Rodion

The defender inherent is the only inherent that rewards the player for doing a bad job. A good defender will never enjoy its benefits. That's the inherent problem with defenders.

Dominators have always had a much easier time soloing than defenders, yet they received a significant damage boost to increase the popularity of the AT.

My guess is that the devs don't want to buff defenders too much for soloing because they're afraid that they will start refusing invitations from teams. After all, the whole concept is that they're supposed to be defending team mates.

The problem with the current inherent is that the endurance discount is too little too late. What good does the discount do if you're held? Or slowed? Or stunned or slept?

There's a far more useful inherent that fits the name "Vigilance" much better.

Vigilance should grant the defender small across-the-board status resistance and status protection buffs per team member. Say, a mag 0.5 status protection buff per team mate and a 20% status resistance buff, or whatever the devs deem appropriate.

On a team of three you would be proof against many common knockback attacks. On a team of five you would be immune to a single application of Hand Clap. On a team of seven you would not be held by a single application of most controller holds and stuns. And even if you are mezzed, the status resistance would lower the time you're out of the picture to mere seconds on large teams.

This is essentially what Khelds get when they're teamed with controllers and dominators. Does anyone remember what the actual buff numbers are per controller?

If you're out there shooting at the bad guys and taking hits, potentially dying, you're playing the game the way it should be played and you're not doing anything wrong. If you're dying on a regular basis, you're probably not doing anything wrong. If you're using tactics like pulling and learning how to use your powers, you're not doing anything wrong. If you're playing alongside high-level characters who are protecting you with bubbles and buffs, you're not doing anything wrong.

If you're standing around by the entrance doing nothing while some really tough tank or Fire/Kin clears the map, you're doing the same thing other people have been doing for years in regular missions. AE just makes this form of power leveling more efficient personnel-wise. It's not "wrong" in a bannable sense -- this has been happening for years -- but it is "wrong" if you have no idea how to play that power-leveled character.

If you're running around the map guarded by dozens of NPC allies who heal you, or bubble you or use Accelerate Metabolism on you while you are fighting gimped enemies that drop like flies or don't fight back, you are in more dangerous territory.

The devs want there to be a risk involved with every reward. If there is no risk, you don't deserve the reward.

Basically, if the XP seems too good to be true, it's too good to be true.

You can already go directly to Atlas/Galaxy or Mercy out of the character creator, and completely bypass the tutorials. You are automatically assigned a contact when you arrive in the open zone.

I have an arc that is rather like that, but it's not possible to "not tell you where to go," because the missions must be presented in linear order. He may not actually tell you, but your single option is to go where the story leads you.

I tried to get around that with an arc I wrote (Murder in Triplicate). It's a murder mystery, where you get lots of clues. The contact doesn't know who the perpetrator is and doesn't tell you. You just have the clues to work from (and there are lots of them).

I wanted to make it so that your decisions actually decide whether the missions fails or succeeds. I did this by having a time-limited final mission, and setting up four suspects on an open map. If you pick the right suspect first you should have enough time. If you pick the wrong suspects you're in for a tough fight and probably will run out of time.

At what level and with what kind of enhancements?

I have a level 50 Fire/Fire tanker and endurance is not a problem, even when running five or six toggles. I slot IO sets I just don't run out of end unless fighting Carnies. And although Consume recharges more slowly than Power Sink, it's just about all I need when fighting Carnies.

No doubt about it, Electric Armor's resistance to end drain is very nice. But if your Fire Tank is having endurance problem the good news is that there are plenty of ways to fix it.

I had Snakes in a mission and noticed the same problem with a level 41 character.

Set the mission's lower level limit to 45. You'll only get level 45+ snakes and the characters will be SKed to the appopriate level.

Okay, I get that. Would it be possible for you to provide a predefined female version of the Granite Armor costume as the default for females? Or allow us the choice of two or more predefined costumes, one female?

The last time I checked him with the Power Analyzer he had 99% damage resistance across the board, and 85% or more debuff resistance.

That means you need at least couple of controllers or defenders with debuffing sets like Radiation Emission, Sonics, Storm or Dark Miasma. A tanker would be good to hold aggro. And then you need some blasters or scrappers for damage.

You do need to hit him with the temp power before you can affect him with your regular powers.

You generally don't want to use Fly in combat, because it does have a sizable end cost. While you don't run out of End flying around with your toggles on, flying while fighting with toggles will drain you rather quickly (just like forgetting to turn off SS or Superjump will). Hover is more useful for blasters than fly in combat.

However, I have Fly/Air Superiority on a couple of tankers and scrappers, and that's a good combo. You can knock those fliers out of the air and then pound them into the ground.

I just had to laugh when I got to this part. Your English is more concise and well-written than that of so many native English speakers who post on this board. I would have never thought you were non-native, except that you said you were outside the US.

The problem is that a lot of MMs don't control their pets very well, and allow them to block other players. When brutes can't do their job because pets are blocking a corridor, they have a legitimate complaint.

I have the same kind of problem when I play a dominator/corruptor. I usually trail behind the brute a decent amount, and then close the distance once the brute has locked aggro. But if there's a MM on the team, often the pets also hang back, completely clogging a corridor and preventing me from getting by. This will sometimes prevent me from using useful powers like Fulcrum Shift to their full effect.

If you're playing on open map, it's not a big deal, but playing with a MM in the narrow caves or Oranbega can be a real drag.

I have had the same issues with controller pets, but since there's a maximum of three per controller it's not as bad.

Add to that the long startup time most MMs have upon mission entry, and the frequent aggroing of nearby mobs by out of control pets, and you can see why a brute wouldn't be interested in playing with a bad MM. And when you get an unsolicited invite you have no idea how good the MM is.

However, if I was looking for a team, I'd accept the invite and just live with the hassles. I'm not saying that brute was right for declining you, just that I can certainly see his point. Also, in certain ways brutes and MMs compete for the "tanking" position on the team, and a self-centered brute might not be enjoy being out of the limelight.

There's also an inherent design flaw in the villain ATs with regard to teaming. Certain ATs (brutes and dominators) have to be played in a steamrolling never-stop fashion. Others (stalkers and Masterminds) force frequent stops in the action to allow Hide to reactivate, set up an assassination attempt or resummon pets. The same kind of issue exists with /Device blasters who insist on using Trip Mines everywhere.

The idiosyncratic demands of the playstyles for each villain AT are part of the reason I favor CoH over CoV. The CoH ATs don't really dictate a particular playstyle: you can steam-roll everything, or you can take your time. With villains, brutes really have no choice but to go nuts, otherwise they miss out on two-thirds of their damage potential.

It looks like a full Fury bar gives you 200% damage bonus. My SS/Electric Armor Brute hovers in the 150% to 220% range for damage bonus when Rage is up running around solo (it's hard to keep the bar full solo). The Fury damage buff is so large that you should slot your attacks for accuracy and endurance reduction (not damage) early on so that you can keep running from fight to fight and keep Fury up.

Fury builds fastest from being attacked. Diving into a big group is the best way to build Fury in a hurry. Fury builds very slowly from your own attacks. Fury decays pretty quickly out of combat, so quick recovery, regen, and endurance drain/increase or healing power are very nice to have to reduce down time (and Fury loss) between fights.

I've played SS/Electric Armor to 41 (recently) and Energy/Energy to 38 (a couple years ago) with a fair amount of solo time, and I don't think it really makes a lot of difference which power set you choose if you're primarily solo. It really depends on your playstyle. Your experience with Scrappers and Tankers will give you a good feeling for playing the Brute. It's more robust than Scrappers, but less than Tankers. You should be able to take it from there.

SS/Electric Armor is a lot of fun once you have Foot Stomp and Power Sink. You can rock and roll non-stop and are pretty tough because EA is damage resistance, especially when fighting mobs with energy attacks (you can pretty much laugh at Wailers unless there's a ton of them). The Tier 9 Secondary Power Surge has a severe hit point and end loss when it expires.

Energy/Energy was pretty fun after Energy Drain (level 28) because you pretty much don't have to worry about endurance. /Energy is (mostly) defense based, which means you can be debuffed fairly easily and take a lot of damage in a hurry. But if you're solo a lot, that's not as much of consideration. (This character was on a server my friends no longer play on, so it has been languishing.)

I had a level 16 Electric/Electric Brute I deleted. I never could get into it; the attacks seemed off somehow. Jacob's Ladder is annoying to use.

Since you can get rare salvage from AE for 540 tickets, and you can sell that rare salvage on the market for approximately 500,000 to 1,000,000 inf, that puts the "value" of a ticket at roughly 1,000 to 2,000 inf.

That would put the value of a purple recipe at about 10 to 20 million. Before AE the high-demand ones were selling pretty reliably for 30-60 million, as I recall. That means the price really should be 30,000 to 60,000 tickets. But since you can't have more than 9999, that indicates that the devs don't think you spending that much time in AE.

The devs are encouraging us to play a variety of content. If you want purples, go to FBZ or some other high-level zone and beat on big spawns. Run missions on Challenge level 2 or 4. Purples will drop.

The ability to set your team size in I16 will make this moot -- many farmers will abandon AE for the same content they PLed on before its introduction.

There are two factors at work here: reduced supply of purples (as you correctly mention), and hyperinflation from the excessive rewards from those players farming in AE (as the previous poster correctly mentions).

Either one spells trouble for an economy, but having both is problematic.

But because there is so much inflation, anyone who sells anything in demand will quickly have millions. That won't be enough to get purples, but it will be enough to outfit them with more mundane things such as regular IOs or the cheaper IO sets.

Getting something in high demand doesn't take a lot of effort. The Bronze rolls provide a lot of high-demand items, and although you won't be able to unload most of the stuff you get, you'll likely get something worth tens of millions if you spend several hundred tickets this way.