PunkRolex

Not to be insensitive, but I can't imagine that a bunch of Korean businessmen would give even the smallest crap about what a minor American celebrity of any sort has to say about anything.

Likewise, I know from other contacts in my personal life that anyone who has an income level that is far above what most people would consider to be average is bombarded constantly with solicitations for donations.

This just does not seem to be a productive avenue no matter how I look at it. I want the game to continue as well, but pestering famous or semi-famous people about it isn't going to make anything better.

Steamrolling difficult content. Confusion powers. IO-ing out a build that I'm enjoying. Teaming with friends. Soloing to let off steam. Finally getting around to running arcs solo so I can read all the mission text. A PuG that actually knows what it's doing. Seeing some sickening combination of buffs happen somehow. Using travel powers to navigate around the city and randomly smacking down spawns while I do it. Randomly finding a badge or plaque on accident. The "Pwnz" badge. The "Said No to Superadyne" badge. Finding a like-minded collection of individuals who actually WANT to take down Lucsa or run a Synapse TF. Enjoying the beauty of Praetoria. Making wisecracks in Incarnate League chat.

Unfun things: Lack of variation in maps. Enormous branching multifloor Crey labs. The 5 layer cave room. The 4-layer Council room. People on teams who don't talk at all. Inconsistent or also WAY TOO SERIOUS role players. People who whine about receiving buffs. Morons arguing about moron stuff in public chat. People who get PO'd over a few defeats. People who join a team and go AFK. The jerk who doesn't press the button to let a trial start. PVP and everything associated with PVP. Anything north of the Longbow base on Nerva. The ridiculously long wait to enter maps that have the guy standing by the helicopter as the mission door. Ridiculously expensive costume packs. Costume packs that no longer include powers or emotes. How long it takes Controller AoE holds to recharge given their duration. Not being able to shut up Woofy the dog. Mask of Vitiation. How stupid the noises that male toons make are.

I don't really *like* Virtue. I have some characters on every server at this point, but Virtue is the only one where people regularly whine and moan about drive-by buffs. I think the quality of player is lower than on some of the less populated servers, HATE the discussions that happen in broadcast and help chat, and I dislike the burden of dealing with role players. Basically, Virtue is full of fussy weirdos. If my only option were to play there, I would not play CoX at all.

I've soloed it a couple times on my 50+3 Fortunata. My first run was at +4x8.

My general strategy for all that stuff is to keep at least one boss confused at all times to help with DPS and to use my collection of huge AoEs (Void Judgment, Psychic Wail, Mass Domination and World of Confusion) to blunt response from the spawn.

Talons bosses are tremendous helpers in that regard.

The second run I just played for kicks, using my confusion powers exclusively until there was just one mob in each spawn to beat up. It took a while but I was enormously entertained.

I was thinking last night after I logged: Maybe the key to the Really Hard Way is selecting a team for very little melee and tons of ranged damage?

It was a good run either way. I was surprised at how easily we got the Hard Way badge.

Skyway, Kings Row and Brickstown look a lot more like the real world that makes up my everyday life. We in the US are all familiar with the little forgotten places that exist around or beneath the expressway. They're filled with cheap hotels and liquor stores, questionable chain restaurants and strip clubs, interspersed with some lonely visitor centers or tiny bits of rest area green space.

Moreso than the tall buildings of Steel Canyon, transit nightmare of Talos Island (one road and one rail line in and out? Really?) or the crappy faux-shiny world of Atlas Park, the "Gritty" bits of Paragon are what make it a real place. They belong in the game for that reason if no other. If I had my way, AP would be gone and the much more interesting and worthy Galaxy City would be the 1 - 6 Hero zone as well.

I really, really hate the current forum skin. There is absolutely nothing appealing about it. I've adblocked it on a few computers where I visit these forums and I resent the fact that any similar art is on the game's loading screen.

The night i23 launched, I ran five full Mag trials on Virtue (also, at one point I zoned in to a Dark Astoria 5, which is INSANE) and they all succeeded. I moved on to Victory and Liberty and ran the trial five more times each and they all succeeded. By late Thursday evening, I was starting to see calls for Mag farms, which I at first thought was just the name given to runs of a relatively easy trial that could be run like clockwork. I hopped on one and realized that no one was moving on after the first phase of the trial. I thought that was lame and didn't do it again.

By Friday evening, people on Virtue were complaining that completing a Mag trial was unusual and by Saturday many of the people I was trialing with said that they had never seen a trial finish successfully AT ALL. I ran the Mag trial once on Saturday and we barely succeeded with under 30 seconds on the timer, and on Sunday I was 0 for 3 attempts. People didn't know what the Lights or the Portals did. It was pretty awful.

I suspect that the folks who were running the trial on Thursday were hardcore fans and people who had run the trial a zillion times in beta and as the weekend went along I was seeing more of the type who wanted zero effort power leveling and the like. The Thursday people unlocked their toons, crafted their T4s and went back to doing other stuff. The folks who were left just weren't/aren't enough of a core of knowledge to make the trial run smoothly.

I definitely saw a much higher level of play on Victory and (especially) Liberty than I did on Virtue.

I suspect that if there's a developer conspiracy against melee incarnates, its genesis is in the fact that there are a lot more of them than there are squishies. I know I had a lot easier time dealing with the various EBs in the Alpha unlock missions on my Scrappers and Brutes than I did on my Corrupters and Controllers, and it's almost impossible to form a pick-up trial without a disproportionate amount of melee.

With that in mind, it makes a certain amount of sense to me that they would create challenges that impact melee incarnates.

Melee guys also shine in a lot of places that leave support and ranged guys feeling pretty worthless. The Grenades and Acids segment of the LAM comes to mind, or dealing with the warehouses full of mobs on a Keyes. Most trials seem to have a portion that's tailor-made for one type of toon over another; it makes sense to me that there would be corresponding moments of weakness during some stages of some trials.

The content that I make a concerted effort to do is Faultline, Striga and Croatoa hero-side, because those arcs are closest to the red-side game. They're rich, compelling and don't require a lot of the same pointless crap as early blue-side arcs.

Red side, I just try to exhaust my contacts of missions. That almost never happens. I also do as many mayhems/safeguards as I can

In either case, the 35-50 run is mostly a preoccupation with getting XP quickly. I try to run on large teams and I discriminate less about content. I run a lot of TFs and tips, since those have reasonable rewards and more of a plot than radio missions.

On my Fort I went with the Energy damage quasi-proc thingy. Most of my damage is Psi, which to my utter annoyance is massively resisted by absolutely everything in the end-game. Widows are in more or less the same boat with their Lethal damage.

I'll probably also craft the Support Hybrid next. I don't really run out of End, but benefiting a team on a trial will probably be more useful than just a little extra damage from me regardless.

I've given the Freaklympics a pass ever since Striga and Croatoa came into being, which is a bit of a shame since I love fighting Freakshow and it awards one of my favorite badges.

I always do Faultline-Striga-Croatoa now, so anything else that might happen in that 20 level stretch is going to be ignored.

On the other hand, I do whichever lowbie and 35+ missions I get from contacts, so I have run Crimson and Indigo and Angus and Harvey at least once in the last four months.

I've lately come to find out that a huge part of the player base isn't even aware of Striga Island. That's a damned shame, as it's one of the best zones available to blue-side folks.

I think there's huge utility in Aid Other and in Stimulant. If you want to heal yourself and ignore healing other people, that's your business, but something like that should cost you two power picks. It's a perfectly reasonable trade-off.

On my MMs, I get Air Superiority and leave it on auto. If something gets close to me, I knock it down. There is a huge level of utility in doing that, whether you want to be in melee or not.

Beyond that, your best bet is probably all those common temp powers like St. Louis Slammer, Gabriel's Hammer and Envenomed Dagger. They're mostly cheap to craft and even using them in a regular attack chain you'll usually get a few missions out of them.

I spent most of last night on a random PuG that was running the Maria Jenkins missions. The team leader was a level 48 or 49 Staff Brute and we were fighting mobs that were +3 to that person. I spent the whole night fighting as a 48, myself.

Except that during one of the missions, we ran into a room of level 54s that included the AV version of Nightstar. During that specific mission, our team was weighted heavily for Control and support, with just a pair of Brutes doing their melee thing. There were a /Kin, a /Time and a /Cold at least, though I was a bit too busy to check who else was doing what (Maybe a /Rad and a /Dark?)

We had a near-wipe from the surprise of finding the AV in the pile of other stuff were were killing and the sudden jump in difficulty, but after we regrouped and gave Nightstar all our attention, we were never really in any serious danger again.

The fight took about 15 minutes and I'm sure we would not have been able to do it at all with many group compositions, but the fact is that we took down an AV that was beyond the purple patch. All of the modifiers should have been in the AV's favor. The team hadn't worked together before, but we didn't even try to plan. It bothers me that we were able to do that. It's not like we were operating as a superteam or some other purpose-built configuration for taking down +6 AVs.

I'm also a bit bothered by the fact that something spawned as a 54 in a sub-level 50 mission, but I've seen that happen before.

Is the game just too easy now? Were we just that awesome? Has this ever happened to anyone else?

I like to street sweep when I'm solo. In part it's because I have fond memories of certain areas of every zone and figuring out the best places to hunt in the issue 0 days before missions gave anything like decent XP, but also in part because being on patrol is something that super-heroes do.

I like to drive-by buff when I'm on a toon capable of doing so. Heck, I'll at least fire off my mystic fortune no matter which toon I'm playing. I like the random interaction with other players outside of a team. I'll even take my /Kin or /Cold or /Emp and find high traffic areas like the Black Market in CaD or the Portal Corporation courtyard and just buff for the fun of it. Every once in a while, I even manage to save somebody from defeat that way.

I'd love to see more incentives to stay out in the public areas of the game, especially in underutilized zones like Brickstown, IP or Boomtown.

I sort of like the "bounty" idea. Perhaps it could be implemented with an XP or inf incentive? "Your police scanner squawks: Be advised that S0n1c800|\/| is rampaging in Mera Heights with a large group of Freakshow. Until he is apprehended, consider him and his crew public enemy #1!" Let the named guy spawn as a zone-appropriate, high hit-points EB and offer, say, 50% extra XP or Inf for defeats from the EB's faction until he's brought to justice.
Basically we'd get something like a non-instanced safeguard mission with a reasonably tough opponent and more of a sense that the non-instanced zones are living worlds.

There's a value in "not getting hit", especially on a controller since that also means "not getting a status effect" almost certainly outweighs reducing cast times on powers by a fraction of a second, which is all you're really talking about at 5% recharge.

Remember too that at incarnate levels, mobs have a boosted base chance to hit, so that extra bit of defense is that much more important if you're going to go play in DA or run BAFs.

Mechanically, Tanks are a whole different ball game. Tanks can operate in a strategic fashion that, because of Fury, Brutes really can't. Admittedly, there are fewer edge case scenarios now where Tank survivability is essential, but there's still something to be said for higher hit point and resistance caps. It's not like you want a mere Brute holding the Avatar of Hamidon's attention, right?