passerby

From my experience playing in Infinity, there are often 2 portals left before the league decides to take down the chambers. 10 acids and 8 people in a team, someone is bound to get more than one acid. But some people are just simply too dim to do anything beside hitting buttons to kill things, and that opening their Powers menu is too hard for them.

Also, the quality of teamwork is especially bad on weekends. Players who play on weekdays almost daily tend to know enough to do what's needed. It's the "weekend warriors" who seem to fumble through everything.

I wouldn't mind my FPS slowing down a little if the scene is really amazingly beautiful or unique. But to overload my system for a warehouse?! Do I really need to see so many boxes, crates and tools in such high detail? I've set my visual settings so that my FPS anywhere else in the game is at a decent level. This tileset plunges my FPS to a single digit.

I was on a 24-member BAF team attempting Gotta Keep 'Em Separated badge with my Ill/Rad troller. I was assigned to the adds team. From my experience, handling the adds is the easiest role compared to the teams that have to coordinate their damage on the two AVs in separate locations. Unless you have a simpleton who spreads out the adds without making much dent in their HPs, you can simply AOE them to death, amply aided by Judgement powers. And there were no simpletons, thankfully.

And we succeeded. What did I get for my role as adds eliminator? A Very Rare loot table. The team was jubilant at getting the badge, of course, and I didn't have the heart to dampen their spirits by announcing my drop to hear what they got. No one reported getting any Rares or Very Rares, so it's safe to assume their drops were unremarkable, unless they shared my sentiment of not spoiling the moment by broadcasting their good drops.

If it is true that doing damage to many mobs, like the adds, earned me my Very Rare, while the folks who had the harder task of managing their damage, slowing down if necessary, got poor drops, then this "participation" system needs a serious revamp. The AV teams played the pivotal role in winning the badge, but got poorer loot tables because they didn't do as much damage or tag enough mobs as the adds team is just bizarre.

During the sabotage phase of Lambda, I decided on my Ill/Rad to not do any damage at all. No pets out, no damage, Superior Invisibility toggled on and followed the team. Sometimes I'd find myself alone with another scrapper. Whatever the case, I'd Confuse the mobs around the crates/chambers and they'd attack the other mobs or the crates/chambers themselves.

The Seers are particularly dangerous with their psi attacks, so Confusing them at least turns their attention away from my team. Their help in attacking the crates/chambers is icing on the cake. The Vickies do a lot of damage on the items and the big Warworks can wipe out the minions milling around.

Now I'm wondering if anyone can answer two questions:

Has anyone gotten any buffs from Confusing the Warworks Orbs?

Does anyone know if Confusing mobs to destroy crates/chambers earn you any participation credit for your loot table?

So it's only Ion that's affected by Rage dropping? Hmm ... this explains it.

Does Rage buff Judgement damage? If not, why does the debuff from Rage dropping debuff Judgement damage? Does anyone know anything about this?

In all my runs, if both teams have equal numbers, the team that goes after the acids usually completes the task first. I'm surprised none of the league leaders I've teamed with have ever thought of pulling one person from the acid team to enter the warehouse with the other team.

Also, it could be just me, but whenever I click on the elevator to enter the warehouse or the lab, the mini map zooms in such that I only see a small portion of the whole map. I always have to zoom it out before I can see where my team mates are. If there are players who are clueless enough not to know how to check their power menu for temp powers, there will be those who don't know how to adjust their mini maps, and fail to follow the leader.

After all, it's not possible for the whole team to enter together due to the elevators opening and closing, so if the leader moves off without waiting for everyone to be in zone, the ones who enter after the first round will find no one on the screen and when they look at the mini map, they won't see any green arrows either.

And then you find yourself in a team-diaspora situation.

Someone will be inconvenienced in whichever timeframe they decide to bring down the servers. As someone who lives in the +8 GMT time zone, I've had to put up with server down times that take place from 7pm to 9pm or thereabouts (due to US daylight savings), all the years of playing this game.

Surely, a server downtime taking place during Europe's prime time once in a while isn't such a big deal when taken in perspective.

The problem with having a thread on "how" is that it assumes that the question of "why" is already settled.

Wanna play pure solo? Try Champions Online. It is languishing in solo-land now. I stopped playing that to come back here.

Did your friend convert ALL 40 shards into threads at once?
If that's what he did then he really has himself to blame. Impatience is not a luxury a trial-averse player can afford.

Having played a healing priest in WoW, when you have to watch the HPs of 24 other people, manage your mana (endurance), cast debuffs on the boss or remove debuffs from your raid group, while running and dodging environmental damage that have at most 4 seconds of warning, the Battle Maiden fight is chicken feed.

However, I also never do WoW team content in pugs. They are fun when done with a group of people who play as well as you, but absolute hell when you find yourself mired in the general mediocrity of the riff raff.

So while I welcome more challenge that require movement in fights, they should not be so hard that they are only fun when done with your own friends. I'd like to be able to hop on a pug and still be able to rely on the general skill level of the other players to complete the TF.

It's fine balance. Battle Maiden isn't too hard, but the devs have to be careful to not raise the threshold too high for future content.

And apparently, pets can target them before you can.

The OP seems to be saying that the contribution of support ATs are less visible than the damage ones, not that the former cannot be played offensively.

The devs probably worked on the assumption that players would know what debuffs are on a mob by the effects surrounding it. An icy effect encasing its feet? Immobilised! An icy effect encasing it from the chest down? Held! And icy effect wrapped around its feet and "ZZZ" on their heads? "Sleeping!" Other effects are less obvious, though. A sickly yellowish-green swirling around a mob? It could mean it is now easier to be hit and less likely to hit me, or it could mean it takes more damage and hits means less hard (the difference in the visual effect of Radiation Infection and Enervating Field is subtle).

However, since players can customize the colours of their powers' effects, it is getting harder to see what they do, especially for newer players. Having floating text that says what they do might help. For instance, when a swirling cloud appears around a mob, a text floats up saying "-def, -to hit". When mobs stand quivering, the text says "terrorized, -to hit".

However, it becomes less useful when a group with 4 support toons cast their debuffs at almost the same time. Not only would you see effects flying all around, you'll see:

"Immobilied" "Immobilied" "-Def, -To Hit" "-Def, -To Hit" "-Speed, -Recharge"
"Held" "Held" "-DMG, - Res" "Held" "-Speed, -Recharge"
"Immobilied" "-Def, -To Hit" "Immobilied" "Held" "-DMG, - Res" "-Def, -To Hit"
"-Speed, -Recharge" "Immobilied" "Held" "-Def, -To Hit"
"-Speed, -Recharge" "-Def, -To Hit" "Held" "Held" "-DMG, - Res"
"-Def, -To Hit" "-Def, -To Hit" "-DMG, - Res" "-DMG, - Res"
"-Def, -To Hit" "-Def, -To Hit" "Held" "Immobilied"

It's not going to be pleasant to have all that fill up your screen.

Well, I blew some merit points and alignment points I've squirreled away to buy the kinetic combats and together with Weave and Combat Jump, I now have 36% s/l defence. It's working fabulously. With the level shift, the level 50 minions are blue, so I am even closer to the softcap with them.

I really don't see the need to denigrate players who prefer to play the game differently from you. Form your own team and set your own pace. If you join someone's team, you have to respect the wishes of the leader. It's really that simple. Aren't we all adults?

I used to bail out of teams at the slightest perceived provocation. I'm glad I've grown out of that prima donna attitude.

Thanks for the pointers, guys!

So I should get at least SOME defense, at least 20% for now? I'll consider soft-capping to be something I'll get to in the mid to long term.

Since I'm using Battle Axe, which already has knockdown in many of the attacks, will the Kinetic Combat chance to knockdown send the foes flying away from me?

I finally got my Axe/WP brute to lvl 50 and I'm now trying to plan out a build that's not too expensive. I've seen some builds that soft-cap S/L def, but they always involve using the very expensive (for me) Kinetic Combat set.

Willpower, on it's own, gives some defense, some resistance and healing. So, I'm wondering if I should enhance regen and max HP instead of defense. Would builds that focus on regen be too far behind one that soft-caps S/L Def? I know that the latter is very strong, but I'm thinking that it might be overkill, given that WP already gives you regen and some resistance.

Would I be able to run missions at X8 with a regen-focused build?

I resubscribed about 2 months ago to try out the content that has been released since GR. The main reason I'm staying subbed is because of the end game content. This is a returning customer who stays because of the team-based end-game content and the friends whom I run the TFs with.

MMOs need content to keep players playing with one another, forming social bonds to slow down the attrition rate that happens to any MMO. After returning, I asked the guys who have been playing consistently since years ago what has happened to those who have left and whether we can cajole them to return with all the new content that we can do together. Two of them have since reactivated their accounts. Social bonds are an important ingredient in keeping an MMO alive and so is content that requires teams or team-work. I made those friends while playing team-based content.

The die-hard soloers obviously see themselves as being mainstream and feel entitled to being catered to. But CoH, to stay alive, need to stick to their plan of developing team-based end-game content while allowing players who prefer to solo but run TFs occasionally to enjoy it as well. Those who adamantly solo, and solo only, for whatever reason, cannot be accommodated without higher development cost. The return on investment isn't going to be worth it. So CoH might be better off financially to let these die-hard soloers go than to incur the cost to retain them.

[ QUOTE ]
The only NPCs that will sell you inspirations in a co-op zone are the are mission contacts. The only reason you can buy them from a non mission contact in Ouroboros (which isn't a Co-op zone) is because of how the flashback system locks you out of all your other contacts.

[/ QUOTE ]

The other co-op zone in the game is the RWZ, and there, all the mission contacts sell inspirations, even Borea, who gives nothing but random timed missions. Her counterpart in Cimerora, Marcus Valerius, does not have inspirations however.

So, if only mission contacts will sell inspirations, why doesn't Marcus Valerius do the same?