Sardan

There's this little concept called "the realities of running a business". Businesses of all kinds give special offers to entice new customers. They know that it will engender some resentment in existing customers but they have to attract new customers.

One of the rednames (Black Pebble?) posted when they first announced the GameStop deal that basically GameStop insisted on a special promotion. This too is common. I've been in the position of dealing with retailers. They have limited inventory space. Unless you're a top-tier blockbuster, if you want to do a special retail promotion you pay for it. One way you can lower the cash outlay is to offer spiffs that are exclusive.

The difficulty slider is your friend. At low levels when you and your team aren't very powerful you'll probably want to leave it at its default position (enemies are your level, i.e. +0, and spawns are for your actual team size i.e. x1, generally abbreviated as +0/x1). If you find you're steamrolling things and want more challenge (and better XP!) bump up the diff slider.

There are tasks designed to be inherently more challenging. They are known as Task Forces and Trials. They're also more time consuming as they are a chained set of related missions. The first one you can do is the Positron Task Force.

You're actually joining the game at a great time because after Going Rogue, the next game update will be "Issue 19" (abbreviated i19) in which an official end game will be added. Up to and including now, CoH doesn't have a large variety of top level raid-type tasks; there are a few terrific ones like the Imperious Task Force (ITF) and the Lady Grey Task Force (LGTF), but it's not a major focus of the game like it is in WoW.

In WoW there's such focus on the end game that it's common for people to have very few characters since they continue to pour effort into their main. In CoH the end game has basically been "roll up a new alt!" And that's still great advice since there's such a gigantic diversity of characters available. But as of i19 you'll have the option to participate in a new and ultra-challenging end game. We don't know the specifics yet, however. More info will come out on that probably about 3 months after GR goes live.

Hold on.... for a person who pronounces the word tomato as "tomahto" they'd read what you wrote as "Tomahto/Tomahto." I believe what you should have typed was "Tomayto/Tomahto".

I humbly realize that I have just improved your life immeasurably. No need to utter the profuse thanks that I'm sure you're wanting to type even as you read this. It's all in a day's work.

Zprophet, as far as I know Thugsrus doesn't play any more so you're unlikely to get your request. Also, what you're not seeing is that about a month and a half after he wrote this guide he switched to SS/Shield and became a strong advocate of that powerset combo over Elec/Shield. He stripped his Elec/Shield of all IOs and moved them to his SS/Shield. He wrote this guide for SS/Shield.

Unfortunately I can't repro at will, but it has happened many times to my Thugs/Traps MM and it's annoying as hell. Dismissing the pets does nothing. Or rather, they vanish from the Pets window, but the actual avatars are still standing with you. If you attempt to resummon while they're physically still present, the command fails. Attacking an enemy hasn't brought them back to my control. Although it's certainly "fun" to try that and then die because I can't handle the aggro w/out my pets. They respond verbally to commands, including the Dismiss command, but they don't actually do anything besides utter the response text. Sometimes zoning fixes it, sometimes it doesn't.

Incredibly, incredibly frustrating. The only sure-fire way to fix it is to log out long enough for your active session to be flushed from the server.

I'm currently experiencing the problem in the "Defeat Manticore" mission. When I zone into the map all is well; but when I click the door of the ship and zone into the interior map, I lose control of the pets. I'll log for a while and see if it will still repro. If it does, maybe the devs will finally be able to track it down.

Yes, because the special enhancements that are the topic of discussion are dual-aspect. They buff both damage and recharge at DO levels but can be slotted at level 1.

At the risk of being overly pedantic, the word "ineffective" does not mean "less desirable". Red SOs are ineffective. They provide no benefit. The procs on these new enhancements are ineffective at 20. But the stat boosts are still just as effective as they were at level 1.

Sorry to necropost, but I only just started looking into this. I believe both Red and Fleeting have it wrong. The proc stops working but the IOs damage and recharge values stay constant.

He said it was boring, not that it wasn't effective. And that was my experience as well. My first villain was a Bot/FF MM. Very effective and became an AoE monster after the second pet upgrade. But boring as hell. He's stalled at lvl 40. For me, it really came down to how boring FF was.

On the other hand, my Thugs/Traps is a ball to play because Traps is a more active secondary. For me, it's a better fit. More fun.

But that's the beauty of this game, right? We don't all have the same tastes, so there's a plethora of powersets to choose from.

Linky, por favor?

No. More AoE doesn't necessarily equal superior AoE. SS is superior to Elec for farming.

A doppleganger implies a copy of someone. So if you put dopplegangers in a mission, presumably what goes in there is a copy of whoever has the star. Or maybe a copy of each member of the entire team? The key is that it's a copy that gets done at the time the mission is run. If it was a fixed character, that'd be no different than what we have now.

You're seriously mixing up deliverables. Yes, GR is being hyped as pure undistilled awesomeness. i18 is the freebie that goes alongside the expansion. It has a few nifty items but they're mostly spillover from GR.

Sorry, but you need to adjust your expectations downward. Devs have confirmed that no work is being done on base raids. While they didn't explicitly say nothing is being done for PvP, I'd bet money that's the case too. There's simply no way they'd be silent on that at this stage of the game. Ditto for base enhancements.

Basically what we're getting is what's been unveiled for GR and i18. They usually save a couple of cool items for the actual release announcement but historically they haven't been tentpole features.

Ghost Falcon just posted on this. The devs are not actively working on base raids. They have previously mentioned there are things they want to fix in PvP to get base raids going, so I think it's safe to surmise they're not actively working on PvP either.

They've said that they still want to do those things, but there's a world of difference between wanting to do it at some vague undetermined time in the future and having a team of programmers working on it.

Jay's forum postings are so.... umm.... "unique" that I always pictured him playing something bizarre and fantastical, so the thought of him just playing a plain-looking character is just hilarious somehow.

I don't see an obvious place to slot the Steadfast 3% unique. I'd have to drop the Scorp Shield and pick up a resistance-based shield to use that wouldn't I? Or is there another power in my build that can take it that I'm just missing?

As long as we're thinking about this, I should mention that this is the reason -Res (resistance) is so good. If you lower resistance you're doing more damage on every point of damage done not just getting a buff on base damage. I believe -Res can even push damage over the damage cap, since the cap is on the amount of +Dam that can be applied, not on total damage deliverable.