Rodion

What are you fighting? Rikti drones have high defense, CoT ghosts have big accuracy debuffs. Sky Raiders have those force field generators. If you take down a Nemesis LT enemies nearby will get a big vengeance defense buff. If you let a Paragon Protector go MoG they can be impossible to hit.

There are lots of time in the game where you are just going to miss a lot. There are usually things you can do to adjust for this: mez the ghosts, hit Sky Raider engineers before they can summon the generators, take out Nemesis LTs last, and so on.

And, yeah, I always slap two SOs worth of accuracy into all my attacks. Three is overkill, but two are needed because so many things have high defense or accuracy/to-hit debuffs.

The real reason is more like they saw how unbalanced the hero ATs were and made a serious attempt to make more balanced archetypes. It's a continuing pattern you see with the addition of Kinetic Melee and Electrical Control.

They've realized that if they make new things more powerful than old things they have a never-ending escalation of expectations. New things need to be different, but they need to be comparable in power -- and that's a very hard thing to do when things are different. The tiniest details can be exploited and disrupt the balance.

Villain ATs in general are more balanced than hero ATs in terms of offense and defense. Brutes have more damage potential than tanks, which is balanced by less defense. Corruptors are like defenders, but with more damage and less "defenderishness." Stalkers are like melee blasters, with relatively weak defenses compared to scrappers, but strong compared to blasters, so it's a more-or-less even trade of more defense for shorter-ranged melee attacks. Dominators get more damage than controllers, but lack defensive capabilities. Masterminds are like controllers without the control, but more damage, and similar defense.

Over time the hero ATs have been buffed in big and small ways in order to attain some rough kind of balance. Blasters were all offense and no defense -- that's been dealt with somewhat with the new Defiance, more hit points, etc. Tankers and defenders have been given some small offensive buffs. Controllers were given Containment for more damage (a long time ago now). Scrappers have always been the most balanced AT, and have remained more or less unchanged.

The problem is that in the current PvP everything is predicated on extremes -- you need to do the most damage in the shortest amount of time, or be able to soak huge alphas to survive. This is my real problem with PvP -- it's nothing like fights in the comic books, which were long, drawn out affairs. Players want PvP fights to be over in a few seconds, and with good reason: if it takes forever to beat your opponent down they can easily escape and no one ever wins.

This is why PvP hasn't been successful in this game. People really hate getting ganked in two seconds. And they hate it when opponents run away. Trying to achieve a balance between these two poles is very difficult due to the extremes of the damage blasters can dish out and tankers can take.

The devs tried to address this with the PvP revamp, with all the obnoxious heal decay, travel suppression, and the like. But no one is happy with the result.

The current solutions don't work. What needs to change is the motivations for the players. Travel suppression is bogus -- players should not want to run away from a fight; they shouldn't be forced to stay. There should be some in-game motivation for standing your ground.

On the other side, getting defeated currently has too high a penalty. In PvP fights getting defeated should be akin to going down for the count in boxing, and then getting back up to fight again. This could be done by leaving all your defensive toggles on when you're defeated by a player, and giving everyone a self-res power that can be used only when defeated by an other player. Then you can be up and fighting again instantly.

To get a point of rep you need to knock down another player five or so times. If you flee from a fair fight, you lose rep and your name is displayed in yellow with a chicken icon for the next day. Determining whether a player is fleeing from a fair fight would be tricky: a lone corruptor running away from six blasters is not cowardice. Similarly, six blasters ganking a lone corruptor should reduce the rep of all the blasters involved because it's not a fair fight. If you lose rep in a fight, you have no chance for a PvP recipe drop.

In short, PvP should be made more like a boxing match rather than an assassination. By providing in-game motivations to abide by a certain code of conduct, PvP could be a lot more fair, fun and engaging, at the same time being much more like the rollicking fights you see in the comics and movies.

I've been able to run them pretty quickly, usually 5-15 minutes at +0/x4 to x8 (depending on enemy type) with my Fire/Fire tanker.

If you're only interested in getting A-merits you should run at -1/x2 (or x3 if it doesn't slow you down) with no bosses. Running at higher than x1 increases your chances of getting tips to drop (as well as purples if you're running at level 50).

Time-wise, nothing will be more efficient than A-merits for generating specific recipes (excepting, of course, just buying them on the market). But a better overall tactic might be to treat tip missions as purple farms (ramp difficulty to -1/x8, and bosses if you can deal with them easily), and treat A-merits as gravy.

The devs imposed a daily ration on tip missions to prevent egregious farming and avoid burnout. They want people to stay around for the whole game and not focus on the absolutely most efficient mechanism for obtaining loot. There's a wide variety of content -- regular missions, tips, TFs/SFs, Ouroboros, and now Praetoria -- so don't just focus the shiny baubles.

Because, at the end of the day, people who have shiny baubles are no happier than people who don't.

First, I'd suggest you get the Mids Hero/Villain Designer from the Titan Network. It's a big help for creating characters.

I don't have an /SR brute so I can speak from direct experience, but on general principles I have a few comments.

If you're using DOs, your Melee defense is only going to be 25% and your ranged defense 21%. That means you're going to get hit a lot, especially by ranged attackers who have -Def component in their attacks (basically, anyone shooting guns at you). You've also got no AoE defense at level 21, so if you're getting killed by AoEs that's a big part of your problem.

Your build will get a lot tougher at higher levels when you use SOs (or better yet, common IOs or IO sets) and you pick up AoE defense with Evasion and Lucky.

Your Katana scrapper probably has Divine Avalanche, which gives a 15% melee defense buff, which is a big advantage.

For all those reasons, that's why your scrapper seems so much tougher -- there's a huge difference in survivability between an incomplete level 21 brute and a level 50 scrapper with maxed-out positional defenses with SOs or IOs.

You might want to move some of your slots around. I'm not sure that putting four slots into Swift and Health is your best investment at level 21. The biggest problem with brutes is usually running out of endurance, and that means slotting endurance reduction in attacks.

I'd suggest getting to level 22 and pick up Evasion. If you don't already have Ninja Run you may want to get the Martial Arts pack. Then do a respec, moving slots from Swift and Health to attacks and slotting them with endurance reduction. If you're having serious end problems you might want to slot end reduction in your toggles as well. Then outfit your character with level 25 common IOs (they're relatively cheap if you get a bargain on the market, or you can craft them yourself if you have the salvage -- and they never wear out).

Using Mids will help you figure out what to do from there, especially if you're interested in slotting IO sets and all the defense bonuses they provide.

If your intent is to confound flippers and help out the little guy, this tactic will have the opposite effect if everyone does it. Flippers systematically set up a spectrum of lowball bids across their niches, hoping to get a bargain. If they get something cheap they will hold it, repost it immediately nearer its true value, or craft it and post the IO at a drastic markup.

Yes, a lot of the time you'll still get megabucks for those recipes you list at 6. But if everyone is posting at 6 many will sell for 11,111, and a minute later they'll be up for sale again at 100,000,000.

If you post things nearer their true value -- and above the flipper's gimme bids -- your items will find homes with deserving little guys and you'll get a decent return. The trick is to dedicate your slots wisely -- don't bother to post things that already have 10-20 already listed with a history of selling for less than 10,000.

Flippers will still be able to do their thing, but their margins will be slimmer. If margins become slim enough the flippers may just move along to more lucrative things.

I'm not so concerned about crafters. They're usually willing to pay a decent price for the recipe and then turn it around for a big profit crafted. They're providing the legitimate service of convenience. If they can find buyers for their overpriced wares, more power to them.

I'ts quacking like I18. My guess is that they are installing I18 Monday to make sure that they will have enough time to clear up any problems and hit their launch date on Tuesday.

No, there's nothing like that coming down the pike. Many people have asked for it, and the constant rumble is likely why you thought you read something about it.

With the ability to send yourself attachments from any character to any character coming in I18, it's less important. All you really need is one character in your solo SG, and you can move everything in and out of storage through email. Slightly painful, but you can do it.

But if you need someone to help you invite your alts to your SG send me a PM and I can make a temp character on your server.

The conceit of defense is much more than you just whiffing. Defensive is an active (Super Reflexes) or a passive (Ice, Tough Hide) mitigator.

In the former case, the target is actively moving to get out of the way. The idea that you will be able to perfectly predict every move of every target is simply not reasonable. Many game systems use two rolls to adjudicate attack and defense and more accurately represent this, but CoH compresses this into a single roll.

In the latter case, the defense basically takes away all the damage. When you hit ice armor it just sort of crumbles away harmlessly. When you hit someone with Tough Hide it just bounces off without any effect at all.

When you look at it this way, it's not about you hitting every time; rather, it's that you always have at least a 5% chance of getting missed no matter how stacked the odds are against you.

Now, looking at it from that point of view, don't you think it would be unfair if you had no chance at all of avoiding an attack?

The game needs to be symmetrical: the same rules must apply to both parties, otherwise what's the point? Heroes already have a tremendous advantage with a base to-hit chance of 75% versus an even-con mob's 50%.

The game also has a streak-breaker built in, so if you really do have high accuracy and you should be hitting every time, you won't be penalized by a string of bad rolls (unless you're actually debuffed and should be missing).

If your character dies because of one miss, it says more about your playstyle, knowledge of the game and the character's build than a deficiency of the system.

You should monitor your last to-hit chance with the combat monitor. If you're missing a lot, it may be because you're debuffed. Under some circumstances your to-hit can easily be at 10% or less (against Nemesis with Vengeance, PPs, bubbled Rikti drones, etc.). So popping a yellow will still leave your base to hit chance at much less than 50%.

If you're getting stuck with PPs and unhittable Nemesis minions, these are situations you can prevent. You need to mez PPs before they get to about 25% HPs, and you need to take out Nemesis LTs last -- preferably whittling each LT down at the same rate so they are defeated at the same time with an AoE. There are similar tactics you can use against Fake Nemesis even if you don't have a mez (hit them with a couple of DoTs when they're below 50%, then hit them with a big damage attack -- the Fake will put up the PFF and the DoT will finish off the last few hit points).

Once you get 10 alignment points you need to defeat mobs until you get another tip drop. In my experience it has happened fairly fast -- I pick up a radio mission and knock heads until I get a tip. When I run at x6 or x8 it usually happens before I get off the first floor of an office mission.

I have a DM/Ninjitsu stalker and it plays fine. I took Air Superiority and Flight and had four attacks at level 10. It will eventually have soft-capped melee and ranged defense outside of Hide, and pretty decent AoE defense. The down side is having only 35% defense debuff resistance, but it's not such a big deal since stalkers aren't usually targeted by large numbers of -def attacks.

The character is surprisingly robust in combat, and having two heals helps a great deal. Siphon Life can be slotted for decent damage, decent healing, decent accuracy and decent recharge. Plus, it crits often enough to make a real difference. The area placate is a life-saver, as is the area confuse (and that's a great set to put the Confuse purple set in, which is especially fine for a position defense-based character).

This build is relatively economical, using three Touch of Deaths, one Mako's Bite, and one Obliteration set. The other pricey things are the Steadfast: +Def, two -KB IOs (which are easy enough to get with AE tickets if you don't want to buy them outright), and the Coercive Persuasion set.

I find this stalker fun, and I'm someone who's hated stalkers since CoV came out.

On general principles it's not clear that any "click to agree" terms -- from the agreements for MMOs, to the agreements on Facebook and similar sites, to the software licensing agreements -- is really binding on the person in whose name the button is clicked.

Since there is no signature, and not even a verbal face-to-face agreement, there is no way to prove that the person whose credit card is used to order a game or the person installing a software application is actually the person they purport to be.

Everyone uses these agreements, but the only legal function they appear to serve is to provide grounds for termination of the service if someone on the account violates the agreement.

In this particular case, the agreement specifically prohibits users from using copyrighted/trademarked character names and appearances, so they're not intending to use the agreement to usurp existing trademarks. They're stating that they are functioning like a magazine that is publishing short stories, and that any new character created in their game is automatically covered by their copyright, and that they are doing everything they can to prevent users from using previously trademarked names.

If they discover that you have used previously protected work they reserve the right to remove the offending names, descriptions and costumes, and potentially terminate your account. That's not the same as claiming that they own a character you previously published in a copyrighted work.

The whole area is rather tricky. Comic book publishers started trademarking character names not that long ago, but it's rather a bogus claim. You cannot trademark the title of a book; how is the name of a character any different? Especially a name like "Harry Dresden?" Surely, someone has had that name before Butcher wrote the book. Nietzsche coined the term Superman long before DC published Action Comics #1. Trademark law has the idea of owning marks in particular realms and even geographic locations. That means all such trademark claims are really up to negotiation and interpretation and not cut and dried.

But one thing is certain: if you don't take steps to protect trademarks and copyrights, you can lose them. That's why these companies are so picky about them.

KM is sort of an Energy Melee version of Claws. I've played all three now, and I have to say I enjoy KM the least.

The numbers may say that KM has reasonable animation times, but it just feels kind of slow and low-damage on the KM/Shield brute I made. I transferred a BS/Shield scrapper to the beta server and respecced it about four times to scavenge the IOs (using email to transfer them to the brute), and the KM/Shield brute still felt underpowered compared to other brutes I've played on live (level 38 El/ElA brute, level 50 SS/ElA, level 50 Energy/Energy).

I think the conceit of the incremental build up of the damage bonus with Power Siphon is wrong. You need something like Build Up to spike damage for a specific purpose. With Power Siphon your damage doesn't spike until five attacks later. A lot of things can happen in five attacks, especially if you're teaming.

Power Siphon should be changed to work like other Build Up powers, or the Kinetics Siphon Power, or be turned into a mini-Fulcrum Shift (five targets max for, say, 10-15 second damage boost for each target hit). I realize that the devs want to have powersets that differ from one another for the sake of variety. But at some point utility should be more important than design niceties.

The cone KB power is also suboptimal: it doesn't even have a 100% chance to KB the targets it hits, which means the vast majority of players will reject it outright.

Isn't Castle the powers guy? Isn't someone else responsible for drop rates?

Not that it really matters, but it doesn't seem right to dis a guy for something he's not responsible for, since he genuinely seems to always want to do the right thing.

As Techbot indicates one of the hassles of playing khelds is the shadow cysts. These can appear pretty much anywhere at random, and if you're on a team that doesn't know what it's doing, it can easily wipe the team.

What's worse, anyone who teams with you is then infected with the kheld taint, and that means shadow cysts can spawn even after the kheld leaves the team. I once joined a team that had no khelds on it. We were doing a Red Cap mission, and were steamrolling everything.

As the team was heading toward another spawn I noticed that there was a cyst in the middle of it. Before I could warn them it was too late. Twenty seconds later the rest of the team was dead.

I was doing another mission where two cysts spawned very close to each other in the intersection of two tunnels. We did everything right, but with the positioning the team wiped three times.

During the merge on beta your bids were refunded as a new kind of item. Items you had listed produced two entries: the original item in the Stored tab, and a listing fee refund in another tab. It was sort of weird seeing two entries for the items you had stored, but it makes sense once you understand what they're doing.

That does mean you can wind up having more items in market slots after the conversion than you have available, so you have to remove the excess before you can post additional items.

The process worked fine for me. I posted about 40 items and bids on items on four different characters and everything worked fine.

I was originally concerned about the merge, but after seeing how they did it most of my fears have abated. There will still be some glitches, but if they're still doing it the same way the number of problems should be small.

If the merge happens the way it did on beta, I don't anticipate much trouble. They added extra states to items that can appear on the market, so that after the merge items you had for sale will be listed twice: the real item will be in your stored tab, and the refund for the listing fee will be under another tab (forgot which). Outstanding bids will be refunded under that same tab, I believe. To get back your bid or your listing fee you "get" those special items.

Thus, the market merge won't touch your original character -- you won't get market refunds until you open the market window and get each separate item.

I still anticipate there'll be a few glitches -- there always are when you process millions of transactions. So if you've got some especially valuable items you might want to record exactly what those are so that you can check that everything came out right and you can make an accurate request to support to get your items back.

This means that the bidding history won't truly be wiped: people will be able to figure out what items were previously listed at and what their previous bids were. If we so choose, we'll be able to easily relist and rebid exactly what we had before.

This is all assuming that the real merge will happen the same way it did on beta.

Storing stuff in email I'm less sanguine about. It's not intended to be storage system: they're email attachments. I had a weird glitch with one of three attachments I intentionally left to test the merge, and it was messed up: I can't get the attached influence and therefore I can't delete the email; it's in permanent limbo which means that email "slot" is permanently locked up.

I ran an Electric/Kinetics controller from 41-42. It worked quite well as a sapper: Static Field puts everything to sleep, you come in with Conductive Aura, the Gremlins attack and wake mobs up, the Static Field puts them right back to sleep. Within a few seconds all the mobs have no end. Hit bosses with Transference and they're totally drained.

The mobs do occasionally regain enough end to launch minor attacks, but they have a hard time doing high-damage attacks that require more end.

Static Field has a lot of advantages: it stays there and resleeps mobs that wake up. The mobs don't stagger around at warp speed like they do with area stuns.

I didn't get to level 47 so I didn't have access to the high-damage controller epic powers, so it's hard to compare to my level 50 controllers.

People are always criticizing Static Field as being useless, but I used it with Gremlins and Chain Fences constantly waking mobs up. Static Field just put them right back to sleep over and over. That's a huge game changer, making the power useful in nearly all circumstances.

A server merge would only occur if the costs of maintaining the status quo are greater (in terms of expenses, upkeep, good will, etc.) than the cost of merging the servers (which might require significant development work, lost subs due to inevitable glitches in the transfers and forced renaming of characters and SGs). Since there are so many intangibles with doing the merge (how many players would quit because they lose their unique names, or because they don't like the solution imposed on naming if duplicate names are allowed somehow), it's hard to make a business case for it. Most of CoH game play does not depend on having a large server population, and it's easy to switch servers if you want to be on a high-pop server.

The devs essentially ran a test of the desire for server merges last Christmas by giving us free server transfers. I imagine that many characters were transferred permanently, but of my personal acquaintances there were no wholesale transfers. People basically moved some lesser played characters to other servers to make room for new characters. Otherwise, everyone I actually play with stayed put. And I mostly play on low-pop servers.

The bar is extremely low now for starting a new character on a new server. You don't really need an SG for storage or transportation anymore, given the ability to transfer items via global email and the various forms of teleportation that are freely available (Ouroboros, the consignment house teleporters). A group of friends can get started on a new server with their own SG very easily, and in a month of playing they'll have everything they need in a base.

You have missed the point of his post. Fury is teaching you the general principle for making money crafting IOs. The basic idea is to find something that you can create at a low cost that will sell for a high price.

The exact thing involved does not matter, and it will change over time. Sometimes it will be level 50 End Mod IOs. Sometimes it will be Crushing Impact IOs.

The trick is to be able to recognize the price differential between crafting costs and sale prices in general, not selling the specific items he gave in his example.

This reminds of that old saying: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think."