Rodion

Generally two SOs is enough. If you're concerned you should monitor your Last Hit Chance with the combat attributes monitor. It should be consistently 95%. If it's lower it usually means your accuracy was debuffed somehow. 95% is the maximum possible Last Hit Chance, and if it's always that you've probably slotted more accuracy than you strictly require.

Many people slot IO sets that grant a global accuracy bonus (Crushing Impact, Thunderstrike, Positron's Blast, etc.). In addition these typically give a 45-60% or so accuracy bonus to the power itself after level 30. As important as the accuracy bonus when slotting five of these IOs are the damage (essentially capped by ED at 95%), and the 30-40% +recharge and end reduction. These sets make characters play much more smoothly -- they provide significantly faster recharge and lower end usage for the same acc and damage you get with 2 Acc and 3 Damage SOs.

If you're concerned about getting optimum performance for the lowest price, sets like Crushing Impact and Thunderstrike are usually your best deals.

This is a good strategy, because patience is really the key to making money in the market. If you're playing your marketing character all the time you're tempted to post things too far below their real value to clear the slots. You won't make billions instantly, but all that really matters is that you have enough to get what you want.

Have you tried using some of the auras that you can get at level 30? You'd have to wait till 30 to get your look, but you could use Invulnerability or WP and turn off the effects with power customization.

I have transfered from Triumph, Pinnacle and Champion without problems.

Because many people used allies as an exploit (several bubblers buffing the PCs and making them impossible to hit), experience has been decreased for each ally you put in a mission (this is in addition to any damage an ally does to mobs).

The devs have said they'll have a real fix for this in the next issue. You'd probably be best off waiting till then and see what the fix entails.

According to Red Tomax the team members need to be within 30 feet of you.

I don't think Team Teleport is really what you want. A more useful power is the vet power Assemble the Team or the temp power you get from the third (I think) bank mission. These teleport the team to you. They have a longish recharge, however. Recall Friend is probably your best bet for running TFs.

Under US copyright law anything published before 1923 is public domain. Things after that might be in the public domain if the copyright holder allowed the copyright to lapse or intentionally released it into the public domain. Since that's a very tricky area, you'd be best off avoiding anything you find on some website that claims to be public domain that was copyrighted after 1923.

There's no reason to use copyrighted/trademarked characters anyway. Make something new and interesting instead of recycling someone else's creations!

I've found that simply selecting the my published arcs tab and clicking SEARCH fixes the problem. There must be some kind of ID cached with your list of published arcs, and searching again refreshes it, syncing your display with the MA server.

I'd guess that previously published arcs sit around on the server for some amount of time because if someone else is running an arc an instance of it needs to hang around until it's finished. They can't just give you the new one because you might be on mission 4 of 5 and the new arc might only have 3 missions.

There are WAY too many users to merge to a single server in the US. Virtue and Freedom have obviously poorer performance than the servers with lower populations. It's noticeable enough that I prefer the less-crowded servers.

There will probably be an uptick in the user population for Going Rogue, and again with I19 when the Incarnate system and the new endgame content are released, so it's unlikely this would be in the cards for the foreseeable future.

Right, I realize that the link to Roman history is the ostensible reason it's named Praetoria.

But when they named it did the devs realize that the name was nearly identical to the capital of the country that practiced such widespread oppression against the majority of its citizens?

In other words, are they intentionally drawing a parallel between Praetoria and apartheid-era South Africa, or is it an unfortunate coincidence?

This is true, but only to a certain extent. Because the game has no real consequences, and it's possible to go completely broke and then be a millionaire again in a couple of hours, people do not behave the same way as they do in real life.

People in the game market are far more impulsive. Real people can't spend their savings down to zero on a whim because they can't regenerate them quickly. Your kids will not starve if you spend all your inf on a LotG: +recharge.

There are people who do behave this way in real life: they are typically gambling addicts (or the guys who caused the economic meltdown). They are fairly rare because most of us are cognizant of the consequences of reckless spending. But the game is a release from reality, where it's safe to give in to your impulses.

Given that, it's only natural for the game market to have more ups and downs than real markets, and for players to be less careful about how they spend their inf. If you pay too much for something it just doesn't matter -- it only means that you have to spend more time doing something that you apparently enjoy doing in the first place.

So, yes, the game market does act a lot like real markets, but it has a lot of crazy incentives (getting crafting badges, for example) that completely skew the value of certain items.

I do something similar to this.

I have mapped all the keys on the left hand to do something useful. My right hand's always on the mouse. I use the same key bind file for all characters.

I put attacks in tray one and map keys 1-6 to activate them.

I put utility powers such as heals, Build Up, Consume, Accuracy, Taunt, etc., on the left side of tray 2 and map keys on the left hand to activate those slots. There's no logical pattern, but over time I've recruited Q, Z, C, E, B, H and ` to activate power slots in tray 2. I usually map Z to a self heal or "help me Mr. Wizard!" power like Hibernate or Personal Force Field. Q usually has Taunt or something similar mapped to it. E has Build Up, Rage, Accuracy, Power Build Up, etc., or a frequently used offensive toggle like Darkest Night.

I put my travel power in slot 9 of tray 2 and use T to active it. Every character activates travel the same way. This makes switching characters easy.

I use the A, W, D, S, X keys for standard movement.

I mapped the V key to target the nearest enemy because it's something I do all the time. I use G to turn on Sprint and R to start movement.

I put always-on toggles on tray 3 -- usually a lot of them for melee characters. I just click those since they rarely need to be turned on in combat.

The Function keys use inspirations (the standard mapping). I always stack greens in the first column so that the instant I start taking damage I can just hit F1. I think being able to quickly use greens has saved me hundreds of times when the rest of the team died while trying to find the mouse cursor in the haze of combat and then click a green.

Finally, I bind commonly used ranged area click powers (like Freezing Rain and Tar Patch) to left SHIFT+click (or CTRL+Click or ALT+Click if I've got more than one such power).

This setup minimizes the amount I have to remove my right hand from the mouse, or perform awkward single-handed shift/click/alt combinations with the left hand.

I went S/L on my Fire/Fire tanker and Melee on my SS/Electric brute (as an experiment). The problem with melee defense is that there are a lot of mobs that stand back and shoot you with guns that do Lethal damage (Council Sharpshooter, Malta Gunslingers). These attacks often debuff defense making your defense worthless once you've been hit a few times. But S/L defense will protect you from those shots for a time; melee defense will not help at all. Eventually the defense debuff from guns will wear down your S/L defense, but you should have enough time to rush in for Footstomp and knock them all down before you lose a lot of HP.

I bit the bullet and made a second S/L defense build for the SS/Electric brute. It seems to play better in general and actually has the potential to get closer to the soft cap by eventually using Kinetic Combat sets (expensive, yes, but effective).

Non-healing defenders work by debuffing the enemy so that they cannot attack you, multiplying your ability to hit and damage them. I haven't played Traps/AR beyond 14, but Trick Arrow is even more this way because it's all debuffs (Traps has a Force Field). Debuffs are quite simply the key to quickly dispatching enemies.

Trick Arrow has Flash Arrow (reduces the enemies' to-hit and perception, making you harder to hit), Glue Arrow (slows the enemies down), Ice Arrow (holds them), Poison Gas Arrow (reduces their damage and sleeps them), Acid Arrow (makes them easier to hit and increases the damage your team does to them), Disruption Arrow (increases your team's damage), Oil Slick Arrow (makes them easier to hit, makes them slip, and will burn them if lit), and EMP Arrow (a very big, long-lasting area hold).

Acid Arrow and Disruption Arrow will make the enemy melt like butter. If you have two debuffing defenders (including Trick Arrow, Radiation, Dark Miasma, Storm, and Cold to a certain extent) the enemies spend all their time choking, slipping, falling, or fleeing, unable to hit hit when they do try, and your team's damage is greatly magnified and your chance to hit is always 95%.

Debuffing defenders don't get some of their best debuffs until later (Disruption Arrow and Oil Slick Arrow are the key powers for Trick Arrow), so they won't seem as useful early on. But when you have a debuffing defender everyone on the team has their damage magnified, not just the lucky stiffs who get Fortitude from an empath.

Put two debuffing defenders on a team and you will steamroll most everything. Put two empaths on a team and you'll be more effective, but it'll be less impressive.

The reward system is stacked against people who just play on teams run by other players. If you're just running radio/paper missions or other people's contact missions you will never get reward merits. The devs apparently want to reward people with initiative.

Reward merits or AE tickets are going to be your most reliable source of large amounts of influence (if you're not into arbitrage). The random recipe roll costs 20 reward merits, and if you do it 10 times (200 merits) you will probably wind up with hundreds of millions worth of recipes. With AE tickets the bronze roll can be very good, but you'll plow through a lot of junk.

To maximize income that means you should do all of the following:

For reward merits:

1) Run teams and do your own contact arcs.

2) Run Ouroboros arcs (probably solo, unless you can talk other players into doing it).

3) Run TFs/SFs.

It's probably best to save your merits till level 30 to 32, at which point you can make random recipe rolls for 20 merits each. Make rolls on the 30-34 or 35-39 level. Some people like to make rolls on the 10-14 level, and while you will get some high-value gems you will also get a lot of useless junk.

4) Run AE missions and make bronze rolls at the 30-34 level until level 32, then do 35-39.

5) If you need a couple of million inf for something right now, you can use 540 tickets to get rare salvage which can usually be sold for 2-4 million. Long-term bronze rolls are probably better, but it can take days for recipes to sell at their actual value, while salvage moves pretty quickly.

Selling recipes is predicated on knowing what the true value of a recipe is. If you list it for 1 you will probably get screwed by a flipper who bids low and sells high. You need to list your recipes high enough to not get taken advantage of, but low enough to sell it at the speed you need the inf.

When this feature is available I suggest doing it. Picking one of the darker colors for Snowstorm on my Earth/Storm controller made it much easier to see when Snowstorm is up. Instead of a white-out you get a minor dimming instead, and the anchor is more clearly visible.

Tsk. Everyone knows it's Zapp Brannigan.

It really depends on what you find more interesting.

I took Empathy/Psy/Psy because it has several control-like powers. Subdue will immobilize a mob and prevent it from running up to you or a team mate. Telekinetic Blast has excellent knockback, which is good for getting mobs off yourself and other squishies. Will Domination sleeps the mob, which doesn't last long in a big fight, but it will stop them cold and turn off nasty toggles on sorcerers, Nerva LTs, etc. All of these also do moderate damage as well as the control effects.

Scramble Thoughts is a stun. Dominate (from the Psychic epic) is a good hold. Mass Hypnosis is an area sleep, which is excellent when you see a second spawn coming at (ambush or if someone accidentally aggroes a nearby spawn). Psychic Scream is an AoE attack that has -62% recharge debuff, so it slows mobs way down.

You can also take the Leadership pool (Maneuvers and Assault are good, Tactics is somewhat less useful these days when everyone has IOs with acc bonuses. I never take Vengeance because I don't plan on letting my team die.

I also have a Illusion/Empathy controller, which is fun.

But I actually find Empathy the least interesting defender set (I started out with it). I think Radiation, Kinetics, Dark, and Storm are all more fun, and more useful in general. Debuffing the enemies is probably more important that buffing your team because debuffers affect all the mobs. Empaths can only buff a few (usually 3-4) team members with Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost. An empath increases the damage for only half a full team, while a debuffer is increasing damage for the whole team. Put two or three debuffers on a team and the spawns melt like butter.

It depends on what your goal for the character is. If you just want to get every arc done, it doesn't really make any difference -- anywhere in level 30-35 is good for the mid-level recipes.

But if you're going to permanently park the character at a middling level, it depends on the character. You want to have your powers slotted sufficiently to make the character effective, so that may mean 33 or 34. And if your level 35 power is important and will be useful with just the one slot, you may want to park at 35.

Though I agree with you that adding 20 more levels is unlikely to happen, it would certainly be possible to avoid Hami-O expiration by just coding it so that level 50 enhancements never expire and are treated as even-con after level 50. It would be bogus, but it would be possible.

To address the OP's question: Levels cause a lot of problems. Adding more of them would simply compound the problems levels cause. CoH has long been moving away from levels in several ways:

• Levels are almost completely irrelevant for teaming with Super-SK. Levels just make finding teams harder.
• Levels were eliminated for zone events like the Rikti invasion and zombie apocalypse. If they weren't it would be much more painful to team and participate in the events.
• Levels are totally ignored with Giant Monsters for the same reasons as above.
• Nearly all level-restricted zones have had their level restrictions removed.
• In PvP everyone is forced to the same level for the sake of fairness.
• In AE characters are often forced to whatever level is required of the mission.

Levels in CoH are pretty much limited to controlling what you get during character advancement and gating content. It's also used to set relative to-hit chances, power effectiveness and hit points. But it's rather artificial and really unnecessary. A level 5 character running at level 50 is no match for a native level 50 character, who will have many more powers, will do more damage, will have better accuracy (because of the superiority of SOs/IOs), will have more effective protection, potentially more hit points (due to power selections and IOs), and so on.

The whole game could have been designed to be independent of level, but more advanced characters would still be more powerful that new characters.

In the end the level is just a meaningless number. Making it go up isn't what makes the game fun. What's fun is playing with friends, getting new powers, improving your powers, seeing new places, doing new things, getting new toys, meeting new enemies and besting them.

All these things are possible without increasing the level number.