cohRock

I've made four water-based characters.

* Wet Stormy Knight: storm/water defender. awesome synergy, btw
* Horse to Water: water/ice blaster. battle cry -- "No. *You* drink!"
* Agua Iguana: water/cold corruptor
* Splash Damage: water/devices blaster. wanted 2ndy where I could skip a lot of powers

Well, phooey. The other day I changed the title in order to make it more obvious what this thread is about. I just noticed that what I changed was the title of the first port, not the title of the thread. Do we have a way to change thread title?

I went to buy Storm Blast, but am told system not available. It let me buy the freebie (web grenade), though. Sigh.

My favorite GTFA power is Force Bolt. 100% knockback, doesn't require any more than the base slot, and can add considerably to the survivability of a solo defender/controller/mm.

Years ago I subscribed to a guy doing CoX parody videos on YouTube. There was no video; it was all a talked story. Each episode followed 2 not-too-smart guys who IIRC wanted to be Skulls, maybe Hellions. In the first, or at least an early video the see a "man with a hat", and start discussing him. Following episodes contain other mentions of the man with a hat. They travel around various zones in Paragon City, and I think even a Rogue Island or two.

I'm not doing it justice, but their discussions were hilarious. One of my favorites was where they visited Brickstown and tried to convince a freakshow tank that they're freakshow as well. The tank remained .. unconvinced. It gave a whole new insight into who the freaks are.

I would have posted a link, but the guy doing it may have cancelled his YouTube account. I'm not subscribed any more. Does anyone else remember these, and perhaps have a link to where else his work may have been posted?

MonkeySpirit, I think both are good. Ninjitsu has quite a number of extras, such as Caltrops and a heal. SR focuses almost exclusively on defense, with some scaling resist as your health goes down. It's one extra is Quickness, which speeds up both your run speed and recharge time (globally), and provides significant resistance to foes who would try to slow down either. I.e., Ninjitsu lets you be the slower-downer with Caltrops, whereas SR lets you laugh at the Caltrops (and other slowing effects) of others.

On further reflection, and some sleep, I decided the respec should go even a little further, with changes beginning at level 8:

For your first stalker, I suggest avoiding dual blade. It's probably the most complex of the melee sets. For stalkers it is especially tricky, because the combos come relatively late in the build.

For comparison, a scrapper can have 2 combos by level 8. A stalker can't have his first combo until level 12, and the earliest he can get the second is 18. The situations is actually worse, because that first combo uses both Build Up and Placate, meaning it's too slow to be part of your normal attack chain. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see "complex" in first paragraph above.

I'm not saying Dual Blades is a bad choice, just that to get the most out of it, you need to work harder and know more. Ninja Blade might be a better first-stalker choice. Every attack lowers foe defense, and your Divine Avalanche attack actually increases your melee and lethal defenses. No combos to plan for and remember. Just keep on swinging...

I've got a pretty new NinjaBlade/IceArmor stalker who just turned 21. He had been having a real hard time soloing missions from level 15-19. Foes doing mixed damage, and sometimes even mostly-smash/lethal foes, would just eat him up, spit him out, and stomp on the wet spot.

No more. At level 20 he took Chilling Embrace (CE), and it is making a world of difference. Protection is very much improved now, with the CE not only slowing foe recharge, but also causing them to spend some of their time getting away from the slow effect -- both effects mean I get hit a lot less often.

Why didn't I take it sooner? Good question. I had taken Recall Friend at 14, and that delayed getting more protection. If he ever respecs, I'll hold off on Recall Friend until later in the build. Something like:

Yesterday someone told me in game that the permanent invention license for non-VIP players is limited. He said you could only use plain Invention Origin enhancements, not set ones. And if you already had sets, you could keep them slotted, but they have none of their set bonuses. Is this correct?

I haven't played a lot of AE missions, and decided to make a character (Ma Ae, Defiant villain brute, super-strength/electric) dedicated almost exclusively to running AE. I'm not really interested in farming, so of course the first thing I find is that almost all the missions are self-proclaimed farms. And every one I call up (the ones who don't call themselves farms) seems to be a farm with foes who use fire damage almost exclusively.

What's with all the fire? Why not energy damage, or psi damage, or cold damage, or good ol' smash/lethal? Suffice it to say electric armor doesn't handle fire damage well at low levels. I tried searching for missions "my level", but it doesn't seem to work. Just a gazillion level 1-54 fire farms. Well, it might be less than a gazillion, but that's all I've found so far.

Anyway, I see that there are other threads here providing some guidance to decent, sensical missions. I'll take advantage of that in the future. I'm still left wondering why people wrote so many stupid fire farms ...

I'm sitting here rebagging and indexing my comic collection. It's been sitting in 10 shipping boxes for over 30 years. I saw Adventure Comics #404 (March 1971). I thought, "No, that's not Supergirl, that's:

* Carnival of Shadows, 1971 !

(Sorry for no image. I thought as a copyrighted work, posting the cover would likely be inappropriate. So I'm posting a link to a site that has fair-use rights to the images.)

oops. I had not gotten the Chum badge in SG mode. I probably got it years ago, the first day Monstrous Monstress was created. So I personally received the accolade for all of Mercy's exploration badges, but the VG had not yet received credit for Chum.

Belay my last.

Windows: I am in SG mode, and gathered all the exploration badges for Mercy Island. I received the accolade for doing so, and the 5 merits. However, I did not get the beacon badge for Mercy. I checked the SG Exploration badges in case missed it in the global tab, but we don't have it.
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Above is the official bug report. I inherited a defunct villain group on Guardian and decided to make the base useful. I gathered almost all the beacons with no problem. (Until can be in RWZ raid, we cannot get the RWZ beacon.) However, for whatever reason, the Mercy Island beacon was not granted. I suspect a recent, maybe I22, bug.

A friend had a bug crop up yesterday, and it got me thinking about the overall design of Ouroboros. I'll start with the bug for some background.

My friend had started out a hero (mind/kin controller) but wanted access to patron epic powers. So he used tips to cycle thru vigilante to villain to rogue. A "funny" thing happened on the way back to hero though. He reached level 50 while doing the Lady Gray TF with our SG Saturday night. After we completed it, he asked me if he should focus first on finishing his hero tips or do the incarnate arc. I told him I'd go with incarnate arc first, to more quickly begin receiving shards. I had to log, and could not help him with either.

Well, the next day we teamed again. He had started the incarnate arc and had the Trapdoor mission ready to go. He had also already converted back to hero. So he, another SG mate, and I all met in Ouroboros, teamed, and were going to do Trapdoor. The crystal wouldn't let us in, telling us that we had to complete the selected mission first. We had no idea what the problem was so we tried different things to get in -- pass the star, select a different mission then Trapdoor again, etc. Nothing worked; we got the same message every time. He eventually realized he had started the incarnate arc in the "villain" Ouroboros, and we were in the "hero" Ouroboros now. Mender Ramiel wouldn't even let him drop the mission.

Wrong Ramiel. Wrong Ouroboros. Phooey! He petitioned for a GM and we went off to do some missions in FBZ. A GM showed up during our second mission there, and spoke with my friend for a couple minutes. The GM was unable to fix the problem. (I have no idea why he couldn't even just drop the mission/arc from my friend's task list, but he apparently could not.) My friend was told there were two ways to proceed. He could run another set of vig-->villain-->rogue->hero tips, and complete the incarnate arc while he had access to the "villain" Ouroboros. Or he could run incarnate trials, and gain the alpha slot that way.

It occurred to me after the GM left was, hey, now there are alignment-change tokens available! Since this issue is a design bug, they should just grant my friend a couple of the tokens so he could quickly become villain, complete his incarnate arc, and quickly become a hero again. I suggested my friend email support and request this, and I hope he does.

Perhaps you can see (or already knew) that the existence of two separate Ouroborosses, with the same contacts, etc, is a confusing design with unanticipated bugs just waiting to happen. It doesn't even make sense in internal logic. I suppose one could throw up smoke and mirrors and claim <cough> time paradox <cough>, but that's pretty hollow reasoning.

As the title to this thread suggests, there is one Ouroboros too many. I suppose they created two because it was the easiest way at the time to allow the same contacts to offer different missions. It also made it easy to insure that players only had access to the right set of flashback missions. CoH game technology has advanced since then, and context-sensitive interaction with contacts is already happening. So here is an overview of how a better Ouroboros could work:

1) One "neutral" Ouroboros. Heroes, vigilantes, villains, and rogues, could all co-exist there. I say neutral (like Midnight Club) instead of co-ed (like Cimerora) because no co-ed missions would be available. Players could remain on co-ed teams, but co-ed teams could not do Ouroboros contact missions, flashbacks, or TFs. (Heroes and vigilantes would be treated as one alignment though, as would villains and rogues.)

2) Contacts would have their logic enhanced to recognize the alignment of the person speaking to them. What they offer would vary accordingly, and no missions would be offered to co-ed teams. If Ouroboros content has already been selected, players of the opposite alignment could not join the team.

3) The main exit portal would have its logic enhanced as well. Heroes could only access Paragon City destinations. Villains could only access the Rogue Isles. However, both rogues and vigilantes would be allowed to travel to all zones. (If you've ever played a Rogue and gone to the "wrong" Ouroboros, you know how much a boon this item would be.)

4) The echo portal would ensure only those eligible could travel to its destinations (which is currently only Echo Galaxy City).

5) This one is probably not necessary, but it might reduce confusion. The large room with flashback crystals would gain doors. A player entering would essentially go to one of two places, where the "hero" crystals are, or where the "villain" crystals are. Entering the room would not split a pre-existing co-ed team. Flashbacks would only be offered to the team leader of a team with just heroes and/or vigilantes, or villains and/or rogues.

Thus far I have not purchased a lot from the market for my primary (long term vet) account. I don't really need to; he gets 550 points a month, and with that I've bought the rocket board and power sets as they become available. When character slots were on sale several weeks ago, I did spend to buy a set of five.

More interesting is the spending for my much newer second account (I believe it was established late November / early December). It was originally intended as an f2p account to which I would subscribe a month or two and then go back to free. Then the limited time offer of a discounted 6-month subscription occurred, and I bought that. I also bought the five character slots for the new account. Then there were the "must-haves":

* Ninja Run (I believe purchased while offered temporarily as a Ninja pack in December)
* Jump Pack (the one which originally came bundled with the Pocket D VIP pass)
* Rocket Board
* Pocket D VIP pass for porting to there
* Mystic Fortune
* Secondary Mutation

The first two were because I've gotten used to builds without traditional travel powers. The latter two were purchased because I've gotten used to these minor buffs, and as a vet I almost feel obligated to be able to share the card buffs, especially when teammates use it on me. The Rocket Board is a "nice-to-have" for new characters, but it gets annoying as your characters gain various toggle powers, only to have the Board de-toggle them.

So in essence the purchases were in support of new characters, even though I'm not really creating a lot of new guys on this account. When the subscription expires, the second account will return to f2p status, and I know I'll have a limited number of guys at that point. I also don't plan to spend money on power sets, although as points accumulate during the subscription period, I may purchase a set or two.