PleaseRecycle

I mean if you're saying that my staff/elec scrapper is as sturdy as your ice/energy tanker, yeah, I think that's probably true. I can guess which of them handles those missions faster, though!

To add a query to my snark, I guess I'm wondering what it is you think staff can't do in terms of end-game stuff? I know a thing or two about end-game stuff and it seems more than satisfactory for my purposes. Yesterday I tanked a STF as the only melee in 32:54 with a bunch of lowbies on the team. Just now, six man ITF in 19:53 followed by a five man Kahn in 22:26. No deaths on any of those. Would you expect better results with a different set? Better in what way? In any case, once I get another rare I'll have my spectral radial total conversion and should be able to see what kind of pylon time I can produce. My estimate based on what I've been seeing so far is that it will blow DreadShinobi's out of the water, and that's without perfectly optimal conditions (musculature is still tier 3, spectral instead of reactive, etc).

Wait, it doesn't? Crap, should I quit soloing DA on x8 or is it okay if I keep it up?

What's awful about Chimera's costume? He can really move, and he's got an attitude. He's the fastest thing alive.

I must differ with Muon, to me the set's albatross is tremor all the way. The radius is the one bone you get, beyond that the set is actually worse at aoe than energy melee. That's really saying something. To that you can say, "It does have a 15 foot radius and you can't discount that," to which I can say, "It also has one of the longest attack animation times in the game." To put it another way, you could make an effective aoe character with stone melee but it would involve going fire armor and mu mastery and not taking tremor at all.

My own feeling is that the set gives up too much for fault. Why shouldn't it? Fault is a crazy power. To me though it's a lot like stone armor: you get granite but you pay a dear price indeed. There are other issues, like stone mallet's mediocrity forcing you to try to make a chain out of stone fists, heavy mallet and seismic smash, a fool's errand. What's the use in one great single target attack if one is all you get? Overall it seems like it was a set designed for a different game or something. It doesn't have any "flow" to it in any sense of the word. It has undeniably strong powers yet little synergy between them. Bleh.

Thoughts based on my own completed SJ/Regen:

You don't need physical perfection in addition to superior conditioning and quick recovery and stamina. I did take superior conditioning but it was more as a nice companion to focused accuracy than out of any genuine need. You definitely do not want assault on a brute unless you have some major team support in mind, its damage buff is so diluted for you that it's something like a 2% improvement to your damage, if that. What you absolutely do want is fighting! Tough and weave are great fits for regen. As for slotting? I'd shoot for moderate levels of s/l/e/n defense. You're not going to softcap without major sacrifices unless you know something I don't, but just having a fair amount of it is really nice on top of your meager resistance, great healing, good regeneration and high HP. Recharge would be an equally important concern, so how to balance those factors is up to your preference.

Grav/FF. It's like the enemies aren't even there. They aren't, they've all been pushed out of the level.

I made, enjoyed and purpled out a SJ/EA scrapper. Here's why I don't play it anymore: it would have been a lot better as a stalker. In exchange for a little bit of recharge and the taunt aura you get a colossal single target attack while keeping all of your aoe and your original colossal single target attack. That's a trade I'd have made easily had I known that stalker buffs were on the horizon when I rolled the character.

Fun combo, though, and it's not like it sucks on scrappers.

Of the three recent melee sets staff is my personal favorite so that's my recommendation. SJ is a much more traditional set which I don't doubt many people prefer. Staff is wild and unique, playing it has felt very fresh to me.

The difference is that whips are real and are not weapons. Why does that matter? Well, look at the existing whip animations. To me they look pretty stupid: they lack anything resembling punch, they don't actually appear to hit the target (all of the contact is in the form of the big fluffy flame effects) and if you focus on the whip part and not all the particles surrounding it they don't even look like things you could do with a whip in the first place. The overhand tickle is especially weak but the pirouette is not far behind. The whip crack ranged attack actually sort of looks like something whips can do... and then fires out a magical fire bullet.

That last one illustrates the most central problem to a whip power set: other than spooky flame whips, what whip concept can be properly served in this game? If you want them to use real world whips, they need to come up with nine different whip powers that don't involve demonic fireballs. There's also no chance they could have anything like hell on earth's lasso effect if they made it a weapon set with selectable 3d models. Further, while I'm sure the art team would be flattered, to think that a super-narrow yet highly detailed thing like a whip is going to have a shot of looking good in the CoH engine on a variety of computers is optimistic at best. Look at the polycounts on titan weapons to get a better idea of what they can realistically do at their most ambitious.

So let's say all of that is out the window and we really just want fire whips. Take the existing three attacks and add some more like them. Then you don't need any more real world animations, they can just come up with whip flurry and whip spin and what have you. By what standard wouldn't that be the most concept-limited power set they'd ever added to the game? Does anyone have a flame whip who wasn't designed to move hologram covers in the early 90s? There's probably an example here or there, but I can tell you right now that if you asked for a full melee set based on demon whips the devs would say either out loud or internally "Just play demon summoning, man."

Nope.

None of the above. Pretty tight build up to 49 and then I had one throwaway power so I picked up focused accuracy, slotted with one common endurance IO for major -tohit situations. Haven't actually used it yet but it may be handy some day. I didn't have enough spare slots to give more than the default one to confront so I definitely wasn't going to have enough to use for a non-essential level 49 power. I guess body mastery is the obvious choice for burning power picks, but staff/elec is uniquely indifferent to conserve power so focused acc is the only one I found to be worth considering.

Defense debuffs are hard on it but its excellent resistance numbers plus the near-perma regen buff and frequent heal from energize tend to mean that even in ginormo-debuff situations you have a bit of time to thin out the crowd or perform a tactical rearward relocation.

Here's where I definitely don't fit in with the common wisdom: I think this combination is particularly powerful on scrappers because of the fact that enemies get scared of you so easily. If everything I pulled in Dark Astoria stuck to me like glue the no inspirations thing would not be happening. Since things run away for a few seconds before returning it's more like being the nucleus of a villain atom. I may not be able to measure where that Conqueror is going to be at any given nanosecond but sooner or later its general proximity to my whirling doom vortex will cause it to die. Any time they spend scooting around aimlessly is time not spent attacking me.

Isn't it quicker to kill stuff if it's all sitting next to you? That depends. One question is whether you'll survive its undivided attention. Without even going into that, though, my attitude is that nobody ever said I had to fight just one group at a time. As long as you maintain aggro on some members of a spawn and prevent anyone from running two hundred yards or so away from you they'll all come back eventually, so why not meet some new friends in the mean time? Older members of the probability ellipsoid are cycled out as new ones are cycled in, as nature intended. Obstacles can be used to cluster up the enemies that remain before you enter a transition they can't follow you through, such as an elevator.

That was a wild aside that didn't really have a lot to do with the topic at hand but I figured I'd bring up my playstyle since you may or may not favor the sit 'n stomp technique that's all the rage with the brutes these days. I think that this is more fun and that the results speak for themselves.

Not to try to antagonize Pinny or anything but I highly recommend putting will of the controller into shadow field. It fully benefits from the recharge at all levels whereas fearsome stare, in a high end build, can easily be up far more frequently than you can realistically use it with all of the other stuff dark/time has going on. Fearsome stare only applies one proc per cast, shadow field applies six. I know what you're thinking, "forty five seconds is five proc chances!" Shadow field is unique among 45 second patches in that it applies two procs at zero seconds. Also, I really prefer slotting fearsome stare for -tohit and if your overall strategy is recharge and ranged defense you get a lot of each by six slotting cloud senses in fearsome stare. That's all, like, my opinion, man.

Whew, that said, welcome to my favorite controller combination ever! It's tanky, it's debuffy, it's controlly, and it even does great damage. As you said it looks very good doing it, too. I could write a treatise on its various virtues but for everyone's sake I'll restrain myself. Basic recommendations: if you have purples lying around, this combination benefits hugely from huge recharge as it enables you to perma chrono shift for even more recharge. This is great because dark/time has a truckload of powers with moderate to long base recharge. Here's one of them: distortion field! This power looks pretty lame between its extremely crappy hold and the fact that you already have an excellent slow aura of your own. What that doesn't factor in is that it's a cheap power that can take a ton of damage procs. You don't even need to slot anything but procs in it, if you have lots of global recharge it will be up more frequently than you can cast it. The principal downside to this proc-heavy strategy is that incarnate powers don't benefit it as much as some other combination, which is to say musculature and interface have no impact on two of your most damaging powers. Not a big deal in my view.

Aside from that, take the pets and use the pets. Haunt is very efficient damage and the annoying dog is one of the best controller pets if you can stomach its idiosyncrasies. Time stop is a really bad power and if you weren't forced to take time crawl at level one I would also recommend skipping that: you're a force of freaking nature, trifling with moderate regen debuffs on a single enemy is far beneath you.

Keeping in mind that this thread is about making the game more fun for other players...

Whoops, I meant knives of vengeance there, as the talons clearly are not featured in that arc (and getting killed by the talons would be less embarrassing).

Staff/elec scrapper. I wanted to mix things up from my normal strategy so I shot for ~34% s/l/e/n defense rather than focusing on smashing and lethal, and so far it has been seriously paying off. In addition to that I was able to get 87.5% global recharge for nearly-perma hasten which is only a little more than you need to run staff's single target and aoe chains. In spite of the fact that power sink is up like constantly and I never use it, I forgot to switch out of form of the soul for form of the body just because soul was so handy while leveling that I was essentially married to it. I even made a bind to switch between them and everything! Old habits, I guess.

But yeah, I can't say enough good things about this combo. It seems like staff would also be very good with the other damage aura sets, but elec caught my fancy and I'm glad I went with it.

Just fwooshed my way through Heather Townshend's arc on x6, tier 1 musculature my only incarnate goodie so far. Staff worked exactly as I predicted it would: exceptionally well. One death against the talons of vengeance of all things when all three bosses in the spawn hit build up at the same time and I neglected to get out of the way, no deaths against the tsoo or pantheon. My plan was to use purple inspirations judiciously but in reality they were fairly unnecessary; for the last two missions I didn't use any inspirations at all save obviously for the final fight. This was possible for a variety of reasons, from guarded spin's amazing usefulness in high end chains to having sufficient aoe damage to chew dangerous lieutenants up rapidly and en masse to having appropriate control powers immediately available any time a problem enemy was present.

As it happens I can think of an easier way to sum all of that up: Staff is a stellar set.

CO's super jump also caused massive self damage and was virtually uncontrollable last time I checked, which was shortly after the game's launch. That certainly sounds more realistic to me but something tells me it wouldn't be universally loved as a revamp to super jump at this point in CoH's existence.

If you want to make extra double sure that the name is available, just /friend Stupendous Man. Of course, if the name is taken this method comes with the extra step of /estrange Stupendous Man, assuming you're disinclined to be friends with someone simply because they thought of a name that you wanted before you did.

You seem a little angry, friend. Please calm down.