Nocturne_NA

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If your SG/VG has a Pillar of Ice and Flame in the base, run any flashback and you'll get the Entrusted with the Secret badge, as you might expect. A villain of mine missed the one early time travel arc and stumbled upon this while looking at missing mission badges.

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Groups of minions falling? When was this guide made and WHAT has happened to Dark Blast since then?

I can barely kill a minion alone, it takes many, many attacks. Did Dark Blast get a drop in damage... As in about a 90% drop?

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I, too, have no idea what you're playing, but it's not a DDC. Mine's 30 now, with minimal set IO's (mostly common IO 25-30). Solo I do quite well, but on a team she rocks.

But... I want a nut of destruction.

Good guide. This is why CoH continues to hold my attention consistently, even with occasional defections to other games every now and then.

Good overview, mirrors some of my own early experiences with the DDC. She's only level 12 at the moment, but I have a good deal of experience on the other side with my dark/dark defender (lvl 39). Playstyle they are nearly identical, since I take the offender route with my DDD, of course.

I've never liked Dark Pit. Even heavily slotted it seems there are way better tools, and way better uses for those slots, available elsewhere. YMMV I guess.

While my DDD relies heavily on Moonbeam, I'm going to skip it with my DDC, replacing it with Gloom. Why? Scourge. I'd rather have small-to-moderate amounts of damage available more often to take better advantage of Scourge.

Great googlie mooglie, you're killing me man! I have enough alts already without wanting to try out some of your proposed build alternatives. My splattroller is amusing enough, in an "OMGOMG I'm gonna die... oh wait, I won!" kinda way. Gah!

Why would a wookiee play with a Big Red Ball? It does not make sense! Why I am talking about wookiees? That does not make sense! Therefore, we must have a Big Red Ball.

/signed

Well, all of the origins were intended to mean something at some point. That was largely ditched in beta. Now it isn't much more than a roleplaying tool with minor gameplay impact -- initial contacts and missions, location of enhancement shops and type of foes that drop yours, and recently your minor origin power.

I seem to think along similar lines as your guide, Enantiodromos. Good, succinct coverage of what "natural" should entail, without sounding like origin police. It's the sort of thing that the game manual (someone still reads these?) should say.

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Natural is appropriate to every powerset; all of them.

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More or less, I agree to a point.

I think it's easier to handwave some powersets into a Natural origin. I also subscribe to the approach that aliens can be considered Natural.

The key to playing the Natural origin, in my opinion, is the quality of the backstory and its ability to suspend your disbelief. It's harder to suspend that disbelief with certain powersets.

I have a Natural Broadsword/Regen scrapper, with Flight and Fitness pools. No issue with Broadsword. Regen I handwave with an uncanny ability to bounce back and a little psychology to convince one's foe you're more wounded than you really are. Flight -- he just "borrowed" a magic ring of flight from Azuria, security at M.A.G.I. being what it is. Fitness is easy, although you're still able to run at like 27 mph...

My philosophy on Natural origin is probably why I don't have many heroes or villains that use it. Three, if memory serves -- the BS/reg scrapper, a MA/SR scrapper, and a mercs/traps mastermind.

But hey, it's your character. My limitations towards suspension of disbelief need not hold you back.

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The -teleport of the forcefield is nice, but it offers no protection from disorient or hold as people have come to expect from aoe fields. I'm actually fine with that, but if I am required to stay in the itsy bitsy bubble for defense, it needs to also provide protection from knockback and repel.

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I'd seen reports of Telekinesis being able to push a pillbox/bunker occupant out. Clever, I like the tactic, but maybe the forcefield needs to make it a little less trivial -- grant just a little resistance to mezzes and KB, enough to require a modest amount of mag stacking but still entirely feasible.

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Also, while I agree you shouldn't be able to heal turrets, there needs to be some mechanism for them to be repaired. More than once I saw a pillbox taken from a superior group of defenders because the attackers simply ignored the players and attacked the turrets. Yes, they were killed many times while doing it. But they didn't care about debt, and neither will the level 50s on the live servers. As is, the game mechanics allow the attackers to win, but not the defenders.

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Indiscriminate healing of turrets isn't something I can get behind. But, suicide rushes for characters that don't care about debt anymore shouldn't be encouraged. Maybe if turrets could heal a small amount for each foe defeated by them (or just in the area?).

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Also, I noticed you can't view the builds of opposing players.

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If memory serves, you can't view enemy powers in any PvP zone. I think that's a good thing, actually. I do wish that the combat log would list more consistent info. Anything that affects you should list who generated the effect, what it did, and exactly to what effect (hard numbers please).

One of my major gripes with CoX PvP in general is that it isn't conducive to classic comic book battles. Squishies are too squishy and are instantly singled out and defeated in mass combat. The "real" heroes are apparently tankers and scrappers, because they'll be the last ones standing and the squishies' jobs are simply to buff them and maybe, if they're lucky, lock down some opposing squishies. Yes, I know some defender and controller builds are far more durable, but they seem to be the exception. It never feels heroic to me when I'm playing a squishy in PvP.

Regarding blasters... one of my friends was fiddling with a stealthy PvP version of one of his regular blaster characters and noticed an amusing consequence of the one-shot code. Defiance at 1 hp makes for a very nasty surprise. If you can get a shot in before the followup shot lands, of course.

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How about teleporting the turrets of a captured pillbox inside your own base, making it impossible for the opposing side to "defeat all defenders" and recapture the pillbox? That's a rather bad exploit, I think. And if those turrets I saw inside the base weren't teleported there then the bug where the turrets follow a defeated hero to the hospital is still around.

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Something along these lines still happens, yes. Last night on two occassions my villain team dropped a bunker occupant and the turrets disappeared, rendering the bunker untakable. I /bugged it and it really needs looking into.

My RV impressions from about 4 hours of villain team play:

I prefer to play squishy ATs in PvE, so I concentrated entirely on them in PvP, trying a mind/nrg dom (Disciple of Xenu) and an ice/kin corr (Icy Curves Ahead). The only real times they seemed to perform well was if I stuck to hit-and-run or hid in massed friendly forces. Otherwise pretty much anything that looked funny at me dropped me.

I've learned to run like hell from elude scrappers. Can't hit 'em with squat.

Signature heroes are silly. Best tactic is to try and win the zone fast and don't worry about defeating them, because the force required to do that would be far more efficiently applied taking bunkers and dropping opposing players. I never saw a signature hero drop below 90% health.

I may have had more fun with a more durable AT, or if I'd tuned my builds to be more stealthy. The looming threat of debt is likely the biggest thing to turn me off from going to RV on launch, unless I use a 50.

My most entertaining moment was watching my /stone brute buddy (Guardian of Xenu) annoy the crap out of dozens of heroes (whilst I was faceplanted, of course). He'd heavily slotted self heals and defenses and could simply stand in the middle of hordes of heroes. Endurance was his only limitation, so he reserved attacks for random squishies that came too close.

To "captain short round" on RV 18 -- gotta love the force bubble herding, that was awesome. Terribly annoying to try and find a flying force bubbler that's shoving you around to divide and conquer for his hero buddies.

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Let me restate. The time bonueses are not random. They are stacking and higher con objects give you bigger chains of time.

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While they might not be random, it's really hard to tell from the outset what you need to do to gain more time.

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Object levels are locked so yes a crate can con purple to you becaues its stronger than your current powers are.
Think about it. In real life can you just run outside and punch a metal crate and expect it to esplode?

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While this may be true, it doesn't make a whole lot of game balance sense to screw a lowbie with super-high con objects. The base object levels should really scale better with mission/zone level. Level 15 objects should not appear in a level 5 mission. Alternatively, the time reward should drastically scale with the difference between player level and object level, so that the time spent wailing on a +10 con car is actually worth it.

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Mr. Pagliacci only failed one of the KR missions, and that because I spent too much time breaking down doors in the police station looking for a captured villain who wasn't there.

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This happened to me too. Thorny Dilemma (lvl 11) in KR mayhem mission. The jail was marked on the map to I went to check it out. Although I couldn't see anyone inside the cells through the view slot, I decided to bust the doors down anyways and see if a prisoner spawned. Nope, just a big time waster. If a side mission isn't unlocked, it shouldn't be marked on the map.

Any chance we could get a couple days where villains who want to test RV can get an automatic bump to 50 (and open an entire PPP and get fully slotted)? There just aren't enough villains in their early 40's, to say nothing of any who have filled out their PPP's, to really see this zone work properly. There's so much other villain content to test, we need an incentive to get more in there. It's always 10:1 odds for heroes, and from what I can see from the comments in the PPP threads, PvP in RV will be a joke if the hero APP's outshine villain PPP's so drastically.

Please, consider some events like you did with the old PvP zones during CoV beta.

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I saw a full team of heroes go at Recluse and they had three heavies with them, he was still at 3/4's health when he simply despawned.

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They're probably suffering from the overbuffed AV/Hero issues discussed in another thread -- Recluse's regen rate, plus ***** health, probably meant he was nigh-immune to damage unless heavily -regen debuffed. I briefly tussled with Ghost Widow along with a half-dozen other heroes (as I recall one heavy was with us), and we didn't make a dent in her before she despawned. I of course couldn't hold her either, but did manage to attract enough attention to get whacked with her DOT immobilize.

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Villains also have TONS more stuff to test.

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I'm hoping to see more villains in RV soon too. I managed to spend a whole 10 or 15 minutes there after crashes and before a server reboot, and had an absolute blast. I sincerely hope that with more balanced numbers each battle is more give-and-take and isn't over in minutes. This is the CoX PvP I've been waiting for.

Regarding the rehash of Atlas Park... I think with the scenic changes as the tides turn, it's great. I'd rather fight over something familiar and iconic than some new zone I have no attachment to. This is where all my heroes BECAME HEROES. And from a villain's perspective, this is a powerful and symbolic place to strike. Kudos, devs!

And now if only the Training Room would come back up, I might offer more constructive criticism...

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So, if they're always in defensive (which mine pretty much are), you set them to attack my target (still def), then to follow me, they'll be in bodyguard mode attacking who you want them to.

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Not quite, according to Posi:
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Issuing an order of “Attack my target” will take them out of bodyguard mode, as will issuing any other stance or order.

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Any order cancels Bodyguard. So my question then is, when is Bodyguard status restored? Do you have to explicity reset them to follow-defensive, despite the fact that they actually are follow-defensive, after the current order is finished? Or do they automatically revert upon order completion?

Wait a minute... I may have missed a similar comment earlier in the thread, as I just skimmed most of it, but doesn't PFF stop Supremacy, like it stops any other power from affecting others? So it would stop Bodyguard too? Why again was PFF for MM's nerfed?

During Bodyguard speculation I'd assumed it was because PFF + Bodyguard would result in capped damage resistance. But this just can't be the case now that we know how it works.