Mystic_Cross

True for /Thermal, it doesn't get anything you can use solo until level 35 (aside from the heal Pbaoe that is). /Pain gets Soothing Aura at 20 and World of Pain at 28, both of which can help soloing (and teaming) significantly. Pain also has a few self +dmg and +rech and +recovery buffs as a side effect of healing/rezzing teammates, which works well with DP.

^^This I can agree with.

I'll start here, not necessarily something to start working on the second you get into the game, but we have what are called Accolades, or Accolade Powers, which are basically powers you can use that are earned from aquiring a certain group of badges.

Most of the badges require some combination of defeating specific enemies or enemy groups, reading certain plaques in the zones, and visiting badge markers in the zones... some also require completing a specific mission at a given level range from some contact or another. Defeat badges, for killing a number of enemies, can range from kill 100 to kill 1000... in some cases you may not encounter enough of an enemy in your arcs unless you're aware of which enemies you need and you purposely select contacts that put you against that enemy group. I remember needing to 'streetsweep' for enemies 20 and 30 levels below me at one point in order to get their defeat badges.

Here's a link to the paragon wiki covering details of the Hero and Villain Accolades:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Accolade_Powers

If the regular price for 5 slots is $19.99, as someone said above, then the in-game store is showing the discounted price, at least for that one. That sucks, Like others here I thought that $9.99 was regular price and I was getting them for $4.99... I bought 10 slots so far, and was considering getting another 5 tomorrow before the "sale" ends...

It's Currently showing 5 slots for $9.99, 2 slots for $4.99 and 1 slot for $2.99 for me when I enter the store or click on "buy additional slots".

I'll deviate a little and suggest a Kinetic Melee/Dark Armor stalker. Plenty of mitigation/control paired with a top notch self-heal makes survivability very good. Great ST damage and a PBAoE thats up rather often (you can always fill out your AoEs with epic or patron powers) and concentrated strike gives build up an instant recharge when it crits... (I believe one of the recent patches also fixed CS so it always crits from hide, anyone else read that?)

Kin. Melee is flashy too, not your typical Brawl animations here ... and DA has some flare of its own, IMO. Aside from flashiness, I think there's some pretty good synergy going on between the sets. DA is also a bit less endurance heavy on stalkers due to missing death shroud and cloak of darkness (0.52 and 0.26 end/sec, respectively) Though you'll still need to pay attention to your end slotting. DA has no inherent KB protection, but a few -KB IOs will shore up that weakness in short order.

Agreed.

The trials are pretty cool and all, but I don't wanna have to be on gargantuan teams all the time just to make reasonable progress with incarnates.

A new zone sounds interesting. If it happens to be GR-only, well, I can't say I'd be upset either way.

EDIT: almost forgot, HAPPY 7th ANNIVERSARY!!

try C:\Program Files (x86)\City of Heroes\screenshots

other than that, Steam is wierd taking screenshots with some games. You need to click "View" then go down to "Screenshots" at the top of the steam window, that will open your Steam screenshot manager. You'll be able to select a specific game or just pull from your last session with a dropdown box. once you're at the screenshots for the game you want, select one of the shots and click "Show on Disk" at the bottom of the manager window, this should open the folder where those images are.

Unfortunately I can't give you the exact folder tree because it's assigned by steam and would be something like "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\63858867\760\remote\550\scree nshots" depending on the game and system I'd imagine, but the above should get you there.

Also worth noting, Steam doesn't make use of "Print Screen" in my experience, it uses F12 to take screenshots. Hope that all helps.

lulz...

is that near atlas park?

*cackles*

I personally tend to build most of my alts for versatility in some degree, as well as for specialization. If I can't attain both in any appreciable amount through my efforts, then I'll typically make use of the multiple builds system to attain my goals. A fair example of this would be my "main" and forum namesake, Mystic Cross, an Invuln/Energy/Energy tanker. Her first build is to handle most situations with ease, and is very good "all-around" against virtually everything. In this build I use the Fighting/Speed/Leaping power pools. The rundown of highlights in the first build looks something like:

Resistances: 88% S/L, 32% F/C/E, 34% Neg., 31% Tox. ,46% Psi. (add 3% to all if I ever get the PvP resist unique)

Defence with saturated Invinc.: 42.4% to S/L/F/C/E/N (28.1% with 1 in range). 21.9% to psi and 12.5% positional. (+3% if I ever get the PvP defence unique)

3534 HP (capped) and 37HP/s regen with Dull Pain (2389/25 without).

Max End. is 119, Recovery is 3.21 end/s, 1.03 usage from toggles (1.56 with focused acc. running, but I've also got conserve power and 2 Perf. Shifter procs). I typically reserve FA for facing heavy -tohit enemies.


For slotted enhancement values, all attacks have ED-capped damage and 60-65% Acc/Endred/Rech, I've also got +53% Acc. from set bonuses and another +20% from FA so there are no troubles hitting anything of any level that I've found. Resistance toggles have Ed-capped resist and 60-70% Endred/Rech.
I went with the Spiritual alpha since she can use bonuses from (nearly) the entire radial tree (+rech, +stun, +heal, +jump and +tohit buff.) the only unused portion of spiritual radial paragon is slow movement. This also makes it so I actually use conserve power, plus all my attacks and toggles get Ed-capped recharge. add in an extra 33% global recharge from sets and then Hasten, which is dow for approx. 19 sec.

In this case, while not a particularly "versatile" power combo in the sense that it has a large amount of options to employ, it does what it's intended to do in nearly any situation and was built with the intent to increase the effectiveness of every available option as much as possible and somewhat equally. I was even able to add funcionality that wasn't previously there and in a very effective way, considering that the prior non-exhistant psi resists are now higher than resistances provided within the primary for F/C/E/N/T.

My 2nd build is similar, but softcapped with 1 in range of invincibility, 30% ranged def., capped S/L resist (woohoo another 2% resist! ) about 35% resist to F/C/E/N/Tox.

This was basically my thought process, balance, and given the wide range of what we can improve, it can be difficult to find that balance. What you've said in these two paragraphs basically defines what I think of as "versatility" in that being versatile means you don't really excel at one thing or another, but you're moderately capable at everything you can do. Like a jack of all trades, you can do a number of things equally well, whereas a specialist can do one or two things far better than you could. having a large number of options is being diverse, and while it also adds more versatility, it doesn't necessarily make that versatility a good thing... Khelds can be a prime example of this, lots of ability, diverse array of powers... but not enough slots to improve them all. They CAN be great, with the right choices and balance of their abilities, but they're not all great simply because they have a large number of options.

playing to all of your strengths or abilities equally (or almost equally) is also versatile, even if you have only a small slew of abilities or strengths. True versatility comes not in the amount of abilities you have, but in your capacity to use those abilities to tackle a large number of different situations, at least, that's what I think of it.

It was on Beta server for a limited time tonight (3pm-8pm EST). It will be back on again Friday and Saturday (3pm-11pm EST) according to a post by Avatea.

I have a total of 17 villains on Protector, so I won't list them all... as for ones close to your level theres Synthrill (8), Wynx (13) and Atrumera (15) on my main account. Then I've got Mindlight (12) or Silent Fang (14) on my second account.

Wow, Is that "Flambeaux" 2nd from the left? Looks just like her...(going off of what I call memory)

I'd guess that the difference in an already ED capped power wouldn't be too noticeable. However, It would be difficult for me to know since I don't have the alpha slotted yet, and I only got around to slotting the common boost on 1 alt during the test phase. So far I've just been busy with respecs on live, once I'm done with those I'll be able to focus more on slotting the Alpha.

You are correct, 1/3 of uncommon boosts ignore ED. Zem was referring to the common alpha boosts... probably missed where you said uncommon