Patteroast

I think if you play enough at night on any server, you'll eventually get to know some of the overseas players there. My main is Infinity, and even though I wouldn't say it's a particularly overseas-centric server, I ended up befriending a bunch of Aussies and a Swede over the course of time.

Perhaps some EU or Aussie channels might let you in as an honorary member, considering your playtimes?

I think I might be on the other extreme. I'm such a packrat that I keep pretty much every character I ever make.

Way back before server transfers and extra character slots, I deleted a number of characters on my favorite servers who just weren't leveling as fast... and eventually, I remade every single one on a different server. When Willpower came out, I remade two characters I'd been struggling with who could fit it into their backstories nicely. One of those was level 33, which remains the highest level I've ever deleted a character. More recently, on Going Rogue launch day, I deleted about a dozen characters so I could turn around and immediately remake them in Praetoria.

I personally don't see the point in deleting a character because they're not that fun to play, or their backstory is sub-par, unless they're taking up your last space that you'd like to make someone better with. In my time playing the game, I've had tons of instances where I disliked a character or powerset or even entire archetype, only to later see them from a new perspective and grow to enjoy them. And as for backstories, it's much easier to write a new one than to level up and get badges again!

An example: For a while, I was playing a lot of static team trios on Freedom with two friends of mine. We would all make characters together with complementary powers. One day, they made characters and asked me to join when I didn't have a concept ready! So I made an entirely terrible character: a Fire/Traps Corruptor named Fire Banana. He was all yellow and his traps were constructed from banana peels. The fire? No idea. Not only were they embarrassed to be seen with me, I was embarrassed to play him. However, I found the powerset combination to be very fun to play, and we'd already gotten into the 20s, which was no small feat for me. Eventually, I completely remade his costume, and wrote up a new backstory, even trying to explain away his name as a drunken prank. And then he was fun to play.

Anyway. I guess I have such extreme deleter's remorse that I can't bear to permanently delete any characters except unbelievably, embarrassingly stupid lowbies. If you ask my friends, they'll tell you that I should definitely delete more characters... like Atomic Lizard-Donkey. Whatever. He's awesome.

Like a lot of others, I started out with a Scrapper. Mine was a Claws/Invuln Scrapper named... Patteroast. He was my main for quite a while, but he got passed somewhere in the 30s, and eventually I stopped having a single main anyway. He's still one of my 50s, and one of more treasured characters.

My favorite archetype ended up being Defenders, although I'm still a huge fan of Scrappers, as well as Tankers, Stalkers, and Dominators. And all the ATs to at least some extent, really.

I'm a fan of the minigames in the zones. I think it would be interesting if there were some more, smaller side-games around too.

Disclaimer: I am not what anyone would consider a PvPer. The most fun I've had in PvP is probably playing around with gladiator battles in the arena... and it seems that I might have been the only one to ever enjoy that.

I rarely even notice the Rage crash on my Fire/SS Tank. I just keep punching things. Yeah, a couple attacks don't do anything except keep aggro, but I feel that's a fair price to do the ridiculous amount of damage I do on him.

The only film that I saw ahead of time this year was Inception, which immediately jumped to somewhere around my top three favorite movies of all time. I knew it didn't have a chance at best picture, and I wasn't surprised when it didn't get writing either, but I am pleased that it still managed to get four wins in the technical categories.

Now it's time for my annual adding of a crapload of movies that sound awesome to my Netflix list.

Hm. I have to actually check... looks like I have three characters who have black and red costumes (out of 114 characters)... two are heroes, and the one villain is based on one of the heroes. (Setebos [Spines/Regen Scrapper]; Llecarud [Elec/Energy Blaster]; Big Sally [Thugs/Traps MM])



I also have a couple characters who are mostly black, with a hint of dark maroon, and those happen to both be villains. (Fire Banana [Fire/Traps Corr]; Bible Boy [Battle Axe/Shield Brute])



I have put some effort to not overdo it with stereotypically villainous costumes, but my main concern is just to make decent costumes.

I've played a Mercs/Poison MM to 50, and I would absolutely love to see Poison proliferated. Hell, I thought Defenders would get Poison before Traps. Sure, it would need some tweaking to make it fit a different archetype than Masterminds (Noxious Gas would need to work differently, for one thing...), but if they proliferated Poison, I would be there to try it on day one.

I remember being amused with the highest level TOs and DOs (especially 53s) before they made the change to ensure they stopped dropping that high. It has been quite a while since I've seen one though!

It's funny, in my personal experience, I've been seeing fewer speed runs since the Incarnate system came out, because teams want more chances for Shards. The other day, the Lady Grey team I was on decided to actually rescue Infernia and Glacia and complete their mission... I haven't done that in ages, even on non-speed runs.

Weird. My last GM experience was during a random task force a month or two ago... the last enemy was stuck in the walls somewhere, so we petitioned. After about five minutes I took a bathroom break and came back to see that everyone had agreed to log off at the same time to reset the mission. I was very displeased, but went along anyway. The GM got ahold of us as soon as we logged back on, but since we'd reset the mission, there was nothing we could do. We went through the entire mission again, and lo and behold, the same one guy was missing again. About five minutes after petitioning again, the GM came and fixed it for us.

I was very happy with that GM experience, but the entire rest of the TF my teammates were complaining about how terrible the GMs are. It was their own fault for resetting!

I'm sorry to hear about several hour wait times... I've had them a couple times in the past, but I've also had good response times scattered in... I think it just varies randomly, no real pattern. Tomorrow they might be better.

I just want to also point out that the supposed clamor for nothing but healing all the time... yeah, inexperienced pugs tend to look for healers, but in my personal experience, I find I get a team just as frequently when I'm on a bubbler. It's very rare that I even get a comment about there not being healing when I'm on my FF Defender... and the times I do, it's just about always a new player who has no issues as soon as I tell them what I do for the team.

I shield everyone up, everyone suddenly goes from being in the awkward tends-to-die state that can be the norm for lowbies, to a much sturdier group that is plowing through missions at raised difficulties.

Meanwhile, I'm spending the majority of my time blasting away, because shielding up my teammates occasionally takes a lot less of my time than, say, constantly watching health bars and keeping track of whose turn it is for Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost on my Empathy/Electric. I rarely have time to do much more than try to do some end drain with Short Circuit and maybe take out a runner who's almost dead. (ETA: Of course, as I said before, a Force Field Mastermind has some valid reasons to not be shielding everything all the time... but not enough to skip the shields.)

I also should point out that if there's enough damage to one-shot a tanker, there's not a damn thing you can do as an empath but hope to hit Absorb Pain at the exact right moment. Good chance they'll be dead in a few seconds anyway. I'd value a force fielder much more at that point.

I'm not saying that my Empath is useless. Far from it, I think they bring a lot to my team. But so does my Force Fielder, no matter how much certain people in this thread want to put their fingers in their ears and not listen.

Psh, when I first read about the proposed changes to Doms, I thought it was going to be awesome. I was right.

And my only high level Dom at the time didn't have /Psy and didn't have Domination at perma yet, so I don't have the problem of feeling like I lost anything. So there.

(I did get mine with my Energy/Energy Stalker though. Still, I got over it, and still have loads of fun.)

But seriously, I'd say the Dominator change was quite possibly the most positive difference that any archetype has undergone in a single patch. I liked them before, and I <3 them now. Yay for doms!

It's not a full website for your SG or anything, but you can make a page for your supergroup in the Ouroboros Portal wiki, make pages for your characters, and link them to each other.

Definitely not a 'plug in some info and out pops a website' kind of setup, and it's really only appropriate for a description, roster, history, and list of details like SG colors or emblem or such... and a link to your full site, if you have one. But still. If you're familiar with wikis, it can be pretty spiffy.

I stick around and scrap after the fight's started on all my Stalkers, regardless of secondary.

What I find funny is that... well, if we're throwing anecdotal evidence around, apparently: I haven't been on a PUG that demands a healzor in ages. I'm not talking about a team with friends, or supergroup members, I'm talking about a straight up 'Looking for any team' and get an invite from someone with no vet rewards PUG. If I'm playing a non-healing-oriented buffer/debuffer, if the question of heals even comes up, I simply mention what my particular powersets can do, and everyone happily gets to beating up bad guys.

I simply don't understand why someone would take Force Field if they didn't want the shield people. Defense buffs are the whole strength of the powerset. I can understand Masterminds being reticent about buffing their pets and a team, no problem there, and I can even understand someone who doesn't like the set taking it for concept and skipping the powers they don't like, but if I were to do that I would fully understand that I was choosing to play suboptimally. It's not a crime, but I would be aware of it.

As for the whole HEALS VS. BUFFS debate... everything I've ever heard everywhere indicated that the consensus is that Buffs win. I think in these debates, people usually underplay the roles that healing can play... heals are not bad by any means! But they have their own sets of pros and cons and they there are several things that buffs do better. (This is coming from a guy whose first level 50 was an Empathy Defender who I still love to play.)

But you know what's way more awesome than force fielded allied or allies who have a steady stream of healing? A team of allies who are force fielded and have a steady steam of healing. That's nearly invincible.

Yes, they really have been saying that since Issue 5, when Croatoa came out.

(Edit: Too slow. )

I think one thing that just about everyone's done when they first get the game is slotting up inherent powers that really, really don't need slots. I have a few specific instances of very poor decisions that I made...

My first Tanker! Second character every, and first without any help from my friend who introduced me to the game. I picked Stone/Stone. At that point I only really played my first character while duoing with my friend, so I tried soloing on my Tanker. So I skimped on primaries, and by the upper teens I had all the attacks I could get, but notably I did not have Rooted. One day I teamed with my friend and fought some Circle of Thorns, and ended up respeccing more or less on the spot. However, that wasn't the end of poor decisions on that character! When I made him, I decided he'd have super speed. So he did. And no other travel power. Yes, I got to level 50 considering myself a serious Tanker whose only option when facing a six-inch-high wall was to turn off Granite and Rooted while I had a full mob's aggro, jump over the wall, and hope I could turn my toggles back on before I was dead. Shortly after I hit 50, I chose a couple powers I would be happy with getting rid of, and got Teleport. I still stubbornly kept Super Speed, though... and after Stamina went inherent, I finally picked up those couple attacks I'd lost back when I got Rooted.

My first Stalker! City of Villains was brand new, and my choice for my first Stalker was Energy/Energy. I was pretty experienced by this point, I thought, but I hadn't played Energy Melee before. So, after looking at the info for the powers I had available, I decided that Energy Transfer was just too risky (keep in mind... this is pre-nerf, when ET was godly.) Because I didn't feel I did enough damage, I picked up Barrage (keep in mind... this is pre-buff, when it did absolutely pitiful damage.) I lost interest in the character around the level 18, and he sat there for about six months while I decided that I just didn't like Stalkers. Then one day, I was talking to a friend who also played an Energy Melee Stalker, and when we got to talking builds, he was appalled... a quick respec later, and my opinion of the entire archetype changed, and after not too long he was 50. Sure, later on they made Energy Transfer a more reasonable power, but to this day that Stalker is one of my favorite characters, but Stalkers are my favorite Villain AT.

Lastly, although this is more of a case of stubborn resistance to change than newbish misguidedness, for a long time after ED... on my Empathy Defender (my first 50, and longtime main character), I kept my heals slotted with six heal enhancements, because I wanted to do as much heal as possible with them. A friend of mine kept needling me about it, saying that I could do more healing if it recharged faster or I had more endurance to work with than the over-cap enhancements would help, but it took a few months before I'd even compromise down to five heal enhancements. (Don't worry, nowadays he is very happy with his Numina and Doctored Wounds sets.)

I misread this thread as the best support set that I like to play on a team... and I know I'm probably a pretty small minority on this, but I really enjoy playing an Empath on a team that's struggling. The crazy rush to keep everyone buffed and healed... definitely not for everybody, but I love it.

Who to be on the same team as? Geez, just about anyone is friggin' awesome. Defenders are my favorite archetype, and every time I see someone join my team with one of the less popular sets, it brings a smile to my face, and whenever someone's playing one of the less visible debuff sets ("Trick Arrow? I don't see you doing anything! You are sucks!"), I always make sure to let them know when they're doing a good job. ("Wow, everything is just MELTING! Yay for Trick Arrow!")

I've had some awesome duos over the history of the game... but I still have a soft spot for the duo of Scrapper and Defender, which is what got me my first level 50 (I was Empathy/Electric and my friend was Broad Sword/Invuln.) Back in the days before they buffed AVs and IOs had not been introduced, we duoed just about every AV there was, and a large number of the GMs as well (memorably, we took down one of Lusca's tentacles by ourselves.)

I doubt we'd be that great today at AVs, since we had essentially no debuffs, but for normal content, it's still quite awesome. I assume swapping the Scrapper for a Brute might be even more so.

You can change it from the help window.

I think this addition, combined with the fact that they added a little '?' button in the basic channel buttons at the bottom of the chat window that puts you in the Help channel, plus the Help tab is a different color now... it all adds up to trying to make it easier than ever for new players to be able to find answers to their questions. Sure, there might be occasional jerks out there just to misinform, but I think for the most part this is a nice idea.