Nucleocrat

I understand your frustration, but you should remember that not everyone "gets" a new powerset right away, and it was a very low level group who might not have understand what they ought to be doing to be the most helpful.

Because Fiery Embrace now causes attacks to deal additional fire damage, rather just increasing fire damage by lots and non-fire damage by a little bit, it counts as a property of the attack rather than as a property of Fiery Embrace. It's just a property that most combinations cannot actually access, so just ignore it.

/Sonic corruptor might be worth a look. Sonic offers the ability to cause a gigantic swing in resistances, giving your team-mates a significant boost while draining your enemies of their toughness. It doesn't heal, but it's got clicky status protection for friends and a large status protection bubble for you. It also has a reliable single target capture, which you can use strategically to remove problems like Force Field Generators or break up annoying groups of Tsoo Sorcerers and similar foes. Best of all, extra resistance for the team and less resistance for the team's enemies is almost never wasted.

I quite like Spring Attack as a utility move for Tankers and Brutes. It can get you where you need to go on a leaper who's been slowed / -jumped, it lets you lay down some fast aggro in an area, and the knockdown is good for a bit of soft control. It's not bad.

As an attack, though, I'd say it's much less useful. The damage is pretty poor for a move with such a long cooldown.

I'm currently playing a Shield / MA character and I must say that it's an incredibly good combo early on: 25% to all positional defenses by level 4 without enhancements is kind of awesome. AAO's damage bonus works well with MA's hefty single target attacks, and Shield Charge helps to compensate for MA's weakness in area of effect.

I've always enjoyed the MA set for its style, and I think the Tanker version has been extremely well designed.

I'm really enjoying my new Regen Brute so far, the new version of Resilience is brilliant.

I don't personally mind the vulnerability to regen debuffs or recharge debuffs given how broadly effective the set is against different sorts of damage: after all, we can take Burnout now to counter those problems from time to time, and every defensive set has weaknesses.

On the other hand, I do feel that Regen's lack of almost any debuff resistance or exotic status protections makes it feel rather dated, particularly as it has no in-built defense.

I think it's pretty generous that you get the XP for "defeating" such an enemy the first time, given that bringing a self-reviving enemy to zero health once is basically just a glorified knockdown.

I was affected by the forum login issue, so now it's resolved I'd just like to say that I, too, love this zone. I've had great fun playing the new stories and I love both the structure and pace of them, as well as the terrific sense of a very interesting place.

Also I love pretty much everything else that's happened with Freedom, but I don't want to gush too much. The new character creator is really user friendly and looks miles better; the new tutorial was pretty cool, the follow up missions were a fun way to get started, providing a much more polished introduction to the game, and I'm really pleased to see the great MMO tech involved in all of that. Death From Below is really entertaining, and I love the Barbarian costume set. Really solid update all around.

That's a good point.

Another interesting contrast with Willpower is that Willpower hardly cares about +recharge at all, while Regen gets a lot of value out of that stat. So they encourage you to build in rather different ways.

Illusions/Force Field controller. Superior Invisibility makes you virtually undetectable (fully stealth capped), and for the few things that can see through it you'll be packing 67.5% defense and 40% resistance (before slotting) from Personal Force Field.

I think Sonic has some of the best buffs. Defense is a lot easier to come by than resistance, and Sonic gives out 35% extra resistance to almost everything before slotting, and to the entire team (or as much of it as will fit in the dispersion bubble, anyway) without any need for recharge bonuses. On top of that, it's giving out the most critical status protections to everyone in the dispersion field too... and is if that wasn't enough, you can anchor on a team-mate a -30% damage resistance aura with a 15 radius. That's just brutal, and it never expires. It can do the single target mez protection boosts, and while it's not something you're going to typically desire, it can anchor a knockback aura on a team-mate should the need arise, which is a weird and unusual buffing capability.

Sonic pays for it in other ways, but it's really got a strong set of slightly unusual buffs.

I like the idea of Regen Brutes. One of the things Regen offers over Willpower is a more active playstyle, as you actually have defensive buttons to push regularly. I love Willpower's style, but I sometimes wish there was more to do.

As a quick reference, these archetypes' basic ranged damage modifiers look like this:

Blaster: 1.125
Dominator: 0.950
Corruptor: 0.750
Defender: 0.650

Blasters get a damage-increasing inherent, the ability to keep attacking while mezzed, and slightly more hit points than the others... but they're pretty much all about the damage.

Dominators hit pretty hard, and they can get bursts of status protection from their inherent. They're also absolutely top-notch at crowd control, so even though they have weak defenses they're in a good position to be able to dictate the terms of a fight.

Corruptors only hit slightly harder than Defenders on healthy targets and have weaker support values, but their sets offer strong synergy and they have a damage increasing inherent. Scourge is a true multiplier to your damage, making it far stronger than an ordinary damage bonus, but as it only kicks in when foes are injured it can be wasted as overkill on weaker opponents. Bringing a support sets makes you very valuable to teams and depending on your selection you can enjoy significant personal advantages too.

Defenders have poor base damage, but the best possible values for support sets, including for the leadership pool, and this can ramp up your damage. Sonic Attack especially can be a decent offensive set as a result. They get a damage increase (an ordinary one) when solo or in very small teams and an endurance cost decrease in big teams, so they're quite adaptive. They're highly desirable as support, but come with the resulting expectations.

I can only speculate too, but it seems to me that either the new system or the old system will be in place during the VIP headstart. I'd guess the new system, as they'd have to process everyone's information to get Freedom working properly to begin with. So if you were due to become a three month veteran under the old system on the 14th, then you wouldn't receive that due to the old system having been retired already...but it would still be your billing date, which would earn you a token under the new system.

That's just my speculation.

In playing card terms, Brutes are "Kings" of damage and durability. They've got scrapper-like damage potential with tanker-like defensive potential. Scrappers are "Aces" of damage, but maybe only "Jacks" of durability; Tankers are "Aces" of durability but they only have middle-of-the-pack levels of damage.

Play a Brute if you just want the most powerful all-round melee combatant possible. Play a Scrapper if you want to be a damage specialist at a cost (hey, they're still miles tougher than most!) and a Tanker if you want to be a durability and taunt specialist at a cost.

Or if you just really don't enjoy fury.

Mind Dominators can be quite good for solo play, thanks to powerful sleep effects and good access to confusion coupled with fairly strong attack powers. You can more or less dictate the terms of the fight.

Pretty much any Scrapper is also an excellent choice.

I always view Invulnerability as a very "solid" set, with a good combination of defense and resistance along with wide coverage of debuff resistances. It's perfect against the most common forms of damage, good in general, and has more difficulty with the most exotic types of damage and control.

Willpower by contrast is a very "comprehensive" set, with a thorough mix of defense, resistance and regeneration. Because it has strong regen, it has no major holes at all - it's even got limited effectiveness against untyped damage. It covers you on the exotic status protections like confuse and fear, but only affords you minor debuff resistance in a couple of areas. It has slightly stranger slotting options and a quirky taunt aura, but a much more user friendly T9 power.

That's how I always see those alternatives, anyway.

I'm glad they're adding it for tanks, as it's nice to see a relatively pure defense based set to help round out the spectrum of available options, and it's good for so many classic hero concepts.

On the plus side, with the high levels of positional defense it should be easy to pick up and play, with good general coverage. On the downside, the lack of any health/heal/regen mechanic is unfortunate (DM and Aid Self could be popular partner powers) and it is rather one dimensional. I remember some of the things the Devouring Earth used to do to my Ice Tanker - I really wouldn't want to face the same issues without Hoarfrost and Chilling Embrace type secondary defenses.

Another minor downside is that you have to wait longer to get your full array of positionals up and running as compared to Shield.

My guess would be that it could be a fun set for free players, as you can get one extremely solid layer of defense up and optimised with just SOs.

I don't think I'd play one myself, but I tend to go for hybrid defenses anyway.

I would love a buyback feature on vendors as a safeguard against this kind of self-fail.

I think archetypes add a lot to the game besides the obvious balancing that they provide (just look at the rubbish base numbers corruptors get versus the brilliant values for modern dominators - yet both are just as fun and effective in actual play) because the variation in base numbers and inherents can add diversity that you don't get from power picks alone. Scrappers, Brutes, and Stalkers all choose from the same types of primary/secondary combination, yet they provide substantially different gaming experiences because the sets can be adjusted by archetype, interpreted in the light of base modifiers and attributes, and influenced by inherents. I like archetypes because they add depth beyond which sets you can pick from.

This is just my personal take on things, but I find Freedom quite attractive. I'd be happy to play for free, as even the "basic" City of Heroes/Villains experience is quite good fun, and I liked the VIP model enough that I resubscribed after a number of years. I'd expect to see lots of new free players and a rise in the number of subscribers.

What I don't find at all attractive is the premium level model. Paying out money and still not having acess to lots of cool features and mostly importantly, the new endgame, just doesn't sell itself to me at all. I'd either subscribe or pay nothing under this system.

I also think they're missing a trick by not allowing players to earn points through regular play, as this seems to be a great incentive in other games to keep free players playing, and having lots of free players to play with makes being a subscriber more attractive. The easier it is to get teams the better it feels to play.

That's just my feelings on the new system.

I would play them, but I would play them with my characters and just run with the whole virtual reality thing. Basically, if the mission arc required me to play a nurse with a guilty past or whatever, I'd take in my regular characters and they would "roleplay" the personna set out by the story.

I'm up for pretty much anything provided that it's clearly defined. If a mission is trying to be "reality" in game, then it shouldn't tell me that my drunk of a brother is in town getting in trouble, but a mission that lets me put my character in the shoes of a pre-defined person who has a drunken brother could be just great.

To get five stars from me, a mission will need to include a good idea with competent execution.

The good idea can be anything from a great story to an original premise to high comedy value to an interesting enemy group. Then it should be well executed, simply meaning that it's enjoyable to play through, without any seriously frustrating or irritating errors.

I'm looking forwards to seeing missions that are designed to play like they were real in-game events as well as missions that are designed to play like they were in-game video games or training simulations. Both types will be great so long as there's clear demarcation. I'd love to see some plausable stories that fit with the ongoing theme and history, and I'd also love to see some stories that simply work the virtual reality angle and let our characters play survival-horror, fantasy, or science fiction games that are totally unrelated to the continuity of the in-game world.

I can't wait to see what people use the architect to do!

[ QUOTE ]
Statesman doesn't make the laws. But the superheroes as a community decided to do this. So you can be stubborn and say frak that. But then you will be seriously snubbed by everybody. Because they think you are a disrespectful sob who is not worthy of their respect. In the end that can kill you.

[/ QUOTE ]

You risk your life fighting crime and may in fact save the entire city several times, but you aren't worthy of repect because you have a personal difference of opinion where it comes to exercising your constitutional rights to freedom of expression?

That's pretty silly. I don't think superheroes behave that way - and even if they did, I also don't think they cave in to peer pressure, so it's really not much of an argument.