Rodion

The thing about this model is that it works for everyone.

Subscribers obsessed with instant gratification can get everything on demand, even things they would have had to wait years for in the past.

Subscribers who have patience can get anything they want at no extra cost if they just wait until they accrue enough points.

People who can't afford a subscription can pay as much as they can spare to unlock the content they want.

People who only want to play in spurts can easily unlock only as much content as they need, and can eventually unlock most of the game and play for free thereafter.

And we've been getting regular updates and additional power sets and content on a regular basis. It seems like a win all around.

There are some Smash/Lethal and Energy farms out there. I have SS/Electric and Electric/Electric brutes that are both soft-capped to S/L damage, and they can handle either energy or S/L farms. My Fire/Fire tanker is similarly soft-capped to S/L damage and has no problems with S/L farms (but gets the End sucked out of him on most Energy farms).

The other thing to realize is that inspirations drop like rain: if your DPS is high enough, you can almost turn off your armor and just use inspirations for defense. You need to use conversions and it really helps to be level 50, but even level 20-30 characters can farm effectively by managing inspirations.

Currently it's easier to give an Electric Armor scrapper "layered" defenses than it is for Energy Aura.

That is, with Electric Armor you can hard-cap Energy resistance and get pretty high Smash/Lethal resistance, and at the same time soft-cap Smash/Lethal or get pretty high all around positional defenses by using IO bonuses. This makes for very robust characters, though it does take a lot of tweaking with IOs

You can easily soft-cap Energy Aura to Energy and Smash/Lethal defense, as well as get your other defenses pretty high. But it's not really possible to hard-cap any resistances currently. This gives you characters with high overall defense, but the problem with defense is that there's always a 5% chance that you'll get smeared by a big attack that you have no damage resistance for.

However: IO bonuses are changing significantly in i24, so things may be changing. The "useless" IO bonuses (immobliize resistance, debt protection) are being replaced by general mez protection and resistance bonuses. It's hard to know exactly how high you will be able to get resistances because Mids hasn't been updated for i24, and figuring out optimal builds is non-trivial without a tool like Mids.

It looks like resistance-based characters may become even more robust. For example, Fiery Aura tankers may be able to hard-cap smash/lethal resistance in addition to Fire resistance by using those same bonuses.

You don't say whether you're VIP or whether you have access to IOs. If you can't use IOs this may not matter to you at all.

I never had any problems with Praetorians on my Dark/Dark, and can solo all the x8 incarnate arcs without any difficulties, especially with a level shift advantage.

If you're having difficulties you can remedy them with a shift in tactics and the appropriate power and IO bonus selections in your build.

Dark generally works better if you draw them into your clutches, rather than charge in, but once you've got the complete toolkit you can do it either way. I went for high S/L defense on my Dark/Dark because I'd never had a character with Stone Mastery and mix it up in melee a lot, but I've typically gone for Ranged defense on my other /Dark/ defenders and corruptors.

Hybrid is a lot like Destiny. Most Destiny powers have a big initial buff, which decreases over time and completely peters out for most versions after 90 seconds (Clarion is a notable exception). Which means that you typically have no coverage for 30 seconds.

Instead of being a click, Hybrid provides a permanent minor buff and a bigger buff while it's toggled on. This buff doesn't fade like Destiny, it's constant. Since it's a toggle, you can turn it off, allowing you to start its recharge early.

Both powers are a lot like the "god mode" in melee defense sets. You can't use them all the time, but if you make the appropriate selections you can do outrageous things for brief bursts and still be covered a lot of the time.

Do path auras work alongside Super Speed now (except for the flashing at your feet, of course)? The upcoming "minimal FX" Super Speed customization in the next issue might be just the ticket, at least for players who don't mind the path aura being on all the time.

I'm guessing that most of the time stars don't show up in photos taken in space because they're so much dimmer than closer objects (the earth, spacecraft), and the exposure isn't long enough for them to register.

The image you mention that you can see stars in has a notation that it's not color adjusted. It looks like it may have been taken on the night side of earth, which would mean it has a longer exposure and would therefore show stars.

Just set up a private global channel and don't invite anyone else. Or have a personal supergroup and use the /sg command.

Thanks a bunch for the fix to set bonus finder!

There's one problem that was introduced in the previous update: whenever the application opens a character the application thinks it was changed. When I exit or open another character it asks if I want to save the current character even if nothing was modified.

It's not a deal breaker, but I have to stop every time to wonder if I actually made a change I want saved, or accidentally made a change that I don't want saved, and I can't tell what the change might have been.

I have the app automatically open the last character I edited, so it happens to me every time I use Mids.

While the alternate travel powers are cool, they cost points and none of them is as functional as the pool travel powers: you can't jump as high or fly as fast. Some of them untoggle all your powers (Rocket Board and Flying Carpet), though Ninja Run does not.

But I still can't recommend Ninja Run. The stance is inappropriate for every one of my characters. If you can't spare a power choice in a build, you can get jet packs in-game for free in a whole bunch of ways--the easiest being to buy the recipe in the market and crafting it. There are several missions that grant it, and you can also just buy jetpacks in Grandville and FBZ from the special vendors.

Finally, since you can slot IOs such as +Stealth and Winter's Gift: resistance to slow in pool travel powers, I find that I always want to take a travel power so I can use those.

So, unless you have a character that you actually want to have skulking around and flipping with Ninja Run, or grunting and huffing on all fours with Beast Run, you might save your points for something else.

I use my points to buy stuff that I'll use permanently, like costume pieces, power sets, character slots, and so on.

The last thing to realize is that as a VIP you can download the Beta client. On Beta you can buy everything for zero points. Then you can try it out, and if you like it, you can buy it on live.

We only have one way to unlock Hybrid because of the vehement complaints made by players to avoid adding a new kind of salvage for it. If we had been able to use threads to buy Hybrid XP, many players would have been able to use the existing threads and salvage to craft a T4 Hybrid power in less than a minute, without running a single mission.

As a sop to solo players, the devs should have made DA arcs give Hybrid XP at a similar rate to the other iXP. It would take so long to unlock Hybrid that it would be giving nothing away.

On the other hand, farming Hybrid XP is trivial. If you run the first part of the trial four to six times you can unlock Hybrid. If your league is well supplied with participants you can easily do it in an hour or so.

I used to go to Striga and beat on warwolves and vampyri in the swamps near the graveyard once I reached a level when they were gray. It was boring, it didn't provide any xp. But it was very boring, especially since vampyri only spawn at night, so I've stopped doing it.

Now I don't bother to go out of my way to get the badge. I find that if you do Council radio missions, you wind up getting the badge in short order, plus you get a lot of XP. It's probably easier to drum up a team to do radio missions than to get someone to commit to doing a TF, or even drag themselves all the way to Striga to do regular missions. And Council radio missions with warwolves and vampyri are available all the way from level 20 to 50.

Given the way tankers work in CoH, and the nigh-invulnerability that the Fighting pool and incarnate powers can provide, I'm not sure what the point is for a tanker to have ranged damage. Most of the time you can stand in the middle of a huge spawn of enemies be completely unaffected. No need for ranged attacks at all.

That said, Mu Mastery would be your best bet: it provides four ranged attacks (a single target bolt, a cone AoE, a "ball" AoE and an immobilize). Coupled with your PBAoE and your Judgement power, that winds up being a lot of ranged and AoE damage.

Whether you can get a tight attack chain with those attacks is dependent on how crazy you want to get on recharge. You can take Hasten, Spiritual Interface, Ageless Destiny, and a ton of IO +recharge bonuses.

You can easily get recharge on these powers down to 3 sec for Mu Lightning, 10 sec for Ball Lightning, 8 sec for Static Discharge and 7 sec for Electrifying Fences. More than that depends on how much time and inf you want to spend on getting high-priced IO sets that crank up recharge. That may require making sacrifices in your other attacks and in your defenses. The latter would be self-defeating, however.

Like all IO sets, it really depends on the overall goals of your build. Some characters may want Sting of the Manticore for the ranged defense and +recharge bonus, while others might want Executioner's Contract for the 3.13% ranged defense bonus, or Extreme Measures for the 2.5% AoE and Melee defense bonuses.

But since all snipes can take regular ranged damage IOs and damage ATOs, I don't think there'll be a huge run on snipes in the long run. As always there will be some impatient buyers who drive up the price but over time this will settle down as people find optimal slottings for their playstyles.

I think the proposed 22% to-hit mechanic for quick snipes is fine in general, but blasters still need to have access to snipes solo to be on an even footing with stalkers' Assassin's Strike.

To this end I propose that blasters (and blasters alone) be able to quick snipe when the target is less than 81 feet away. With the 22% to-hit bonus the snipe will quick-fire up to the maximum range.

Here's my analysis:

Part of the rationale behind making the snipe changes was to improve blaster performance along the lines of the mechanic that allowed stalkers to use Assassin's Strike in normal melee combat.

In order to use snipes in normal combat with anywhere near the same relative frequency that stalkers can use Assassin's Strike, solo blasters without /Devices have to do the following:

• Three-slot Hasten.
• Find 50-100% recharge somewhere else with +Recharge bonuses to make Hasten permanent.
• Three-slot Build Up with Membrane Exposure so that it can used used once every 33 seconds. This can't be done until level 47. For more slots you do this at an earlier level, but this is probably wasteful.
• Three-slot Aim with Recharge so it can be used once every 33 seconds.

To get that same advantage /Devices blasters can do the following:

• Four-slot Targeting Drone with three Membrane Exposure and one To-Hit buff.

To get that same advantage Time/ defenders and /Time corruptors can do the following:

• Three-slot Farsight with Membrane Exposure.
• Two-slot Power Build Up with Recharge.
• Three-slot Hasten with Recharge.
• Get to level 36 so the above powers can be slotted properly.

To get that same advantage non-Time/ defenders can do the following:

• Three-slot Tactics with Cytoskeleton Explosure.
• Put Kismet: +6% to-hit in Maneuvers, Steamy Mist, Combat Jumping, etc..
• Get to level 31 so the snipe and the other powers can be properly slotted.

To get that same advantage, any stalker can do the following:

• Get to level 9 or 11 so Assassin's Strike can be slotted reasonably.

Thus, the vast majority of blasters will not be able to use quick snipes without a very specific build and a lot of annoying clicking of Build Up and Aim, while stalkers get an absolutely trivial mechanic that requires no special build at all. Blasters won't be able to do this until a high level (or by wasting a lot of slots), while stalkers can do it after one or two runs in DFB.

The fact that Tactics and Farsight are common on teams is of little help. Do we really think that people forming teams will go through the following thought process: "Oh, we can take blasters because they can use snipe better since we've got two characters with Tactics?" This just doesn't wash, and it's inherently unfair to solo blasters, or blasters who play on small teams without team mates who have Tactics.

The idea of using a high to-hit bonus to be the condition that actives quick-snipe sounds logical enough on paper: snipes are slow because they require aiming. If you have a high to-hit bonus your aiming is already done.

But in the real world the reason snipers need a long time to aim is that they're at extreme range. If you're at short range, you don't need a long aiming time; it's like having an automatic to-hit bonus.

It's all well and good that snipes in general will fire quickly for all ATs if the to-hit bonus is at 22%. But for the stalker analogy to hold any water, blasters still need one more additional advantage that other ATs don't have with snipes, one that's equivalent to the stalker mechanic. I propose that we use range.

Since blasters are expert ranged fighters, snipes should fire quickly at short range. When a target closer than, say, 81 feet is selected, the orange ring should appear around the snipe to indicate that it can be fired quickly. Beyond 81 feet the snipe will have a long and interruptible animation. That 81 foot range would be boostable by all the various powers that increase range.

The client obviously knows the range of targets, because it won't let you fire a power if a target is out of range.