Scientist

Given that the devs have said overall league success is an important factor, how fast did the teams with the Dominator succeed at the objectives? How many objectives did they succeed at? Is it possible that your Dominator contributes SO much more that those leagues were consistently more successful?

My suggestion is to make characters on both. CoH is VERY friendly to having alts (alternate characters) all over the place. I have a friend with over 100 characters, sigh. . .

So rather than getting them to move, have a tanker to play with them when they are on! And have another, different tanker to play on Freedom when they aren't!

There is so much content to this game, that you could take both characters to 50 without either of them ever seeing the same mission (though thats kind of rare, since theres a relatively small amount of content that most people do a lot of, like Task Forces).

In fact if you have enough play time I think its not a bad idea to make a good soloing character like a scrapper and just play contact mission stuff, see the Hollows, Striga, Croatoa, and so on which a lot of people skip these days.

Right, when I'm playing my tank in this, if someone else has the AVs and isn't in sequestion danger, I'll target the adds, Taunt them and hop back to drag them into the middle. When I'm playing my Cold defender, I'll fire Sleet at them then Ion to thin them out some, popping some purples to survive any return fire. Yes, it slows down work on the AV a bit (though as cold/sonic I'm flooring the AVs resistance anyway without Sleet) but helps keep everyone else alive by keeping the adds cleared out, I've been on a couple of BAFs, mostly early on, where they got too numerous and caused a failure or near failure (finished one with under 5 seconds left on the timer, whew!).

Yes, I was wondering how effectively my Crab could replace a Fire blaster for AoE carnage one time, and from what I can tell it takes the Crab about 10 seconds in animation time to put out the damage that a Blaster can in 5 seconds. Thats not a terrible tradeoff, mind you, given that a Fire blaster is top of the AoE blaster heap, and at the end of my Crabs attack chain everyone ELSES AoEs are doing more AoE damage because of resist debuffs, and the Crab has much better protection, but given how highly this game rewards fast, upfront AoE damage for most content, it is definitely some level of sacrifice.

Look low down on the left in the Advanced Search window, there is a checkbox for "post" or "thread" (I think those were the terms). The default is "thread", but if you change it to "post" it will take you to just the post that they made.

I played with a friend a bit who normally soloed his Storm a lot, and yeah, Tornado is great solo because it tends to keep most of the critters from operating. Especially nice against mezzers, they tend to stop shooting you if you get mezzed (part of critter AI) and they have something else to distract them, whereas if not they'll just keep shooting at you.

I'd also suggest getting either Superspeed or a stealth IO to stack with Steamy Mist, part of using the positioning effectiveness of Storm is to be in the right position to start your smackdown from. It lets you do things like Gale into a corner, rather than get shot at while you are trying to get into position.

Practicing for a Master badge may skew your "participation" score relative to how people normally do it, for example there may have been more wait time for instructions, or to coordinate for something. But I believe Arcanaville also said in one of her posts that there may be issues with rewards for particularly small Leagues that she is trying to investigate. She has offered to go through any chatlogs people send her, so if you are trying something like this it may be worth logging it so she can add to her data. I doubt the devs are deliberately trying to penalize people who run this in a smaller group, though I don't know if they will make a big effort to help people out who decide to duo it, say.

If you want to see just what she has to say on the Trials, I suggest a forum search on her global for her posts. They will include the closest thing we have to any hard data on the reward formula, though she summarizes what she has so far just above.

Thats not terribly surprising; those were designed to be a solid challenge for experienced players with pretty well min-maxed IO builds. If your build is a min-maxed IO one without using a planner like Mids, that would be really impressive. Before Tin Mage and Apex and the trials, it was very unusual in the game to be fighting all +4s short of a few power gamer/farmers/challenge nuts.

I can also say based on playing with a friends fire/rad that its a powerset fully capable of pulling aggro off my Fire tank who is cycling PbAoEs and Taunt like mad, the Fire Immob has a really big radius. So despite him being a good player with a good build, he faceplants a fair amount (not that keeps him from trying to beat me to the next spawn, sigh, he grew up on a fire/fire blaster. . .).

If you don't want to emulate my friend, doing a solid Mids build will definitely help. Beyond that, you may need to take some care to note in which situations its safe to use which powers. If you decide to solo a crate in the Lambda warehouse, you'd better have your best controls up and available, I can tell you with the base tohit of mobs in the trials being higher then normal, plain debuffs won't be enough to let you survive. Some judgement is needed to say that enough other people are hitting the spawn with enough other things that you can lay in there as well.

I actually got the impression from posts of Arcanaville's (who has almost certainly worked out the most about how the system works, and may well have figured out a few things the devs don't know about it yet) that this may only be partially true.

She thinks, if I recall correctly, that as an INDIVIDUAL, once you participate a certain amount, you get the reward table instead of threads. Participation includes shooting at enemies, sticking with the team, click buffing of teammates (as opposed to running Maneuvers, say), and probably other factors. It doesn't include much love for pets and pseudopets, unfortunately, so if you rely heavily on those consider adding some personal attacks, even if its just a Brawl or Origin attack once in awhile.

But she also thinks that its likely that there are more than one reward table, and how the whole LEAGUE performs can move the people in it to a better table. It is, as yet, much less clear about what is considered "good performance" for a league. It probably includes fewer people dying, more people being active, more objectives being accomplished (such as zero escapees in BAF, all collectibles collected in Lambda, etc.). The kinds of things that, in theory, good players should be trying to accomplish anyway to succeed.

The last thing the devs probably want in the system is an incentive to, say, leave dead teammates lying there in favor of running around "doing something". I doubt they can cover every single nuance of player behavior in their system, but so far with the exception of pet heavy ATs it seems to be working reasonably well with the recent fix to reduce excessive uncommons.

Thanks everyone. The team captain wasn't responding, which is why I wanted to promote someone else over them. I'll keep the "make new team" idea in mind for next time, a fair number of people don't tend to participate in chat much, even if they are decent players, and when recruiting PUG folks of course I don't know that in advance. Some hate leadership too (of the half dozen regular friends I play with, only one other would be willing to take team lead, even in a league).

I bet that was it, they were probably locked, and I didn't have a chance to try to communicate with them specifically after returning to ask about unlocking even if it had occurred to me, it was already into the fight Marauder phase and we were doing poorly enough that I was pretty busy. I hate to have someone cheated on rewards by being on a tiny team, plus it was one of our two defenders, meaning they probably weren't going to be taking down a bunch of mobs themself, and for any teammate buffing/healing powersets its also a bit of a pain to do people not on your team.


Anyone happen to know what the slash command is to unlock, should I wind up in that situation?

Its actually pretty easy to miss, since at the default size the window opens, you only see the top recipe. As someone else said, you have to click on the thing you want to craft to "pin" it in place so you can go to the scroll bar on the right and scroll down to see the multiple recipes, I missed this too.

I'm planning to craft Alphas on a few characters this way, since you can average better then one component per trial if you do them gradually, an Empyrean Merit (worth one common) plus some other component on the reward table plus a few threads and Astral Merits, vs a TF shard component plus MAYBE enough shards to make another.

And I agree, doing a Tier 3 Alpha is likely to be faster with the Notice of the Well then waiting for a Rare Incarnate component, depending on your luck. Especially if you wait for a fairly fast and popular WST for the Notice, like the ITF or even this weeks Positron part 1.

I would suggest *opening* the Alpha slot via the Oro arc rather than trials, unless you are a really pathetic soloer and can't manage to get a Shivan to help it should be faster. And people are usually willing to help with the Trapdoor mission, for example.

While I don't know the details of the latter situation, it is possible that the mod missed the invective. Its certainly possible to miss things in any channel for substantial periods of time, depending on what you are doing (working on a sg base, respecing, fighting for your life, logged onto a character on another server without that channel set up, etc.). With some of those you can't even see or respond to tells.

That said, unless channel mods are all in the same sg, or are friends, it can be pretty tough to set up any system whereby they all have exactly the same standards for how to treat things. My general attitude is that if a strictly moderated channel for a particular purpose has a high membership, and some people decide to make another "anything goes" one but are unhappy because they can't get most people to join the new one, it shows what proportion of people want to be in a strictly moderated channel vs a loosely moderated one. I suspect a lot of the people in such focused channels don't post much, don't want to get involved in drama, and just want to see things they might want to get into.

To me, the responsibility of the mods of a channel are to keep operating it in the way that the members support, based on "voting with their feet". The responsibility of the members is, well, to vote with their feet.

In the case of something like the example above of complaining that the server doesn't do zone events, assuming it was a channel for organizing events like TFs, I'd personally probably allow one or two complaints like that, but issue a warning if it continued being discussed. If, on the other hand, someone was trying to organize a team to participate in doing a zone event, that woud be fine. Thats the kind of constructive channel use its set up for.

I would also judge off topic content for a focused channel somewhat by server size and time of day. On Virtue and Freedom channels, you might have to be stricter about off topic stuff, especially during prime play times, because there are a lot of on topic posts and they could get lost if there was much side discussion at all. On something like the Triumph channel mentioned, say during early morning play when there might only be 20-30 players on the whole server, conversation could drift a lot further without being likely to impede anyones organizing.

I have to disagree with this bit of advice; Soulbound Allegiance is one of the few purple sets that don't provide a global recharge bonus, and the recharge intensive pet sets are actually pretty good. Expedient Reinforcement is one of only 2 sets I know of (along with Stupefy) that provides a 6.25% recharge PLUS a defense bonus over 3% in the same set, in this case Ranged defense, which is what you want. And I'll often slot 4 of Call to Arms for another 6.25% global recharge, then add just the Damage/Recharge from Soulbound to top off both nicely in the other pet (typically Call Reinforcements, with its longer recharge it needs capped recharge more). Soulbound is one of the cheaper purple sets, probably because it doesn't have that global recharge with it.

One nice feature of this is that between that and Positrons in your AoEs, its easy to hit the max of 5 set bonuses of 6.25%, letting you put Thunderstrikes instead of Decimations into the ST blasts for more ranged defense. A couple of those plus Steadfast +3% defense (not too expensive) plus the Expedient Reinforcement above and you are most of the way to the Ranged soft cap already.

To the OPs original question, though, it is hard to make a Crab build with everything you want and still have a travel power. I squeezed in Superspeed, because I really like being able to stealth things when needed, and Recall Friend because it often speeds a team along and doesn't need any additional slots, or can add one extra Zephr for more Ranged defense. Good place for the Zephr -knockback too.

I had actually run into this kind of issue before in high end content; a fair amount of it (Khan, STF, etc.) turns into "team against solo AV" fights at the end, where theres not really a lot of leverage for a Warshade to use after the first minute or two. I have to take comfort in the fact that although its somewhat boring, on an average team mix with the Kheldian inherent if you have a high enough recharge/recovery build you can do a seamless attack chain from Nova that compares reasonably well with most blasters. And by that time in the fight, apart from the tank its pretty much down to damage + debuffs, so you are bringing as much as a scrapper or blaster would. People don't usually go out of their way to recruit scrappers and blasters, but having a couple on the team is good, and at other parts of the TF/trial you can contribute a lot more.

AVs just aren't the best situation for a Warshade's strength, which lies in lots of weaker foes. They aren't terrible, just not the best.

Though if as a previous poster said, it can chain from any pets present, and it chains PbAoEs instead of ST attacks, it may be rather overpowered against ATs like Traps and MMs who may have half a dozen targets per character for it to chain from. Kind of like the "broken" Poison Trap was, when it generated a cloud from each target and each cloud processed every proc in the trap, thus nuking tightly packed spawns. I question whether the devs thought through the implications of a multitarget autohitting (or near autohitting) chaining damage PbAoE.

Wouldn't it allow the knockup to affect foes with a higher level of knockback immunity, though? Such as some bosses, possibly AVs (not sure of their protection) and PvP?

Thats what I was wrestling with for my bots/traps as well, and I think I'll need to take a look at what both my global recharge and the recharge on my individual traps powers is. Traps unfortunately has some contradiction between putting IO sets in powers for things like global defense and global recharge, and actually having its long recharge powers ED capped for recharge, since most IO sets don't cap recharge. It may actually be necessary to build around the alpha to some extent, something I prefer to avoid in case of exemplaring. On the bright side, even an exemped down bots/traps who loses some set bonuses and the alpha should manage to survive a bit of peril.