Seldom

*shrugs*
Actually, I thought the natural stuff fit. Would leaves be magical? Meh, not always. Tech? Heck no. Science? no...leaves are natural. Natural origin fits.

FAR better a fit than the "mutant" in my opinion. Fire and a demon tail cape. Huh?

Okay, so we wanted to try again this week? Is tomorrow okay?

Proposed time: 7:00 central/8 EST (the 6/7 from last week seemed too early for most, but I'd still like to get thing rolling sooner rather that later)

Does this work for folks, or should we await the weekend?

Signups, for those interested:
1 Myself, on my dom again
2 ?
3 ?
4 ?
5 ?
6 ?
7 ?
8 ?

As per last time, the hardest thing to get is a defender/mastermind for the black scorpion temp power. A good player to take Reichsman's pounding to the face for 15-20 mins without a death would be good too.

Doing this again, we should do the tunnel strategy. Every single time I've done this, not doing so ended up with at least one body on the floor. I know some folks can do without it, but better safe than hours wasted, says I.

Leaping 5th power idea:

Shockwave

The character stops either on the ground or mid-jump, and does an upward jump animation akin the thundestrike/total focus, etc, except rather than forward facing, it's downward facing. The character crashes to the ground, immune to any falling damage. When they hit the ground, it does a large shockwave that knocks all nearby foes to the ground, and deals moderate damage.

There is a trick with this. The idea is a lower damage footstomp, but one which can be activated from extreme heights. The plummeting to the earth part is easy, as is the animation. The power just does an extreme -jump/-fly value to make the character come down. The trick is that most powers calculate their attack at the activation; this, on the other hand, is supposed to be able to be activated hundreds of feet above enemies, then have the character come smashing down on top of them. Here's a possible solution, but I'm not sure it could work.

• The power is activated, the character does the opening 'jump up' animation.
• The character is put into the 'downward shockwave plummet' animation, and stays in that for 15 seconds or until they reach a grounding surface. The 'plummet' state makes them immune to any flight/jump powers, so that they fall immediately. Note: the plummet state makes character immune from the 'flailing fall' that happens when some characters fall from great heights.
• If they reach a grounding surface, during the 15 second 'plummet' period, it spawns a pseudo-pet 'splat' patch that knocks foes down and damages them once, and makes the character do an 'impact' animation. Simultaneously the character is released from the -jump/-fly/plummet state.
• If the character does not reach a grounding surface after 'plummeting' for 15 seconds, they do no impact, do a reversal animation, and are released from the -jump/-fly attributes.

Anywise, that was my thought for the 5th leaping power.

There's no way around it: this game is based around defeats, and has few, if any, paths that circumvent this. In fact, if a player found a way to level as quickly sans defeats as those doing so, it would be termed an exploit and closed. You're in a game that's all about taking down enemy threats via force.

That said, the closest I've found is this: Mind control with concealment. If you play your cards right, you can finish many missions with only one defeat. Sneak to the objective, confuse target group, wait until they whittle themselves down to a single foe, take that foe out. true, you are inciting violence, but it is among those who have chosen that path already. You are merely redirecting what was there to end its threat.

My main dominator:
Where will we go today? Why am I just sitting around, doing menial day job badges? Why am I redoing the same SF's/TF's? I want to go somewhere new!

My brute:
Why am I just sitting here? Why am I not out killing things? Why haven't you found a way for me to kill NPC's yet? You're working against me, aren't you?

My mastermind:
Why am I not filthy rich? Why haven't you gotten more robots for me? I WANT MORE BOTS! I have all these temp powers, WHY HAVE YOU NOT CRAFTED THEM FOR ME? I can carry an army's arsenal in my pocket, WHY AM IN NOT CARRYING AN ARMY'S ARSENAL OF WEAPONRY? Oh, and... I WANT MY NUKES!!!

My corruptor:
*snores, enjoying the amount of time I let him alone*

My Tank:
*Fiddles with his stock of invention recipes, agitated that I haven't completed upgrading him*

Scrapper:
Why am I not out striking villains with JUSTICE?! My hands barely remember the feel or a good pummeling! How can I serve JUSTICE my becoming a shopkeeper? Justicejusticejusticejustice....

My cyborg defender:
*Looks around Rome in confusion*

The 43+ others:
So YOU're the reason we can never go out and do anything fun!!

Just a report on the outcome: no dice.
We had a good, clear run up to the end thanks to our very crunchy tank who knew what to do. Unfortunately, we violated our own rule: don't face the big bad with the hordes at once. We were only 6, and grouped a bit close, so the nazi lightning and masses got to us.

I would like to very much thank the tank who volunteered an directed stuff, as well as the 4 other folks who stepped up to bat.

*Siiiiiiiiiiigh.* Some day I'll get this right.

...This is now. If those who signed up can't make it, I might have to give spots away. I'll give you some slack, though.

...Wait, people use titles?

Just being facetious. Yes, such things need to be reevaluated.

Hehe. yeah, right now you only need three of those. Three free slots!

The one I might try if I were you would be the achilles: chance for -res. It works best in a toggle, and only one really is needed. This IO doesn't stack, from you or any other sources, but the extra damage is certainly welcome. It''s also pretty durned affordable.

Sort of. Right now I'm picking the inventions I think I'll get the most mileage out of, then slotting the rest with SO's. When I get enough slots, I put in another proc in...it slowly builds up.

I can only go crazy, as mentioned, at level 50. Since a hamidon enhancement can work like two to three SO's at once, and purples can give up to 50%, it's only when I get to those that I can throw in all the crazy extras. (not to mention some of the procs are purples themselves, so those must wait in storage as well.)

Just dropping by to put one other thought in- for the "evil scientist" I went a new direction on my build: every power possible is slotted with proc/effect inventions that cause the powers to behave as many new ways as possible. So as a mad scientist, not only does the character have super abilities, he's used his skill at inventing to experiment with cause altogether new effects. I haven't gotten the character to mature enough to test the results yet, but here's the rundown on how I'm planning it:

Neutrino bolt: chance for lethal, chance of hold, chance of negative energy

Radiation infection: chance for recharge slow, chance of -res, chance for negative damage (toggle, so it rolls the chance every 10 seconds! )

x-ray beam: chance for lethal, chance of hold, chance of negative energy

cosmic burst: chance of -tohit, chance of immobilize, chance to hold

lingering radiation: chance of smashing, chance of -recharge

stamina: chance of +end (auto, so it rolls the chance every 10 seconds!)

irradiate: chance of fire, chance of -res, chance of smashing

choking cloud: chance of smashing, chance of psy damage, chance of -recharge, chance of +mag 2 hold (toggle, so it rolls the chance every 10 seconds! )

Neutron bomb: chance of knockdown, chance of lethal, chance of negative energy

atomic blast: chance of negative energy

EMP pulse: chance of stun

tactics: chance of buildup (toggle, so it rolls the chance every 10 seconds! )

powersink: chance of stun

The build is still in progress, and will needs some rethinking with issue 19, but it's a fun exercise. All the weird IO's I usually might sell, I craft for him and set them aside. To use all those invention takes some crazy frankenslotting to not lose enhancement value, and it'll take level 50 with purples/hamidon enhancements to get all the way there. But it should be fun just to watch the madness in my combat logs. :P

Okay, 'tis Thursday, and only half a roster is in.

Do we still wish to give this a try, doing 'evening of' recruitment, or shall we put this off for a better time?

My evil scientist:

Rad/rad corruptor- It just seems so wicked to walk around spewing deadly radiation in highly populous areas, weakening foes as I irradiate their bodies until they collapse. You score bonus damage if they're injured!

Alternate power choices: traps for the gadget scientist, electric blast for an alternate, perhaps more Frankenstein-themed scientist.

Other possible ideas:

Robotics/ masterminds. A pretty common combo, from what I've seen in the rogue isles. This goes toward the inventor scientist skew.

Necromancy/ works for this as well, if you're going more Frankenstein.

For mastermind secondaries, traps, forcefield, and poison are good. forcefield/traps for the gadgety scientist, /poison for the chemist.

For dominators and controllers:
I'd say electricity/plants/gravity are the easy primary pics. electric going tech, plant controlling mutant fauna, gravity being the tech manipulating earth's forces.

Dominator secondaries I'd choose: energy/electricity for the gadgety/high tech attacks.
Controller secondaries: Kinetics for energy manipulation, or radiation for, well, I covered this in the corruptor. Perhaps /storm could work too, as manipulating weather.

Me? I went with a Rad/rad corr as it seemed both advanced, but needlessly malevolent and toxic. Irresponsible in its use of science to further its own goals. Scourge just seals the deal for its evilness.

Free to play is has the advantage that it allows the skeptics in, but rather than asking for a price upfront before allowing them in for an evaluation. However, this game has trial accounts already to do this.

Free to play is a gamble, in that rather than allowing access for 200 paying players, it allows 2000 hoping that 11% will pay at least $15 a month in purchases. If more than that pay, it's the obvious business choice. If less, then it's a failure.

At that point it's all about how good the game comes off to those 2000 players that they actually want to stay and pony up for stuff. ..And if it's too good, they have no incentive to pay for extra. What would CoX do? level cap 40 for non-payers? No power pools for non-payers? SF/TF's for a fee? No IO's for non-payers? One or two characters available unless you pay? The trick is that there's a fine edge between luring in players with palatable goodies for a price, and annoying the entitled new crowd by locking stuff away that seems arbitrary.

Nevermind the PR balancing act that happens when long-time customers feel cheated after paying hundreds of dollars, some over a thousand, for the game in the past.

The even worse outcome is when people don't like your buyable content, and you're forced to either (a) restrict free stuff even further, so that the new players have to pay for stuff that was once free, or (b) go back to a subscription model, removing everything that the free player once had.

I'm not sure I see NCsoft wanting any of these options just yet, as there's a lot of uncertainty and headaches involved. The fact is, it has to bring in more cash than the subscriber+booster sales already already does, and have a low probability of actually reducing game income. The game is lower in population, but not to the point that I see the bigwigs rolling the at this time.

So far, we have four tentatively: a dom, a dom, a blaster, and a peacebringer.

I hate to say it, but if there isn't enough interest in this, it might be better to put it off for a weekend. ....And I daresay the coming weekend will be a bad time, with the Halloween parties and such.

We still could use: a defender/MM, (anti phase power) aggro management, and hopefully some punchy buffs/debuffs in there somewhere.

(The below are stolen from a write-up I've been working on, more in-depth then folks would want to hear right here.)

A psychic buff/debuff set. Like actually psychic, about suppressing enemies' minds while protectic allies from manipulation. Great combo for Mind/psychic controllers, psychic/psychic defenders, Psychic/psychic corruptors, and /psychic masterminds. (You know, the masterminds that don't have a willing army.)

A battle strategy buff/debuff set: the first purely 'natural' buff/debuff, this would be about team buffs/enemy debuffs based on military-ish tactics. This would be a great pairing for gun-toting defenders/corruptors, as well as mercenary masterminds. Could be handy for any 'non-super' buff/debuff AT's that don't want to rely on gadgets/shields, or any 'leader' themed characters.

A monster mastermind primary: melding the mad scientist with the beast tamer, a mastermind that commands a horde of creatures that seem like mutated, monstrous beasts. This covers the tamer, mad scientist, and mutant themes for a mastermind.

A toxic blast primary for corruptors, to go with a tweaked /poison. C'mon, nothing says 'corruptor' like poisoning your enemies into an enfeabled, toxic end.

Dark/dark dominators, as well as controllers. Dark control, controlling enemies by manipulating darkness and enemies' fears. Dark Assault for dominators is a bit of a trick, as is dark miasma for controllers, but there are enough dark powers to swap into such places to make it work.

Gadget/ control: a gadgeteer controller (gadgets/traps) as well as a 'natural' dominator would be great.

/Cloak stalkers: stalkers that gets teleportation paired with defense, a secondary that bases its survival upon even more disappearance abilities.

Solar blast. People have been asking for light blasts for a while. I know, you can recolor or go peacebringer, but this is a set that can actually blind enemies, and does energy/fire light beams for the whole 'burning light' thing. Yup, I know you can recolor stuff, but it's still smashy energy, bubbly radiation, or flamey fire. This suits the solar, light, and when recolored, laser-type power themes.

Yup, a few notes...

when we get into the open air boomtown map vs. invincible reichsman, it goes in three stages:

Defeat der Unterfuhrer
Defeat Oberst Shaumstein
Beat Reichsman

The last of the Oberst Group should be mezzed, then all but the buffed tank should go. Tank can finish the last one or two, then high-tail it out when the objective turns to reichsman.

Defeat Reichsman:

The first part went quite smooth. No worries there.
The second part had a few complications, nothing big, but some stuff to keep in mind if we try again.

It's a gadget fight. The temps should be timed well, but used as much as possible. The Scirocco hold+Scirocco tornadoes worked pretty well. All members with these should use them when they can, coordinating. The phase happened twice, but that was it and he didn't recoup that much. Good on the MM. I know we were giving him a lot of pressure.

The ambushes are mind-numbing. They start out luaghable, but edge into crazy...over a loooong time. half hour would be a safe bet. It's tempting to get impatient but dividing up the team to fight the incoming and reichsman gives many possibilities for a messup.

Likewise, the fight vs. reichsman is just silly long. It's a fight vs. a giant bag of hit points. He hits kinda slow, but very hard. two hits in a row, though, and you're toast. Staying at furthest range is best and even though it's a long fight, making sure the front lines hold up with all the buffs/mitigation we can give is the way to come through. Even a tank can go down in two hits if he manages to stun, and chains his heavy hitter aoE with his heavy melee.

We need some coordination to our retreats. I did a bad job of making it clear where folks should go so that's my bad. Timing the retreats well, and making clear where to go should assuage this a bit.
It was a good round, first time for some, first master for others, and a rather randomly assembled group, I think we did well. If we built the team again, we might try getting some more debuffs, but I'm confident in saying that with knowledge of how to do this, we'll come through once everyone's familiar and comfortable with it.

Even if we weren't perfect, it was still a good run.