NightshadeLegree

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I like the lower level game and frequently lose interest in my characters in the second half of the game. I have 3 characters above 30, all of whom can solo comfortably against almost anything on diff 4 or (excluding AVs) 5. I have seldom been so bored with a character as I was with my claws/SR scrapper once she hit 35 or so, since every mission was simply a case of charging the nearest group of enemies and cycling her attack chain until they died, then charging the next group of enemies and so on until the mission completed.

On the other hand, entering the Hollows at level 5 or 6, and doing all 4 contact's arcs with the same character, with no travel powers - I didn't even pick up the raptor pack - and walking out at the end at level 15 - that was some of the most fun I've had on heroside.

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Speed - Increased Global Recharge 15% (auto power) available at level 20

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A level 20 pool power that gives the same recharge boost as not one but two Luck of the Gambler: Global Recharge...

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Stamina - Recovery 20% - available level 14

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...and Stamina available 6 levels earlier.

/No.

Stamina is a very useful power, but I think a lot of the people who want it sooner need to slot some endred DOs and stop trying to play their pre-20 characters like they would an IO'd up 50, and the OP, like most Stamina related suggestions, is stupidly overpowered.

My Bots/FF has been sitting at level 25 for a couple of weeks now. I know the Assault Bot is only half a level away, but I'm used to Thugs/Poison, where if any target lasts more than 10 seconds you know it's an EB.

By comparison the time it takes my Bots to kill anything is just mind numbing.

The problem isn't when a build is sub-optimal. It's when a build is out and out bad, and the character is performing way below their potential.

The Thugs/Poison I described... we were fighting purple conning Paragon Protector Elites. Nightshade, at that time, was still an all SO build (I didn't start playing around with IOs until very late) so I'm not claiming to be a powerhouse, but who do you think was contributing more to the team - me with Envenom, Weaken, Paralytic Poison and Noxious Gas? Or him, with Dual Wield and Empty Clips?

I don't consider myself a build snob, but, especially on a small team, a couple of team members like that can make any mission a lot harder than it should be, and the next time I saw that person in broadcast putting another team together I... well I decided I was in a soloing mood that evening.

Villains: Ghost Widow. I love the look of the character, and her guest appearance in Seer Marino's arc left me feeling a bit star struck.

What can I say... I was only level 17 or so at the time

Also, although I have many favourite powers, Soul Storm is the best of the best - the pose you go into after casting it is the very definition of cool.

Heroes: Fusionette! No, really. She's incredibly annoying as an ally of course, but you know she means well.

When Going Rogue is released he plans to reroll as a Dual Pistols Corruptor.

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It wasn't published by Cryptic. It's Prima that published it. And man oh man oh man is it bad. By 25 Gloom is six slotted, but the pets are just slotted with one ACC. I'm having trouble seeing how the build would survive.

As I understand it, the CoH strat guide as of issue 6 still said that scrappers don't need to take or slot defenses due to not being hit (tanker gets hit instead) and tankers don't need attacks since their job isn't damage but to be hit.

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It sounds like an unintentionally hilarious read, but... could be an idea for a fun supergroup - wherein all characters must adhere exactly to the guide for power selection and slotting. Get 8 of them to 35 then try and do the ITF, on Invincible naturally

Plus, if it was an all-female SG you could call them The Prima Donnas...

Full pet customisation can't happen, because if it did then MMs would become so awesome that noone would ever play any other AT again

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The sample build doesn't have you pick up enchant undead until level 32, and has you wait till level 35 ro get the second pet buff. It also has you NOT slot anything besides a single acc in the pets.

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That's... that's... well, words fail me.

Presumably this is a relic of the days when the design philosophy was that 3 minions or 1 lieutenant should be the equal of a single villain.

Or proof that the Devs have always hated villains

My first serious attempt to level up a hero went via Atlas > The Hollows > Synapse TF > Midnighters > Striga TF (the Kheldian one) > Croatoa/KHTF > RWZ > Cimerora, so I was in the high 30s by the time I actually ran any of the older contact arcs. The difference (I'd played mainly villainside up to then) is very noticeable.

TeChameleon pretty much sums it up - in my experience most of the arcs seem to be one enemy group over and over and over again. I found The Terra Conspiracy exhausting (may be a matter of taste - personally I find Devouring Earth extremely boring to fight) and The Praetorian War is similarly repetitive, though it has a few good moments buried in among all the Defeat Alls.

As an aside, I can't help but feel that the Praetorian arcs in particular really need to be redone in anticipation of Going Rogue.

Indigo's arc - if you can handle Malta - is pretty good, and I'm looking forward to doing World Wide Red. Generally though the hero side arcs are longer and the individual missions less eventful than the villain side arcs.

I will recommend the Midnighter arcs from Mercedes Sheldon. I haven't done her third arc so can't comment on that one, but Dirge of Chaos is fun, and The Magic Man is exceptional, with an utterly brilliant final mission.

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Please tell me he'd taken the pets and buffs at least...

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Yes, thankfully.

I had one possible insight into his playstyle. When I was setting the mission he said I should lower my difficulty, which was set to Relentless. I do wonder what went through his mind when the team entered the first mission and he saw a hallway full of Red Crey Power Tanks and Purple Paragon Protector Elites

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That sounds like my very first MM, a 'Bots/Trick Arrow, I made it up to ... 27, I think. Think it was all attacks, all bots, all fitness pool, and ONE arrow attack. Yes, even 'Repair'! I was young and DEEPLY dumb then ... a year ago. At least I can admit it, though. lol

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Well I think everyone has made some odd power choices - on my first Stalker I skipped Build Up and Placate... As far as MMs go my first ever post in this forum was entitled something like "Is Bodyguard Mode Overrated?" because I couldn't get my head around the way it worked. Learning, from the replies I got, how to use BG with Provoke was game changing for me, along with reading Poison Pill's Thugs/Poison Guide.

I was around level 20 at the time. I dread to think of how slow and frustrating it would have been to crawl through the second half of the game without knowing these things.

I remember forming a team in the high 40s which included another Thugs/Poison. Since that's one of the few powersets I know well I took a look at his powers, which included all 3 of the pistol attacks, Alkaloid but nothing else from his secondary, the two attacks from the fighting pool (but not Tough or Weave) and the entire medicine pool.

How he'd got to 47 I don't know. I can only imagine he teamed a lot. This was pre-AE.

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Again, I'm simply tired of building a "super-hero" who, regardless of how much care and time I put into him, is in no way comparable to any of the villains he fights. I'm tired of it.

Are we building superhumans or not? Seriously... 'cause it strikes me that, given everyone we interact with in the game, we're average at best.

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I agree, believe it or not. But I find this problem is best exmeplified by minions, lieutenants and boses rahter than archvillains. While archvillains should represent the absolute cream of the crop - the most skilled and dangerous beings on the planet - minions should be, well, exactly what it says on the tin. Superman, and the Silver Surfer do NOT quake wiht fear and choose a different story arc because some guys with special forces training show up, no matter how tricked out their hand guns are.

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Neither Superman nor the Silver Surfer are examples of the sort of power levels characters in this game should be able to attain.

To those who feel average I'll say that's because you are. It's called City of Heroes, plural. The Heroes in this game aren't earthbound gods - they're cops with capes. On a busy night in AP you'll see more heroes on the streets than you'll see in any Marvel or DC story outwith the most bloated crossover event. I don't care what your back story claims - you are NOT that special.

As for not doing a mission because you're scared of Malta - neither my Scrapper nor my MM shy away from them. In fact I like them, because unlike most other high level enemy groups they present a reasonable challenge to those characters.

I'm a big believer in making content soloable, but not every AT and powerset combination should be able to solo Malta missions on the higher difficulty settings and I see no reason to weaken one of the few genuinely dangerous enemy groups in the high level game just to stroke the ego of people trying to solo them on characters that aren't built for that.

Invincible/Relentless is overrated anyway. I prefer to play on diff 4 (or 2 in the lower levels) - no unbeatable AVs, and the spawns are a bit more varied than the 3 minions or 1 lt and 1 minion that make up the vast majority of the spawns on diffs 1, 3 and 5.

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I remember there wa a sugestion some time ago that, while it has obvious logistical prolems, was quite interesting in principal, to add a significant number of underling class mobs to any given encounter to allow the player that feeling of fighting their way through whole armies of mooks, casualy obliterating them,a nd/or laughing off their puny attacks.

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I hate this idea. Hordes of underlings would be an irrelevancy to anyone with an AoE or two, and an irritation to anyone with mainly single target powers.

Besides, the minions of most enemy groups can be casually swept aside. If my scrapper focuses all of her attacks on the boss just firing off Spin and/or Shockwave a few times will ensure that by the time the boss goes down the minions around her are either defeated or close to it.

The RWZ AE does feel out of place, but the zone is big enough, and built up enough, that it doesn't stand out as much. There are others I'd sooner see gone...

Nerva: I haven't spent much time in Nerva recently, so I've only just noticed how massively out of scale the AE building is - at least twice the height of any of the buildings around it, and with a much larger footprint.

Faultline: Again, out of scale, especially if viewed from the air, and it's not like Faultline is a hub zone in any case.

Cap Au Diable: I like Cap, and since my characters often take their travel powers late, if at all, I often make my way through Aeon City on foot. The AE building make that both less interesting - since the drones around the AE create another safe zone - and more difficult - since the lag around the Cap AE is often worse than anywhere else in the world, even more so than WW or the BM, which is saying something.

My suggestion would be to put some terminals, but not a teleport beam, in Pocket D, so players can work on their arcs without being disturbed (well, except on Virtue, I guess) and keep one, or two at most, in the world. With auto-sking it's not like AE is in any way level specific anyway, so there's no need to have them in all zones.

I find most of the music in Sharkhead as offensive to my ears as the scenery of the zone is to my eyes... but Sharkhead's supposed to be a horrible industrial hellhole, so I guess it fits.

My favourites would be the music that plays during bank heist missions and the music as you walk into Spider City - that was a big moment for me when I got Nightshade to 40, and the big dramatic soundtrack, combined with the awesome look of Grandville, really had me thinking alright, I'm in the big leagues now.

Also, the sombre version of the Atlas Park theme you hear around the Longbow base in Bloody Bay is very effective.

/signed.

I respec'd Nightshade a month or two ago to switch a couple of powers around. After an hour I'd almost finished reslotting my enhancements when I noticed a taunt enhancement and I had nowhere to put it, because I'd forgotten to pick up Provoke, although that wasn't a power I'd been planning to drop.

/me facepalm

So all the way back to the beginning again...

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If you want to go toe to toe with a signature character set your diff to level 4 and solo it.

Most of the Team vs AV fights I've been involved in have been extremely one sided, especially at the higher levels. The number of buffs and debuffs, and the sheer firepower a team can aim at a single opponent means that unless you're very unlucky, or the AV gets the drop on you before you're ready, you'll win. Make those AVs into EBs and we'd smack them aside so fast they'd lose all credibility.

It's a game mechanic to create some level of challenge to a team. I'd like to see the Strike Force AVs scale down to EBs, but only so I could try soloing them

I'm curious as to what everyone thinks is THE best soloing combo of AT and powerset in the game. By best I mean:

<ul type="square">Good from level 1 onwards.

Well balanced - so none that are, say, very survivable but not very hard hitting until late on (Bots/FF I'm looking at you when I say that...)

Not dependant on an IO build - good with only TOs/DOs and eventually SOs.[/list]So, what do you think?

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Confuse tends to be the Achilles' heel of otherwise highly mez resistant enemies. Very handy against certain Arachnos bosses and lieutenants in particular.

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QFT.

While playing my first ever dominator - mind/fire - I almost lost all confidence in the AT when I saw how useless my controls were against a Fortunata. I hadn't really used Confuse, up until then

Nay.

The holodeck addicts need at least a couple of reasons to venture out into the wider world.

Check your contacts window. Do you have the newspaper? If so, click on it to get started on your newspaper missions. Complete 3 of them to get a Mayhem, then complete that to get a new contact from the broker (and it sounds like Mikey is your broker after all.)

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Mikey the Ear told me to find the broker. Where is he in port Oakes? How do I get newspaper missions? Did I literally choose them from a newspaper or is it automatic like my other missions?

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If Mikey sent you away that means Drea the Hook is your broker. He's marked on the map, in dockside.

Once you speak to him you'll get a new option in your contact tab - the newspaper. Open it up to be given a choice of missions.

Doctor Creed is the most outright villainous of the contacts in Mercy, so I'd advise you to move on to Port Oakes. Of that zone's contacts I'd say Billy Heck or Angelo Vendetti will allow you to keep a clean-ish conscience.

Later on I'd steer well clear of Peter Themari or Westin Phipps in particular, if I were you

Yes, when I go back to my Fire/Therm (powerset choice dictated by concept, as usual) I'll definately be doing a second build. Although I do team, I just don't feel comfortable with any character who can't solo at a reasonable level.

Of course I'll have to remind myself to switch builds when I do accept a team invite. I'd hate to be one of those characters who inexplicably doesn't bring their support powers to the team

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You build your hero villian as you want and can choose to not get your self buffs, but no AT or powersets bar any hero or villian from self buffing powers.

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I'd imagine the OP is talking about certain powersets such as /Thermal where you can buff and shield your teammates but are unable to do the same to yourself.

This makes certain sets extremely unattractive to soloers. I have a Fire/Therm corruptor, and of the first 5* powers in his secondary exactly ONE of them, the tier 1, is usable if I'm not in a team due to the "Cannot Target Self" rule.

*I can't speak for the latter 4 powers, as I've yet to level up that far.