Patteroast

Man, I was such a huge fan of Animorphs. Still think it was a great book series.

Sorry, don't really have a comment on the suggestion. I just had to say that. More options are always a good thing, though. And since they made animal-esque characters possible, they might as well allow up more variety.

A friend made me. I didn't really have a choice.

I was never interested in MMOs or the genre (not interested in the Fantasy genre either...), but I did like sci-fi stuff, and having the option to play to that probably helped. Anyway, the actual story...

My friend Joe is a gamer. I am not so much of a gamer. But playing games online with friends is always fun, so he would keep bugging me to get certain games until I caved. Even though I have pretty much no interest whatsoever in extreme sports, because of him I ended up tagging along to the tune of most of the Tony Hawk series, SSX, and recently Skate 3. Despite not being a particularly big zombie fan, he got me to get Resident Evil: Outbreak and L4D/L4D2. To clarify, the last game I went out of my way to get without any input from Joe was probably SimCity 4. Yeah.

So, Joe was keeping track of CoH from before it launched. Not long after it did, he started playing, and started talking about how awesome it was. It was really only a matter of time before I caved, and I got it.

What kept me here? Exploration (even now, I still randomly wander around the cityscapes and find places I've never really paid any attention to), and the endless combinations of costumes, backstories, and powers that you can make. Almost six years and over 100 characters later, I'm still here.

It doesn't appear that logging out next to the Tailor awards the Fashion Designer day job, despite it being listed by the recruiter. Plus the Marketeer day job is funky, as people have mentioned... also, Banker/Thief is easy, as the banks in Praetoria work for it.

I don't understand why Praetorians can't have Law Enforcer or Patroller... hell, maybe even Pilot (there's an airstrip in Neutropolis) or Demagogue (TPN headquarters?)

Speak for yourself. Almost all of my characters are mortal.

According to their backgrounds, my characters range in age from just a few years (for non-human characters that were created suddenly), to about 15 years old, to around 75 years old, to somewhere around 1400 years old.

I'm afraid looking at the buffs list for the entire team is just about the easiest way. Just remember what your buff icons look like. Or I guess you could actually look at your teammates and see if they still have the cold shields on them.

Also, adding a kill zone outside every mission map would take a LOT of work, likely adding them in manually, to every single mission map in the game.

I'm kind of sad that Stalkers didn't get the version of Field Mastery they had in the first iteration of it in Beta. Personal Force Field, Temp Invulnerability, and Force of Nature. Ridiculous amount of overkill for a class that already has defensive powers? Yes. Would I have taken it anyway just for the hell of it? Probably.

As it is, my tech-based Stalker who works with energy fields isn't terribly enthused about any of the new pools. I'm thinking about just getting Mace. But some of my other stalkers are looking forward to them.

Actually, that's one of the characters I remade. The y scale is in months. I deleted that character when they were in their low 30s, remade them, and got them into the low 20s before the end of the month. Since they were the highest character I'd ever deleted, I made a concerted effort to get them high level again.

Like I said, with the big dropoff in a bunch of levels at the same time (and also a few other times), characters' levels drop because I deleted them and then remade them.

Another example of insane listy-ness is the detailed character list that's linked in my signature.

I am also a fan of keeping track of ridiculous amounts of character info with Excel.


This is a chart of my characters' levels over time. You can tell at-a-glance how neglected most of my characters are. The drop off of a dozen characters recently was when I deleted and remade a bunch as Praetorians.


The data table of my characters ranking by level over time... highest level, second highest, 34th highest, etc. Yes, it goes over 100, because I have 112 characters right now. This data generates a chart similar to the other one.

Those are just examples. I have four excel files, each with a few different sheets of raw data and charts of different styles, plus several text files of single types of data, Mids builds for all my character, new builds without Stamina for all my characters for I19, and even a character list on paper.

You're not alone.

Just about everything I've ever deleted, I've remade later. Recently I deleted a dozen character so they could be Praetorians. The highest character I've ever deleted was 33, but I didn't like his powersets. (He was a Stone/Energy Brute... now he's a Stone/Willpower and level 50.)

But for the most part, I never permanently delete characters. I even remake terrible characters. The only characters I can even think of (out of about 120 characters that I've ever made), that haven't been remade and weren't created by just hitting the random costume button... a ~level 5 brute called Player 3 (part of a set team based on some characters from the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del... I kind of felt like reporting myself for making a cloned character the whole time they existed; a ~level 3 stone/battle axe tanker named 'Awful Comedian' (his backstory was entirely terrible... the stone armor was really a built up layer of tomatoes thrown at him...); and a level 1 blaster who was INTENDED to be a one-off thing for a video a friend made, but ended up hanging around for a year named P. Destrian.

On the other hand, I once made a character during a closed beta by hitting the random costume button and naming them 'Atomic Lizard-Donkey'... I remade them on live, played them into the teens, and recently remade them again as a Praetorian. Yeah. I'm attached to my (terrible) characters to a fault.

I've seen a costume contest in Mercy before... but then again, I think that might have been the only villainside costume contest I can remember seeing. So there's definitely not a set spot for it...

If you think the parallel is better between Cap Au and Steel than Cap Au and Atlas, then I guess there isn't an Atlas. People just don't tend to hang out in Mercy.

You can get Faultless Mystic with Ninja Run (or probably even just hurdle), and you can climb scaffolding and jump to get Weapon of Mass Destruction. Another example (mostly) is Meltdown on top of the reactor dome in Terra Volta... although before the jump pack or raptor pack existed, I did manage to get it on a super speeder by making a one in a million leap and barely hitting a spot where I didn't just slide back off.

But yeah... it seems intentional that there are a few badges that aren't accessible without any vertical movement... but it's not an issue, as any character can get vertical movement now, even without boosters. I remember needed help from friends with recall friend to get badges way back when.

There's always the Ouroboros Portal Wiki. It's part of the Titan Network, kind of a sister site to the Paragon Wiki. It's like the Virtueverse one, but for characters from all servers.

My attitude is, if you plan on using the power, you might as well enhance it decently. My main Kheld plays tri-form, so I tried to slot up powers I liked from the forms when I had the slots.

My Dark/Dark Tank is slotted with... single origins. *cough*

Personally, I find Oppressive Gloom to be an indispensable power. I just let them group up on me before toggling it on, and I don't really have any problems with them wandering around.

I don't agree that everything other than Granite is suck, but I can't say I've done much with it as a Brute. Personally, I would probably make sure to keep the non-Granite armors so I could fight without the -rech and -dmg when things weren't as mean. Also, I'm a big fan of fighting psychic stuff with Minerals. As for dealing with Granite's nasty side effects, a decent amount of Fury should easily overcome the -dmg. Some slotting for +rech bonuses and Hasten could take some of the edge off the -rech as well. Granite really is a toggle godmode you can keep on as much as you want, aside from its debuffs.

Whether the tradeoffs are worth it to you is up to you. Then again, I am absolutely not a min/maxer and mostly play 'suboptimal' builds because I like variety.

Edit: Also, I think it's quite possible to play Stone Armor without having a pocket kin for your entire existence. I played my Stone Tanker to 50 without even having Teleport.

As far as I know it still does -fly. It's one of the key aspects of the power, so I can't see them removing it, except maybe as a bug if they were making some other change to it.

Perhaps Eagles have a high enough magnitude to their fly that Air Superiority isn't enough -fly to bring them down? Someone has to know the numbers...

There are also some +Max End set bonuses, and I noticed that in the new ancillaries for villains, instead of Conserve Power in Body Mastery, Stalkers have Superior Conditioning... which if I understand it correctly is a +Max End auto power which is enhanceable.

As for a hard cap on how much +Max End you can have, I don't know if there is one. If there is, I don't think people have found it.

Rhode Island is indeed the smallest state in the United States. Its land area's 1045 mi^2 (2705 km^2), the next smallest state is Delaware at 1955 mi^2 (5060 km^2). To compare, the largest state, Alaska, has an area of over 500000 mi^2 and over 1000000 km^2. So yeah, there's not a lot of room to squeeze a fictional city in without pushing other things out. But the map of Paragon is not a direct copy of the Providence area at all. Vaguely similar with a complicated coast with lots of bays and islands, but not identical.

One thing that I find very nice about soloing a Dominator is that you can fully utilize sleeps. My Mind Dom fell in love with sleeps after years of being told they were crap.

Also, just thought I'd mention since it was brought up... a unifying concept that I've used for a Plants/Fire Dominator is the idea of trapping the enemies with plants and then setting those plants on fire. I have a character who's sort of an evil Smokey the Bear based on that concept. Forest fires for fun and profit!

I can't speak for the finer points of set bonuses and such, but in my experience of playing a Dark/Dark Tanker (currently level 39), I found it fun and quite tanky, but with the caveat that his health is on an insane yo-yo most of the time. Maybe I'm just fighting too many things or maybe I just like using my self-rez too much, but it is rather noticeable.

To compare, my experience of Willpower is that it's mostly quite solid, although I do find myself using the tier 9 pretty much every time it's up, and also making frequent use of revive... and as for Invulnerability, I find it also quite solid in most situations, although in its case you always seem to be fighting a battle of attrition with the enemies health vs. yours... but in most cases Unstoppable and Dull Pain recharge just before your health gets to really scary levels.

My strongest advice about Dark Armor is that as a tank, you need to pay close attention. You can't herd up a mob and then go to the bathroom and expect to still be alive when you return.

Enhancing the knockup in Lift and Levitate is incredibly amusing and actually helpful... for example, when I'm soloing on my Mind Dominator my usual method of attack if my AoE mezzes aren't up is to hold one enemy, sleep another, and then throw the third way up in the air. Quite effective!