Patteroast

Very sad to see you go, Castle. You've always been very accessible and provided a great insight into the development motives in this game. When I got to talk to you a couple times in Going Rogue closed beta, I was kinda geeking out, thinking 'Wow! I got to talk to Castle! So cool!'

I will always remember when you caught me snooping around in Imperial City before it was ready and made me fall over dead. I totally felt like I had my hand caught in the cookie jar, and its a hilarious anecdote of dev interaction that I'll be telling people for years.

Good luck with whatever you do. We'll miss you!

I don't know if this is helpful at all, but I found I was quite happy when I set the bound for my alts at playing each powerset on each archetype. Because there's usually not the same number of primaries and secondaries, there's some overlap, but not a ridiculous amount... I think I don't have more than three of the same powerset on any one archetype. That's left me with 113 characters and a short list of maybe five or six that I still haven't made.

It sounds like you're well past that point, though... all of my stuff is on one account.

I find it's nice to pick a character with a favorite power combination and/or backstory per archetype and try to concentrate on them. If you want to play that archetype, pick that character. If you get REALLY sick of them but still want to play that archetype, you can always switch, but it will slow down your progress.

Overall, I don't think quitting altism entirely is the answer... but reining it in a bit could do some good.

I've found Oppressive Gloom to be a handy power to help survivability on every AT I've tried it. It's not going to take care of everything, but if you're swarmed by a bunch of minions, it pretty much shuts them down.

Haven't tried it on a blaster, though. Hope it works out for you!

If they wanted to port it to Tanks, they could always throw a taunt aura on one of the toggles, like they did when they ported SR to Brutes.

Most of my experience with Energy Aura has been as a Stalker, where I found it to be a perfectly respectable set. But I definitely think it could use a bit of tweaking to make it perform more consistently, especially if they plan to proliferate it.

Done the arc about six times, admittedly haven't tried it after today's patch, but before the patch I never tried pulling him out of line of sight. When he bifurcated, I killed the bifurcations. Otherwise, I beat on him. Had little to no problems working that way on my Scrapper, Stalker, and Controller, and I was teamed when I did it on my Defender and Dominator. The character I had the most trouble with was my Stone Tanker, because I felt like trying to solo it even though his damage isn't that awesome... and the main problem I had was the fact that in Granite, I had trouble getting to the bifurcations and back in time. Eventually, the lava helped quite a bit in taking him down, even though I was essentially beating on him through two bifurcations the whole time.

My understanding is that if I used the exact same tactics again after this patch, there would be no difference. Please correct me if I am wrong on that. But if it is at least similar, then I would have to say he's not 'invincible'.

I had a problem like this in the past. For a while, even though I have cable internet, my IP appeared to be in Los Angeles (while I live in the Twin Cities, Minnesota...)

Oddly, when I was having that issue, it didn't affect my CoH subscription. I was only having problems on some different websites that refused to take my money. I ended up making a Paypal account just to get around the problem, and eventually my IP went back to normal.

I can't say I really know how to fix this, but I can sympathize with how much it sucks.

I think it's more likely they'd freeze the lakes again or recolor the grass white to simulate snow, before they'd add a bunch of new geometry all over. It would be AWESOME if they did go nuts and add tons of new stuff, but I doubt they will... since even the lakes freezing again seems to be too much to ask.

For me it's all the new exploration badges.

There should be badges for defeating Malta Gun Drones and Sky Raider Force Field Generators. I hate those things, and it would be nice to at least get something for beating on so many of them.

I usually start by thinking of some sort of odd powerset combination I could try, usually on an archetype that I haven't played one or both of those sets on yet. From there, I try to think of an interesting concept on how that could work, and a very rough idea of their backstory. Then comes a name, and only then for me do I work on the costume. As I play them, maybe months later, I fill out their background more.

Occasionally I swap a step (the name is the last step sometimes), but that's how it mostly goes. Sometimes I ignore the 'make sense of their sets and backstory' step until I've played them for a while. Especially when I was new at the game, I tended to just make a costume, pick powersets that seemed cool, a random name, and an origin at random. Only later did I try to figure out how the hell any of it could make sense. On characters that grew to be my favorites, I ended up with some very cool, detailed backstories to explain all the random choices I made.

I'm pleased that more people are interested in running TFs, and I haven't really been able to run then for quite a while. I'm also pleased to not have to do a speed run every single time. They can be fun, lots of fun! But they get boring if they're all you ever do. I did an ITF the other day, and in the Rescue the Sybils mission, once we got outside we actually fought our way up the hill instead of just jumping and flying straight to the top. I'd just about forgotten that there was even a path up it had been so long.

No need to clear all if that's not what people want, though. But no need to stealth every possible thing, either. On balance, I'm having more fun.

They've been showing up in the market screen since GR came out. I believe they were first noted in GR beta. But they are not obtainable at this time.

I am playing my lowbies the same way I played them before I19. Sure, some of them do have another attack or armor that they didn't have, but it's not that much more... and when I play the same way as I did before, I have a much, much easier time with endurance. If you play like you're all SO'd out with end cost in every power, you might have problems, but... don't play that way until you do. At least for me, problem solved.

The vast majority of my characters are male. I have a handful of female and non-gendered characters (mostly robots there.)

Of my women characters, the one that I most consciously was trying to play off-type would have to be my Mastermind. Some friends and I were having a discussion about how there are no MM primaries with female pets, and one said they suspected the reason is because a male character completely controlling a small harem of women who they objectify might be kind of sexist. I countered that with the system now, there's no reason somebody couldn't make a female mastermind who objectified her male minions whom she has complete control over. Thus, Big Sally, owner of 'Big Sal's Sausage Bar' was born. (I would like to state for the record that I did not come up with the name of her business. )

On the other hand, I do have a male widow (he's 50.) I also have a Psy/Mental Blaster who I remade as a Praetorian whose story says that he was part of a trial program of male Seers, but Mother Mayhem wouldn't stand for it.

When the game started, I decided that my favorites to win, in ascending order were:

5) Dominators
4) Tankers
3) Scrappers
2) Stalkers
1) Defenders

So I spent a lot of the game pretty happy.

Spoiler: this badge has a really long name.

I can't say it's much better for Stalkers, either.

I was messing around yesterday, ended up doing the Imperial and Neutropolis events three times while solo. I also soloed the Nova one twice, and then I came across it already in progress and joined in, barely. I killed one seer, punched a couple items, but only destroyed two, and then killed maybe five TEST officers. I got a reward table with several options, although the badge didn't appear because I already had it.

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Vote # 509
Defenders +
Tankers -
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Defenders 6
Tankers 101
Dominators 33

You have new powers that you're putting slots in now. The opinion from the devs seems to be that having to be more cautious when using the same number of slots we've always had is a fair trade for being able to get new powers.

I should also warn you that this had been brought up quite a few times before here on the forums, and you're probably about to get a bunch of replies saying as such...

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Vote # 480
Defenders + My main defenders is /Electric, is slotted up for end drain, has power build up, and always carries lots of break frees.
Tankers -
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Defenders 20
Tankers 94
Dominators 26

Hm. I'm not having any issues getting teams, even when I'm not looking, on the lower population servers. When I've hopped onto characters on Virtue and Freedom, I've gotten tons of invites. Do you play during some off-hours?

Either way, hope you have better luck. The players are out there.

There are a number of my characters I don't particularly care about right now, but I can't think of one off the top of my head that I hate. I have some that I admit are terrible, but even those I kind of like in a strange way (although maybe not at all to play... Ex: my petless mastermind.)

I can readily think of a couple times in the past where I only realized how much I hated a character after I made a change and suddenly loved them. My Warshade sat at about level 30 for most of a year before I took him to a friend's farm for a bit to jump-start him into the upper 30s. I suddenly found that I had lots of fun with him, and I easily played him normally through the 40s to 50.

The best example though is my Energy/Energy Stalker. He was the first Stalker that I really played for more than a couple levels, and around 18 he just stopped leveling. Not only did I hate the character, but because of him I hated the whole archetype. Then one day a friend asked me about my build, and at his suggestion I got rid of Barrage (which I had taken to fill out my attack chain) in favor of Energy Transfer (I didn't know much about it, other than the self damage. This was before it was nerfed.) Overnight my opinion changed, and I started playing him again. He rose quickly, and I soon expanded his backstory. Not only is he now one of my absolute favorite characters, he helped make Stalkers probably my favorite villain AT.

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Vote # 479
Defenders +
Tankers -
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Defenders 20
Tankers 94
Dominators 26