City of Heroes Vade Mecum "Unofficial Guide"

Not sad for the people who will be saved from buying it.

It would be something that I would peruse and browse actually. I guess that shows my age.

You've been around longer than I have and I don't consider myself a "log-time CoH veteran."

I would consider throwing any money towards a 3rd party guide to CoX a waste. Especially when I can find it for myself in ParagonWiki, find it in the forums, or ask my fellow forumites if those two don't provide what I am looking for. The knowledge of the players is amazing, the gall of someone attempting to sucker people into paying for something that is readily available for free is equally amazing.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

20 is tough. 21 is worse. 22 is when All The Problems Start To Go Away. I am against powerlevelling, EXCEPT for people who are level 21. My friends and I call it "Level Suck."

Here's what I'd build- keeping in mind that the last time I touched Inv/SS was when my wife built Lady Vanguard, two or three years ago. I remember it as a slow starter- the good news is, you're past almost all the misery.

GOAL 1: Getting to 22 for under 10 million inf. If you get a big fast team, it will go really fast, but if not, it is worth kicking, scratching and fighting for. I'm building for smash/lethal resist, some soloability, and the ability to slap around Warriors, Freaks and BanPan.

Level 20 build.
L1- Jab [mandatory], Temp Invuln
L2- Haymaker
L3- 2 slots in Haymaker
L4- Dull Pain
L5- 2 slots in Jab
L6- Air Superiority
L7- 2 slots in AS
(we now have the skeleton of an attack chain. Jab isn't great but you're stuck with it for now. It's at least recharged all the time. AS/Haymaker should keep people down and shut them up.)
L8- Unyielding.
L9- two slots in Temp Invuln.
L10- Swift. (I prefer it to Hurdle.)
L11- two slots in Haymaker.
L12- RESIST PHYS DAMAGE OR BOXING
L13- one slot in Temp Invuln, one slot in Air Sup.
L14- Flight
L15- two slots in Dull Pain.
L16- Health
L17- two slots in Unyielding
L18- INVINCIBILITY OR TOUGH
L19- one slot Unyielding, one slot Temp Invuln OR two slots Tough
L20- Stamina. Three, count em three, toggles. You need this even more than you need a second big hitter attack.
L21- Stamina slots.
L22- KO Blow. SO's. Songs of angels etc.

Note about level 12 and 18: you want to pick either (boxing and tough) or (rpd and invincibility.) I'd pick boxing and tough, for reasons I will explain:

With Tough your basic smash/lethal is 50%. With RPD it's 45%.
Slotted all the way up (as they will be at 22) that's 80% vs. 72%. Which means for every 100 points of incoming you take 20 vs 28. That's 30% less damage. Almost everything you fight will be smash/lethal at this point. Invincibility will come, yes, but not yet. (You also eventually want Resist Physical, so you can totally, totally ignore smash/lethal. )

So now, what do you PUT in those slots? Level 20 generics, mostly. This is either time consuming (if you wait for cheap stuff) or expensive (if you buy ingredients and build 'em yourself) but they work much better than DO's and they do not go yellow at level 21, when everything sucks ANYWAY.

Haymaker is your big attack before KO Blow. You want end reduction, you want recharge, you want acc and damage. I 5-slotted it. I recommend Bruising Blow (all three)- or some other combo that gets you acc/dam, dam/end and dam/rech- and Smashing Haymaker (Acc/Dam and Dam/End/Rech). Whatever's cheap and available. If you get those at level 20 exactly, and I would get whatever you can find in the 18-22 range, you'll have 76% damage, 29% recharge, 29% end reduction and 32% to hit. Don't stress too much , you're going to slot over them at 22 anyway.

For 3-slotted resist powers, go two Res/End and one Res (35% and 35%, roughly, with level 20 enhancements)- for 4-slotted add another resist to get to 50%.

At level 22 you will put SO's in everything. Maybe if you plan ahead you can get some level 25 or 26 end/res pieces (use two from different sets per power) and acc/dam pieces (again, two from different sets per power.)

While you're stressing about your damage and such, I recommend going to the Temp Power Store and grabbing Medpacks, Recovery Serums and, like, a baseball bat and pistol or something.

GOAL 2: the 20's and such. This is a much quicker sketch of Your Future. At some point you're going to want to respec or switch builds, because I did some short-term things with slotting up there.

I'd devote the 20's and 30's to (mostly) defense and capping smash/lethal. You're going to slowly, slowly develop serious damage (KO Blow and Footstomp are two of the most brutal powers in the game.) When you get to 30-ish you can think about full frankenslotting and when you get to the 40s you can think about Your Build At Level 50.

Quick suggestion-
24- Invincibility
26- Resist Physical
28- Rage
30- Tough Hide
32- Unstoppable
35- Weave
38- Foot Stomp

... I left out Taunt. It's true. I'm a scrapper at heart.

When does he have time to play if he is so devoted?

This is my thought exactly. It sounds to me like the only kind of person who would be interested in this book is the kind who wants to engage in some extreme shortcuts to getting to the end of the game. (Which, by the way, is rather pointless, since as almost any City of Heroes player will tell you, the fun is in the journey to 50. Once you actually hit level 50, most players get quite bored with those characters.)

The problem is, the demographic that this guide is targeted at would be much better served by asking questions here, glancing at some of the archetype forums, and reading a few articles on the wiki. It would be significantly faster than reading this guide, and the information would be orders of magnitude more current and relevant. As a bonus, you don't waste $30.

I've always felt that in the age of the Internet, having these paid guides are silly. I really just don't get why one guy thinks he's smarter than over a hundred thousand players, many of which are willing to freely share their hard-won knowledge and information. But hey, whatever, if he can convince people to pay $30 for his guide and make some money at it, more power to him I guess. Still, as a player, I just can't imagine exactly what it is he thinks he has to offer over the resources already mentioned several times. I'd trust pretty much anyone who has posted in this thread--veterans of the game who have been here for over six years and who have proven their mettle repeatedly--over some guy I've never heard of who wants me to pay him $30. Sounds like snake oil to me.

Why, because he's "the world's foremost expert in the Dark Melee/Dark Armor Scrappers"!

Seriously, isn't he breaking some kind of truth in advertising laws with this nonsense?

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

Can you prove he isn't? j/k

I am the foremost expert on the best way for me to enjoy playing City of Heroes though. There can be none who deny that.

ummm, just cause he solo'd 3 dark scrappers DOES not make him an expert in all the powerset combos, so i doubt his "guide" has a lot of useful info. Honestly if you've got a question ask us on the forums, yeah you might get 1 or 2 trolls but most of us are happy enough to lend our help when its needed/wanted. I'd rather see a nice post asking for suggestions/help then some of the more recent posts like "i want to be thanked for sb every time i use it on you".

Also from sounds of things this guide really has no useful info for the current state of play, if hes spending time with his family he won't be playing on CoX now would he?

Save your cash, ask us in the forums, join your servers main chat channels, but ultimately HAVE FUN on your preferred toon. Yes getting to 50 can be a grind but its not about that, its about the journey and not how quick you can make 50 (i have a lvl 15 that's been that way for over 10 months cause i have altitus lol)

*walks away mumbling about making a new concept toon*

Fulmens, as you probably know, many, if not most veteran Invul tanks would disagree with your recommendation to take Tough pre-20 and delay Invincibility. Not only does Invinc provide as much (or more, depending on circumstances) damage mitigation as Tough, it covers more damage types than S/L. Invinc also has a significantly lower endurance cost than Tough, which is particularly relevant in those last few pre-Stamina levels.

But getting back to the OP's request, IMO his desire to upgrade his Invul tank points up the weakness of relying on a guidebook for such information. For one thing, if it's as out-of-date as it seems to be, any info on Invulnerability is unlikely to include information on the buffs the set received some time ago.

And it's even more unlikely that the guidebook will have the kind of up-to-date, detailed, and nuanced information you could get on how to build a Invul tank by simply asking the denizens of the Tanker forum. I spend a lot of time in the Tanker forum, and people ask for, and get, build assistance literally every day. I'm sure it works the same way in the other AT forums.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

Although Brawl Indexes were a perfectly acceptable stepping stone to figuring out how the powers actually worked, among its many faults is that its a pain in the neck to do pencil and paper calculations with them. Power Bolt is a scale 1.0 attack. Life is good. Its a 2.7778 Brawl Index attack. That sucks. All those repeating decimals in the Brawl Index were due to the fact that Brawl is a scale 0.36 attack, which meant in effect almost all attack powers were having their damage divided by some multiple of 9 when converted to Brawl numbers.

This was so obvious that the actual maintainers (at least, some of them to my recollection) of the Brawl Indexes realized - or rather assumed - that the devs were clearly either in love with setting powers to a multiple of 100/36, or it was Brawl itself that was set to some multiple of 36/100. The scale system then made it obvious which was which.