Steel_Shaman

I'll be in The Secret World. I signed up for their free trial this weekend and I like it a lot so far. It doesn't have near the appearance customization of CoH, but character building itself looks like it will keep me busy for quite some time.

I define it as taking appropriate powers for a character and using them appropriately. For example, someone dropping an Earthquake and following up with Stone Cages makes me shake my head. Min/maxing is by no means required in my mind. But someone literally sabotaging their own powers always makes me think they're either a new player or playing an unfamiliar AT/power combo.

I don't by any means demand that others min/max. But I'd prefer they not shoot themselves in the foot. It's painful to watch.

Thanks guys. This means I can actually take Thunder Strike on Mu Oracle then. Excellent news.

Does the KB to KD proc turn KB into KD guaranteed or is it only a chance? I read the tooltip on the thing and still wasn't sure. I ask because it sure would be nice to be able to take Thunderstrike on my Elec/Elec Dom and not have the power sabotage Static Field.

My account renewed last Saturday. I checked my bank account's website and the money has already cleared (it actually cleared on Saturday as the charge was posted by NCSoft almost exactly at midnight on the 18th). I have yet to get my monthly stipend of points, or my Paragon Rewards token. Is this normal? I remember there being a lot of confusion when the system first launched, but I've been getting my points and token on my bill date for some time now. Anyone else have any experience with this? I'm trying to decide if I should initiate the hell of contacting Customer Service or just keep waiting.

To the OP: Some Dom combinations can be a bit end heavy. Some will also serve your endurance bar with an eviction notice at the character creation screen (i'm looking at you, Ice Control). That being said, don't think of Domination as just an emergency power. It also works great as an end refill. Pop it when you need it. If later you find yourself with Domination on cooldown and a Boss grinning like a jackal at you, just pop some Lucks and go to town.

My favorite support character is my Earth/Storm Controller.
He can pretty much turn anything into jello. You have to be careful with some of the /Storm powers like Hurricane but played well the combo is absolutely devastating.

After reading more of the thread and thinking about it myself, I'm going to have to agree with the sentiment that if Illusion isn't too strong for Controllers, it certainly isn't for Doms.

As has been stated, Controllers can boost PA's damage indirectly through debuffing. Dom's wouldn't have the ability to do that. Seems like an even trade to me.

I started an Earth/Psi last night. So far he's a lot of fun, and I think the combo will work well together. I generally find Earth/ to be more AoE friendly when soloing than Mind/.

My 2 Inf:

Ice Control: It needs better soft control than ice slick. Someone mentioned earlier they eat alphas a lot with Dark Control. On Ice it's even worse. My Ice/ is the only Dom I've taken stealth on for just that reason. Makes it easier to position ice slick from around a corner so I don't get my face smashed in every spawn.

Ice Armor: Endurance maintenance before level 26 is a huge pain. My first 50 hero was an Ice/Ice tanker, and had I not known what was coming with Energy Absorption he probably wouldn't have made it to 20. Maybe move EA earlier in the set?

And then there's Gravity. It's the only Control set I truly do not enjoy playing. It needs something even with the recent changes.

My wall is the 30's Blue Side. As a result I have quite a few hero characters in that level range. I don't seem to have this problem Red Side at all, so I chalk it up to my reaction to the really old content that still largely constitutes that level range. I haven't given Night Ward a try yet, so that may help.

The very first time I played a game that had PvP (this was before CoH had it) I thought I'd give it a try.

I discovered some things that day:

1) Profanity-laden juvenile trash talking was both annoying and apparently the accepted norm.
2) The concepts of sportsmanship and fair play (two things featured in every single competitive real world endeavor) simply do not exist in MMO PvP. And even suggesting that they should is regarded as complete heresy.
3) Numbers 1 and 2 were deal breakers for me.

Since then I have found that pretty much every single PvP community in every single game is like that. So I stay away.

Just as an aside, the villains you faced in the Galaxy mission are the team from Dr. Graves's arc. He's the Red Side equivalent to Twinshot. I definitely prefer Twinshot's arc over his (Graves constantly insulting my characters got a bit tedious after a while, though his dialog does have funny moments).

Like a lot of Kheldian players, I make heavy use of binds. Most of the powers you see are bound to keys that are independent of the powers' tray locations. My binds automatically switch out Tray 1 to Trays 8 and 9 for Dwarf and Nova. Due to all the binds I mainly just have the powers on the trays to make it clear when they've recharged. The combat stats window shows damage resistances. This way I can easily tell if Eclipse has expired.

I have the locations of the Nav and targeting windows inverted from what I'm seeing in most people's images. I started doing that way back in the day when I was running on a much older system. At the resolution I ran in at the time, opening the map at the size I preferred obscured my view too much. I got used to having it that way and have kept the habit ever since, even though with my current resolution it's not really all that necessary any more.

I run in fullscreen, 1920x1080 on a 23" monitor.

I realized that apparently ImageShack greatly sizes down the pictures I post due to the resolution I run in, so I made some close up shots of Starless Knight's three main costumes. These should be easier to see (I hope):

Original Costume

Second, More Armored Look

Newest Outfit

I leave it at your discretion which one you would like to use (though I admit I like the last two better than the original).