Seldom

My favored duo:

Sonic/Dark and Sonic/Sonic corruptors.

This gives you +resistance to all damage, healing, four powersets with strong -resistance, strong -tohit to cause enemies to miss your already bolstered armor, a large array of mez, and mez protection for both to all but sleep/confuse, for which one is covered.

I'm all but CERTAIN I recall Positron saying he wanted to avoid any "bought" badges, which would give an advantage in badge collection to those with disposable income and thus 'penalize' badge hunters low on resources. As the points (as I understand them) are associated with VIP subscriptions AND money purchases, this suggestion is all but "buy a badge!"

As such, I very much doubt this will happen.

(I am aware that veteran badges have been money-based, but before there was no way to play without the monthly cost.)

My mind/psy is going with phantoms- these are illusion decoys with the reflections aura. They seem ghost-like, which works for my theme, and matches the look to the aura they sport. Fun fact- the boost the support pet gives is adrenalin boost.

Note: polar lights are the veteran wisps, and the bosses are a brilliant red. The support set gives you assault.

*le Sigh* did this last night on my illusion/emp controller. When it came down to it, I had no time to do anything but heal. The ideal strategy seemed to be: healer heal, tankers be taunters. (no attacking!)



It seems to cater to some of the worse habits in the game for standardized MMO strategy with no adaption needed.

Worse yet, the disintegration ray was invisible amongst auras, shields, and destiny buffs. I had to be told directly by the target they were being disintegrated, even then I could only tell by their rapidly emptying health.

Suggestions: have an unmistakably brilliant aura that makes the disintegration target visible. Have pressure release valves that redirect the reactor pulses skyward, if they are clicked just before the pulse. This is interruptable, and guarded. This makes avoiding the disintegration death/heal more manageable, and gives different options than "HEAL EVERYONE!"

As far as visuals go:

• Arachnos: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura
• Carnival of Shadows: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura
• Cimeroran: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura
• Longbow: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura
• Nemesis: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura
• Phantoms: Identical to Illusion Decoy models, with reflections aura
• Polar Lights: Identical to Veteran wisps models
• Robotic Drones: Identical to targeting drone/veteran drone models
• Rularuu: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura
• Rikti: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura
• Storm Elementals: identical to the Lanaruu purple cloud NPC enemies.
• Vanguard: Identical to NPC models, with reflections aura

My high-tech archer will gladly use the robotic drones. Perfect for her gadgety/natural origin.

My dream-based dominator will use the phantoms.

My ghost-summoning controller, likewise.

Most of my other incarnates? I have to admit, the robotic drones will be my go-to set. Natural, tech, science, the unobtrusive drones just work from many angles. I have NO idea what my fire/fire/fire dominator could use. If the polar lights/storm elementals/phantoms could be recolored, I'd use them in a heartbeat for my energy/fire/etc. based characters.

Hooray! *breaks out all of his forcefielders/kineticists*

C'mon boys and girls, you can do trials with the whole league buffed AND time to blast!

Heh. I always call tankers the "Diva" archetype, tongue in cheek. No other archetype has so many tools that shout to the enemy "Look at me look at me!"

Many folks know what tankers bring: the ability to withstand tons of damage. The ability protect allies through diversion. The ability to punch things in the face. Unfortunately, you get "Diva" players. They like tanks for a different reason: being the center of a team's strategy. "I will go in, leading you guys, once I get all the attention, buffers, pay attention to me. Debuffers, mess up things that I am controlling attention on. Damage dealers, kill only once I have control. Mezzers, mez the things I am not on, of hold things still for me."

A secondary tank in such circumstances is not treated as a secondary tanker, but a secondary Leader. No, I'm not saying these tankers are always holding the star, but they do like 'steering the boat.' The odd thing is that though this can be workable in some situations, if the tanker is telling others to wait for them to become center of things, they can slow stuff down. Team mates focused on this one strategy aren't rolling with things well as when they're allowed to start/finish things in accordance with the all of the team's full abilities. For instance: if you have 3 controllers with good lockdown, you don't need to tank everything. You just need to get the things the mezzers missed, intercept things that come un-mezzed, and generally punch stuff.

The only fix I could think of would be upping cloak of fear's magnitude so that it would affect lieutenants, justifying it's high endurance cost.

That kind of change would make cloak of fear quite handy on brutes. Huh, wait....

Question: has anyone tested to see if league members can enter the leader's base? I only ask because my VG base is a personal one, leaving me the sole player able to give tours. As such, a league entry would allow me to show more folks around more easily.

I just haven't tested to see if this would work or not.

Heh. The fact that even vets I've played with aren't familiar with bodyguard, that more nuanced, easy access pet controls are only found by creating macros/binds, and that they require a very different learning curve than other archetypes make holding this back from free newbies a no-brainer.

To be quite honest, I am not seeing the cause for alarm in many of these threads. Most of this game is instanced, and we have plenty of tools that let us decide which individuals we would like to spend time with, listen to, or avoid. Even if there's a large influx of players who are absolute trolls, they can be kicked from the team, (or, conversely, you can quit from theirs) placed on /ignore, ignored until a mission is entered, or one can simply go to a new zone. As non-subscribers won't be chatting in broadcast, will be unable to do certain content, (AE especially) and can't get into global channels, It may be easier to cope with new-system problem players who are "free" than it is currently with spammers, griefers and such.

Conversely, I know several people who have played this game before, but have stopped subscribing because their limited time in game made the monthly chunk of change unjustifiable. Now, they will be able to log in ever so often as 'premium' users, and hang out with old friends on a limited, but more sustainable basis. That's just awesome.

"Stay."

Heh. For what it's worth, I was playing my frankenslotted dark brute the other day with naught for extras but the aforementioned easy +recovery/1-shot Io's that help with endurance, plowing through a +1x6 map with a gaming buddy. His comment? "Wow, what bonuses are you using?" I had to laugh. It was all dark armor, just with the blue to back it up. The power to stun/fear 10-20 flunkies in a crowd is powerful indeed. Throw in a heal that can almost literally bring you back from the dead, and a rez that literally does, and you have a powerful combo.

I have a EM/DA brute that's truly fun, and much of that is owed to dark armor's uniqueness. You don't have to go so crazy with /DA on inventions. While many love what the set can do on high defense, I kept it simple. Use the tricks /DA has, just frankenslot the powers I want to work best, and have as much +recovery bonuses to be able to use them without worries.

I will say taking tough helps a lot, and getting dark regeneration fully enhanced asap makes a world of difference. The main enemy in that power is the huge endurance cost, the second being its recharge.

With all of its tricks, especially CoF, using endurance, simple +recovery does LOTS of good. The nice thing? +recovery is in many cases an ENTRY bonus. Two slots, lots of sets give this. Impervium armor gives it, so my choice slotting was 2xres/end, and 2xres. with the impervium armor res/end+res easily slotted in your armors, that's an easy way to frankenslot the end/res split, as well as get an easy bonus on core powers that need the attention.

The trials are fun here and there. What I don't like is how they in practice detract from running the rest of the rest of the game should, you want to bring your character up through the new progression that's been opened.

I LOVED the alpha slot sytem, even before shards dropped from lower SF's. It's message: "Rewards for playing different parts of the game, and here, here's a different SF each week to try." If you want a notice, don't like this week's target, you'll get a new one next week. Add in the shards for exemplaring, and you have an endgame that let's you also use the rest of the game, doing anything with your incarnate=progress.

The threads and trial rewards seem to be far more begrudging, to the point that the shard-->thread-->component/incarnate xp conversion seems so steep it's all but labeled "you really should be running trials." It really makes me wonder- are the devs nervous enough that they think something that's even half as fast as trials would lose interest in league runs? Would trials cease to be popular if they were not such an exclusive-ish source of new incarnate rewards, or would the instances still hold up as a fun thing to do with other players just because they are fun? I'd reaeeeaaallly hope the devs would make stuff they could comfortably say was fun enough to run on it's own to go and play, even without a carrot dangling at the end.

That, in the end, is what has me a bit disheartened. By appearances the devs are placing the carrots so completely on the new stuff, it does seem to come back to the "you really should be playing trials" nudging. What, not the game you guys spent 7+ years on? I can't get all my incarnate stuff for that, because conquering statesman, nictus in rome, or all the other 50ish stuff in the game just doesn't count the same way? I'm sorry. I guess I really should be running trials. Those are the real incarnate feats.

I should be able to participate.

Global Name: @ChicagoDoodler
SG/VG Name: Winds of Bale
SG or VG?: VG
Availability: tentatively both
Base Description: Cobbled mad science/archaic fusion underground lair

Fire/fire/fire dominator. EVRYTHING IS ON FIRE! Show me another set that has a giant fire aura, can enshroud huge groups in walls of fire, rain fire, set giant bonfires, lob fireballs, breath fire, set flashfires...you get the idea. AT full tilt, it's tougher to find stuff that's not burning.

Fire/rad controller.

Illusion/empath controller, everything blood red.

Peacbringers.

My favored combos so far:

Mind/Psy/Soul- control freak, safest of the safe. Mind controls everything that can be, psy gives both an excellent buff & debuff as well as some varied side effects, soul gives a buildup and AoE.

Fire/fire/fire- a blaster that happens to control stuff too. So. Much. Stuff. TO BURN!!

Plant/earth- soft controls galore, and nothing says 'force of nature' like summoning a forest of writhing vines, creating your own bramble fields at will, hurling rocks, and smashing stuff with stones hammers.

Elec/elec. Sooo very sappy. He's eventually going to be elec/elec/mu. Stuff can't move, stuff doesn't have the energy to fight back.

Besides preferences for what zones you start in, the primary/secondary level you get powers does come into play especially if you are into flashbacks/SF's.

Solo, the difference between the two is extremely similar, due to vigilance. But on a full team, the corrupter will do a lot more damage.

Against high-health targets, the damage margin grows larger in favor of corrs due to scourge.

Besides balancing issues, there is a technical limitation. No power in the game lets you target and buff and ally or target yourself. In fact, all self-buffs do not target oneself by selection, but by default.

So, the powers would need to be redone to allow switching between a self buff to a ally buff. And, perhaps an entire new system added for self-selection on powers. Why? to allow sets to use powers that have continually been purposefully set to leave out the caster to cast buffs on themselves to allow them to not only weaken foes and buff allies, but buff themselves with some of the most potent buffs in the game.

The suggestion brings numerous problems and the only solution being "these powers that seem deliberately designed to exclude me, should not because I want them."

Most support sets that exclude the user "balance" by leaving one team member vulnerable in some way. Can this be bypassed through doubling/tripling/quadrupling up on such support sets, basically buffing members out of any vulnerability? Yes. But doing so costs team slots, monthly subscriptions and extra characters. Is this cost too low? perhaps, but it is a 'loophole' of sorts that exists simply because of the way the system works. The solution is NOT to remove what little cost remains to using these powerful buffs.

(It's no wonder that after seeing how all defender teams worked, Castle did not say "they should do that solo!" he said he'd like a sort of diminishing returns on buff/debuffs, but wouldn't because of outcry.)