seebs

My DS MM is only 29, so I haven't got the upgrades, but my demon prince has been fine with two ordinary pet damage IOs and a smashing damage proc. I do like the idea of swapping to a slow set, though, since absolutely everything it does is slow.

See, I'm not totally sold on the "you should have to put in effort in-game" model, because that sorta screws people who want to have cool shinies but have limited play time.

Okay, so, all sorts of things CAN solo.

Sometimes, I've had a long day, and I just wanna run around killing stuff. Were I playing World of Some Other Game, I'd just go find a zone a couple levels low and pursue old quest chains, or farm materials, or something. Now, I could just go to a lower-level hazard zone, but I want to be getting SOMETHING for my time -- even if it's not very much.

In CoH, the closest I've got to ezmode thus far is MMs (bots/traps, DS/dark), but they do require a bit more attention to detail, because the pets can actually die occasionally. I'm sorta wondering what might be a good combo or build for more relaxed soloing. Ideally, I'd probably prefer something that would be effective at, say, -1/x3 or something -- I enjoy the big swarms of enemies, more than I enjoy actual difficulty per se, when I just want to relax.

Suggestions? Archetypes that might be a good fit? Specific builds? Particular missions or zones?

"Not quite, no" is not the same thing as "Not quite no".

I tend to do a lot of sets very early. The thing is, at level 17, if I have a bunch of frankenslotted stuff, I may end up with not only better bonuses than I'd have from SOs, but also with, say, +10% regeneration, +9% recovery, and so on -- especially helpful pre-Stamina.

Well, hmm. They just had some (small) layoffs, and they're now releasing more stuff that costs money. Maybe they are, in fact, hard-up for cash.

I don't much care; I like the auras, I can afford them, I'll probably get them. Haven't done the party pack, because it's not appealing enough to me -- I don't spend much time emoting, I spend a lot of time having my characters go around in costume.

You're three levels ahead of me.

Here's a thing to consider: Start looking into IO sets. You can get two major things from this:

1. Recovery bonuses. They aren't much, but they're something.
2. +acc, -end.

Your goal is to reduce endurance per swing, and also reduce swings. Don't worry about damage, you're a brute; once you're in the swing of things your tier 1 attack will one-shot same-level minions. But accuracy DOES matter. If at all possible, get a kismet accuracy proc for your one toggle -- that's really a +to-hit, and that means it gets multiplied by all your +accuracy. (Also, war mace starts out with +acc, as I recall.)

Frankenslot freely. Remember that you can grab things from non-melee-damage sets; my brute has four attacks, three of which have a two-slot bonus from Razzle Dazzle, where I've got acc/end and acc/end/rech. Note that, even though it's a stun set, I'm not enhancing stun -- but because stun sets are useless, the recipes were cheap. Get your accuracy to something more like 1.2-1.3 per power, your base to-hit to 81% instead of 75%, and suddenly you'll find that you have a lot more blue. Similarly, a 20% or so endurance reduction on every power pays off.

Dual-aspect and triple-aspect IOs give you more bonuses; if a single-aspect IO of a given level would give you 20%, a triple-aspect will give you 10% to each of three powers... Meaning if you slot three triple-aspects, you get 30% to each instead of only 20% to each. It adds up.

Actively pursue global friends. Then, when you're on, ask around among them. If someone I knew and enjoyed playing with said "hey, I wanna do <x story arc>, wanna come help?", the answer would usually be "sure, sounds fun!". I don't usually have goals more sophisticated than "run into crowds of enemies and toe-bomb them" or "OMG I HAVE SO MANY COLORED AURAS". (Scary thought: I do NOT play this game high. I just really like bright colors.)

My guess is there's a fair number of people who'd be fine with doing that, and I usually find that even duoing most content makes it a lot more fun.

ETA: BTW, I will be polling SG folks to see whether they like quiche, and may get back to you with an additional suggestion depending on the outcome of the poll.

I'll probably get this one, pretty much just because I have a character who really, really, wants sparks.

I don't spend the time to evaluate recipes, I just craft everything that drops. Unless it looks like it's valuable, I list it at 1.

Here's the thing:

Yes, it's incredibly expensive to get a bunch of purples. That puts it out of the reach of people who aren't willing to do any of the several things that generate purples.

So, uhm.... Yeah. It is. And?

I've been avoiding MSI ever since they signed me up for a bunch of spam and tried to ruin my credit rating because I tried to actually collect on a rebate offer. (No, really. We have IP logs.)

I have an ASUS G73Jh, it plays CoH just fine at 1920x1200 on an external display. Some people had issues with video stuff, but the company released an updated vBIOS that seems to have fixed it.

Honestly, just take the mission, gain a level or so, and come back for it -- it's fun that way.

Will these be restricted to characters of the corresponding origins, or will we be able to mix and match? (e.g., not every "robot" character I've ever done has a "technology" origin, but they might want sparks anyway.)

If people would rather pay a lot more for the crafted I/O than for the components, what makes you think that's over the "real" value of the crafted I/O?

I don't complain that restaurants are charging me several times the price of their ingredients; I buy from them because I don't feel like cooking.

How do you define "lame" damage?

My mid-30s mastermind can run at +2/x3 while I'm not actually paying attention; just walk up to a spawn, drop a trap, read a book.

None of my other characters are close to that.

I've been running a traps/sonic defender, and as long as I can get a group, it's AMAZING. Only level 23 so far, but I'm having a blast. I do need more defense because I seem to spend far too much of my time soaking new groups. But it's fun!

I'd like to see Energy Aura for tankers and scrappers -- and of course, see it fixed up a bit for all archetypes.

I've been doing energy/dev. I'm only level 27, and not yet soloing tough content, but I'm certainly able to do stuff like tip missions without much effort. /dev really is nice for soloing -- caltrops gives you immense protection against melee attackers.

Web grenade is not about the immobilize. It's about the 50% penalty to recharge. Use it on annoying bosses and life is good.

It's the level 1-19 range which sucks right now... That, and/or the shortage of real power picks in the teens.