Scientist

I will be there, brought my 53 rad/rad defender kSpace two weekends ago, but we did not succeed, so I'll transfer over my 53 cold/sonic defender Zephyrsong who has much better -resist debuffing. No Hybrid on either, unfortunately, but I think she has everything else on your list.

Do you think it makes sense to put this in the TW2 motto of the day for folks who may log in once in awhile but not read the server forum here?

I'll be there with a 50+3 rad/rad defender, kSpace. I've got a T3 Lore but think I can upgrade to T4 by then, no Hybrid unfortunately but I do have Achilles Heel in Neutrino and Rad Infection and Tactics/Assault/Vengeance.

I should be able to persuade a friend to transfer a corruptor to help. And if the first try fails, I can transfer over a 50+3 Cold/Sonic defender who is brutal for reducing resistance, but I was hoping to get the badge on kSpace, my main, if possible.

Based on a reply I saw in that thread, it looks like it even works changing from XP to System 7, which is what I was hoping, thanks Rangle! Still the best MMO community ever!

I will be getting a new computer with Windows System 7 on it, replacing my old one with Windows XP. A friend told me that would be a problem, as I wouldn't be able to just copy the folder across between operating systems, and as far as I know you can't download the System 7 client from CoH any more. My most recent CD for the game is CoV, I was assuming I could install on System 7 with that and then just let it update, but will I run into problems with that approach?

Any guess what would happen if the credit card charge is disputed, if one is lucky (or unlucky) enough to have just paid it before the announcement so its still in the time window?

This was my first MMO, and my first characters were a pair of rad/rad defenders, intended to compare leveling on a static team vs solo/PUG. One became my main, though I got both to 50. That kind of spoiled me for other defenders, and even other characters (I wondered why people made such a fuss about Vahz at low levels till I ran a scrapper against them, they really hurt without debuffs!). Despite my complaints to my friend about how often they nerfed Radiation Emission, we both knew it was STILL a bit on the overpowered side. . . I'm pretty sure I have more defenders and corruptors then all other ATs put together, especially since as was mentioned the support sets are so varied in how they play.

Thus I was a bit surprised to see how limited the role of support characters was when I tried another game, and I saw why people came to CoH and only looked at making a healer. I suppose other game designers are scared of the awesome power of stacked buffs and debuffs we have demonstrated so ably here.

Its an interesting dynamic, virtually everyone agrees having buffers/debuffers on your team is really helpful for hard content, and they are quite powerful, yet they are not a terribly common AT, so you rarely accumulate enough to make content "too easy" without concerted effort like superteams forming around them. Thus any team leader you would actually want to play under will never turn you away.

And my favorite recruit as a team leader was always a defender. A corruptor or controller may have built to emphasize blasting stuff and neglected or not understood their secondary, but if someone runs a defender there is a very good chance they actually appreciate the support powerset and have built for it and learned to play it. Not always, but I liked the odds.

I've spent nothing beyond my VIP subscription (which I get yearly, so ~$13/month IIRC?) since F2P, but in the entire time before that since a couple months after Beta when I joined I'd only spent about $80 on CoV and a couple of packs with actual useful powers in them (I've never bought anything in CoH for just costumes/emotes/etc.). Things are certainly being added to the game faster then I can play them these days, though, and I'm quite happy that they keep adding costumes and emotes I don't care about because it attracts other people to play, and I DO care about that.

I have one friend who, in addition to maintaining VIP, has probably spent about $100 extra since Freedom. Maybe as much as $200, he has everything functional and a lot of decorative stuff.

I have another friend who, in addition to maintaining VIP, has probably spent at least $500 extra since Freedom. I'm not sure how much, but he has every single addition to the game that has ever been released, costumes, powersets, etc., and he never wants to wait for anything, so whatever that would cost.

Here is my grav/FF controller build. I took Dimension Shift, even though I don't use it very often its a unique power, dang it, so I will find a way. . . It was also a good place for the Will of the Controller ATO set, since no Immob set combines ranged defense and recharge. Ranged defense is nice on a grav/FF because you have several ways to keep foes at range.

On your build, you might replace one of the Lockdown sets with the Will of the Controller ATO set, you lose half a percent of ranged defense but gain 8.75% recharge, which is worth the tradeoff in my opinion. In particular I suggest putting the WotC set in a control power rather than Singy, as you can see on my build I've capped out accuracy, mez, and damage in 5 slots for Singy, which helps when you are down to single hard targets like AVs, where grav/FF isn't a terribly strong contributor.

I've got Hover so I can Wormhole down and not scatter foes, though thats somewhat map dependent, and Teleport because the character is somewhat based on a character from a pnp campaign of long ago. Though I like Recall Friend on any character I can fit it on.

It is described as a Global Heal proc, by the way, and mentions a chance of heal on "firing many damaging powers". Does that mean if placed in any single power, it gives them all a chance to proc this heal?

Where it could help slightly is that a lot of bullet/sword attacks debuff defense by 7% or so (not positive of this number, but its fairly small). After the first one hits, a remaining defense of 39.88% vs. 38% gives you about a 25% better chance of NOT getting hit by the next attack and starting cascade defense failure.

The reasons for Leviathan are;

1. Arctic Breath, which with enough recharge gives another roughly perma AoE -15% resist on top of the -20% from Venom Grenade. A total of -35% is on the order of what debuffing defenders provide, only none of their -resist debuffs do serious AoE damage on top of the debuff. As a note, AVs/GMs don't have their "special" resistances to -resist debuffing.

2. Bile Spray, toxic damage, if used as a followup to both of the above its seeing a total of -65% resistance to its damage, thanks to the doubling of Venom Grenade -resist vs. toxic.

Downside to Leviathan is, as others have commented, the whole "vomiting/breathing" attacks look doesn't work for everyone. Plus you need a predecessor for the above two attacks, though taking the AoE Immob isn't a terrible thing if you are a ranged crab.

My favorite tip missions actually were the Hero -> Vigilante ones, as I felt most of them really captured the moral difference between things like "rescue the policeman and let the Big Bad Guy escape" and "let the policeman suffer, its part of what he signed up for, and capture the Big Bad because his next plan is probably to blow up an orphanage". The Rogue ones weren't as stark a difference, I thought, because they revolved around villian = interested in fame vs. rogue = interested in money. Which explains a lot about the priority seemingly given to CoH's marketing department, but that's another topic.

A note about the queue times you may see for trial type things, since its not obvious. They always show short times, because as another person mentioned, most people form teams big enough to meet the minimum THEN join a queue. Thus they go right in, and the "average" wait time the system calculates is highly weighted by the fast entry pre-formed majority.

Just as a note, there are a few badges/plaques in Old Galaxy that you need for accolades, might be a good time to get them before exiting. Otherwise, you can get there from the crystal way in back of the Oroborous building that takes you to Echo Galaxy.

I saw in another thread that Zwillinger mentioned on Virtue Chat that there was no freespec with I22.

"03-17-2012 20:05:02 [Help] NCsoft_Zwillinger: <color #ff0101><bgcolor #010101>Development team determined that AT changes weren't significant enough for a freespec."

Which puzzles me a bit, actually, since in theory I22 was the first issue in a very long time when every single AT's build was potentially affected if they want to make use of Archetype Enhancements. ATOs were a featured item of I22, after all.

Ah, well, burned a real respec on my grav/FF controller since I'd used my previous freespec in yet another quixotic attempt to make him useful and interesting to play. With the new power changes, I have hopes that he will at least be good for some niche situations, so I'm giving him another try.

As a note, I know with the Cold defender/corruptor Ice shields, you can change the fx in the costume designer to make them considerably less obtrusive. Change colors to variants of grey, and they become barely visible. I haven't tried this with the Epic pool, I don't know if its possible for epic pool powers.

As one might guess, I was leaning towards slotting the ATs in Dimension Shift. My reasoning;

Wormhole can take Stupefy, for both Ranged Defense and Recharge bonuses.
Grav Distortion can take Basilisk + the Lockdown Proc + Apocalypse damage, to get good control values and still squeeze some damage out of it.
Grav Distortion Field can take Unbreakable Constraint, for good Recharge values without needing to use Catalysts, and it can actually use the purple Damage Proc. This would be my backup choice for the ATs, though.
Crushing Field can take 5 damage procs, for my main AoE damage below Epic levels, and its very spammable, so I'd rather not put a set in there. I might if I needed it to soft cap (my Grav is Grav/FF so not as hard as some sets to soft cap Range).

That only leaves Dimension Shift to take the AT enhancements, since there is no Immob set that gives both Defense and Recharge, and I'm not sure how the hold proc from the purple Immob set would work with a phase power.

If you want to soft cap Ranged, though, and don't have Dispersion Bubble as a base like I do, it could make sense to put Trap of the Hunter into either Dimension Shift or Crushing Field with the AT in the other and put Lockdown into Grav Distortion and GDF. I was trying to push recharge as high as I could go without actually losing my soft cap or any more AoE damage then necessary.

Does anyone know if the new Dimension Shift is supposed to take the Controller ATIOs? I checked on Live and it doesn't, but that seems odd since its now allowed to take Immob sets and its certainly one of Grav's "core" control powers. I'm hoping its a bug or just not yet working as intended?

Hmm, folks do make a good argument for a lot of the price difference being in how useful the sets are. I actually took my first good look at the MM set, and agree I don't really find it worth slotting on my bots/. I do think the "I have one Warshade so I don't need any others but have multiple tanks/defenders/etc." argument would still reflect in prices if not for the difference in set bonuses, as I wouldn't expect most people with multiple level 50s of particular ATs to take the trouble to respec ALL of them for ATIOs, more often I would think that they would pick one or two favorites, which still helps determine what people like to play.

I wonder if something less direct could be done based on the relative prices now vs. after enhancement converters come out, but I'm not sure if there would be enough data on how many people would be using them to fill orders for scrapper/brute sets vs. MM/Kheldian, for example. Converters will definitely kill any price signals we have now.

I would also say even with the differences in set bonuses, one might still be able to draw limited conclusions. For example, the "good" scrapper and brute bonuses are similar (S/L and Melee defense); which of those two sells for more? The "good" corruptor, controller and defender bonuses are similar (recharge and ranged defense), which sells for more? The not terribly impressive HEAT/VEAT bonuses are similar, which sells for more?

So you can't necessarily say that Brutes are more popular than Corruptors, but you might be able to say that Controllers are more popular than Corruptors, for example.

I think Arcanaville made a comment around when Praetoria came out that the devs had forgotten how to design low level critters, based on how tough they made them. They were designed more like mid-to-high level critters in terms of attack chains and capabilities.

The Praetorian stories are very interesting, and worth repeating to see the different faction variations, but I'd suggest trying them on a fairly solid soloing character. I'd suggest a Mastermind, but you may not have access to that once you go free to play. Other good choices are a Brute (ideally with a low level heal), a scrapper, as you found, or maybe something like a Fire/Dark corruptor or Fire/Plant controller, where you have more ability to shut down or debuff some of the critters.

If you want to stick with the same defender, try to do some searches and find someone else to pair with. You could provide some good support to another character.