Rodion

Perhaps even more important is the 500% regen debuff, which makes taking down most AVs a whole lot easier.

Exactly which damage types and debuffs are involved? Depending on the exact build, you may have more or less trouble. (I'd look this up myself, but I've tried in the past to find a resource that lists CoH enemies and their attack types and can't find a general reference. Do you know of one?)

Knowledge of details of the enemies' attacks is often just as important as having defenses against them. If you know your limitations you can take steps to minimize them when needed. Your strategy is a good example of this: you use broad-spectrum defense supplemented by inspirations as needed. Other strategies are possible, including just using more or bigger inspirations, relying on team mate buffs, changing tactics to avoid situations that cause problems, or just avoiding those situations in the first place. (The latter limits the content you can run, and I don't endorse it, but many people don't have a problem with it.)

In the new TFs, for example, you have seven other team mates who will usually be able to get you through whatever challenge the TF is presenting.

An S/L soft-capped Fire/ tanker or /Fire brute can steamroll solo through quite a large swath of high-level content at x8 without relying on defense inspirations at all. That means they can use damage inspirations to amp up damage instead of "wasting" them on defense. You can even solo "dangerous" content (Carnies at x8, for example) by judicious use of tactics and inspirations.

Neither of these approaches is "wrong." They're just different. They appeal to different tactics and playstyles.

On my keyboard it's easier to find the F1 key than any other function key, so I put greens in the column corresponding to that key. Being able to quickly use a green will save your life: milliseconds count!

On the other hand, I almost never carry Awakens. They are a total waste of space, preventing me from carrying something that will keep me alive. They get deleted immediately upon dropping, unless I'm on a team where there's a person who's constantly getting themselves killed. That is, unless I have the resurrection day job power, which I make sure to get on my support characters.

If I do get killed, it's usually because I failed to use my inspirations in time. Which means I've got a lot of them still, which means I can combine something to make an Awaken as needed.

Finally, as often as not your killers are still standing over you and using an Awaken is not really an option. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off the hospital we go.

I was able to soft-cap a Fire/Fire/Pyre tanker to S/L without making too many sacrifices. The weirdest things I had to do was four-slot Consume and Taunt with Mocking Beratement. I also had to four-slot Ring of Fire with Enfeebled Operation. I eschewed Acrobatics in favor of three Steadfast and Karma -KB procs. Finally, I had to use four sets of Kinetic Combat and three sets of Reactive Armor, and three full sets of Obliteration. If I had to do it all at once it would have been very expensive, but this character is five years old and I've picked these IOs at my leisure.

This gives me four single-target attacks and four AoE attacks that are easy to fire off (three PBAoE and Fireball -- I skipped Breath of Fire because it's a hassle lining that up while trying to be the center of attention). That gives me a decent ST attack chain and lots of AoE potential, soft-capped to S/L with 70% S/L damage resistance.

The down-side (as always with DR-based characters) is you have no defense debuff resistance, and your S/L defense can disappear pretty quick under the wrong circumstances.

Endurance use was problematic until the Alpha Slot -- now it's a no-brainer.

The only real sacrifice I had to make was having to choose four of the the five AoEs (click AoEs and Blazing Aura). Looking at Hero Stats data it seems that Blazing Aura may outdamage the other AoEs in the long-term, but in the past there have been bugs with Hero Stats and Blazing Aura, so it's hard to say for sure. If you take a long time defeating mobs then Blazing Aura will certainly come out the king in the end. But if you're knocking mobs off quickly enough, BA may not affect them long enough to make a difference. With Fiery Embrace, Burn and Fire Sword Circle the minions drop very fast, and Blazing Aura would only be ticking against LTs and bosses.

I'd always used Blazing Aura in the past (skipping Burn because of all its previous problems) but with my latest respec a friend convinced me to go without BA. Subjectively I don't notice any difference solo. My main concern is that skipping BA means I lose my taunt aura while teaming, but considering the near-constant string of AoEs I'm not sure it makes any difference (plus, the radii of three of the other AoEs are nearly twice that of BA).

I'm considering swapping Combustion for Blazing Aura (Combustion feels slow and clunky), but will have to look at actual data to make a good decision.

I agree that having swing lines attach in midair is silly, but that's no reason to dismiss swinging as a travel power.

Since a significant part of the impetus for swinging has to come from the characters, it's obvious that the characters have significant jumping capabilities all by themselves. The swing line basically provides a way to gain altitude above what the jump alone would provide. That means that a swinger would be able to travel quickly by super leaping in the absence of tall objects to anchor from. That's what Spider-man always seems to do.

In CoH swinging would be a modal travel power. When you start out it works exactly like super leap, with a lower jumping distance.

To swing you would hold the space bar and click an object, much the same way teleporters do, except you couldn't click in midair. A swing line is projected and you transcribe the appropriate arc. As long as you hold the space bar you hang on to your swing line. Let go of the space bar and you let go of the line. You continue on in a parabolic arc, going up and then coming back down, as if you had superleaped from that point. Space bar-click another object and another swing line is projected.

Practically speaking, the sides of buildings aren't particularly good anchors because you tend to smash into the side of the thing you're swinging from. Spider-man seems to favor horizontal flagpoles, awnings and cornices to avoid this problem. Does Paragon City have many of these in convenient locations? The alternative would be to swing back and forth across streets, anchoring from buildings on alternate sides. That would make it rather slow, kind of like tacking against the wind.

The physics is pretty much the same as superleaping, except that you have a point of rotation that constrains your fall. But how easy it is to hook into that with new code is a completely different question.

Because this version of Swinging has the limitation that tall objects are required, it's not unreasonable that the travel power itself would be available as a first-tier power in a power pool.

The only problem with this power is that they'll have to pick an implementation for its appearance. Because of their history with Marvel, CoH may be hesitant to make something so clearly derivative of Spider-man. That, more than anything, could be why we haven't seen swinging yet.

Press the key to attack. If you're out of range the attack won't fire, but it will queue up. The attack will fire when the target comes within range, or the currently activating power is finishing firing. We'll assume for now that you don't have another power firing.

Face the target and press the W key. When you come within range the power will fire. Let up on the W key and you'll stop just within range.

This is a misapprehension of what the soft cap means. The soft cap is relative to level and rank: the 45% soft cap is relative to even-con minions. Higher conning enemies have an accuracy bonus (see the ParagonWiki article on attack mechanics), as do higher-ranking enemies like LTs and bosses.

This means that if you're fighting level 54 bosses and AVs -- which you find in the Tin Mage and Apex TFs -- you want to exceed the even-con minion soft cap.

Similarly, there are lots of defense debuffing attacks in the game -- many bullet and blade attacks reduce your defense for several seconds. That means when you do get hit it increases the likelihood of getting hit again, leading to the infamous defense cascade failure.

You can see this for yourself by looking at the combat history tab. My BS/SD scrapper is at the soft cap for AoE. When fighting a level 51 Freak Tank the tank's Grenade power has a 7.15% chance to hit. When fighting the same Freak at level 54 the chance to hit was 9.10% and 12.87% (he had hit me with one of his defense-debuffing attacks and debuffed my defense, increasing his hit chance).

A 2-8% increase in defense, though it may seem meager, will keep you at the soft cap when you're fighting higher-level enemies.

Finally, when the rarest boost is available 2/3 of your defense bonus will get through ED, which is nothing to sneeze at.

That said, I don't recommend everyone run out right now and try to get 60% defense. Partly this is because Apex and Tin Mage require 8 players, and that usually means having defenders, corruptors and controllers who will buff you and debuff the enemies. Those buffs and debuffs will be much greater than the defense you'll get from the alpha slot.

But if you're running a lot of high-end content solo, the soft cap is actually higher, and the same arguments that apply to hitting the even-con minion soft cap will apply to hitting the +4 minion soft cap.

There is no need to tune foes to your strengths -- most builds can find at least one type of standard foe that they can handle easily.

People have been farming standard content since the game was released. The most common abuse of this was the "Family Farm," a mission given by one of the 45-50 contacts and used by Fire/Kins to great advantage. Players would start the mission and instead of completing the goals they would exit and restart it after slaughtering all the mobs (the mission was populated by the team leader after haranguing other players to pad the team so they could spawn it for a full 8 -- the need for padding was eliminated when the new difficulty system was instituted). This was so abused for PLing that the experience rewards for Family in that level range were drastically cut.

Other missions were similarly abused, but instead of changing the experience values time limits were placed on some of those missions so that could not be saved and farmed. This was done to some warwolf and freak missions.

There are many standard content missions that certain builds can breeze through: the Infernal mission with all the demons is trivial for Fire tanks. The Hequat mission with all the Mu sorcerers is easy for /Electric brutes. The Battle Maiden missions are often farmed.

And, of course, any Council radio or paper mission is trivial for most scrappers, tanks and brutes in the 40-50 range. Since you can abandon any radio mission at will and get a new set of three to choose from you have a ready-made source of trivial farming missions in PI and Grandville for any character with good S/L defense or damage resistance.

Thus, the devs cannot frown upon someone who builds a mission that is identical to one of their own. They do, however, disapprove of AE missions that take advantage of exploits that give full experience for things like pets and monkeys.

As long as an AE mission is structured like a regular mission and gives the same kind of experience as a regular mission, it is by definition not an exploit. But if takes advantage of some quirk of the system and delivers XP at a much higher rate, then it's an exploit.

In general, however, a solo character running a mission optimized for their particular build is still going to get XP at a lower rate than a well-balanced team with lots of debuffs and damage dealers. A well-played team of a tanker, scrapper, blaster, and two or more dark/sonic/rad/storm/trick arrow defenders/controllers/corruptors will run roughshod over almost any kind of enemy, including Nemesis, Malta and Carnies.

That's really the yardstick you should be measuring against. If a solo character is earning XP at a lower rate than a good team, there's no reason to put a stop to it.

You're right: a level 50 character can be pretty much invincible for 30-60 seconds using the right inspirations. But since you can't do that on an ongoing basis, it's not really broken. True, if you run solo at x8 your inspirations are replenished quickly. But not as quickly as you use them if you don't have some underlying mitigation of your own, even if you combine them as the wrong types drop.

Before I IOed my Fire tank for S/L damage I could solo at x8 by using purples as necessary. Inspirations dropped fast enough to make it possible to do an entire mission. I have a much harder time doing this with my blasters even when they are softcapped for defense. You just have too many weaknesses.

Currently the only advantage defenders enjoy is the idea that they are force multipliers. If this is taken away it undercuts the entire concept of the AT.

However, I think it would be possible to rebalance the defender AT in some other way if diminishing returns were applied to buffs and debuffs. They would have to get some other kind of inherent, perhaps, or add effects that no other AT can achieve. For example, DR might affect defenders less than other ATs.

This sums up the core of the problem.

SGU was doomed from the beginning because it would surely alienate the vast majority of viewers. The strikes against it:

• It's a rehash of Lost in Space.
• Too many characters are unsympathetic whiners.
• It's a glorified reality show. This was probably its biggest selling point to the network execs, because almost everything happens on that one set, and that makes it cheap. The constant battles between regulars might make for inexpensive production, but it just makes someone who liked the previous series want to toss the whole bunch of them out the airlock.
• The show's themes and characters are almost uniformly dark. Viewers of the previous two series liked the mix of drama, space opera, self-deprecating humor and heroism that typified the average Stargate episode. The studio execs (or the producers) apparently decided that they wanted to "shake up" the franchise and make it gritty like BSG or Lost. Big mistake.
• The characters had, up until the very end, no control over their own destiny (pun unintended). People who like Stargate want characters that take charge and act (more or less) unselfishly to accomplish a common goal, or at least make progress toward that goal. Everything was always a dead end. I watched the second season out of abstract interest, but my wife gave up because it all seemed so pointless.
• Making Rush, one of the two main characters, an egotistical mad scientist who didn't give a damn the consequences of his actions was a huge mistake. Making the other main character a murdering son of b*tch was similarly a huge mistake. They couldn't forgive each other those sins: how can viewers?

SyFy doesn't give a damn about science fiction. The vast majority of their self-produced movies are not even B-movie quality -- they're just C- or D-movie horror dreck. And wrestling? Soon there will be nothing worth watching on this network. They are quickly morphing the channel into the same sort of pablum we get on the other 500 cable channels -- not that it was ever very high-brow science fiction, but at least they tried living up to the name.

Snipers are the same way, aren't they? And popup turrets?

While it's annoying for there to be mobs that are immune to your powers, it doesn't mean this is an error. It just means you have to use different techniques.

Stalkers have it even worse. They regularly run into enemies that have +Per that make Assassination tactics completely useless. And have you ever tried running a Defense-based character against certain DE mobs? Man, you can die so fast you have no idea what hit you. (Their accuracy is jacked up by a summoned pet so Defense is basically ignored.)

While technically true, this does not accurately represent the reality of blasters and mez protection.

In one sense, blasters have the best mez protection in the game: Defiance. With this you can never be prevented from using your Tier 1 and 2 primary powers and your Tier 1 Secondary power. Depending on what those are, you can continue to do serious damage no matter happens to you until you're dead.

There have been (rare) occasions playing tankers that I've gotten held or stunned due to several mobs hitting at once: dual Master Illusionists and their summoned Illusionists, or a big bunch of Tsoo Ink Men. Blasters can still attack under such circumstances. They can't flee or heal, or use their AoE powers, but they can still do damage. And sometimes that alone is enough to let them pull through.

Blasters can get Acrobatics, which provides minor protection against holds, and Combat Jumping, which provides good protection against immobilization. Blasters can also get Aid Self, which provides stun resistance for a time each time it's used (not as good as real protection, but given Defiance the reduction in stun durations can often be enough to let you keep attacking at full strength until the stun wears off). Finally, Health provides Sleep resistance (though everyone gets this now automatically, so it applies to all characters except ones that haven't been respecced).

If you carry a 3-4 break frees and replenish them as you use them by combining other inspirations status effects become almost irrelevant, especially on teams where someone else is drawing aggro while you're mezzed.

Me too. I hate the "lumbering oaf" run that males use. Sometimes females still use it when they're carrying certain items.

I tend to use a stereotypical body type rather than gender for the characters I play. Tanker are big and burly. Sczappers are somewhat less so. All the rest are generally "athletic" or thin, with controllers/dominators usually being the most petite.

One trick for making perfectly good attack powers with three slots (the initial one plus two more) is to use two Nucleolus Hami O's and a damage IO. I've found this useful for controllers and tankers taking attack powers in the Ancillary power pools.

Similarly, using Endoplasm Hami O's for mez powers like Char and Hand Clap allows you to get decent accuracy (assuming IO accuracy bonuses) and non-trivial duration with just a single slot. Holds are very useful for tankers to avoid those embarrassing endurance drains from sappers.

The Medicine pool is also quite useful; Aid Self with one level 50 Heal IO heals 27% of your hits, which is (slightly) more than a green insp. That makes it extremely useful for anyone to use between fights (reducing your downtime), and possible (though somewhat risky) for high-defense characters to use during a fight. With the Spiritual Alpha Slot you get a double whammy with Aid Self: it provides a recharge and a healing boost.

Combat Jumping is good for slotting LotG: +recharge and for immobilization resistance. You can also put Karma: -KB there.

Pretty much any of the power pools have at least one power that is useful in and of itself with a single slot, or can at least be used for an IO proc mule (the favorite one being LotG: +recharge).

I've had 40-odd purples and 2 respecs.

The people paying the exorbitant prices are the ones that are "ruining" the market. Marketeers don't list items at high prices if no one will pay for them, because they can't earn money if their slots are clogged with merchandise that doesn't move. And they lose the listing fee if they pull the item and relist lower.

If you are listing at 1 to attempt to stop flippers, you're playing right into their hands. They often put in several legitimate (but lowball) bids and then relist at higher price for a decent profit, but no big killing. Or they turn around and craft recipes that are selling for ridiculously high prices as IOs. When they do make a killing is when someone with lots of cash just bids way higher than their listing price. Which as you've seen people do all the time.

If you want to stop flippers you need to post at prices higher than their buying bids, and lower than their selling price. In other words, to beat flippers you need to understand the market and think like a flipper.

However, flippers aren't the enemy of the "little guy" who just wants to get a set of Kinetic Combats. The rich guys who bid outrageously high to jump the line and get the goods immediately are abusing their economic clout. And I seriously doubt the flippers are the ones paying outrageous sums to get stuff they want -- they already know how to get it on the cheap; it's how they make their money.