Organica

A scrapper!

Since you don't list that as an option, I'd pick the shield/ss tank or one of the VEATS... VEATS can be a lot of fun when fully IO'd out, as can a shield anything.

Dechs will tell you the warshade of course... that's his answer to everything. ^_^ He's like the Tim the Toolman of HEATs... "More Power! MF Warshade!"

Since I'm both an altoholic and a power gamer, I often have multiple characters in the level 40+ range and have long threatened or toyed with the idea of arranging things so I could have a new 50 a day for a full week, or something. The only problem is, that means leveling a lot of characters to 49, and then waiting until I have all the others lined up. And I can tell you, once you hit 49 it's hard to not gun immediately for 50. ^_^ So I've had characters hit 50 within a week of each other once or twice... but I think this last week is the closest I've come to that "one a day for a week" idea.

Because the ITF was the Weekly Strike Force last week, I abused it quite a bit to level three characters at once. I was already working on a spines/WP scrapper named Sister Kate, and she hit 50 on Saturday. But I also ran two of my Defenders through ITF. They'd long been stuck in the 46-47 level range. I quickly got them to 48 and 49, and on Monday Ice Girl Eight hit 50. After that we were back to regular ITFs... but two more runs Tuesday night brought Dark Girl Four to 49.5, and on Wednesday I hit 50. ^_^

I did not run an ITF tonight... I think 8 or 10 runs in the last week was enough for me.

Alas, if only this weekend were still DXP weekend, I probably could have gotten another level 45 character up to 50 by Friday... that would have been fun indeed. ^_^

Anyway, what I've learned:

A. Working on IO builds for three new fifties at once is kind of a pain. Even though each of them was mostly finished before fifty... trying to polish off each build now that they're 50 makes my head hurt. It's much easier to concentrate on one character at a time.

B. Spines is a fun scrapper set, but is still not as AoE happy as my tricked-out electric melee/shield defense scrapper Sparks Fly. That's my favorite character to play, for the last half year now.

C. I have five level 50 Defenders now, and I really don't play any of them. The others are Empathy/Dual Pistols, Force Field/Energy (Bubble Girl Six), and Dark/Arrow. Dark Girl Four is Dark/Dark of course, a D3, and Ice Girl Eight is Ice/Ice. I've always liked dark powers, my highest Corr is dark/dark as well, but really, even though I know everything the character can do, at 50 I still feel weak. The Ice defender meanwhile feels not only more damage-capable, but more useful in general, with several AoEs, two single-target holds, debuffs, defense shields, and endurance recovery... I think if I work hard on incarnating any of my defenders, Ice Girl Eight is the one to do it on.

D. I'm not sure who to work on now... or if I should stop leveling sub-50 characters for a while. Sonic Girl Seven is still 45, my only MM is still 45, I have two blasters in the 42-44 range, and several characters in the 35-39 range that I want to level... at some point I'd like a 50 of every AT, and I still need to get a stalker, corruptor, and dominator to 50 (along with my MM). (My highest stalker and corr are in the 35-39 range). But when DXP comes in August I might just start with a brand new character.

Anyway, I had to document these three. Kind of wish I'd done this sort of thing for all of my other 50s, but ah well:

Don't forget that Steadfast Protection (resist IO set) has a 4 point KB protection too. Depending on your AT/sets, that might or might not be easier to slot.

BotZ is expensive because it's the easiest for anyone to slot, and is not a common (yellow/uncommon) IO to start with.

My experience is that 4 points of KB protection will do you very well in most normal situations, and 8 points is good in almost every situation.

I guess it never occurred to me, but if you were teaming with other people, there's nothing to stop you from moving a VEAT or HEAT to Preatoria right after creation is there? You wouldn't be able to start missions yourself, but you could tag along with a friend.

I watched Ghost in The Shell Solid State Society (movie) yesterday, and I suddenly decided that I wanted to create a pure cyborg character in the mode of a Major Motoko Kusanagi or a Gally/Battle Angel Alita. (As you might guess, I'm a big Battle Angel Alita fan, that's her I use for my icon).

I did this on Virtue, where many good names are obviously taken. Made a claws/willpower brute; never played claws up to 50 before, or even 20, so that sounded like a good choice. Used some of the clockwork options including a clockwork face for a very robotic/cyborg look.

The name Battle Angel is blocked, of course, as would be Battle Maiden, but surprisingly enough "War Maid" was unclaimed. ^_^ Bingo!

You have to store something somewhere -- whether in base/bank storage, in the market, in e-mail, or on toons. I guess on your toon is the safest but nothing is ever truly safe. ^_^

All done, goal accomplished. I guess I'm happy now. ^_^ But now I need to find something else to do with my time!

(I have joined 3 hami raids and 4 ITFs this weekend... maybe I need a little more variety, lol. But my spines scrapper Sister Kate hit 50 yesterday, and I got two of my defenders very close to 50 -- Ice Girl Eight is now 48, Dark Girl Four is 47. ITF on a WSF week is soooo yummy!)

Even with the maxinactive tag, trying to run two instances on my main computer kills the game pretty fast. I can make it through one mission with lots of lag, then it's ready to crash. ^_^

Which is too bad because the game runs great with only 1 instance (other than crashing after an hour or so). When I dual box I have to use my laptop, which can barely run the game anymore.

That, and in fact I have bought on the market a lot previously but it's nice to have a full stack of level 30s. ^_^

Besides, I tend to use my money for things that merits are not good to spend on, such as purple IOs.

Eh, it's not as annoying as the Friday song. But that's not saying much. I find most of what actual modern pop stars do to be pretty bland/annoying, and most of them have actual talent of some sort.

Don't we wait until Friday for threads like this?

Yes. I've done it on several characters.

I have a solo base on Virtue, where I have twelve enhancement storage bins:
1. the defense/resist IO bin (reactive armor, luck of the gambler, steadfast +3% def IOs, knockback IOs, etc)
2. the melee damage bin (kinetic combat, obliteration, and scirocco's dervish mostly)
3. the ranged damage bin
4. the heal IOs bin
5. the other random damage IOs bin
6. the troller type stuff bin (holds, stuns, immobilize, sleep, etc. -- most notably a small collection of Basilisk Gaze IOs)
7. the lesser defense/resist IOs bin (nearly any resist or defense IO of level 25 to 33 or so is probably worth hanging onto ^_^ )
8. the generic IOs bin, which never has the actual generic IOs I want
9. the other generic IOs bin that has a bunch of BotZ and other travel related IOs in it
10. the bin in the back that has endurance IOs, about 30 winter's gift slow resist IOs that I thought I could sell at some point, and other random stuff.
11. the bin for level 50/top level stuff I buy cheap so I can sell it when prices go back up... if they ever do.

and then there's the special bin, where I keep all the stuff that's really valuable or hard to get. In here I place purple IOs as they come to me, PvP IOs that I manage to buy, stealth IOs, and things like Numina uniques, Miracle uniques, Luck of the Gambler 7.5% defense IOs... etc.

Except that it usually contains stuff that's more or less valuable, but not stuff that I actually need right now. For example, I have a full set of Soulbound Alegiance... but my MM has been stuck at 44 for two years. I have various Absolute Amazement and Fortunata Hypnosis IOs that I got as drops and crafted... not really valuable enough that I want to sell them, I tend to see purples as worth holding onto, but I have no use for them right now. I have a set of Unbreakable Constraint which I pulled off a character during a respec and which I know is worth holding onto... so I keep it in storage. And I have a couple of random Ragnaroks and Hectacombs, but never a full set of any purple set damage IO. The ones I have are the cheaper parts of the set usually, and I tend to buy all of those when I'm working on a new build for a character instead of raiding my base.

What I never seem to have enough of are the things I put into nearly every build: Miracle Unique, Numina's Unique, LotG 7.5% recharge, Celerity Stealth. I tend to buy those things when I need them, usually with a-merits.

This past Spring I spent a lot of time earning 30 a-merits on three different characters, and bought 3 of the Glad Armor 3% def IOs. It was a nice goal to set for myself. I used one each on the builds for Sparks Fly (EM/SD), Trinkets (FM/SD) and Sister Kate (Spines/WP). For a short time two of them were sitting in my base until Trinkets and Sister Kate were high enough level to use them, but then they were gone. I missed having such a nifty IO sitting around in my base waiting to be used.

Soooo... after Trinkets hit 50 I spent a few weeks in June earning 30 a-merits on her, and placed the resulting Glad Armor proc in my base. I like having it there. I have no concrete plans to use it just yet. It's my precious.

I earned this about 10 days ago, and after that I asked myself: what next? Having a goal like "earn 30 a-merits quickly" meant that I was focused on doing that every night. Trinkets has yet to run an iTrial, and I haven't even finished all of the incarnate powers on Sparks Fly yet, but I'm in no rush, so... what next?

I still needed a couple of LotG IOs for Trinkets, and there were none in my base. I thought: hey, earning 2 a-merits is a lot easier than earning 30. Why not earn a bunch of LotG IOs, and a few Numina and Miracle unique IOs, and fill up your base so that the next time you level up a character you'll already have those things lying around?

And the cool thing is, I have quite a few characters who already had between 100 and 200 regular merits, and maybe a single a-merit, that were waiting to be spent. I've run a lot of TFs on a lot of different alts, and I rarely even paid attention to how many merits they had, unless it reached above 300, then I'd probably spend it. (My three Vigilantes are my real "rainy day merit fund" holders, since they can't convert to a-merits and I'm loathe to buy anything strictly with regular merits these days. Because of this I have over 1,000 merits on Tiffany Blackheart, about 600 on Mouse Police, and some 300 on Squiddy Kitty.)

So... for the last 10 days I've been using both accounts to duo 5 tip missions a day, effectively earning 1 a-merit every day, and also duoing the occasional Ouro arc for extra merits to convert or running a second set of characters through tip missions. And I've checked to see what merits my other character have sitting around and I've converted those. My goal is about 15 LotG IOs, 5 Numinas, 5 Miracles, and maybe a few new Celerity Stealth IOs.

Because I was able to convert a lot of regular merits, I've moved very quickly towards my goal. And I feel like Gollum when I look at all those beautiful shinies, so I just had to share/show off (first photo is from about last Sunday):





In a way it'll be kind of sad to use these... I kind of like just having them there to look at.

(Meanwhile... still haven't run an iTrial on Trinkets, I've been too busy doing this )

According to the Wikipedia CoH article:

"City of Heroes and City of Villains employ several servers. The servers are divided between the North American and European markets, with separate European servers with language localization for German and French speakers. The North American servers based in Dallas, Texas, while the European servers were moved from Germany to a new site in the US in November 2010."

...which would be Dallas as well, I think.

There used to be East Coast and West Coast servers, so far as I know... I don't remember when all of those were consolidated.

They moved them a while ago, when they shut down their European support team I think (two years ago?) In any case by all reports US servers work better than German ones, even if you're in Germany.

Wanting an active server and wanting a no-lag server may be two different things. ^_^

Virtue or Freedom, depends on the time of the day.

Virtue has a lot of roleplay, Freedom has more PvP (not sure you could say "a lot" though). Freedom has a reputation as the server with the most idiots, but really, both have very active populations and players of all types.

But when Freedom launches, I expect a lot of servers will be more active.

Also: insert standard rant that dead servers aren't dead, you just need to know how to find people. Which is mostly true. But if you want a random invite to a TF at 1 AM PST, your best bet is still Virtue or Freedom. ^_^

I'm admittedly not a number cruncher, but I read the scrapper forums and pay attention to what people like Werner and Arcanville have to say and to all the comparison tests between various sets. Like I said, no scrapper primary is a bad choice... but MA ranks in the middle of single target damage sets at the very best, and probably in the lower third. MA trades damage for some control-style mitigation that is not always that useful. Here's just one thread that talks about that a bit.

Also, Dragon's Tail is not one of the better scrapper pbaoes. I've farmed with my MA scrappers and I've farmed with my EM/Shield scrapper... Lightning Rod is hands-down a better AoE, as is shield charge, as is fire sword circle... I like Dragon's Tail, but it doesn't kill every minion in a single attack like Lightning Rod does. Combine Lightning Rod with Shield Charge and pretty much everything dies... meanwhile my MA scrapper is still surrounded by enemies. ^_^

I can farm with my MA scrapper. I've solo'd at least one task force with my MA scrapper. It's a fun set. But in a head to head comparison with other scrapper sets, it still comes out on the lower end of the scale.