NightshadeLegree

Play Villains. The contacts are more interesting and the arc stories are better, and the mayhem missions (where you rob a bank) are an absolute blast.

Perhaps the OP will enjoy the game more if it provides an experience closer to WoW

Remove Sprint from your power bar.

NO jumping. If your way is blocked by a 5 foot high fence you must run around it.

Do not use any temp travel powers, or pick any travel powers.

Don't slot enhancements in your powers. Fighting more than one even con enemy at a time should be a challenge that as often as not results in your death.

Do every hunt mission possible. In fact if you're asked to defeat 10 Hellions defeat 15, to reflect that not every one of them would drop the item you need to collect from them.



Edit: Lightfoot beat me to it on the drops and the dangers of multiple enemies...

No. There aren't enough maps in the regular game. Adding to those would be a far better use of Dev resources. MA has had more than enough time spent on it already.

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Make the interior of the AE building its own zone - like Pocket D. That would clean up the broadcast spam and eliminates the lag.

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I prefer something like clicking energy blast if you want kd, but shift-clicking the power if you want kb. Knockback enhancement can still enhance knockback distance if you shift-click.

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Not useful if you use the number keys to activate powers.

KB is one of the most characterful effects in the game, and it doesn't need to be 'fixed.' If AoE users can't kill a spawn unless every enemy is in exactly the right position then they need to dial down their difficulty, and if Tankers get upset by KB messing up their herds that only reinforces the stereotype of Tankers as insecure control freaks who expect the entire team to revolve around them.

I don't mind it too much. It's very satisfying to use Focus to take down a runner

I seem to recall that enemies are more likely to run if you debuff them. I know my /Poison MM spent a lot of time chasing after Longbow Wardens and Ballistas, not to mention the Cyclops EB in one of Sister Airlia's missions who ran for the hills as soon as I opened up with Weaken and Envenom - I don't think he'd taken any damage at that point. Of course, like a typically reckless and overconfident MM, I chased after him, and what should have been a perfectly straightforward fight turned into a chaotic free for all as I aggro'd half the map before I caught up with him

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The Mission Teleporter (and all of your other powers) also instantly recharge when you switch builds. So if there's a convenient Trainer, it's only a 15min timer, not 2hr.

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Now people will start asking for a Teleport to Trainer power

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I've done it to avoid out-levelling Marshall Brass before I got to his second story arc. Yes, I've dropped Oro Portals at the BM for other people if they ask, but personally I like to earn the power and Echo Down The Aeons is the only pre-40 redside mission that gives it.

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Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Meaning if AE wasn't having a negative effect on teaming there would be no need for this thread to exist.

AE is still a problem. The anecdotal evidence of a handful of forum goers doesn't change that fact.

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Or a thugs/thugs.

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Only if the personal attacks were Quad Pistols.

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Also, waiting patiently for new MM set that has mini-MMs as pets. Killing by proxy of your pet's pet (and the tier 3 could have a pet-summoning pet of its own), sounds confusing, and like a chaotic mess. Just what I want to annoy teammates with.

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Each pet should also have Gang War.

I've been running Indigo's arc, and that's giving me a much more concentrated dose of Malta than I've had on villainside.

I like them. They're what a high level enemy group should be like.

Now I'm wondering what it would be like to run an 8 man team set to Invincible against them. After a few full team sized spawns full of sappers and engineers (and their blasted turrets) you'd know you'd been in a fight

Yes, I've been watching The Matrix Reloaded again

I realise that the redraw issues alone are enough to ensure it never happens, let alone the fact that 36 attack powers might be considered overkill, even for a scrapper...

...but it would be really cool

Every time I try to speak in the Help channel I get a message like this in global

Usage.h takes 0 args, you gave 7
show help window
h

Does anyone have any idea what this means?

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Terra? Well, she doesn't have any particularly special attacks beyond those of any other Greater Devoured, so if your Scrapper happens to have a surplus of Smashing Resistance on top of some defense, you should be able to do quite well.

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/SR, so my only resistance is what I get from Tough. I went into the fight with some lucks, and then when the hits she did get in took me down to about 1/3 health I hit Elude, and by the time that wore off my health bar was full again, and I took some more lucks.

Sadly the Psychic Clockwork King in the next mission put a swift end to my dreams of being a big bad AV soloer

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As for the one level advantage, it increases your base tohit to 80% and gives all of your powers a 11% boost in effectiveness, lowers the mob's tohit by 10% giving you an effective 10% more defense while simultaneously reducing the effectiveness of their powers by 10%.

Is a 21% swing in effectiveness going to make a significant difference?

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Maybe a bit

Thanks for the explanation. I'm not good at number crunching so that kind of analysis isn't something I could do.

Bots/FF is not too exciting. You won't die often, but you don't have any debuffs and it will seem like the bots take forever to take down certain opponents.

I'd recommend a Thugs/Poison Mastermind. The Thugs do good damage, you have some excellent debuffs and a single target heal, and you get dual pistols, which not only look cool as heck, but also do a decent bit of damage pre-20 or so.

Usually I keep my diff at 4, so I'm fighting EBs rather than AVs, but there have been two exceptions - Johnny Sonata's Soul on my MM, and Terra on my Scrapper.

In both cases I'd levelled up during the mission before I fought them, so I did have a 1 level advantage. So my questions are:

Does that 1 level make that much of a difference?

And are these two particular AVs uncharacteristically weak/easy?

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When in doubt eat more lucks. Of course there was the time my 45 storm/dark was trying to solo the Psi clock king EB and he killed me 8 times in a row, the last time with 7 lucks before I could even finish dropping my initial debuffs on him. Sometimes you're just cursed.

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The Psychic Clockwork King is a scary EB. My Claws/SR took him down by pushing his tohit down to 5% (toggles, elude and lucks) and attacking him in a frenzy, praying that he wouldn't get a lucky hit with Psychic Wail, since I knew from previous attempts that if he hit me with that it was game over.

An ocassionally effective tactic I've used on tricky EBs (like Positron) is to carry a wakie and make sure that I'm out of aggro range when he kills me. EBs don't regen nearly as fast as AVs, and if you can get back in the fight quick enough they're already weakened from your first attempt. Not very dignified, but it does work. Sometimes.

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I'm only 6 months in. I do like my trenchcoats.

...but every time I see someone with the little Mekman pet I get jealous. It's just too cute

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This game is great

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Yes it is, and isn't that a good enough reason to spend a little money?

I used to be very sceptical of the idea of a monthly subscription to any game - I'd played a couple of free-to-play MMOs and... well, they were fun, but nothing I'd spend money on. Then I tried CoH.

At the worst possible time, in retrospect. I didn't have a lot of free time that fortnight to spend on it and never really got past level 10 or so. Even so, there was enough in that 2 weeks to bring me back - exploring all over Mercy (I spent a lot of time climbing around the roofs, don't know why... just felt like the thing to do), my first sewer team (I remember being sooo impressed seeing an energy blaster using an AoE on a big group of enemies) and the Rikti invasion of Kings Row.

That was really what brought me back. I figured any game that would, seemingly at random, turn the sky green and flood a zone with alien invaders was a game that would hold my interest.

It's worth it. If you enjoy the low levels of a trial account you're sure to enjoy the higher levels. It only gets better.

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Scary flashbacks of my SR scrap's 1st excursion to the Shadow Shard have begun.

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If nothing else it's a very good way of demonstrating how good /SR normally is.

I remember reading another thread about Rularuu a while back and up to then I'd only encountered them with my MM, who had shot them to bits without too much trouble. It's good that cannon fodder for one AT or powerset can be deadly to another.

Weren't there Rularuu invasions of Paragon City at one time? I can imagine they'd be much deadlier than a Rikti attack...

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Devouring Earth Quartz emanators also give a +100% tohit buff to nearby DE.

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That makes sense. I remember diving into a group of DE and thinking "Wha... they're actually hitting me!" Then I read the description on the Quartz emanators, which then went straight to the top of my First-To-Die list.

In a way it's quite exhilarating to suddenly encounter something that actually poses a threat, after so half a dozen levels or so of shredding every enemy I meet.

Haven't tried her on Malta yet, though

I don't usually look at the combat tab, but ocassionally something happens that's so unexpected I have to scroll back and see what just happened.

So on my first excursion into the Shadow Shard, at level 42, after a surprise defeat, I see this...

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Overseer HITS! Chomp power had an 88.82% chance to hit...

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Just to explain, I was on an /SR scrapper, with all the passives, and the 3 toggles, and Weave... and Elude.

So um... these guys are quite accurate, yes?

I haven't been this shocked by a first encounter with a new enemy group since my MM stepped off the ferry in Sharkhead and thought "Demolitionists, eh? They don't look that dangerous..."

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This assumption is not restricted to AE.

A week or two ago I felt like teaming, so I hit broadcast and got a team together. As it happens the first mission I had lined up was "Rob the Mercy Bank", and I mentioned that in broadcast to let people know I wasn't forming an AE team.

Everything was going great until someone grabbed the money. Suddenly team chat looks like this:

Player 1: Oh no, someone grabbed the money!
Player 2: Exit quick!
Me: What?
Player 1: Don't kill the guards!
Me: But...

Several of the team run for the exit, and the rest of us are taken out by the now overwhelming security. Once everyone is either outside or faceplanted...

Player 3: What happened?
Player 1: Someone grabbed the money. We'd have completed the mission if we defeated the guards.
Me: Um... I wasn't planning on farming it...
Player 1: Really?
Me: No.
Player 1: Why not?

On reflection I realise that the Mercy Bank is a very popular levelling tool for lowbies, but at no point during recruitment or during the mission itself did I, or anyone else, use the word Farm. Having to explain and justify why I wasn't farming it was something I could have done without.

So it's not just an AE problem. It's just more pervasive in AE.

Stalkers solo very well indeed, and Hide takes a lot of the risk out of traversing high level zones to the next mission. In a way they are a closer match to blasters than corruptors are - high damage, but can get in trouble if they don't put down their opponents fast. The first villain I took past level 10 or so was a stalker.