Night_Club

Some good ideas, especially the IO stuff. I haven't played my Bots/Dark much since I9, but I have to mention the awesomeness that is Fearsome Stare. Maybe I missed it, but your build seems to do without. If that works for you, good deal, but everyone using this guide should at least try FS imho. : )

Even better, how about Weird Al's "Eat It"? Now THAT would be something, eh?

Well, I guess the vast majority of the silent majority is staying silent on this one. OK, I concede several of the points above and would be happy if DA sounds were quieted down to what most would consider a reasonable level. Just don't wipe them alltogether, please?

Oh, the one point made above that I have a problem with is the migraine allegation. I would posit that playing a video game for 8-10 hours straight, as I know many people do, has more to do with migraines than one set's sound FX. I get the same kind of headache no matter what toon I play if I play for too long, and can play any toon in moderation and feel fine.

Besides the eye strain and lack of real physical activity, nourishment, or lack thereof, can also be a huge culprit. Caffeinated beverages may allow for all night gaming sessions, but they also dehydrate you, causing headaches. Not eating right can do the same thing.

Even further off topic, did anyone else see the CSI (Miami?) where the guy gamed himself to death? Funny stuff, but I suppose it's possible . . . too much Red Bull, apparently . . .

At any rate, please let me squeak at least a little. I feel naked without my squeaking . . . that was an odd statement, wasn't it?

So do the upgrade costume changes randomly vary from summon to summon like the minions themselves, or do they remain the same each time?

Cool name! : )

Haven't tried a Dark Stalker yet, but as someone who's main is a lvl 50 D/D scrapper, I want my DA sounds back! I never found them annoying, just incredibly unique. I didn't mind turning off a few armors to hear glowies. : ) Now I just feel like something's wrong every time the sounds cut off after a few seconds. I think there's a silent majority who LIKES the original DA sounds. Count me as a no-longer-silent DA sound supporter!

_Castle_: Thanks very, very much. This stormer appreciates it!

I love it when people use the words "fair" or "unfair" to describe anything at all in PvP; it's downright comical. You know why? I'll say it again because it bears repeating ... PvP isn't supposed to be fair. Chess is fair. You know why, because everyone starts with the exact same "powers." Is that what you PvPers want? Everyone to be exactly the same? City of ... Clones? Wow, that'd be exciting, wouldn't it?

Again, not an avid PvPer, so if that is what you want for YOUR game, so be it. Just leave MY game alone. I like it the way it is: pinning bosses in corners, getting hella aggro, knocking mobs around, getting mezzed, etc. That's what's fun for me!

So keep your whining to yourself, thank you. We all know that the squeaky wheel gets the oil, but because the oil isn't the easiest thing in the world to deal with, it invariably gets slopped over to the other side of things where it's not wanted or needed. So let's all just keep our mouths shut OK?

I don't care about fair, and I don't care about over-powered. I care about having a good time when I game. That's why I got out of collectible card gaming and came to CoH: I wasn't having fun anymore (see my earlier post if you like).

Again, do what you like with PvP. Just leave my Stormy out of it, please.

To Kidquik: did you actually read all of Stone's post? Your response leaves an awful lot of his points uncontested ...

WARNING: quite possibly my first CoH Forums rant. Ignore if you are so inclined.

Please add me to the list of people who could care less about PvP. Been there, done that enough to know for certain that it's not why I play this game. Fun now and then, but that's not where it's at for me really. If I cared about PvP at all I'd have already posted a ton of rants about how "unfair" force bubble or energy melee stuns, or <insert whatever power you like here> are. But I haven't. I mean complaining about being one-shotted by an assassin strike? Come on! That's why they're called "assassins." Just like hurricanes are called hurricanes for a reason too ...

So to see a PvP change take such a huge chunk of the fun of my playing my PvE-99.7%-of-the-time Storm Defender (who's still far from 50, which is about the only time I PvP with a character, after 50) rely honks me off.

I had just used my 34+ respec to switch from Flight to Teleport so that I could Mist up to a big group of mobs, cast Freezing Rain, shoot Tenebrous Tentacles, summon a Lightning Storm, teleport to the other side of the group, and push them back into the Storm. Good times! I was having a ball with that combo! Trapping a boss in a corner and throwing a tornado at him is good clean fun too! Bully the bully: what could be more super-heroic than that?

There's a reason why my top 4 characters are a tank, a scrapper who likes to tank, a storm defender who also likes to tank, and an MM: it's how I have fun! I do not appreciate PvP changes that severely alter my ability to have fun in PvE.

I haven't played since release without noticing a few things, and since you've indulged me thus far, I'll share some more thoughts ...

The way I see it, MMORPG PvP is just like collectible card gaming (you know, Magic and everything since): people who don't use a particular power/card/combo will always whine about said power/card/combo being overpowered. It doesn't matter that there are a number of ways to beat it. People are people, and over-competitive people don't like to lose ... ever. When they do lose, it's not their fault, it's always somebody else's. It has to be that their opponent used a cheap tactic or got lucky or whatever.

How do I know this? Because I've been there. I'm an overly competitive person myself. I'm playing this game (and largely avoiding PvP) because of it. There was a time when I was a regionally ranked player in a popular-at-the-time collectible card game. I picked the game up quicker than most, got good, won a lot, and kept winning. When I did lose, I told myself that it was because of cheap-tactic A or over-powered-combo B, or whatever. What's funny is that I would swear to avoid using said tactic/combo myself (even though I had the cards to do it) and instead vowed to find a way to beat it.

That's just how I dealt with it. I never once posted a nerf-this rant. It didn't matter how many other people were crying nerf, I considered it my job to figure out how to beat it. My job, not the makers of the game. But that was just me.

A funny thing about PvPing, collectible card gaming, and many other competitions that are completely irrelevent to the real world is that the people who don't get good and win a lot eventually quit and move onto something else, leaving just the "good" players to beat up on each other until the game dies.

To close, please don't kill my beloved Hurricane, at least in PvE. Do what you like with powers in PvP. PvP will never be 100% fair, and even if it was 100% fair, people would still say it wasn't, because in most any competition, there is a loser, and more often than not, the loser does not enjoy losing. This of course leaves only winners who then create more losers, and so on, until there is noone left. "There can be only one" may work for Highlander, but it makes for a lousy player base. I agree with an ealier poster: the future of this game lies not in PvP, but in new content, powersets, rewards, events and, in short, continuing to feel super. And one of my favorite ways to feel super in this game is to push the bad guys around, both figuratively, and in the case of my stormer, literally.

Thanks for your time.

I've been thinking all day about how to add to this thread. It finally came to me:

"But Dad always said our powers are nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special!"

"Everyone's special, Dash."

"Which is another way of saying noone is . . ."