Robotech_Master

Grrr, stupid board decided I wasn't logged in and ate my reply. Starting from scratch:

Great guide, though I have a couple of quibbles or questions.

First, I think that Blazing Aura should be taken as soon as possible. It's very helpful in keeping mob aggro by damaging as many of them as possible at once, hence drawing fire away from teammates. And it can also be used in hazard zones like Perez Park (or, with the new more-granular difficulty system, in your own missions with the spawn size cranked) to melt down large groups of blue and green mobs and hence level quickly at the low end.

And I think that the new super-sidekicking system means that Rise of the Phoenix benefits by being moved ahead, too. It's not possible to unexemp to self-rez anymore. So my old build had it at 49, but I'm now moving it back to 32 so it can benefit any exemp-teams I'm on as much as possible. After all, if you're on a team and something was bad enough to take you down, likely the rest of the team won't stand a chance unless you get back up and get the enemy's attention again as soon as possible.

And a question: you mention slotting up with Enhancement sets, but what about those of us who were around in the old days and have scads of Hami-Os? I've got three Accuracy/Damage Hamis in most of my attack powers, meaning it's like having three extra SOs' worth of room to add L50 recharge or endurance IOs after hitting the ED cap on both Accuracy and Damage. Are IO sets really worth losing those significant power benefits? (Here's the respec build I'm currently considering, replete with the hami-os I have.)

The really annoying thing is that I'm coming back to this after being away for several issues, and I'm going to have to respec literally almost every character I have to take advantage of these changes. It's an annoying process as it is, not made any easier by this tray rigamarole. :/

Is there any way to save the arrangement of my trays so they don't get screwed up when I respec? I'm using most of my trays, have them arranged JUST how I want them, and will go nuts if I have to start from scratch again.

A number of starter boxes of various editions of CoH are available online rather cheaply (well under $15). Even though I already bought and applied them the first time around, would I be able to buy up some of these old editions (like Good vs. Evil, Architect, etc.) and apply their codes to get the benefit of that month of play time?

Wow. So now you literally need help to be able to use the help channel.

Great one, devs. :P

Lately I, and a number of other players, have noticed a tendency on the part of the game to put a bunch of garbage in the chat box, often related to movement keys. I thought it might just have been me, until I saw someone in broadcast post something like "wwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaassssdwaaaaLooking for Group".

This also seems to affect the login screen, causing text to appear in the password box when we launch the game that has to be removed.

I hope a fix for this is on the way?

I recently created a new character on Triumph. When I go into the "Help" tab, which is set with the "Help" channel as a default, and type things, nothing shows up. The same when I create an all-new tab with just "Help" in it.

I checked Virtue and "Help" works just fine over there.

So, um, help?

Why is there no macro for creating Awakens?

Those are what I combine for most often of all.

The following section will be incorporated into the next version of
this guide, if and when I ever find time to revise it. (I will probably be wikifying and moving it to ParagonWiki while I'm at it.)

Since Ouroboros is in and there is no longer as much reason to be concerned about bypassing content, I have come up with the following "leveling path" for heroes.

The purpose of this path is to show that you do not need to shell out big bucks to some "powerleveling service" to get your fifties fast. Following the advice in this path should get you from level 1 to level 50 within just 3 or 4 weekends of dedicated all-day play (or less if one of the weekends is a Double XP one).

As with all my guides, there is no one "right" way to play the game; if you find some alternate method that works better for you, by all means use it (and feel free to share it, too!). This path is provided as an example.

I may eventually do one for villains, too, though that one will not be as easy given that there are fewer Strike Forces there.

LEVELING PATH FOR HEROES

1-10:

Create your character. Go through the tutorial, or just skip it. With Ouroboros allowing you to go back and get the "Isolator" badge, there's really no reason to bother with it unless you want the two big Inspirations. You'll hit level 2 in about two or three enemy defeats once you hit the pavement, anyway.

Once you hit Atlas or Galaxy, join or form a team with as many people on it as you can get (preferably 8). Do missions until you hit level 5 or so, then (optionally) go to King's Row to do Police Scanner missions and a Safeguard to get your jet pack. After that, enter the sewers. It should only take an hour or so in there to reach Level 10.

Slot your attacks for Accuracy. Because of Beginner's Luck, you can up the difficulty and still be assured of hitting things, but I would go no higher than Rugged at this point.

10-15:

Optionally, do more radio missions and a Safeguard to get your jump pack. Then join or form a Positron Task Force. In accordance with my Task Force advice earlier in this Guide, sidekick as low as you can (or, if you are a back-ranks support type like a Defender or Controller, you may not even need to sidekick at all) for as short a time as you can, and not die very much, and you will be at or near level 16 by the time the Task Force is over.

Yes, nobody likes Positron, but it's necessary for Task Force Commander and you might as well do it now when you get XP out of it rather than having to exemplar back in later.

15-20:

Join a Synapse Task Force, as above. It should get you to level 20 or level 21. Note that this will skip you right over the Faultline content, so if you want to play through it, do that first.

20-25:

Join a Sister Psyche Task Force, as above. It should get you just about to level 25. Note that the first Striga Island arc, with the 2-hour-duration Wedding Ring reward, can only be accessed below level 25. (The version you get through Ouroboros does not have that two-hour duration.) You may want to do that before you do the Psyche.

At level 24, you may also want to run a Respec Trial or two.

25-30:

Your choices for Task Force here are several, including Citadel, Moonfire, or Hess (depending on your level range). One TF alone will not get you all the way to 30 from 25, so you may choose to form an 8-man mission team for the rest of it. (Doing the last two Striga arcs to unlock Hess or the first two Croatoa arcs are good choices.)

Note that the first two Croatoa arcs, with the Divining Rod and Rune of Warding temp powers, can only be accessed below level 30 (unless you want to get them through Ouroboros later).

30-35:

Doing the last two Croatoa arcs will get a couple of useful temp powers, and unlock the Katie Hannon Task Force which is easily good for a level or two per 45-minute run. You will also want to do the Manticore TF as above to get a couple of levels out of that.

At level 34 you may also want to run a Respec trial or two. The Freakshow respec is a decent XP earner, and much less boring than the Sky Raider trial.

35-40:

Unless it's a double XP weekend, the current TF (Numina) will be good for only 1-2 levels at most, even if you enter it on the low end of the scale and do not sidekick. Fortunately, this is also where the two newest endgame TFs kick in: Imperious (Cimerora) and Lady Grey (Rikti War Zone). Once you hit L39 you will also want to do the Eden Trial.

Apart from these, forming an 8-person team and doing newspaper or arc missions on Invincible is a decent way to earn XP to fill in the gaps.

40-50:

At this point, you can keep on grinding out the Imperious and Lady Grey Task Forces and the Respec trials (Freakshow up to 43, Rikti at 44 and up) to level. Remember to sidekick as low as you can effectively fight to gain XP faster.

Alternately, you might find it worthwhile to nip over to the Shadow Shard, open all the contacts, and run the four Task Forces there. Quaterfield is a bit long and boring, but it's decent XP (and once the Merits system goes in, it will probably be one of the best bets for earning a good chunk of them at once). The other three are shorter, but at least offer a decent amount of variety and a good amount of XP.

There are a number of decent, repeatable missions in the Shard. The Kora Fruit missions, though no longer farmable to powerlevel, are still a good way to fill up (and to fill your supergroup's storage up, if you have one) with mid-size Inspirations (which can be converted three-for-one to Bounce Backs).

If you cant fly or teleport, NCSoft's store now offers a $5 30-day jetpack that will help you get around in the Shard for a while. If you are going to run a month of Shadow Shard missions, it might just be a good investment.

ddgryphon: Sorry I didn't see that post for so long.

Yes, I believe that is true; the XP bonus on mobs is long gone, and you only get the end of mission bonus once every half hour.

No matter what you create for folks who come out, you'll annoy the people who can't. I'd have thought you'd have learned that lesson from veteran rewards already.

I don't think it would be so bad except that the ability to wear a hardsuit like that has been something that players have wanted for some time, and I suspect they feel it is unjust that only those people who can go to Seattle will be able to get it.

I would suggest not to limit it to Seattle, but to give it out at all conventions where you make an appearance for the next year or so. That will at least make it feel a little more fair, while still keeping the specialness of it in reserve for people who meet you live.

And in a couple of years, give it out as a vet reward.

Another thing that's nice about having Field Crafter is that once you have it, you are in an ideal position to equip all your alts with cheap IOs at need, and end the tyranny of the obnoxious 5-level buy-up.

If you already know that you are going to need to respec your character, go to Wentworth's and buy ten L45-50 IOs. Interrupt time, Confuse Duration, and Intangibility are generally available cheaply (500-1000 each). Put them in your character's Enhancement tray, then sell them as part of the respec. You'll earn an extra 500,000 or so on the respec.

Darnitall. I was really looking forward to having a working portable crafting table…

Word of warning:

Always make sure at least one Nictus is within line of sight of Romulus when he goes down.

Don't pull the last Nictus out of line-of-sight of him before he falls.

If the Nictus is out of line of sight, he won't rez Rommie.

And if you're unfortunate enough for it to be the Twilight Grasp using Nictus, it'll be impossible to kill it. I had a TF fail that way last night. :/

It's something extra every character gets for purchasing it, as are the Pocket D teleport power and the new costumes. It's like a temp power that never goes away.

R_M's Consignment Market Buying Guide for the Casual Player (I12 and up)

It was brought home to me recently that there are a lot of "casual players" out there—the sort of person who just wants to play the game to smack heads and level up, and is not interested in reading lengthy guides to learn more about what he's doing. It occurred to me that this sort of player might benefit from some kind of a short, simple guide that just covered how to find good deals at the marketplace without going into any of the sort of selling stuff that seems so complicated. So, I set out to write that guide.

Of course, the irony is that any truly "casual player" would probably not even be reading this guides board to begin with, so I'm not sure how they would find this guide—and it may well not be short enough even for them.

But I can hope.

The guide is at

http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/R_M's_Consignment_Market_Buying_Guide_for_the_Casu al_Player

Feel free to leave feedback, comments, questions, suggestions, etc. here. As a Wiki guide, it can be constantly improved in place without needing to post an entire new version or worrying about people running across old out-of-date ones.

What the heck is "snood," anyway?

(Seems like this board is developing some of its own conventions and terms, what with "snood" this, and "drinking tears" that. Would be nice if someone would write up a FAQ for the, dare I say it, casual forum reader…)

Name: Hedonism, Inc.

Currently Recruiting: Seeking new members

RP Level: We prefer RP in-channel (with ((OOC parens)) as appropriate), but tolerate those less inclined.

PvP Level: Left up to the inclination of individual members.

Theme/Concept: The supergroup was started by supervillain Pouncetta Purrfect, whose villainous ambitions extended solely to the level of providing a hedonistic lifestyle for herself. Once she had made it to the top, she realized it would be much more rewarding if she could start an organization for other villains like herself—people who do not care who is in charge of the world, as long as they do not cut off their supply of caviar and Grey Poupon. The IC justification for the group is that the members pay "dues" out of the monetary proceeds of their bank robberies, like a sort of Amway for crooks—but since there's no such thing as actual "money" in the game, this is strictly RP only and no OOC "dues" are asked beyond playing in supergroup mode.

Activity: I'm not sure how many unique members we have—probably twenty or thirty, and we are looking for more. Probably most are active during the normal North American hours of evenings and weekends. (There is also a large number of inactive members on the rolls from the group's last major period of activity, but they will not be removed unless and until there are enough new members that we need the space (just in case there is another grant of "X prestige per member" somewhere down the line).)

Requirements for Membership: There are no strict requirements other than a willingness to at least give lip-service to playing in-character, and a willingness to play in Supergroup Mode to give us more money.

Leadership: Pouncetta Purrfect

In-Game Contact(s): Global @Purramedic (characters Pouncetta Purrfect, Shellcat, Stray Rae, Pouncetta Prime, Night's Tigress)

Out-of-Game Contact(s): Forum ID Robotech_Master, email robotech (at) eyrie.org or robotech.master (at) gmail.com

URL: No individual website yet; however, fanfic about Pouncetta Purrfect and friends has been posted in the RP Congress Other Worlds/Virtue forum.

Coalition(s): Coalitioned with a few other VGs, but mainly as a matter of convenience. Not at all averse to coalitioning with other VGs for the sake of RP/alliances.

Other Details: Fully-functional base, including all teleport destinations, both magic & tech Empowerment Stations, mission computer, storage (Inspirations, Enhancements, Salvage), crafting table & vault, medical resurrector. (No Inspiration store yet; we're still working on the badge for that.) Leader willing to run Respec Trials or Strike Forces by request on short notice; plenty of low-level IOs currently freely available to low-level members due to badgecrafting.

Seriously, something else that bears mentioning is that getting Field Crafter has the side benefit of having you memorize most of the common IO recipes along the way—so when you have it, you're in a great position to start up as a value-added reseller of whatever is currently hot in the marketplace.

I knocked out four of the nine sets on my 50 villain last night, and will be going back for the other five tonight.

What I have learned from Field Crafter so far is that the easiest way to make a small fortune in the Marketplace is to start with a large one. :P

I was considering going through and updating this in light of the freespec about to be issued, but the only thing that really needs changing is to mention that you can now get dropped or buy from the Consignment Markets respec recipes that will recharge your freespec if you have already used it up. You should be sure not to craft them until you are certain you have used your freespec.

I think you may be making this a little too complicated with the whole necessity of team balance between heroes and villains thing. Sometimes the media conventions have to give sway to convenience and easiness to understand for the players, not all of whom are, shall we say, genius-level intellects.

Use a specialized contact for the probation thing, yes. Wyvern might work for the villains, but if you do Hero Corps you'd need to make sure that their contact isn't easily confused with the Reputation contacts who are also Hero Corps.

It might actually be better to handle this through Pocket D and the Rikti War Zone. Put a fixer in some shady nook on both the hero and villain sides of the D, and in some out of the way place in the War Zone, and teams have to come to the D or zone to arrange the meet. Then, once all members of the team are either duressed or probated, they can all exit through the appropriate portal.

They'd probably want to use some variation on the Task Force/Ouroboros code for this, to make sure that a line-drop wouldn't drop you from the team but a team quit would send you back to the D or RWZ. Though I'm not sure whether it would be possible to do this and still be able to take normal missions.

I [heart] this thread.

You can also use Unicode to flip text upside-down. I'm not sure whether you can paste it into the game or not; I haven't tried that. But if other unicode symbols work, I would think this should too.