Moraelin_NA

No. What you describe as "socialism" is just a generic totalitarian regime, as exemplified for example by the Soviet "socialism" (or what their communism perverted the term to mean), but then again any other kind of totaliarian regime. Left, right, doesn't matter.

I.e., no wonder that you see the nazi totalitarian regime being similar to... the generic definition of a totalitarian regime. Big surprise there. No really.

At any rate if you can say with a straight face that, say, French or German socialism are defined as unconditionally obeying the state, I'll just say you have _no_ clue what you're even talking about.

And whop-de-freakin' do, so the best you can do is link to (A) a right-wing propaganda site, and (B) someone's clueless and logically incoherent rants on a blog (ok, a Tripod free web page used as a blog.) Riiight. As if one can't find bogus sites belonging to the whole range of lobbies, interest groups, and plain old nutjobs on an ideological crusade.

But the sad thing is, even if you want to redefine "socialism" as "Soviet communism", you're still not even starting to understand it. Even in the article you linked to, the starting paragraph states "Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism". Do you even understand what those perceived moral defects were, and what Lenin's promise (misguided as it may have been) was?

"Obey the state or you'll be punished" is _not_ how even Soviet socialism was defined. That was just the totalitarian regime used to enforce it. And grafting that idea on top of socialism that was indeed Lenin's creation, and why his "bolshevik" faction (advocating direct action and taking control by force) split from the "menshevik" faction representing the real socialist movement (advocating gradual reforms and working within the frame of a democratic state.)

The (failed) promise even of Lenin' nationalizing the economy was precisely to take equal care of _all_ members of society, and make the economy provide to everyone according to his needs. Basically to flatten the existing wild-capitalism social structure where a few lived in palaces, and a majority barely avoided starving, and replace it with an utopia where all have equal chances and all are equally cared for.

Even in Stalin's USSR, by which time a lot of Lenin's utopic ideals had been thrown out the window anyway, the idea persisted (or was at least kept as a facade) that everyone should be equal in getting at least the basic care, and everyone should get equal chances in fulfilling their potential.

E.g., everyone had access to free education. You could finish a college regardless of whether your daddy saved a bunch of money for your college fund or not. There was simply no such thing as paying to get a diploma, in any form or shape. There was a uniform written exam for access to university, and the highest ranking pupils got admitted.

E.g., everyone had access to free medical care, and at least in the official propaganda, the _same_ kind of medical care for everyone. (Again, it was like that only in the official propaganda, but that propaganda was how even Stalin defined the "socialism" idea he was offering the people.)

E.g., access to high paying or otherwise better jobs was again officially based purely on performance, not on daddy's money, not on daddy's social networking, no other favoritism and nepotism forms. At the end of college, there was a list of available jobs, and the students were sorted by the final grade: the one at the top chose a job from the list, then the second, then the third, etc. And for most promotions or newly created jobs above entry level, a written exam was pretty much mandatory. (Again, in practice those at the top found their ways around this ideal equality, but it was regarded as the blatant corruption and nepotism that it really is.)

E.g., the official list of salaries was very much flattened, with the difference between the salary of a director or even minister and that of a janitor, being lower than anywhere else in the world. (But again, that was largely theoretical, because in practice corruption soon grew to allow those in power to augment their income with some serious bribes.)

_That_ egalitarian utopia was the fundamental idea that permeated even the Soviet-style version of "socialism". _That_ was the offer to its people,

So to define a state which executed the handicapped as "socialist", is... clueless. There are no polite ways to phrase it. It's just talking out of the rear end. Get a clue. Read a real history book, or a real economics book, instead of taking your "facts" from retards' blogs. (I had a chuckle at his saying that Hitler was socialist because he had a one-party dictatorship just like the USSR.)

And as was said before: usually the rule of thumb is that whenever you see someone accusing everyone else of being revisionists, he's the real revisionist. How often did you throw that word around in this thread alone?

Hitler was, simply put, a psychopath and surrounded himself with other psychopaths.

I mean in the medical meaning of the world, and not the popular "axe murderer" use of the word. A psychopath is, basically, someone for whom everyone else doesn't matter. A psychopath can rationalize _anything_, from destroying somone's life, up to genocide. (As Hitler for example did.) One psychopath has argued that abusing children for non-consentual sex is a victimless crime and should be regarded as just normal, for example. _That_ kind of being able to rationalize anything.

They can tell any lie with a straight face, because they just lack that "omg, this is wrong, I can't do this to this nice guy" reflex. Anything that gets you to do what they want you to do is fair game and normal. E.g., a characteristic of psychopaths is reinventing their past to milk the most sympathy, admiration, or whatever they want to go for. This ability and willingness to manipulate can make them _extremely_ charismatic.

So a psychopath could end up a mass-murderer, yes, but equally well a successful politician or a CEO that Wall Street _loves_. There are quite a few up in the top of western capitalist societies, just as communists too had their own share of them at the top.

And here's what this rant is getting at: it's hard to say if he was really socialist or ultra-capitalist or whatever. Most likely he was neither. He most likely only believed in one thing, and nothing else: making himself an emperor. That's all.

To that end, he just told people what he thought they wanted to hear, and in the way that made them most likely to swallow it without thinking. (Read Mein Kampf. It contains occasional stuff like how he discovered it's best to have meetings when people are tired, so they don't think much about what they're told.)

Even the anti-semitism, that was just a prop.

To a nation that was just about fed up with being crapped on by the ones at the top, how do you sell the idea that they must give more power to them? How do you make them unconditionally follow the same factory owners they hated? Easy. Sell them a lie like "See, that's only so bad because they're Jews. If you sell your liberty to good ol' Aryans instead, those will take good care of you. You'll see."

Plus, giving people an enemy is good for consolidating your own power. And the Nazi propaganda _always_ had a convenient arch-enemy that all good men should unite against. If it wasn't the Jews, it was the French, or the Communists, or even the church, or whatever. There always was someone else to divert attention to, someone else to blame.

At any rate, he just told people whatever got him more popularity. That's all.

In the impoverished Germany of, say, 1927, yeah, socialist speeches and the pretense of staying a socialist party made him more popular. You can bet that that wasn't what he told the factory owners at that very same time.

And to claim that his totalitarian oppression had _anything_ to do with actually believing in socialism, that's outright laughable. We're talking a regime where you could be executed for as little as missing a day at work, for crying out loud. How's that socialist?

It may come as a surprise to an American, but the underlying theme of socialism _isn't_ "I know, let's take freedoms away and be as inconsiderate as to stop billionaires from buying another yacht". The whole theme is caring for your fellow human, and believing that a society is defined by how it cares for its _least_ fortunate members, not by how great it is for the top 10 billionaires.

So I fail to see how the brutal oppression in Nazi Germany can be seen as having anything to do with believing in socialism. No, seriously. Mind boggles.

Well, playing other MMORPGs for years is part of the problem for COH players. Not saying that's his case (I'm not even on the same server, so I can't judge), but I've grouped with people where that was the whole problem: they tried to play COH like it's EQ or WoW. People come with their tactics already formed around what works in EQ or WoW whatever, e.g., that priest=healer, then figure out an inexact defender=priest. And a lot of other such mis-expectations.

The finer points of buffing, debuffing, draining and status effects are lost on them. (And I don't mean just in their own team. You see some people at level 45 who still haven't figured out how to deal with Nemesis Lts' Vengeance, or with Ring Mistresses in a Carnie mish, or the rare idiot who still attacks the Zeus Titan before the the Sapper, because their mommy... err... EQ taught them to kill the boss before the minions. And their _only_ conclusion there is "we need one more healer." Or still haven't figured out why the whole group comes when they pull the boss.) They've already got their YEARS of experience with something utterly irrelevant to COH, and aren't gonna let some newbie question their experience and authority.

And some can make it all the way to 50 by doing the wrong thing again and again, since even in perpetual debt and between frequent hospital runs the xp bar still moves (slowly) forward.

In practice, a lot of things work differently enough, or can work if you step outside the EQ mindset.

E.g., to take Radiation alone as an example, while Buffer Overrun is an _excellent_ example of what it can do in overkill amounts, I'm going to illustrate what a single Rad Defender can do. Incidentally, it also illustrates what you can make work well on those days where you don't have a wide assortment of Empaths and Tankers just waiting around for you to invite them.

I've been in 3 AV teams in I6 which consisted of 1 rad defender, 1 regen scrapper, 2 blasters. (As far as it gets from "we can't do this without 1 tank, 1 empath, 6 blasters", right?) The AVs were Dr. Vazhilok at +1 levels, Nemesis Rex at +1, and Bile at +2. (Ok, ok, not exactly Infernal material, but still AV, right?) For Papa-Doc Vazhilok I was the rad defender, for the other two I was the regen scrapper. _Without_ MOG, so just a regenner.

In all 3 cases, there was no problem for the scrapper to tank the debuffed AV, and noone died in the whole mission. I'll admit that there was a moment at Bile when my IH and DP ran out and I thought "that's it, I'm dead, I should have taken MOG after all" Strangely enough I didn't die, though the defender deserves the credit for that.

And it's not just that he was debuffed, it's also that between the Defender's Choking Cloud and the Ice Blaster's Freeze Ray and Bitter Freeze Ray, Bile was held half the time. So in fact, it shows another deviation from the "take Defenders only for healing, take Blasters when you need more damage." In this case a Blaster was used to help limit the incoming damage.

Or here's an even funkier team I remember from an old (maybe I4) TF: all Scrappers, an Empath and a Storm Defender. I tell you, that was some crazy chasing the running enemies around. But they were (A) debuffed to extremes that surprised even me, so they just got felled with a minimal amount of hits, and (B) too busy running around to fight back.

Maxxing the level is as much a "goal" in EQ2 or UO (to give two examples I'm also fairly familiar with) or whatever as it is in COH. I.e., it's only a "goal" people set for themselves, nothing more.

There _is_ a game between levels 1 and 49 (59 with the recent EP) in EQ2, and it's not just a grind to get to the final raids. There are storyline quests, class quests (e.g., the armour quests at level 20), crafting, and generally 99% of the content on that DVD to explore between 1 and 49.

And, again, it's anything but grind at lower levels. In the beginning you're in fact overpowered in EQ2, again quests are aplenty, they're in safely soloable areas (for a lot of them you don't even have to leave Qeynos or Freeport or fight anything), and the hunting/questing/resource-gathering areas are right adjacent to your assigned village. And, as usual, it goes downhill as you raise in level.

How that can be seen as just a grind to get to level 50, is truly beyond me.

Now mind you, there are plenty of faults with EQ2, and plenty of reasons why one would quickly grow bored with it. But nevertheless that _is_ the actual game. That there's something magical at level 50 that makes it all worth it, that's at best a mirage and made-belief. Whatever you didn't like about levels 1-49, you'll get at level 50 too (in some cases, e.g., the huge load times, you get worse, as you get to zone several times just to get from point A to point B), with the added kick of being stuck in a Groundhog Day kinda loop where you do the same thing over and over again every day.

I'm not kidding. There are missions at that point in WoW where you either go through a higher level enemy area (I guess someone at Blizzards really wants to shove PvP down everyone's throat) or you take a scenic detour around the whole world map. And then all the way back to hand in the quest.

My favourite metaphor for WoW is that of boiling a frog alive. They say that if you drop a frog into hot water, it will hop out. But if you put it in cool water and very very slowly raise temperature, it will stay there and get boiled.

(Mind you, I haven't actually tried it, and I wouldn't really advise anyone to perform cruel experiments on animals. Unless you're a necromancy mastermind, I guess.)

That's WoW. It starts great fun and almost no time-sink (the first missions in the newbie area send you at most 100 ft away) and you're as happy as a frog in a cool pond. Then gradually, very slowly, it becomes more and more time-sink and less and less game.

Until the end-game raids, when it becomes almost purely time-sink for large groups of people. The chances that the boss will drop the armor piece you need are so low, it makes hitting the jackpot in Las Vegas seem a lot safer a bet. And if he does, you're one in 20 people rolling the die for it.

(Think what COH would be if at the end of a TF or Hami raid (A) there's only a 2% chance of getting the enhancement, and (B) only one person got the enhancement. All 8 get to roll a die for it, and only the winner gets it. Literally. That's WoW's endgame raids in a nutshell.)

And let's get a bit deeper into the fun of that raid itself. None of them involve any clever tactics, they just involve large groups of people using the same 2-3 powers over and over again. Literally. No, seriously, you're suddenly reduced to a repetitive pull-and-kill routine, where only 2 or 3 icons on your bar are ever used. In fact, they involve a lot less tactics and thinking than the missions at single digit levels, and you use less powers than you used at level 9.

And the kicker is that it's a reward you don't even need, technically speaking. You're already at max level and powerful enough to take on the toughest critters in the game. There's no further level to be gained with that equipment, and no opponents you need it against. That's it. It's just an exercise in collecting some costume pieces, for very little more than fashion.

Mind you, I'm not saying WoW sucks. It _is_ well designed. (Getting people addicted first and then paying for months for less and less actual game content per day played, until the point where they just repeatedly see the same dungeon over and over again, I can only admire the genius in that design.)

I'm just saying that the view that all the fun is at the level 60, and that levels 1-59 are just a grind to get to the fun part, is completely false. Levels 1-59 _are_ the actual game in WoW too, and level 60 is a last-ditch repetitive chore you're given to keep you busy. I fail to see how someone can see that repetitive chore as _the_ meat of the game, unless they're obsessive-compulsive or something.

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In nearly every other MMO out there, the levels leading up to the max level “end game” are just gravy. They are meant to make you “put in the effort” or “grind” to reach the fun: max level raiding, equipment, crafting. Essentially, the meat of the game occurs after your level is maxed out and you are fine tuning your “stuff” (whether that be powers or equipment or rabid chipmunk pet of DOOOMZXORS)

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You know, that's where I'd disaggree with you. Right there. I haven't yet seen anyone who can claim with a straight face that WoW's endgame is where the fun is.

Au contraire, every single co-worker that's tried WoW, plus for example both Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade, seemed to quickly find that end-game grind non-fun. In the words of one co-worker who reached level 60 in WoW, he quit when he noticed that he needed a few hours just to assemble the massive teams needed for that end-game raid. That's it, literally: a few hours wasted every day before the "fun" even begins.

And how much "fun" such a massively repetitive affair is... again, let's just say most WoW players would quickly disaggree.

As someone who's briefly played WoW too, I can tell you that the game evolution is exactly the other way around than you paint it. The most fun is to be had in the single digit levels: quests are aplenty, the difficulty is reasonable, and they don't involve much walking. Then it gradually goes downhill, and there's more and more timesink and less and less game. By the time you get your mount, most quests starts involving an hour of riding just to get there.

That fine-tuning your equipment is _not_ the meat of the game, and _not_ where the most fun is. It's one last bone you're thrown to keep you busy (and still bored) while you're in the "but if I quit, I'll lose all my guild-mates and friends" phase.

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PLers just don't "get" this game.

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No. You don't "get" PLers.

Most of the PL-ing in those games isn't because they need to get to the fun part, and in fact it _skips_ the fun part.

The reason it happens is just because some people are terminally insecure, and need a virtual crutch for their ego. The crutch being the achievement in a virtual world, and keeping up with the virtual Joneses. There's a mirage that if you're level 60 and have the full set of dire-chipmunk-fur clothes (or the biggest castle in UO, or whatever), you're suddenly _someone_. Suddenly everyone will envy you, your boss will give you a promotion, random females will want to bear your children, etc.

That's all there is to it: a mine-is-bigger-than-yours mirage. They just _have_ to keep up with the virtual Joneses, even if it takes reaching for the RL credit card and paying to be PL-ed.

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That is NOT CoH. (this is why many people who PL to reach the end become unsatisfied very quickly; they are missing the point of this game)

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I'll aggree: COH is exactly the other way around than WoW. In WoW the first 10 levels are the most fun, and the next 10 a close second, and so on. COH starts with the least fun 20 levels, and gets to be a lot more fun later.

In the beginning in COH, you're weak, travel takes ages (and sometimes gets you killed before the mission even started, e.g., in the Hollows), and you wheeze out of endurance like an asthmatic all the time. (And since we're talking PL: let's remember that while now Rest recharges quickly, at the apex of PL-ing, it took half an hour to recharge. So getting your stamina back involved standing around watching the walls for a minute. After each fight.)

_And_ it's the levels where you don't even get much choice over your character's development. You face a stupid grind for Stamina and travel power, where half your powers until level 20 must go just into getting those. There's very little fun in that for most builds, and very little character development: you just gnash your teeth and grind your way towards Stamina. Instead of taking something you badly need (e.g., a second attack on your Tanker, for when you can't find a good team at 6 AM), you gnash your teeth and check yet another punishment power on the checklist. (Yay! I soo wanted Hurdle... NOT.)

And only after that it finally starts being fun. You finally actually have endurance for more than one fight, and most importantly, you finally get control of your character's development. (Or maybe not even then, as you first scramble to take all the resistances/attacks/whatever-else you skipped to get Stamina and a travel power.)

And I'm not even getting into the life of a Controller before Containment. That was an agonizing grind until level 32, when you finally got your reward.

So in a way, COH is the only game where I somewhat understood PL-ers, up to a point. It was never my thing, but I didn't really rush to point fingers at those who did get PL-ed. If anyone decided to skip those grind levels, well, I don't have to try too hard to see their point too.

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I've never participated in a TF or extended campaign that went WELL that didn't have a 1) solid tank, and 2) solid empath. Period. No exceptions. Sometimes they succeed lacking those elements - but they almost always struggle. In my experience, the secret to a successfull task force, whether it be numina, positron, or anything inbetween is solid class balance, a solid tank, and a solid empath.

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Hmm... Well, I'd try to argue with that, but the words of someone from the "How to know you're in a pick-up group" thread come to mind. Namely, the words of Shikra:

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I've learned through painful experience that when one of your teammates says "We can't do this task force without a healer/tanker/whatever," then they're invariably right--THEY can't.

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My emphasis there.

Again, you'd be surprised what works, if you actually know the archetypes and know the enemy. E.g., since you mention TFs, _the_ easiest level 24 respec trial I've ever been in didn't involve an Empath at all, it involved a Mind Controller. Deceiving/Confusing the shield generators made them bubble _us_ and the reactor, instead of the Sky Raiders.

Incidentally, the same applies to Malta: you'd be surprised how you _don't_ need an Empath if every single Sapper works for you, draining the other Malta instead of you. Controllers can do stuff like that.

More TFs. Croatoa? I can't even remember one where we had a Tanker or Empath at all. The easiest, though, involved a kinetics defender, a force-field controller, a scrapper (me) and a few blasters. Between bubbles, pets, and fullcrum shift, those witches didn't stand a chance.

AVs? The easiest AV teams I've been in involved a Stone Tanker and a Force-Field defender.

Etc.

But, again, I'm reminded of the wise words of Shikra.

Anyway, here's my "constructive" part for the day: the best leaders I've grouped with (and there have been quite a few) were _not_ the ones who could give a good pep talk and a good excuse after yet another team-wipe. The best ones were, in fact, those who told you what tactics to apply to _not_ end up with a team-wipe, and thus needed no excuse.

In fact, that should probably be Directive 1, and _the_ first thing to apply, before all the psychology and excuses parts:

Directive 1: plan, formulate tactics, and _communicate_. All the time. Stuff like "now we rest", or "wait, Sapper ahead", or "TP and kill one of them, then everyone hits the elevators to lose aggro", or "just one thing before we start: if you're the last one standing in the trial and can't res, don't fight and die too, just heal the reactor while the rest of us run back from the hospital" (ironically, due to the leader's extensive knowledge none of us died there at all, but it was nice to see planning ahead anyway) beats a thousand "but we had no empath" excuses afterwards.

Well, I'm certainly not saying that it's bad to have a balanced team either. I was just arguing that adding a defender may, depending on their primary, actually increase damage. That's all.

I will, however, aggree with that the converse of my example is also true. If you already have 7 Rad defenders, there is merit in taking a blaster as the 8'th member. If nothing else, because with 7 AM's you're already at the damage cap anyway, and an 8'th wouldn't push you any further. Ditto for the debuffs.

On the other hand, at that point you hardly need more damage anyway.

Some simple maths. Let's say you have a team of 7 Fire Blasters. (Yes, not a good team mix, but bear with me for example sake.) Adding another one will boost the total damage by 14.3%.

Adding a single Radiation Emission defender will add 25% base damage from the Accelerate Metabolism damage boost alone. Which can mean anything between just that in the single digit levels, and 13% of your total damage when you've already enhanced everything to 94% in the 40's. Possibly even more from having more endurance and recharge rate. And that's just from the buff.

If the defender took Assault from the Leadership pool, that's another 18.75% base damage increase on top of AM. Slice it any way you will, but he/she has at this point already added more damage output to your team than another fire blaster would.

Stack some debuffs on the enemies too, and it can become scary. E.g., Enervating Field boosts your damage by _another_ 23%, applied multiplicatively on top of all the enhancements, buffs and inspirations you might use, even if you were at the damage cap.

One more thing about defenders is that, unlike some other MMOs (e.g., WoW), buffs and debuffs of the same type _do_ stack.

E.g., in WoW, if one Paladin boosted your mana regen, another isn't even allowed to cast the same buff on you, unless it's a higher level version of it. And if it's higher level, it will replace the old one, so you're back to just one buff anyway.

Ditto for auras (similar to COH's PBAOE toggles, e.g., to Leadership): if there were two paladins in the same team and one was already boosting the team's defense, I had to switch to giving them something else, or one effect would be lost.

Ditto for debuffs: if a hunter had already slowed a target, a second wouldn't even be allowed to use the same spell on the target, unless it's a higher level version. And again, the higher level version replaced it.

In COH such things don't happen. COH allows stacking buffs or debuffs sky-high and then some.

What I'm getting at is that the "but we need a mixed team with specialized roles" is true for WoW by design, but not necessarily true in COH.

In COH you can have for example a team of exclusively Rad defenders and the stacked buffs and debuffs will add up to something scary. The debuffs alone can peg an AV at 5% chance to hit and not too much damage per hit either.

And the stacked recharge boosts alone mean you can unload a Nova or Nuclear Blast or whatever in every group of enemies on the way, and have it at the damage cap at that. (In fact, at more than the damage cap if the enemies saw some generous application of EF first.)

Basically, again, AT's are important, but how you use them is much more important.

It's not "chaffing against the archetypes", it's just using them for what they _are_. Yes, defenders defend and most can heal. And by all means, they should do it when it's needed. No ifs, no buts, no "but blasting's more fun". But if that's all you've understood from that AT, you don't even start to understand the AT and how to use it.

And one more thing about ATs. Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm, and anyone can win a battle with an ideal army and numeric superiority. That's no feat. The good leader is the one that can make use of what's available.

Sometimes you don't have an Empath or FF available for a Malta or Carnie mission. (Yes, FF too. I wish more people would read the description of Insulation Shield in the game, to end the mis-conception that Empathy is the only thing that protects from end drain.) Sometimes you don't have 4 level 50 Kheldians just waiting to be your damage dealers. Sometimes you don't get a Tanker for your AV mission. Etc. You'd be surprised what else can work there.

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Everyone pulls their weight.

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Great advice, but IMHO hard to judge just from a script or from their endurance bar.

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If you find someone who seems to be standing around a lot, hardly using their END, that's a warning sign.

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In principle, yes, but again, it's a bit hard to judge it objectively.

In heavy lag animations are often skipped or reversed, for example. (E.g., my DM scrapper would look like he's the one on the receiving end of a Shaddow Maul, when in fact he's the one administering it.) So someone may appear to stand around when they're in fact actively attacking.

As for the endurance bar, pretty much any regen scrapper nowadays and most defenders can regen endurance almost as fast as they use it. Any of my higher level regens, between QR and Stamina see their endurance bar go down very slowly when not actively drained by a Sapper or Carnie, and usually not at all if some form of recovery aura (also including Rad's AM) is applied on top of it.

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I have a little script I wrote that can parse a demo file and tell me how much damage people did in the last mission. It isn't perfect, given that you only see damage that happens near you. But it can give you a real good idea.

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While indeed it can give you some idea, I would be wary of taking it as more than just an idea. If you take damage output as the only indicator of someone's contribution, you've for example discriminated against anyone with, say, the Leadership pool which uses their endurance to boost the others' deadliness. E.g.,...

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Last night I teamed with a level 50 Blaster who did less damage than his Emp Defender SK.

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... might (or might not) mean the defender just spent too much time blasting. I'm not saying defenders shouldn't blast at all, far from it, but I do occasionally run into one which I have to heal with the Medicine pool because he's too busy blasting to even heal himself.

... or it might mean he was an Ice Blaster, which get Blizzard as their final power, while the Defender had a Nova or Thunderous Blast and Hasten. Or the Defender had Psychic Blast which, by sheer virtue of being undefended by most opponents, can easily out-damage, say, AR in _some_ missions.

Comparing strictly the damage output tends to favour:

- AOE-heavy builds over one-target high-damage builds (e.g., Fire will inherently top the list, just as it usually does in the Punisher rankings),

- damage-intensive builds over team-oriented utility builds (e.g., Fire beats Ice, and Fire Control beats Gravity Control... even though Gravity has much longer holds that the team can benefit from.)

- berserk builds and play-styles over defense-oriented builds (E.g., until the 30's, a defense-oriented Invuln or Dark Armor scrapper will be out-gunned by everyone else, but can tank even an elite boss without needing a Defender's full-time attention. Conversely it would be very easy to build a purely AOE build with no defense, e.g., Spines/DA taking only Death Shroud and Dark Embrace (because it's mandatory) and top that damage chart, or better yet a Blapper with Combustion, Fire Sword Circle, Blazing Aura and some assorted pool attacks. But you'll need one defender doing nothing but keeping you alive. I.e., one defender which hardly has any time left for the rest of the team, or to do any blasting of his own.)

So basically I'm sure you know how to apply that intelligently, but I'd caution anyone against following such an indicator blindly.

You know, it all sounded like great theory and advice... until I've read the "success" stories.

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I'm not gonna lie, it gets exhausting from time to time. Sometimes people respond better then you do. We tried to to do a Malta mission the other day and got BEAT DOWN HARD. Honestly, I would have [censored] at my people a bit more to try and get them to leave, we thinned out down to 4 because the 5th had to go pick up his roommate. But the remaining group wanted to stay, so I tend to think it was one of those situations I needed to shut the heck up and let things unfold as they will. On the bright side, I educated some people who'd never encountered Malta on the dangers of Sappers. On the downside - we really did get smacked down pretty bad - I don't think anybody left their with less then 200 grand debt.

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And yet apparently it never occured to you to practice what you preach. E.g., get everyone the <bleep> out and reset on a lower difficulty setting. Especially after some people had left and the team was under the number it was instanced for. (Please, please, please, don't tell me that ridiculous outcome was on "Heroic".)

Everyone ending up with 200k+ debt in a level 40-43 mission doesn't strike me as great leadership. And that's already understatement of the century.

I've only once gotten 125k or so in a single mission in that level range, and that was with a leader and a team (well, ok, only half of them were clueless) who had trouble even following simple tactics like "we must kill that one first". That's not a leader I'd ask for leadership advice. That's a leader I made sure to refuse to group with ever since.

And against Malta? Malta? There's a single Sapper per group, even in 8-man teams. You don't even need an empath for that. Just concentrate firepower, and there goes the Sapper. Now there are occasional overlapping groups, roaming patrolls, or the odd ambush just around the corner, so I won't hold it against anyone if a team wipe or two occur. But 200K debt against Malta? At level 40-43 in I6? Geesh.

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In retrospect the only thing I would change to this since I wrote it is to add a directive that emphasizes the value of patience. On freedom, at least, it's damn hard to get a decent defender/controller/tank - I'm constantly popping up the lft-search window, but it's something leaders just need to accept. See directive 2 - the archtypes are important, you're not going to get defense by wishing you had it.

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Yes, archetypes are important, but what's more important is if you know how to use them. A 4-person team should be able to do a non-AV mission, yes, even a Malta one, without 200k debt, even if it's 4 Blasters or 4 Scrappers. In fact, _especially_ a Malta one: if you take out the Sapper first, the Malta become just slightly more than paper tigers.

It will go slower, it will involve more resting, it might need setting the difficulty lower or running to buy a few inspirations, it might even involve a wipe or two or three. But over 200k debt just tells me "utterly clueless."

Or how about doing something else, if you've hit a mission that absolutely can't be done safely without a good defender, controller and tank? Ok, I'll swallow the hypothesis that you might have hit a rare mission configuration where there just were no viable tactics with less than a perfect team. It could happen. So how about doing another mission? Or someone else's mission?

You preach doing your own missions as a way of knowing what risks the team takes. Did you even stop to think that at that point it's obviously too high, and maybe doing someone else's mission instead can't possibly be any worse than that?

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Yeah, sorry but the info in swipe is just funny. Fast? It has the exact same animation time as Slash. I'm not saying slash is better, well yeah I am, but it does have it's faults. But swipe just plain outsucks every other attack in the game.

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Now, now... I'm sure there are other attacks that out-suck Swipe. I just can't think of any Actually, come to think of it, you're right, it does out-suck everything else, _including_ the pools.

E.g., even Flurry's 0.9937 DPS is better than the puny 0.8 DPS of Swipe. Jump Kick would come close enough at 0.8680 but it's still better than Swipe. (And Jump Kick at least can cause knock-up/knock-back.) Kick from the Fighting pool? (A.k.a., the "don't take that one" power.) 1.1666 DPS, or almost 50% better than Swipe. Of course, anyone getting the Fighting pool will take Boxing instead, at 1.7592 DPS, or more than _twice_ the DPS of Swipe.

All DPS relative to the Brawl Index, of course. The numbers for Swipe are taken from the Character Builder, which lists only 2.43 seconds as its activation time. Going by the 3 seconds everyone else seems to assume, Swipe would be even worse.

All the other numbers are taken from this thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...part=1#4120067

The numbers in the Character Builder would make the pools actually look even better compared to Swipe.

Geesh, I shudder to think that someone would read this thinking it's some expert guide and ending up with Swipe.

Awesome article. Just one personal opinion to add, though: for anyone who intends to seriously RP a character, weaknesses or deffects can help a lot. Yeah, I know it's already in the list as the second half of #11 and partially #12, but IMHO it deserves a lot more attention.

See, everyone can come up with a story where they're a deity, can do everything better than anyone else, can outrun bullets, can out-fly planes, etc. That's so common, it's boring. That's what 99% of the MUD and MMO population comes up with. (Or would come with, if you forced them to RP.)

The weaknesses can IMHO actually be more important to RP than strengths. Everyone has strengths. What stands out of the crowd is admitting or RP-ing a weakness or deffect. That's something your average Joe Munchkin doesn't do.

Even in printed stories/comics, think about it. What makes Super-Man exciting or even possible/palatable at all? Yep, kriptonite. You couldn't have any suspense if the guy had no weakness whatsoever. Achiles's Heel. Samson's Hair. Every single good super-abilities story gets its suspense from also having a weakness to match.

It doesn't have to mean a weak character. The character can still be min-maxed to heck and back, but

1. even if by virtue of the archetype limitations, you can't possibly do everything. Those things you can't do, can be more worth roleplaying than those you do.

2. There are a plethora of possible personality deffects that are outside what's modelled by the archetype. E.g., a troll character could be of limited intellect or education. E.g., someone could have delusions of being something they aren't, such as the prophet of some non-existent deity, or the one knowing about some imaginary conspiracy. (That skull cap could be a tin-foil cap, quite literally.)

For that matter, anyone looking seriously into playing a COV villain could have a good excuse to play a psychopath. Typically criminals score pretty high on the antisocial personality disorder criteria: the average score in prisons is IIRC 22, while average people are around 5. So for a villain starting in the Zig, it's just begging to be used.

BTW, no, it doesn't mean axe-murderer. It's a pretty fascinating mental deffect. It can just as well produce a ruthless politician, or a CEO, or various other positions of power. Psychopathy is, in a nutshell, mainly about having zero empathy or remorse, and being able to rationalize any deed, no matter how bad or evil. (Psychopaths have been known to argue with a straight face even that mass-murder or child [censored] are victimless crimes, and there was no harm done. Or that it was for some greater good: look no further than the Third Reich for a few examples.) This complete lack of empathy or remorse makes a psychopath not only well suited to kill or torture someone for their own enjoyment, but also awesomely effective in power games, manipulation, intrigue, etc.

All, of course, just IMHO.

Actually, that doesn't seem to do justice to Vlad's madness. And, no, even by the standards of that time, it was way over the top, and shocked most other European courts. (And those were no saints either.)

1. The _only_ chroniclers who wrote good of him were those in his own employ. You know, the equivalent of Mussolini's own newspaper writing good stuff about Il Duce. So saying that inside his own country he was a hero for his random executions and taking his own population into slavery... that's not quite proven. And considering how his reign ended, quite unbelievable.

2. I've mentioned taking his own population into slavery. Yes, the guy raided Tirgoviste, his capital city, and from the large mass of prisoners (defenseless civilians) taken he _killed_ the women, children and elderly. Then took the rest on a mountain top and made them work on a fortress. He told them that if it's not ready in a couple of weeks, he impales them all. It was ready by the deadline.

3. Vlad held court banquets in the middle of a small forest of impaled people, ranging from already rotting corpses to still screaming. One noble looked a bit sick from the horrid stench, so Vlad ordered him impaled too. He reckoned that on top of a stake he'd have more fresh air.

4. Social security during Vlad's reign: he announced a big meal for the beggars and crippled (no shortage of those with all the warring). Then he shut the doors and set the building on fire.

5. Two travelling monks got asked by Vlad if he's right in doing the massacres he does. One monk was smart enough to basically say that a ruler has the god-given right to do whatever he damn pleases. The second tried to diplomatically preach christian mercy and love for thy neighbour. The second got promptly impaled.

6. For that matter, the guy loved impaling ambassadors and emissaries on a whim. That's what made him hugely unpopular with the other European royal courts.

7. To get the throne (which at the time involved giving huge gifts and bribes to the Turkish court) he incurred a lot of debt to rich merchants and bankers. So at the start of his reign, he invited them to the court to repay them. You can guess where that led. Hint: wooden stakes. Lots of wooden stakes.

8. He went and besieged the rich trade city of Brasov, partially still because of those debts AFAIK. He couldn't take the city itself, but vented his frustration by impaling all defenseless peasants he could find on a wide radius around it.

9. He terrorized his own army, by impaling any soldier with a wound in the back, reckoning that they must have been cowards and ran from the enemy. The thought that in a wild and wooly melee, with flanking, encirclements people don't just stand neatly aligned front-to-front didn't occur to him.

10. One story typical of his regime is: while travelling he saw a peasant with a torn shirt. Vlad reckoned that the peasant's wife is lazy, so the sick woman got promptly seized by Vlad's troops and impaled.

And now for the end of his reign. It wasn't as much the Turks as his own country which revolted against him. Just shows how much of a "hero" he was inside his own borders.

An army led by Matthias Corvin of Hungary went to his aid, on account that the madman did keep the Turks away from Hungary. Upon hearing the long list of horrors that Vlad had done, Matthias changed his mind and imprisoned Vlad.

Some time later Matthias and Stephen The Great of Moldavia are having big trouble with the Turks again, so they aggree to put Vlad back on the Wallachian throne. For better or worse, the madman had proved extremely effective at fighting those. So the armies of Hungary and Moldavia march south, dispose of Radu, and put Vlad back on the throne.

Precisely because they knew that Vlad is _hated_ by his own population, he gets a company of elite Moldavian veterans to serve as his personal bodyguard. The madman however takes offense to being guarded by foreign soldiers, so he stages a night ambush (his favourite tactic against the Turks too) and kills them all.

Without them, a very short while later Vlad is killed by a Stalker... err... an assassin.