eternalYouth

Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect

I don't recommend Dual Blades/Fiery Aura for PvP at all. Hate to tell you, but you picked a combo that is towards the bottom of the effectiveness list for brutes. If you're really dead set on it you can go level it, but when you start PvPing with it you're likely to be disappointed with it's performance.

Originally Posted by Thirty-Seven

Some of the key "mechanics" people on the forums are:

• Arcanaville — She is very knowledgeable about how stuff works in this game. She is, however, rather cerebral and verbose. (Take that as you will.) She is the type of poster that will randomly creep in to a thread and give someone the lay of the land far more loqaciously and accurately than just about anyone would have really needed.
• Umbral — He is quite knowledgeable as well, and is a regular poster in the already mentioned Scrapper sub-forum. He is, however, how should I put this kindly... rather direct.
• Nihilii / Werner — I mention these two together because they are both avid AV-soloers and are also frequent posters in the Scrapper sub-forum.

I would imagine that you see a trend as to where the most discussion of optimization, DPS and the like occurs?

Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood

If you like playing healers you will probably enjoy playing the various support ATs (Controllers, Defenders and Corruptors).

Just remember 2 things:
1. Your buffs or debuffs are far better than your heals (assuming you even have any heals)
2. You have two powersets and for the most part are expected to use both of them (Defenders and Corruptors get ranged attacks alongside their support powers, Controllers get... controls).

As Agge said Empathy and Pain Domination are the most heal focused support sets (with Thermal Radiation coming in third) but even with them it's important to note that the heals are the weakest powers in the set, the higher level powers are about proactively preventing damage or increasing the teams damage rather than re-actively healing people.

There are 12 different support sets in the game, I recommend you try a few different ones and see what you like. All of them offer a unique combination of powers and play very differently. If you want a more active support set you'll probably prefer one of the debuff focused ones such as Traps, Radiation Emission or Dark Maisma where you need to focus on positioning debuffs on spawns. On the other hand if you're prefer a set that allows you more time for blasting then you might prefer a more buff focused set such as Force Field, Sonic Resonance or Empathy where you can do a lot of your buffing in between fights with only one or two heals or debuffs during a fight.

Originally Posted by Call Me Awesome

healing is one of the weaker forms of mitigation, our debuffs and buffs are generally much more powerful. This is something that tends to confuse lots of other MMO players when they first start playing... there are no "healers" per say and if your team's at all competent heals are largely unnecessary.

Originally Posted by Aggelakis

There aren't any actual addons for City. Nothing will change the functionality of the base game. You can only tweak the visuals, and then only by changing texture files.

There are applications to assist information-gathering (HeroStats for data; Badge-Hunter (badge-hunter.com) and City Info Terminal (cit.cohtitan.com) for badge collecting stats, both of which can be verified by HeroStats, CIT also can be verified through a separate, low-resources program called Glycerine).

There's the Vidiotmaps Pack, which changes the base image of the map to include helpful information.

There's the various icon fixes, which changes the power icons to more standardized versions (using a pet icon for a pet, instead of a knockback icon, which is something the pet does...that kind of thing).

As for your other question, as a sometimes WoW player myself, I find this game is actually kind of freeing to not have to powergame in order to be the very best, because you can play the game without any enhancements (our version of gear) and still do OK. However, you'll find an EJ mentality down in each archetype's subforum. People tend to stick with the official forums for most of their poking at builds, that way they get the most exposure and the easiest channel of feedback. Even better, you can only post on the forums if you have an active account, so you'll always get responses from someone who is playing *right now* instead of possibly operating with old information. Mids (cohplanner.com) can help you plan your build.

Keep in mind that City is EXTREMELY casual friendly, so there's no actual 'wrong' way to do it. If you're having fun with it, you're doing it right.