Sterling

I saw someone suggest a fire/storm controller. I am sure that is a nice power set to play. I am currently leveling up a plant/storm and am having a blast. Plant also synergizes well with Storm btw Very soloable and does very yummy AoE without having to get up in mobs faces with Hot Feet.

Plant/Storm is really endurance heavy...If you can frankenslot in accuracy/endurance or whatever it can be a big help. You will throw a little party when you get Stamina. As far as slotting towards an endgame build there are different paths to take all of them have advantages and disadvantages. I am like you I have come back playing after a long abscence and only just got done IO'ing one of my toons. I am not 100% sure what path I will take with my plant/storm.

From what I have gathered you can slot for mainly recharge, mainly ranged defense or for mainly smashing/lethal defense. The Recharge route is so your powers come up faster with your survivability coming through the sheer amount of controls and damage you can dish out...If you go this route I suggest going with the fire epic for consume or primal for conserve power. With Defense if you go with Ranged it is because anything that gets in melee can be gotten rid of by hurricane whilst plunging their to hit down the drain. Going S/L defense gives you a bit more versatility as the vast majority of attacks have either a smashing or lethal component to them. If you go either defense route I suggest going with Stone or Ice. From what I have seen most people prefer Stone...

Also whatever little recovery bonus you can get from various sets is nice to have. A lot of sets have a recovery bonus with only two or three of the set slotted and like I said Plant/Storm is an endurance hog.

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+ http://planner.cohtitan.com/planner
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Archetype: Controller
Primary: Plant Control
Secondary: Storm Summoning
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01: Strangler => Accuracy(1), Damage(3), Damage(3), Recharge(5), Recharge(5), Hold(7)
01: Gale => Accuracy(1)
02: Roots => Accuracy(2), Accuracy(7), Damage(9), Damage(9), Damage(11), EnduranceDiscount(11)
04: Snow Storm => EnduranceDiscount(4), EnduranceDiscount(13)
06: Swift => SpeedRunning(6)
08: Seeds of Confusion => Accuracy(8), Accuracy(13), Recharge(15), Recharge(15), Recharge(17), Confuse(17)
10: Steamy Mist => EnduranceDiscount(10), EnduranceDiscount(19)
12: Hasten => Recharge(12), Recharge(19), Recharge(21)
14: Health => Heal(14), Heal(21)
16: Freezing Rain => Recharge(16), Recharge(23), Recharge(23), EnduranceDiscount(25)
18: Vines => Accuracy(18)
20: Stamina => Recovery(20), Recovery(25), Recovery(27)
22: Super Speed => EnduranceDiscount(22)
24: Combat Jumping => Buff_Defense(24)
26: Carrion Creepers => Accuracy(26), Damage(27), Damage(29), Recharge(29), Recharge(31), Recharge(31)
28: Super Jump => Jump(28)
30: Hurricane => EnduranceDiscount(30), EnduranceDiscount(31), Debuff_ToHit(33)
32: Fly Trap => Accuracy(32), Damage(33), Damage(33), Damage(34), Recharge(34), Recharge(34)
35: Tornado => Recharge(35), Recharge(36), Recharge(36), Damage(36), Damage(37), EnduranceDiscount(37)
38: Lightning Storm => Recharge(38), Recharge(39), Damage(39), Damage(39)

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+ Inherent Powers
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01: Brawl => Empty(1)
01: Sprint => Empty(1)
02: Rest => Empty(2)
OK here is a quick and dirty build based on my Plant/Storm to level 39...Ignore the slot levels but keep in mind that is how many slots you should be aiming for by lvl 39.

You want your single target hold to have one accuracy, a couple of damage, a couple of recharge and a hold...or frankenslot it, which is what I did. If you don't care to much about set bonuses you can find some nice IO recipes cheap at Went's (never buy IO's outright unless you are rolling in influence.) You will also want to slot Roots and Seeds of Confusion up as quickly as possible. Those will be your major one/two punch throughout your career (Edit: One/Two/Three Punch. use stealth to get as close to mobs as you can. Use Seeds, use root, then use freezing rain...repeat roots as neccesary). Also, Confusion IO sets are usually real cheap. You might want to look at the various set bonuses and see about getting some of them. I am using Malaise at the moment.

Also notice I put my movement power(s) off til later. I have ninja run so I felt I could put those off. If you don't have that pack you may want to juggle things a bit to get a travel power earlier. I reccomend Superspeed, especially for leveling. Combined with Steamy Mist it gives you an effective stealth and you can get to mission objectives quickly, allowing you to rack up a lot of xp by just the completion xp alone.

It is an extremely fun combo of power sets to play. Enjoy! and I hope I helped some.

Are you looking for a DO/SO build for leveling or are you looking for an IO build. Cause those are entirely two different animals.

Oh god...The Drek Map...My first toon ever was a fire/fire tanker. This was my first toon ever on any MMO. Never had read a forum or guide at that point. I wouldn't have understood what OP meant until you explained it to me. I just thought. "Fire Sword, oooh Shiney". I didn't know that at the time it would make me slave to the PL later on. It was fun at first feeling all big and bad helping your friends level up alts. But at the end there I was perfectly ok with ED and the nerfs to burn, etc. I think the GDN was actually the big killer at the time. Since IO's and set bonuses weren't even a gleam in daddy's eye at the time.

I left for a number of years and have just returned. But it wasn't because of the nerfs. Some RL friends lured me to the WoW side and it took me awhile to get burnt out on it :-)

Hello Syfy welcome to the game. I am sure you will enjoy it. It's like nothing else out there and you have joined up at a good time. You will have a chance to get your feet wet before Going Rogue comes out and revamps the game (for the better it is looking like more and more).

As far as the archetypes go all of them are good and suprisingly well balanced. Some powerset combinations tend to do certain things better then others, but all of them have good points to work with.

I am gonna list out the hero side AT's with some thoughts about each of them. My preferences definitely are not the be all end all. I am just offering some friendly observations.

Heroside AT's

Scrapper-(Melee DPS, Survivability), Probably the quickest leveler in the game. Really good damage and decent survivability. They are a bit squishy at first but can become excellent at survival late game.

Tankers-(Survivability, Melee DPS), Level nicely solo as well because of how tough they are. Their damage especially at low levels isn't that stellar. Their attacks come in later but once you get into the mid 30's they can do some respectable damage.

Blaster-(Ranged DPS, Melee DPS, Light Crowd Control), Lots of damage early, mostly ranged, lowest survivability in the game. This AT generally survives by the "killing stuff before it can kill you" form of mitigation. I find you have to play with a more strategic mindset when soloing a blaster. Though certain sets offer light crowd control to help you survive. This archtype is probably in the mid range for leveling. It can kill stuff real fast but is more prone to faceplant.

Controller- (Crowd Control, Support, Ranged DPS). Slow leveling AT at first but when they start getting into their mid 30's, they can really take off. This AT survives mainly by various crowd controls and does most of its damage through the same means. It is also one of the more varied AT's certain combinations of powerset choices can really change how you play one controller from another.

Defender- (Support, Ranged DPS) Slower leveling AT. If you are used to a game having a "healer class" this is the closest you will come to one in this game. Though thinking of Defenders as "healers" as a whole is erroneous. A number of Defender primary powersets don't even have a heal. But they all have ways to help themselves and their team survive, through either buffs, debuffs, controls or the aforementioned heals.

In the end all of the archetypes can be leveled solo. Just some are quicker and/or easier then others. One final thing to note is that even within an archetype you will find very noticable differences depending on what power sets you choose. For example an empathy or force field defender is going to level a lot slower then a kinetics, storm or radiation defender.

From what I have been seeing GR is going to be worth the 40 bucks and as others have said it isn't going to be released until July. Do yourself a favor and set a few bucks back here and there. Skip the occasional apple pie with your happy meal and drink some water instead of mountain dew once in awhile between now and then and you will be able to afford it.

This is a good game with an absolutely great bunch of devs. This new expansion is going to totally blow the doors off of the hinges. Whining about having to pay for all the hard work they are doing is petty and reeks of a sense of entitlement. Pony up and enjoy.

I see what a number of posters are saying. What the OP suggests doesn't really have enough control for a control set and to much control for a support set. It is a real nice concept though and with some work could be tweaked either way pretty easily.

You could add a confuse power into the set or a stun.

Temporal Warping-Randomly shifts (a target/targets) consciousness through many different alternate realities making them unsure of what is real or who their enemies actually are.

The above would be the confuse power. You could easily reword it, saying that it makes the targets unable to make any decisions due to the overload of possibilities and make it a Stun...

Not sure this is the best idea, just something off the top of my head.

Been away for a few years. Left a month or two after issue six and came back with issue 16. I like what they have done with the game in the interim and am really looking forward to issue 17 and GoRo. While you can't please all the people all the time (including myself) The current dev team seems to be on a hot streak as far as good ideas go.

Y'know, while my experience is totally anecdotal, I am a returning player that has been gone for years. I am also noticing a lot of other people who say that they have returned to the game from others. I also don't find it hard to team when I want to and the market seems to be real healthy, blueside at least.

I am not sure where the doomsayers are getting their info but the game seems pretty solid at the moment, even if it isn't thriving as much as some would like.

Only problem I have with salvage is the lack of storage you have if you wish to stockpile it for your own use. I guess that is to encourage a healthy trade. All in all, even the most expensive common salvage isn't all that expensive. The only real time it is prohibitive is when you are looking to make pre-lvl 30 Invention IO's and you know you are going to be replacing them real soon. Sometimes the reward for investment ratio is pretty low when you buy salvage for that purpose. The best bet is to figure out what common salvage is usually the most expensive and hang on to it for your own use if you know you are going to want it. Also, keeping some lowball bids out on salvage you know you will need can help alot.

"If they're a potential threat to the public, then they'd need to be kept under obsevation somewhere for psychologial profiling to be carried out to try and identify the ones most likely to go bad."

Yeah Carnifax...those are called internment camps, fun stuff that. Plus, psych profiling is sooo accurate and fair (heh, yeah right). I think GG's personal philosophy should be called Rainbow-Brite Fascism. It seems fitting for some reason.

*Dials 116*

Operator: Hello this is the forum police, what seems to be the problem.

Sterling: Umm, yeah, hi...This is Sterling. I'd like to report a thread hi-jacking.
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To the OP: I hope you are successful in your drive to get more people to play redside. Personally, I haven't been able to get into it that much. But more balance between red and blue would be a nice thing.

To the Thread Hijackers: Both GG and Abrahms are making solid points expressing their views. Even though I find GG's a bit simplistic. There are HUGE problems with an outside force coming into a region to impose their values and mores for another society's supposed benefit. A large portion of the problems we are having with the middle east right now stem from decades of following an ideology similair to GG's.

Ah well, thanks. I can hope though. I am not sure about anyone else but I think Grav/Traps would be a real fun powerset combo to run. I also think Plant/Poison would be very cool, thematically at least. I haven't really considered any synergy those two would have. Earth/Poison would work nice as well, considering all the earth based poisons/toxins like arsenic, mercury, lead and the like...

Earth gives you more control options but Plant is a lot more DPS heavy. I am currently leveling a Plant/Storm right now. I have gotten him to lvl 36 and I'm having a lot of fun with it. He is an AoE beast. I can take down large spawns very quickly and safely. Only thing I have to say is that the combo is heavy on your endurance so learning how to manage it is pretty important. Other then that it is one of the more fun toons I remember leveling in quite awhile.

I read in some random post where a person supposedly quoted Posi that Controllers were getting the /Traps and /Poison secondaries come GR. My search fu is weak and I can't find the post (if it exists)

Anyone in the know able to confirm or deny this? If it is true I am really contemplating making a Grav/Trap for my GR toon. The idea of wormholing a group of baddies onto a field of trip mines just sounds like to much fun...even if it does take forever to set up :-)

My little plant/storm is up to 33 now and it just keeps getting better. I am pretty much rolling over missions set to +0/+5 already with my only IO's being some frankenslotting in my holds and confusion. Carrion Creepers is up over half the time, my flytrap is doing nice damage and has AoE's of her own to use and if I happen to pull an extra mob Hurricane and Snow Storm help keep me safe til I can get everyone under control. I am really looking forward to Tornado and Lightning Storm. I have noticed how end heavy it can get already so I will probably go with the fire epic pool for Consume and Fireball and try to slot for recharge and some ranged defense. This guy is gonna be a beast when I get to 50 with him and throw a few IO sets into his build.

My condolences to the family. To suffer a loss like this at such an early age has to make things even harder. My prayers are with you. May you find the strength to carry on and may providence help provide for you over the years to come.

It's always a blow when one of your fellow gamers pass on. I've had this happen to me a few times over the years. Even if you didn't know them personally, you share a bond with them through the game and its community. Also, with MMO's being a way to escape the realities of life for awhile. Events like this always seem more amplified then if we hear of such things through television or the local paper. But one thing a loss like this always shows. That amongst all the petty bickering and disagreements you see on the forums there is still a very strong, caring bond amongst those in the various MMO communities.