Scientist

First time I got monkied, I was stealthing through a mission. I wasn't sure if critters would aggro to it, so I kept going to test it, and nothing shot at me. Awesome! Its like the Faultline mission, where you get an Arachnos disguise!

I found out in the next mission where I got monkied again that the first time must have been a fluke. . .

If Arcanaville's "Scrapper Challenge" mission is still available, thats also pretty tough, might be interesting to compare to yours. She had some video somewhere of the original version beating a dev using a special cheatery dev character with all the controller powers (pets, debuffs, etc.), though she's toned it down since then.

I can suggest one other thing that may help you avoid the trap of trying to "save the salvage you might need for recipes". You are right, storage space we can achieve is pretty limited, even with a maxed out sg base you can only store about 2 of each salvage.

Until you realize that your "storage" is the market. It is almost unheard of for any salvage to be at zero supply, and most of it has hundreds to thousands listed. So sell what you have without a care, knowing that when you need that Ruby to craft a recipe, you can buy one. And, if as it sounds, you mostly play and only do a bit of crafting, you will generate much more Inf selling salvage then it costs to buy it back later. If you want to be careful, study what the prices are for the rare stuff and try to list near (but not at) the highest prices you see, that will pay for a LOT of common salvage that you sold for 10 and buy back for 5000. Then, placing patient (24 hour) bids on things will get you good prices on what you buy back.

This extends to recipes as well, though there it can actually make sense to craft some drops for what you need later if you have a sg base to store them.

And consider buying common IOs on the market, if you don't want to craft them yourself. Don't believe the 300,000 price you see on a lvl 25 damage IO, place bids about 40% above what SOs would cost and wait a few days. Some IOs never drop that low, but a lot do, then you can just make the handful you still need. It saves a ton of time and Inf on the way to 50, long term.

A very interesting discussion, and I appreciate the effort you made Samuel_Tow to present both sides in an unbiased way right in the beginning.

My comfort zone is rather large, as one of the things I enjoy most is finding new ways to apply tools within the game to solve new problems. I also enjoy teamed content much more then solo content. As a result, the way I tend to evaluate new content the devs add is "will it get or keep more people playing the game". For example, I could *personally* care less about new costume bits being added, as I can rarely remember what my own costumes look like let alone those of my friends, but I am always enthusiastic about them adding more parts because I know many other players, including my friends, love them. More happy fellow players = CoH continuing to exist and me continuing to have people to play with.

So I look at the end game thats developing, and notice 2 main things. First, its clearly intended to strongly encourage teaming; you get "phat lewt" much faster that way. I see that as a good thing, despite the fact that a good chunk of my play time is brief periods early mornings without enough time for TFs, because I suspect most people in a MMO like to team more then solo, given a choice. Otherwise you can pick up a console game and not have to pay a monthly fee. Many people, like myself, don't always have the choice to team and have to solo some or most of the time but people interacting is what tends to make friends and a social system which are more likely to bring people back.

Second, its clearly intended to be more difficult and require more coordination to win. The coordination has the potential to feed into the item above, get more interaction which has the *potential* at least to get people involved in the community more. Obviously some /gignore will result as well. The difficulty provides a reason for people who were getting a bit bored with the lack of challenge (as they perceive it) of the main game to stick around. It also provides a reason for people who don't want more challenge to leave. Really, though, since the devs have provided parallel paths that are slower, but more like the classic game, the subset of people who would leave are the ones who want the best lewt but ALSO want it fast but ALSO don't want more challenge. The devs are obviously placing a bet that thats a smaller subset of players then the ones who wanted a new level of challenge.

If they had eliminated possibilities to advance other than the new, challenging routes I would fault them for it. Since all of the "classic" game is still there, though, I don't have a problem with them making the most efficient advancement hinge on teaming and on new levels of coordination required. I think that overall, those aspects of the game will increase the social aspect of the game that will keep players playing long term, so I'm in favor of them.

I don't have it open in front of me, but I know there is an option from the top menus in Mids to "search by set bonus" or something like that. It even has a way to select the various bonus levels, 2.5%, 3.25%, and so on. Very handy for someone new trying to focus on particular types of bonuses. For example, one of the best ranged defense bonuses comes in an Immobilize set, and folks who have done tons of builds will tend to remember that, but you wouldn't think to look there if you were just starting off. That kind of thing can even point you to taking or slotting particular powers mainly because of what you can slot into them. The finest example of whats known as a "set mule" I saw was 5-slotting Brawl with the purple Melee set for the recharge bonus, currently about 1.6B Inf or thereabouts. . .

As you do more builds, you sort of learn "OK, need +rch bonuses, have two AoEs, they get 5x Positrons Blast" and things like that to speed it up a lot.

I believe, based on experience with Acid Mortar in Traps, that pets like that will shoot further if you actually move up near a spawn, thus "letting it see through you". Its fairly easy to test with that and any kind of inviso, since Acid Mortar has a significantly longer range then its aggro radius (fortunately), but I never did it systematically.

I know if I don't play my WS for about a week I forget how, thanks to various keybinds and multiple options, its almost as bad as my MM that way. Particularly perturbing is when I'm lying there faceplanted and say to myself, "You know, if I'd used powers A, C and E instead of B, E and F I'd have survived that, no problem. . ."

A Widow's not a bad idea, as Capa said its not quite complete stealth but easy to add the stealth IO or superspeed and then you are fine to go. With mezz protection and good defenses, you don't even have to worry that much about getting past things like Rikti Drones. I haven't found anything they can't solo pretty easily, especially with the choice of 2 builds to do so. And they will be more popular to add to a team for the badges you really need a team for then scrappers.

Soldier is also a good choice, for the same reason; stealth/solo missions with the Bane build, join teams with the Crab build.

I have not played an Electric tank, but found a Fire/Fire tank (with tough and eventually weave) fine for all the content up to end game.

For end game content, I put considerable effort into IOing out my Fire tank, but that was part of my plan all along. Its much easier to add Defense, Hit Points, etc. through IO sets, accolades, temp powers and such and improve survivability by several orders of magnitude then to add Damage and improve *that* by several orders of magnitude. With an IOed out Fire/Fire tank, I have both. That has been handy on low damage teams, no team I'm on is ever moving slowly, and I consider setting the team pace one of the responsibilities of a tanker.

So thats something of the tradeoff to consider; if you don't plan to work on improving your tanks survivability at end game, a Granite tank is great out of the box. But it doesn't have the potential to ever move very far into "high damage" territory. Electric sounds like its much further towards the "more damage but more squishy" territory, but not quite as far as Fire. I'm only going to have the one tank on that server, so I invested a lot of effort into making sure that (1) it could handle any tanking content for the team, and (2) it could finish the content if half the team bailed.

One advantage to sonic I didn't see mentioned thats nice for soloing is the cone sleep; rad debuffs don't break sleep, so you can get all your debuffs set up before waking up the spawn. It also has a low damage ST stun, so you can mezz lts before they mezz you. As mentioned, rad/sonic will also be in very high demand on high level teams for its "hard target" melting capabilities, I've been on far too many teams that won't start without a rad. Down side, weak AoE, so you have to ST things to death soloing.

If you don't mind toggle debuff herding, I'd suggest rad/rad. Set up Rad Infection, pull into a clump in Choking Cloud + debuffs, and you have 2 AoEs you can use while standing in the middle of the spawn. With enough +recharge set slotting to make AM/Hasten perma, those two plus Cosmic Burst (best damage + mezz ST attack a defender can get) are basically a full attack chain, so you can pull 2-3 spawns together and melt them simultaneously, faster though not as safe as a /sonic. Achilles proc in Neutrino gives substantial extra -resist debuffing on a hard target because of its fast fire rate.

Otherwise, I'd suggest Dark. I'm not fond of the cones, because you constantly have to move back and forth to get a whole spawn, but mobs run pretty readily these days if they are debuffed or whiff a few times, so pinning the spawn in place to keep the debuff anchor from running through another group will save you a lot of grief. Otherwise, plan to stun or hold your anchor with one of the other power sets.

I would actually suggest a VEAT, a Soldier. A Bane build is very good at soloing, has some built-in stealth, and has no trouble handling bosses (assuming a bit of investment in IOs). I've seen people say that "its what a stalker should have been".

Then you can switch to a Crab build for when you need a lot of AoEs (monkey badge), or want to join teams, since some badges are are hard if not impossible to get without a team (task force badges, etc.). A Crab is always welcome on a team.

The down side to a stalker for a badge character is that, fairly or unfairly, you may have to beg your way onto teams at points.

The down side to a Soldier is that levels 1-24 can be a bit tricky solo, its sort of like playing a lower damage blaster with a few defenses. Definitely consider the AoE Immob.