StarkRavingMad2

I did not realize that Cobra Strike was raised from minimal damage to HIGH. Jeebus. I had it just for the stun and was happy with it. Right now I've got 2 Heal enh's on IH, even with the tiny return, largely because I had nowhere else I felt I needed 2 more slots. I figure why not squeeze out those extra 7.5 HP per second.

The idea of doing yet more damage is appealing and all, but but I really do not want to respec again. Wish they made a cheaper/quicker way to do a partial respec just for your slot allocation without changing powers.

Oh yeah. Nightstrike is back. This new MoG is amazing. I solo'd Captain Holtz at 52 EB. My buddy jumped in to help out with Honeree cuz I'm not that cocky. He defeated us once, but not so fast it was as humiliating as the Trapdoor debacle. Round two we took him.

And just for fun, you know how in his Incarnate mission, those 3 portals back there just keep spawning hordes of Ritki until you can't count them anymore?... we went in for giggles just to see how long we would last. That WP/SJ tank who bailed me out yesterday... He died. I managed to take down one portal mob, then had to run when my slow recharge heals were used up and Hasten went cold. But I survived. I bet I could have gone back and done it if I pulled a little to thin the herd.

Good God what a difference one power makes.

That is what I suspected when I saw the DR numbers in the power details. The devs really should not even allow Def or DR enh's in there otherwise players who don't read up on this stuff will gimp themselves.

Been reading a bit and I smell a respec coming on. One key thing I did not realize about the new MoG is that the crash and heal resist are gone. I left just before that happened, so to put my post in perspective, it was that OLD MoG that I hated. This, even though it's only 15 seconds... that actually sounds much more useful to my playstyle now.

My usual tactic with Dull Pain is to use it as my first heal of the combat. Meaning I don't go in with it on right away, but then hit it first once I drop to 3/4 or so. So not totally pre-emptive, but I never wait till I'm near death before using it either.

I had hasten going and everything that needed it was 3-slotted with recharges. Thinking back (cuz I can't sleep, so I'm running that stupid battle over and over in my head) that I wasn't paying enough attention to the Reconstruction button.

Just had another otherwise great night of gaming destroyed when I made the mistake of going against a 52 EB solo (Trapdoor). My MA/Regen scrap used to be able to do stuff like that. It wasn't easy. I needed a full belt of insps, but I could do it. He was my first and favorite toon since beta.

This time against Trapdoor, I got owned in under 30 seconds. I don't just mean it was a little harder than fighting Tyrant. I mean whipped like a rented mule. I think I might have gotten him down to 1/4 health but he took me out with like 3-4 hits -- with Dull Pain and Instant Healing both active. By himself. He didn't even drop his minion pets until after I had died.

So I asked a couple friends for help. A level 27 WP/SJ tank and a Controller. They slapped him around silly -- WITHOUT me. They ran up ahead of me while I was still taking out Trapdoor's little minions and before I could blink, he was dead. The controller didn't even have to heal once. WTF?? I know SJ is a nice attack set but come ON. He's still a tanker. Talk about embarrassing.

I know they nerfed MoG ages ago, and I don't care. I never wanted or needed it. I remember when IH was a toggle in the days of yore, too. When they changed it to a click, the powerset still rocked for me. I was in the minority that actually liked it better that way. It made the game more fun, just challenging enough that I had to think during fights for a change.

Did they do something else to the set? Or am I really just that rusty? Or is Trapdoor really that unbalanced vs anyone without massive damage reduction? It is so depressing to think that I might need to lower the difficulty on my once best character, who soloed 95% of the way from 1 to 50.

My first MM, and the only one I've liked to date, is Mercs/Traps. It is perfect conceptually and it gives me plenty to do. It has buffs, crowd control, and like the OP, I am hands on so I took two of the gun attacks. The idea of just playing a Defender for my pets with Pain or Bubbles sounds depressing to me. I did NOT take the grenade one, though, because I do not want to draw aggro off the boys by firing an AoE. I'm not that hands on.

One thing I really loved was that he was the only toon I ever made who did not need Stamina (back in the day before inherent fitness).

Medic is a pretty mediocre healer, yeah. Don't hinge too much on his Aid Other saving anyone. But he's worth having for Stimulant.

Serum is nice for boss fights, but honestly... I almost didn't bother taking it because I didn't feel the Commando really needed it. Not when I can keep the fight under my shield and within triage beacon and acid mortar range. It's good against those red and purple bosses who aren't polite enough to stay where you want them.

I thought that all Immobilize powers had -Fly on them. Or is Web Grenade the only one?

Either way, it's a rhetorical question. I'm posing this as a request. I am now painfully aware that MG does not have -Fly like I would have expected it to.

I just quit after my third death vs a Longbow Warden who had Illusion and Force Field. So it was me against a buffed army of decoys with me debuffed by psionics to boot. Being a DA brute, my knockback resist from Acrobatics was pitiful, so I was getting tossed around all over the place by energy torrent coming at me from 3 directions. And of course since this was the first Widow mission, hospital = prison cell, so no insps on the way back.

After the second death I thought I'd be clever and pop a Break Free that had dropped earlier, maybe that would help vs the KB. Then I can take him! Right? Wrong. The minute I approached him I then found out the Warden could FLY, too?? Ack. I didn't notice him hovering before, what with all the decoys and rapid fire energy blasts filling the screen.

I might have stood a chance solo if I could have grounded him. Logically, you would think that tentacles that rise up from the netherworld would have that side effect. No?

It would be nice if once a costume change emote is selected, that emote stays on that character next time you play them. This setting would apply to the character only, not the whole account, so that each toon can have their own emote without having to reclick it.

Sounds like a great set... Once you hit 37 and you have all defense max slotted with purple IOs. I can't really imagine surviving that long. Looks like you can hit 31-32% or so vs Melee and Ranged after 21, once you get Quickness and the rest slotted with basic IOs. That might start to make the toon more tolerable. Those first 20 levels must be brutal to get through, though. Sounds like something I'd only build if I wanted to PL him first.

It never occurred to me to try to turn off a buff. That's good to know, though in the heat of combat, it's not really feasible either.

I know this is going to sound really weird to most of you, but I HATE Speed Boost. No. I DESPISE Speed Boost. The forum rules do not allow me to accurately convey just how much I LOATHE Speed Boost.

I sincerely am not sure if I would have paid for VIP upon my return to the game had I known that SB had turned into an AOE. That's how much I hate it. Back in the day I could ask not to be buffed with it and maybe I'd only get hit with it once or twice by accident. I could cope with that. Now I don't really have a choice. No Defender is going to keep track of me to make sure I'm out of the AoE. It's completely ruined teaming for me. I don't want to team with PuGs again for fear of running into it.

Why you are probably wondering?

I do not have mad WASD skills. When speed boosted, I cannot control my character's movement. I overshoot targets every time. I risk agro. It's that much harder to keep track of the map. It's especially maddening for my scrappers. My toons very rarely need it either. I build all of my characters with triple slot Stamina and I manage end drain pretty well. And the game seems designed so that in larger groups, you end up using less endurance anyway unless you're on support.

So, I know that based on the usual track record with dev response, mine is probably just a lone crazed voice in the wilderness that will never be answered, but I felt the need to vent after having an otherwise great night of gaming destroyed after running into my first kinetics defender since my return. =(

Funny how Street Justice is rated so high. On the website it talks about how the set was never slated to be finished, but people had been asking for a "Street fighting" set... "for some time." Uhm, no... I seem to remember a bunch of us being really really vocal about it from pretty much day 1. It's about time we got it, and I'm glad to hear it's so good. Too bad it's weak on AoE. Still, I can finally make that speedster I always wanted since the theme finally fits.

Energy Melee does blow chunks. I have it on a tanker, and I wasn't sure if I even wanted to unlock that slot.

Martial Arts was on my first scrapper and remains my favorite. Love the animations. Awesome crowd control with the KD/KB and stuns.

Dark Melee rocks for sheer damage. It's cone attack is so awesome it inspired a vet reward power.

After that I've had the most fun with dual blades. Love the combos and nicely balanced.

Only had super strength on a tanker. Hate the animations. I wish I could swap the animations for the first two attacks from EM for those lame overhand clubs in SS. Then I might care. Don't know how effective it is on a scrap or brute because it looks so boring.

Easy... or challenging? No middle ground. There are 5 mission difficulty levels you could be but only 2 AE ratings?

My mission arc is not "Easy", which to me means you can solo it with a squishy on Invincible. Nor is it the worth the highest rank of "Challenging", which to me means that uber players who normally solo with squishies on Invincible would find it any harder than the rest of the game.

It's right in the middle. It's BALANCED. Or so I've been told.

The warning at the bottom caught me off guard, too. "May contain EXTREME Archvillain". Well I had to make his offensive set "Extreme" because making him only "Hard" would leave him without any AoE attacks. He'd be a too easy to defeat then as an AV against a big team.

On the off chance that a dev is reading this... That's a really misleading warning. Saying Warning: Archvillain is enough. It's not like YOU warn us when any given AV is really any harder than another. :P

I only hope there are similar warnings for "Broken Martial Arts Stalker Lts who will kill a regen scrapper in two hits". I fear them a heck of a lot more than my "Extreme" AV.

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I'd hold off on that one until you run Johnny Sonata's arc. There's a bit of interaction between the player and Hardcase that makes the one in Virandi's arc much worse.

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I liked that Arc it was one of my favs.

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I have to chuckle when I run across the scattered few people who actually liked Hardcase's arc. What I was about to post was... To add insult to injury, his missions are kind of boring. Not all that jazzed about fighting cookie cutter wailer demons with the same 3 sonic powers each.

I'm surprised I have not come across an AE mission where you get to either beat up Hardcase or where he is a custom ally to establish that he really is badass and make him more likeable. Having him just be a guy standing whom you are forced to accept as a king killer who will slap you around if you don't do what he says is really off-putting to people thinking they are playing villains. He's been despised by most folks since day 1.

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That seems almost paradoxical.

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Heh. Well my idea could tank. I'm no Geoff Johns, but I can try.

So the TF/SF makes no allusion to the screwed up history or how the Council "replaced" the 5th Column. But there's dimensional energies involved with this new leader. Okay I can work with that.

A big part of why I am so fixated on this is because the whole invasion from Axis Earth spin parallels my own self-published comic that I could never get off the ground. If I ever do get it back in production, I don't want anyone thinking I ripped off CoH. I wrote it before I'd ever heard of this game.

http:///www.rogue-wolf.net/comics/im...D1-1Page27.jpg