately take a look under gameplay.. fame is interesting... and the download for the gameplay video works O.O grab it from ausgamer files haha omg..

I'm glad to hear that Alphas gets a second season. Ryan Cartwright the actor that plays Gary just steals the show. Great character, interesting ability and he has some of the best lines from the show.. "Bill give me a gun." "No Gary." "Fine then Bill give me a grenade."

If you were going to make one character and only one character to do everything you could possibly want to do in the game (Farm, SF/TF, missions, etc)

What archtype and powersets would you choose and why?

I would go with an Elec armor tanker and then Kin Melee

Why.. Elec armor is very tough verses normal content as you can high resistances verses s/l e and psi damage as well as moderate resists to Neg, Fire, and Ice. Much of the TF content hero side especially in the lower levels deals with s/l and e foes. Capping your energy resistance very early in your career is a huge boon of elec armor. Elec armor actually gets stronger in the later game... you'll laugh at malta sappers trying to drain you, be able to engage rularuu fairly easily, and carnies won't be much of a threat to you.
Elec does have a hole to toxic damage.. but unlike other sets Elec armor can plug its own hole using its tier 9 power which will also end up capping all but psi resistances. It makes for a very powerful set overall and one of my favorites.

Why Kin Melee... Kin does -damage which stacks nicely with the high resistances of elec armor. The combo goes as well together as Super Reflexes and Dark does. It also offers a nice mix of single target, aoe and ranged attacks and has a good damage boosting mechanic that I like better then build up, but not as much as rage. I just love the -damage aspect though and you really notice when you are focusing on a single target, and you have burst helping you with your aoe targets.

Why a Tanker and not a Brute? I'm a turtle sort of player so I like the higher base resistances that tankers offers verses the damage potential that a brute offers.

Teaming: I like Elec/Kin for teaming because no matter what sort of buffs and debuffs you add to elec armor it just gets better. The only thing you will have capped is elec resistance.. so you have room to be enhanced via a sonic or thermals... you have good end recover but its typically done via bursts of recovery and reduction of end costs rather then typically boosting the end recovery rate itself. +def and -acc powers are very useful and will greatly improve your durability. +recharge is nice for energize and powersink to bring them up faster. -damage stacks well with resistances and your kin melee effects. You are really good solo but get so much better teaming that its crazy good.

Final thoughts: I really like my elec/kin and soon to be artic epic tanker so far and would highly recommend it if you were only going for a single character to play as its just a good all around character and tanks are just really fun to play. I'd say that elec armor is one of the best all around sets in the game and you won't go wrong with choosing it.

The best defensive tanker.. pretty much any tanker that brings along a defender/corruptor/controller in what they are weak in. People do this all the time with grantie by bringing along a kin.. but an Ice tanker can get a sonic defender an elec tanker could get an Ice or FF ect.. so the best defensive tanker is the smart tanker that knows how to build a team around the limitation that their set has.

This happened to me earlier in the day as well. I was on a BAF went to load the map, crashed.. relogged into the game, rejoined the trial in progress. Loaded up the zone and all my tray slots were empty. I had assumed that the tray power wipe was related to one that had happened years ago and was rearing its ugly head again. I opened up my powers tab to drop my powers back in my tray and there was just a blank page, no powers were showing. Checked the enhancer screen and it as blank as well.

The problem fixed itself towards the end of the trial. It was sort of like my character loaded but then it took a few minutes for my power data to load and catch up with my character.

Containment is ontop of the damage cap. So if you cap you still get containment damage in addition to your usual damage.

If you wanted to go melee.. Energy/Energy brutes make great light based characters.

Blaster... Elec/Fire reason.. pretty much out damages people in low level play. At level 10 you have the short circuit, ball lightning, fire sword circle and combust attack chain. Also its just an easy set to play and in low level play it is very good all around for damaging foes.

Defender... Sonic, FF, Ice, or Thermal mix it with Elec, Fire, duel pistols. The shields are a HUGE boon in the low levels and it also allows for you to do double duty as a damage dealer as well. I would personally lean towards FF or Sonic as they are more fire and forget then Ice or Thermal. Elec as a ranged set caps out really early on and it offers two aoes, and 2 single target attacks. Duel Pistols offers on demand damage changes as well as debuffing.. Fire when ti comes out simply because its fire. heh

Controller... Earth Control, or Mind Control.. both sets are very good in the low levels of play. I would go more offensively focused buff/debuff sets though like Rad, Kinetics.. and the like. If you want to focus more on your secondary and play a more buff oriented character... Ill/emp or Grav/Emp.

Tanker.. Pretty much any tanker is good.

Scrapper.. pretty much any scrapper is good.

Kheldians.. I would go Warshade if nothing more then the stealth/TP aspect that is inherient in the set, a PB would do just as well though.

I started in round 1 beta, so I've actually forgetten more people over the years then I can remember, so I will have to go with The First 100 as a collective group. Some of them I keep in touch with, others I've lost track of over the years.

There was just something about that group of players, we had a shared experience that you just can't replicate these days. MMO's were fairly new to the scene for most of us, a hero mmo was utterly unique. So for most of us this was not only our first MMO, but it was in a time when MMO's themselves were just starting out and no one really knew much about them. It wasn't a mix of newbies and vets, you didn't have people with extensive experience in other MMOs, and none of us had a superhero mmo we could compair CoH to.

We didn't have number crunchers like we do today. We weren't at the point that we cared about the numbers yet, about how the system worked. We all had character concepts that we were dying to play and had been waiting to play for years ever since the game was announced back in 2001 and we first started following it. All of us were forum regulars since pretty much the start of the forums and the way we got into the beta was by continually checking in on the boards. Come october I'll have been a part of City of Heroes in one shape or another for 10 years of my life.

Those first few weeks were just sheer joy of playing and bug hunting. We could only play a certain amount of time and only one certain days of the week. We were all newbies and we had no idea what we were doing. We didn't know how ANYTHING worked. For most of us we had no idea about the holy trinity from other MMOs. It was a unique combination of utter inexperience.

Once that second wave came in that was lost. We knew what was going on. Sure it was all new to the new players but they had questions and we had answers. We didn't know everything but we knew enough that it set us apart from everyone else and so we became the first vets.

Then as beta got bigger that enjoyment was still there but it diminished.. we could see the flaws in the game and began to break it (in very creative fashions), and so we became the first openly critical voices to be heard while newer waves of bright eyed youngsters were added that fed off of our energy... the boards were a very bad place towards the end of beta. We knew stuff was wrong but we couldn't explain fully why it was wrong. Systems were still undiscovered, formulas were not available, and the only numbers we had were those that we had figured out which were limited and flawed. It was a frustrating time as we knew beta was also coming to an end.

So being one of the first 100 is a double edged sword.. we got to do everything first before anyone had seen any aspect of this game, but that also meant we did everything first and were both the bright eyed newbies that just made a character out of sheer love of comics and heroes... as well as the first to vented openly when we found something we didn't like.

In the end I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. Its something that you just can't replicate these days as MMO's have been around for so long that the intitial magic that was there at the time of CoH's opening is just lost. Its also the only MMO with such a great community that sticks together over the years that even saying The First 100 will bring a few nods and smiles to faces from those that know and remember that simpiler time.