TwilightPhoenix

Fallout. If you have someone willing to be Fallout bait, nothing a Defender can do will kill as fast as Radiation Emission. Aim + Soul Drain/Power Build Up + Vengeance (if you have it) + Fallout = one-shotted mob. Dedicated Fallout bait is rather hard to find, but it's awesome when someone volunteers. And strangely, both times I did it, they said they had more fun being blown up repeatedly than by actually playing.

Fallout beside, I've played lots of Rad, but little Cold, so I'm not going to comment much of Cold's strengths and weaknesses.

Rad is very strong solo and in teams. It plays pretty much the same in both situations (ignoring heavy-support based builds) except solo the rez and nuke are worthless. With some good anchor and mob management, you can keep the whole mob debuffed into mush. I haven't looked at my Defender's real numbers since I resubbed, so I don't remember my precise debuff values, but I do recall my Radiation Infection lowers To-Hit by about 50%. 45% drops them to the to-hit floor of 5%, so that's a little wiggle room to make up for any mob resists, higher cons, and AVs. Not a ton, mind you, but it helps. And I'm pretty sure I'm not at the ED cap for it either, though I'm really close if I'm not. And regardless, Rad's debuffs help immensely, so long as you're not going for +4s. And if you are, then you might as well ditch both the Rad and the Cold for an Emp and FF if you're that worried about debuff resistance.

Rad also can heal, something Cold needs to go into the medicine pool for. Stopping lots of damage is fine, but some will get through. And when it does, Rad just pops Radiant Aura on occasion to patch it up. Cold can't without Aid Self. Rad also boosts endurance recovery, damage, recharge, mez resistance, and more through Accelerate Metabolism from as early as level 2. Cold is much more buffy, with resistance, defense, stealth, +MaxHP, and more, including Heat Loss which pretty much lets you pretend your endurance bar doesn't exist. Rad also has a rez, for those moments when someone screws up (and someone will), and also EM Pulse, which is probably the best hold power in the game. Yeah, sure, it has that recovery crash, but its more accurate than a Controller's mass hold, does substantial sapping, and drops some pretty hefty debuffs. Between LR and EM Pulse (and careful end management), Rad can floor the regeneration of pretty much anything. Cold has -regen too, but I don't know how strong it is.

In PvP, if you're interested in that, Rad wins hands down. Buffs get DRed into crud under the current ruleset, so Cold's buffs suffer. And if you're solo PvP, which most is and most are built for (from my experience), those buffs are useless. Going by that, Cold has six usable PvP powers, four of which are actually feasible to use. If the enemy has any kind of mez, Snowstorm is useless because, without any substantial defense buffs or to-hit debuffs, it'll get shut off straight away (though if they don't have any, it's quite nice). Sleet is useless because aiming a locational AoE against super speed/super jump opponents on the constant move is near impossible and, once you miss, they have a very obvious spot to avoid. And all serious melee PvPers will have at least one ranged attack to use if you drop it at your feet (not to mention Taunt/Confront to keep you from shooting back). Infrigidate, Benumb, and Heat Loss are probably quite effective, but I don't know the recharge times. If they're long recharges, then that's not going to be so hot.

Rad has seven powers it can actually use in PvP, even on teams. Of those, five are feasible. EM Pulse's crash is too much of a liability, as is its recharge, and Choking Cloud ticks too slowly and just hogs endurance. Rad is able to safely employ its debuffs since Rad Infection provides -to hit, which makes landing mezzes to shut it off much more difficult. AM provides endurance and, most importantly, recharge and damage boosts. Radiant Aura can be used to self-heal, which is very important in a PvP scenario. Rad has more endurance issues in PvP since it needs to maintain two toggle debuffs, but those two debuffs are dang effective at protecting the Defender and making the opponent easier to kill.

My early days are full of them, especially since CoH was my first serious MMO.

I played my first toon, a MA/SR Scrapper, to 25-30ish without Stamina or Practiced Brawler as well as 4-slotted Brawl. To this day, I don't see how I managed it.

My first Corruptors, I thought I was just a villain Blaster. Took my blasts, ignored any powers that didn't directly benefit me. It didn't click until I had rolled and deleted a Thermal and a Sonic that my secondary was support.

I made an Elec/Ice Blaster, AR/Dev Blaster, Sonic/Electric Defender, and a Arch/Dev Blaster. All of them were deleted. I think I would have realized with the first two Blasters that I don't like Electric Blast or Devices. But, nope!

Perez Park. That's how I got to Kings Row and Galaxy City. My brother and I used the Pocket D jump jet to run across the trees. Then we discovered the train...

Finding a mob of Supa Trolls for the first time, back before the raves were announced. My brother and I charged them while at level... 12? We died horribly. We couldn't navigate back to Atlas, so we fled through the Hollows gate. We wound up fighting CoT in the Hollows' forest area while feeling like we stumbled into a fantasy game.

First time my brother found a CoT Spectral Daemon Lord, he was like "Hey, I found these Daemon Lords, let's kill them!" My reply? "Heck no!" But I followed anyway. The Daemon Lords in question were purple conned to us. Again, we died horribly.

Another time with my brother. He found the Field Analyst and turned his difficulty up to Invincible. We then ran a door mission. We died horribly to the first mob.

When I started playing, it was Rikti invasion week. I eagerly joined in. Without teaming. Didn't know how people were leveling off of that when all I got was a stream of 1 xp.

There's also getting lost in Pocket D...

Beyond the newbie days...

During the Mac Open Beta, I was level fourteenish and a group asked me to join a Posi. Against my better judgement, I did. Against my better judgement, I stayed through the end. We started with seven. Second mission, one quit and later one logged. We slowly pushed through mobs set for six with five of us until about 1/3 of the way. It was late, so we decided to finish tomorrow. Only me and another guy showed. We pushed halfway through the next mission, set for six, at a very, very slow rate until the third person logged on. We completed to about 85% before we all logged for a break and came back to finish later that night. Still three of us against mobs for six, but we finally won. Time to complete? Roughly 8 hours! Made good friends with the other two, but they both vanished once the game hit Live.

One thing I constantly do: if nobody is the designated tank, I will not shy away from running in and grabbing the alpha. This includes toons who cannot tank anything. I've died a lot as a result and it's joked about with my friends sometimes. On the bright side, it makes someone more capable rush in ahead of me to do the tanking so I stop getting killed so much.

During my time unsubbed, I slowly pieced together a Rad/Sonic guide. I finished it and placed it on GameFAQs (where all my guides go) about a week ago and, now that I've resubbed, I can ask you all for feedback! If anyone has a chunk of time they're willing to spend giving it a read and tossing some feedback, please do so. I'm always looking to improve my guides. Just, be warned: the guide is long. Very, very, very long.

Here's the link: http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/536558-ci...oes/faqs/59807

IOs at those levels are no better, but yet more expensive.

Anyway, the problem I have with Stamina is having to pick three auto-powers to get it. While I do accept that is the cost for the power and making it available early or free would not be viable, I HATE having to pick three auto-powers in a row to help get endurance under control ASAP while there's more interesting options saying "Pick me, pick me". Sure, I don't have to get Stamina at 20 or at all, and sometimes I do push it back depending on my needs, but I don't exactly like doing that either.

I wish more combos were like Grav/TA where Stamina helps a lot but is definitely optional. I got away with putting it off until level 49 on that toon because a little bit of end-slotting (one SO worth) and the end-lightness of the attacks made doing so extremely viable.

The Ingenious' Magma Lord's hold. It just looks that awesome.

Protection Shield that many FF NPCs have. Only takes one bubble to block everything!

Fake Nemesis Personal Force Field. True immunity.

Pretty much all of the Reichsman's signature powers. All powerful and all flashy.

Hellion Slicer's Knife. We don't have any knives in this game. And no, Dual Blades does not count.

I nuke just about every time it's up on my Rad/Sonic. Debuff toggles on, hit Amplify, Soul Drain, Howl, Nuke, /e victory. And then the next spawn gets a face full of EM Pulse. The only main two times I don't nuke is if Soul Drain is down or I have some Fallout bait, since Fallout is even stronger than Dreadful. I'll even nuke an AV or a GM, albeit usually when their HP is really low so I can try to knock off that last chunk myself.

My other Defenders? They need more levels so I can nuke with them too!

If something like this came about, I'd want more control over it than proposed in this topic. I don't want my origin to determine how I met my nemesis or what his motivation is, I want to determine it. I want to control what he says, why he strikes, so on and so forth. I also want to decide if it's a single entity or a group. Or both.

After seeing what the AE can do, I'd want to see that kind of flexibility in any sort of nemesis system. If it didn't let me customize my foe(s) exactly as I wanted them to be, then it wouldn't be worth dealing with for me and would look half-done compared to everything else we're allowed to customize.

Grav/FF or Grav/Storm Controller. Grav's mass immobilizes don't put on KB protection, unlike other control sets, and has Lift, Propel, and Wormhole for launching foes flying in different ways. Singularity also has Lift and Kinetic's Repel, fun to summon in the middle of a packed mob.

As for the secondaries, everyone else already explained them.

Just to add to the above list with some of other methods that are either not true travel powers or come later..

Kinetics: They can pick up Siphon Speed at level 6/10, depending on if it's a primary or secondary, which they can just use on a random mob and then get super-speed like movement for a couple of minutes. At 12/20, they can boost their teammates to super-speed movement with Speed Boost. At 18/28, they can give the whole team, including themselves, super jump for a minute with Intertial Reduction.

Warshades: Can fly via Dark Nova at level 6 and super jump at 24 with Nebulous Form. Finally, at level 10, they get Recall Friend for free.

Peacebringer: At 20 with White Dwarf they can Teleport. At 16 they can fly other teammates with Group Energy Flight.

Flight Pool: At level 20 they can fly teammates with Group Flight.

Teleportation: At 6 they can port teammates across most zones with Recall Friend. At 20 they can teleport any teammates around them with Team Teleport.

*Note: many people do not like the group flights or Team Teleport.

Fitness/Leaping: Combat Jumping + Hurdle is a ghetto travel power some people use, available at level 8.

Sprint/Fitness/Super Reflexes: Sprint + Quickness + Swift is another ghetto travel power, available at 20 for Scrappers, 28 for Stalkers, and 35 for Brutes.

Safeguard/Mayhem: At level 20, you can do radio/paper missions to get to a Safeguard/Mayhem at Steel Canyon, which rewards Summon Teammates for 24 hours in-game time. It's Recall Friend, except for the whole team.

42 month vet: Gets the vet version of Summon Teammates, called Assemble the Team. I believe they get it at level 1?

Other missions: Some contact missions grant temporary travel powers. A level 15-19 CoV contact, Marshal Brass, offers a mission that rewards you with a 90-minute flight pack. Dr. Shelly Percey, another CoV contact albeit at 10-14, has a mission where you get three Warshade powers for two in-game hours, one of which is a teleport. There's a few more I'm sure as well.

Out of curiosity, what AT and powers did Dr. Aeon have? Was he built like a standard character or did he have access to impossible power combos, like how Blue Steel is a MA/SD/War Mace Scrapper?

I've suggested this before, so of course I'm going to /sign this, even though I almost never quit by accident anymore.

Vigiliantes trades with Wents. Rogues trade with the BM. Not sure about actually walking up to someone and hitting "trade" though.

I got a pair of toons who could really use this badge. I even know an exact set of buildings in Atlas I'd love to see turned into a regular school, but that's just me being selfish.

For a bonus... how about a 5% crafting discount (inf cost, not the salvage you need) pre-badge and 10% post-badge? The explanation could be taking advantage of your access to school supplies, perhaps.

Very likely that, if somehow custom weapons prevent custom animations, they'll probably get the Spines treatment for customization down the road. As had been said before by the Devs (or just BAB), some of the things we have power customization before would have worked with weapon customization beforehand. I remember Spines and Earth Melee's stone hammers being cited specifically, but I "think" that fire and ice swords were also included too, as well as any other prop-using power. And look, we can customize all of those that didn't get weapon customization.

Unless I'm shown otherwise by an explicit statement (implications from a post that the forums won't even let me read isn't going to prove anything to me), I'm going to sit in the camp that says alternate animations for weapon sets are very much possible. Just bear in mind please that I'm not saying it would be easy...

I'd love to see different animations available for Broadsword. It'd be possible to make the set look faster with quicker moving animations that are simply more elaborate. It's IS hard to think of alternate animations when looking at BS's. But, when you look at a different game's instead, not so hard. Not suggesting we copy other games, I'm just saying that I can never think of alternates if I'm watching CoH's sword in action.

A few ideas I've had. I was originally going to make my own topic sometime when I could come up with a full 8 animations (sorry Build Up!), but I might as well throw them in here.

Slash - A quick diagonal slash.

Hack - Not sure here, I still want a downward strike personally, just something that doesn't look so... slow.

Slice - Not sure here either. I mainly hate the "gotta get my balance back" movement at the end that at least feels like it makes up half the animation.

Parry - I'm envisioning an overhead block with the sword held horizontal, followed by either a quick downward slash or a stab to the gut, whichever looks better.

Confront - Dual Blades taunt animation please!

Whirling Sword - How 'bout a Zelda-style spin attack?

Disembowel - The existing animation is probably one of BS's better ones, but doesn't look entirely like a Disembowel. I'd say start by sticking the sword in the opponent's gut (assuming the enemy is using a human-like model and other characters are of about even size). Since we need to include a knock-up effect, then we can have the character yank the sword straight up to pull it out. The ending result in my mind kind of looks like the Climhazzard animation from FF7.

Headsplitter - Well, a two-handed above-the-head blow is out. Well, maybe if he cupped his other fist around the first it could work, but I don't know if that'd look good. Having to work up a new idea here. Just something, anything, other than the current shoulder splitter that doesn't even look like a sword attack!

There's a few first-picks for Scrappers where a second would be more beneficial. For example, if I remember, Invuln's first power is a passive instead of a toggle. I'd rather have the toggle first.

As for Blasters... well, if the Blaster doesn't die then something's wrong.

If it lets you take the second power in the secondary instead? Sure, go for it, I'd love to skip the useless Entangling Arrow for the infinitely more useful (proportionally speaking anyway) Flash Arrow on my Grav/TA Controller.

If it lets you in anyway skip your secondary completely? Heck. No!

Firery Aura Scrappers (and Tanks and Brutes I assume) can cap Fire resistance with just SOs, or maybe even DOs. Don't quote me on the latter though. If I remember correctly, Invulns with Tough can hit S/L cap. But, for all positions? Ignoring Tier 9s and the aforementioned Eclipse, the only thing I can think of are Khelds mixing shields with their inherent. But, depending on how you choose to define it, that may count as a teammate buff in an indirect sense.

Well, that covers the "other combos for Deftrollers" to sate that curiosity! Two questions still: anyone of you try Rad/Sonic Deftrolling? Also, is Deftroller a common term that's been around awhile? I don't want to claim inventing it if I didn't.

Going to have to disagree with this. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the few Cysts I've encountered were always dealt with easily. And they seem incredibly rare. My level 39 Peacebringer still is waiting on her first Cyst spawn.

D'oh, that's what I get for looking at the Wiki past midnight.

While working on a guide for Rad/Sonic Defenders, I got struck with an idea (among a couple of others) of a Rad/Sonic focusing heavily on control abilities, or a "Deftroller" so to speak. I've never heard of anyone making such a build nor have I seen one before. It seems rather intriguing, something I'd definitely try if we had the ability to have three builds per character (both of mine are already in-use). Basically, to sum up the idea, this is what I wrote in the guide...