Remmet

I'll be getting the complete collection, assuming I get it. Why do I want to pay $30 for the expansion, when it can be had for $15 or so ($40 - $15 game time - $10 goody pack*)?

Also, when are we going to find out what's actually *in* GR? Yes, we know there are 2 new powersets, and zones and missions covering 1-20 gameplay. And presumably something to help pre-existing characters swap sides. Is that it? Or is there more?

It's all very well and good explaining pricing and availability, but it'd be nice to let people know what they're actually getting for their $30-40 before they hand it over.

(*) Based on the price of all the similarly sized booster packs.

Stalkers, at least at low level before they get all their defenses in place, are generally better at the "strike and run away" tactic instead of hanging around and scrapping it out. They're also more geared towards running against smaller spawns of higher level enemies.

However, my katana/electric stalker is quite capable of sitting and scrapping it out with a x3 or x4 average-difficulty-type spawn largely due to Divine Avalanche. By using that as often as I can, she can have her melee and lethal defense up to the soft-cap and higher with no trouble. She has a resistance based set, so any hits that get through do less damage than they otherwise would. And she has a heal. Really, her main problem is being hit by ranged non-lethal attacks, but since most enemies will close to melee if they can, that isn't as often as you think.

I've only played a handful of stalkers myself, but I'm sure there are other combinations that have similar benefits.

If you don't like the game enough to keep on with it, then that's fine too. It's not everyone's cup of tea. But to address a couple of your points:

1) You should get a decent connection from Europe. I get a fine one to the NA servers from Australia (and not in a big city too), and that's about as far away as you can get. If you're after higher population servers, then yes, you're probably better off on the NA servers (Freedom and Virtue are highest population generally, the order of the rest seems to depend on time of day). Yes, you can't transfer your EU trial account to a NA trial account, but so what? If you've played the game enough to go "Well, gee, I might buy this if there were any other people on", then just buy an account. It'll be like $20 US, and you'll get a month to decide whether you actually like to game enough without those annoying trial restrictions and and with the extra people to play. Failing that, you might be able to get another trial if you use a different email address -- not sure on what information it uses to determine if a trial is unique though, but that's what it checks when you try to send a trial to a friend so it could be the same for self-made trials too.

2) The game plays considerably differently from AT to AT. Taking 2 scrappers pr brutes through their journey to 50 will be fairly similar. whereas taking a scrapper and a mastermind, or brute and a controller will be considerably different. I find that the support / controls ATs differentiate more from powerset to powerset too. During normal progression, you won't hit every contact in a zone, and in CoH, you'll often have multiple zones to pick from for each level range. Not so much in CoV, though their contacts are better IMO! The game is pretty much built around having multiple characters.

Yep, there are quite a few annoying bugs with the MM pets at the moment. (Suddenly finding myself being pounded on by a longbow ambush after entering the bank in a mayhem and my pets are god-knows-where is my favourite )

FWIW, the pets seem to go AWOL less often if I put them in passive follow before an elevator. I have no figures to justify anything and it could be pure luck, but it might be worth a try.

Anyway, as far as the pets dying thing goes, in my experience, it happens when I'm exemplared (i.e. on a team where I'm not the leader -- I've *never* had it happen solo). I wonder if what's happening is that I level, pets go up a level, then the exemplar-leash yanks me back to the same level as the team leader, and the pets die because of the drop, like they always do if you drop a level from when you summon them.

I find /TA to be distinctly underwhelming as a MM secondary. Admittedly I'm running it with Ninjas, and those little buggers are hard to keep alive at the best of times, but it seems (at least so far -- she's 24 at the moment) very light on mitigation. Glue Arrow's useful, and Ice Arrow is nice, but Flash Arrow? I haven't noticed a scrap of difference between fights where I use it and fights that I don't. It doesn't seem to be very good at helping you split spawns (like Fire Control's smoke) and the -To Hit is unnoticeable.

At least Oil Slick Arrow looks like it'll be decent mitigation once she gets it.

A few of mine know each are / are related:

I have a mother, daughter, aunt trio. The daughter thinks she's the only member left of her family (not counting her family's pet ninjas which she took with her when she left), and the mother / aunt are trying to find her.

My tanker has an evil brute alter-ego, caused by a Portal malfunction. The brute knows all about her origins and hates her goody-two-shoes "other self", but the tanker knows nothing.

And my boyfriend and I have a brother / sister pair: Mine's a fire/fire dom, and he's a fire/thermal controller. The dom is insane, fire-obsessed and quite dumb. The controller is a more personable type, and likes barbecues.

Yeah, I've run into this before. Mainly with Lost, but also council and family, on occasion. It seems to happen more when I'm doing a story arc I've just outlevelled. Yeah, I normally run on at least x2 difficulty, which might explain why I've seen it several times before.

That's right.

Eh, mine are all No VFX anyway.

(btw, for those that missed it, I was talking about the big dust storms on the NSW coast yesterday morning. It was very apocalyptic looking!)

The sky's gone all orange, but I haven't seen any zombies yet.

[ QUOTE ]
I believe it's a silly hoax simply because he didn't realize that the round things went into the round holes when he's clearly smart enough to click on the "Enhancement" tab and hit "Manage."

[/ QUOTE ]

It doesn't let you slot expired enhancements though. If he tried after those 1s and 2s had already expired, then he's probably going to assume that it's not what he's supposed to do.

I'll jump in and out of melee range if I'm fighting an EB I haven't managed to hold yet, but otherwise I just stay in melee. How else is my proc-feet going to hit things?

She's /dark. That's pretty squishy.

I'll give it a go on one of my doms though, and see if it's any different.

Are the ranged attacks really all that powerful? I was on a team against a custom group last night of all War Mace meleers, and it wasn't until halfway through the mission I even noticed they had throwing knives. And as the brute, going in early, I'd have been more likely to have been hit by them.

Granted, this was on Live though. Were things changed before the patch went live?

Subjective:

- It'd be great to be able to mark a custom critter as unique(*) without having them be an EB/AV. EBs/AVs tend to be too powerful for lowbie arcs, and some (coughNinjitsucough) are just too powerful for solo-friendly missions. Currently, the only way of doing so appears to be to make a second group, but then you run into problems with the two groups having different names.
- There doesn't seem to be a way to set a custom group's display name from the GUI. You can change it in the .cvg file (in my case, to give 2 different groups the same name), but the GUI overwrites it back to the value that was entered in the critter's group drop-down.
- More replacement text options for dialogue would be nice. In my case, I'd like master/mistress (sir/ma'am doesn't have quite the same tone).
- The payphone can't be used as a contact? That seems like one of the more obvious choices.

EDIT: (*) By unique, I mean that they won't show up in normal spawns, only as placeable objectives.

There appear to be some issues with Mastermind allies. The ally summons his pets quickly enough, but for the most part they just trail along following the MM, and don't attack. After watching their behaviour, it occurred to me that the pets are probably being summoned in defensive mode, which means that unless the MM themselves draws aggro (not common, if you're playing a solo tank like I was), then the pets are basically useless.

Objective: Snaptooth spawns as an Elite Boss (level 4, in my case) while soloing on Villainous. That seems a little tough for a new character which only has a couple of attacks under their belt.

Yep, that's the one.

Subjective: The "rescue Ghost Widow" mission of the Sister Airlia story arc seems very easy to fail.

I was playing through with my 38 dominator. I got to the third floor, rescued her, and then was killed by the purple boss that spawned behind me. So I went to the hospital, flew back, and while I was on the second floor trying to get back to her, the mission failed.

Is this normal behaviour? I thought that NPC interactions stopped while you weren't within a certain distance of them, but I wasn't even on the same floor. And if this was meant to happen, that makes this mission basically an auto-fail if you have to go to the hospital after rescuing Ghost Widow.

On a positive note, Sister Airlia's resulting comments about the mission failure were funny and perfectly appropriate for my poor dom!

Agreed. My boyfriend and I have been having this same issue with our new pact-levelled pair.

Also, I second (third? fourth?) the idea of allowing us to make pacts with our higher level character pairs. We have, um... far too many ... and it's annoying to always keep them in sync.