seebs

I tried to make a traps defender, and I sucked at it. I'd just keep plugging away, but there were other issues (including a serious clipping problem on his costume when running which was driving me nuts), and he was only level 8, so I deleted and figured I would at some point give it another try.

But this leads me to a question: How is a traps defender supposed to work? In a lot of groups I've been in, there's been a serious difficulty in not having any healing to speak of, and I'm not sure Triage Beacon does much healing -- I don't have exact numbers to hand, but it didn't seem like it was doing much. I suppose the force field drone is a pretty core power, but this gets me to my general question:

How is a traps/ defender expected to handle stuff, either soloing or in groups? What's the solution to "health bar has gone red", or do you just try to keep that from happening? My intuitive read is that, compared to sets that have at least some heals, traps ought to be pretty weak, or ought to have some huge advantages to make up for the lack... But I'm told it's a really strong set.

So what's the trick?

(Edit to clarify: Interestingly, /devices is my joy, and the two blasters I'm still playing are both /devices, because OMG SO MUCH FUN.)

Imagine that you were to add more recharge reductions to HT. Consider, if you will, all the times you will find yourself thinking "how annoying! I could cast an auto-hit stun and damage effect that would rez my allies. I wish it were still recharging."

If you don't expect that to happen very often, more recharge slotting couldn't hurt. I think I have three recharge reductions in mine, and I still sometimes wish it were up again already.

Can recall friend stack more than one friend? I guess it has a pretty short recharge.

I think wanting leadership and recall friend just makes my "too many powers" problem worse. So does wanting dark pit to stack it with HT. But the character's a djinni, and really HAS to fly. (And really, I want Shadow Fall just because the blue cloud at her feet Looks Right for hovering.)

Yeah, I noticed that. The tradeoff, of course, is that you sometimes get a ton more with unreasonable prices. I managed to go through a stack or so of brass selling for 175-250k and buying for 500 on one of my alts.

Huh. Well, that'd be three more slots tied up somewhere, and I don't know how I'd shuffle that in. But it does sound tempting, and fits with my general conception of Defender as built for party support.

In an ideal world, I'd want teleport too (mostly for RP reasons).

I mostly ran on teams to level up, so I didn't get many drops at all. I'd guess I had about 900k inf from actually selling stuff (often listing things at much more than the apparent going rate and waiting a while for them to sell), and the rest I got by farming WW for vendorable recipes to make a bit of a profit.

I'm told that I'd have more money if I'd been soloing that whole time.

Yup. I filled out a web form, I think, to initiate a support thing, they escalated it, they contacted me a few days later to say it was probably fixed. During that time, I once managed to get the store to sell me one thing. After they said it was fixed, I bought the remaining boosters.

It may be a new bug, but it does seem to be there. Just ran into this myself.

On the other hand, my desktop Linux machine is still faster than my Mac laptop, so it may be worth it.

(I've toyed with the idea of getting a Windows machine to run video games, but right now, the extra attention/effort required to maintain another OS doesn't sound appealing.)

Okay, where do I learn more about how I can use MA tickets and Merit Rewards to get stuff, because I apparently didn't adequately understand that functionality.

Hey, another newbie question that this reminds me of:

Is there a limit to what I can craft at a given level, or is it purely a question of what mats and recipes I have?

Buy recipe?

I get the feeling this is Something I Should Know About. I have at least a few Reward Merits gotten from various stuff.

And yes, I've been nearly-always teaming, that would explain it. Drops divided by eight people, but we have 5-8 times as many mobs... But there's that huge XP bonus, so the net result is a ton more XP per mob I get loot from. So I'm running behind on loots, probably.

I was messing with crafting, although I ended up about breaking even because I forgot to include the actual influence cost of doing the crafting. Silly me. But I understand the principle, anyway, and I have indeed made some money doing that. The killer for me has usually been lack of available slots to leave bids out on stuff that fluctuates widely in price (that being, so far as I can tell, everything on the entire market). I assume I eventually get more than 15 auction slots... Although I could improve things some by using alts aggressively, pick a given range of stuff, have an alt put out bids on most of it, leave them there for a week or so.

FWIW:

I am mostly positively impressed by CoH. Sure, there's stuff I'd like to see fixed, there's more typos than I'd be comfortable with in anything I'd release (but then, I used to edit stuff professionally), but... This doesn't look badly done at all, and a lot of what I've heard about GR sounds not merely tolerable but pretty good.

FWIW, I'm not particularly in great shape or beautiful or anything, but I am a genuine recognized expert in some fields of software development. (No, really!)

So, my highest-level character just made 27. And I noticed something: It's fairly hard to afford a complete set of SOs, and any IOs other than the generic "invention: damage" types seem to be thoroughly out of my reach. I've been doing cheap WW farming (buying recipes for less than they vendor for and selling them), and I made 27 with about 3.5M inf. That's enough to buy the rarest/most-expensive component of, say, a single orange or yellow IO of around my level, probably. The IOs themselves tend to run anywhere from half a mil to 5-20M+.

So. Theoretical question: What is the game balanced around assuming I'll have? Is it assuming I'm fully tricked out with SOs? That I'm using a mix of SOs and DOs and maybe a few IOs five or ten levels below me (but still working)?

The big issue I'm seeing is that I'm not used to the idea that equipment completely stops working as I level. I'm used to it becoming sort of obsolescent, but hey, it's still working, it's just that it's not as significant as it used to be. And I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be dealing with this, or even whether I am.

Possibilities that occur to me:
* You're not really expected to have anything enhanced except by whatever random drops you got and maybe a handful of SOs, and the game is plenty balanced and playable as such.
* You're expected to regularly spend a fair bit of money upgrading, and I should have made a lot more money somehow (perhaps by crafting and selling stuff?)
* The game assumes that you have a level 50 alt to farm for money.
* It's not really working as designed, but it's not practical to try to correct it, because any of the obvious proposed corrections would be dramatically worse.

My experience thus far seems to be that, at least for a relatively new player, the big crippling weakness is that there's not enough auction slots to leave both bids and sales up for very long, making it hard to either buy low or sell high without using a lot of alts who are buying and selling different kinds of things. Which may actually be a good strategy, but it seems odd.

So, imagine that you just made 27 and didn't have any rich alts or rich friends. What would you be putting in for enhancements? How would you get it?

Fly's not optional for RP reasons -- character must have fly. And I actually really like hover for defending, because I can position myself pretty well.

There is no way I can afford a Stealth IO at this point -- they're an order of magnitude more expensive than I have money.

I've been having a really hard time reliably hitting multiple mobs with nightfall. I usually get two, but rarely more than two. I'm not sure why -- I may just suck at positioning. I'd kill for an actual visual representation of the cone.

It really feels like there's just a few too many powers that are must-haves or close to it. I had been planning to postpone stuff like teleporting and leadership until after I had a few more of my core powers in place, though this may be a bad plan. Stamina has been relatively avoidable for grouping, although I agree that it becomes more of an issue when soloing. (This whole project may become somewhat academic for a while, too, as it turns out that I'm nowhere near being able to afford a respec.)

When I'm in groups, stuff dies quite quickly. When I'm solo, I still have a pretty rough time of things, even at -1/x0. It's gonna be a long time before I can do things above my level consistently.

Dark Blast is the non-optional one that I took at 1 because you have to. I could swap Moonbeam for Gloom (the short DoT), I suppose -- but I've found it awfully useful. I do want to have a second attack power relatively early.

You may well be right that I could move tar patch later, although at this point I can obviously slot it for enough recharge to have it available most of the time, and it is pretty awesome. DN has been sort of a poor fit for the mostly-minions fighting I see at lower levels -- I don't see many things live long enough for it to be a good choice. But maybe I should rethink that...