Abandoning the Rogue Isles.

Uhhhh. The times I do play on heroside, the heroes are so incredibly STUPID and don't know how to play that I can only stand staying blue for a couple hours a week.

And grouping redside is not a problem. Use /sea

Now see if you didn't specify, I woulda sworn you were talking about villains.

The only thing I wanna do is get my widow to 20 so I can get the hell outta there come GR, and so far I've made it to level 10. About 8 hours after creation.

The only decent team finding areas are Cap, Sharkhead, and Nerva. The rest are just a bunch of players who don't actually know what they're doing. I guess they're playing villains to fill a quota or something.

Not to mention the enemy groups. Pretty much all it is is Circle of Thorns, Arachnos, and Longbow. It's like they took the **** no one wanted and said "Here you go, you guys can have these, we don't want them."

Sure, you can find a freakshow mission every now and then, only it's being choked by the endless stream of arachnos.

Maybe villains will be more playable once some heroes join it.

Course maybe that's right in there with "Maybe pvp will be good again" in the wishful thinking department.

I join/start PuGs in Villains quite frequently (all level ranges), and while there are at times those who don't know the game or their powers very well, on the whole everybody does a good job and has fun. Perhaps it's because there aren't people like... uh, erm... um... certain people don't play Villains.

I think that's a big part of it, actually. There's a certain degree of the community that will always exist blueside that won't exist redside due to the fact that villains are often played as ... well villains. I tend to solo with many characters so it will be interesting to see how everything transpires for those who primarily team.

But we're not talking about abandoning Paragon City and going to the Rogue Isles.

Quality gameplay? Here's a standard day for one of my Doms:

Dom: Gee this story arc sure is fun, I'm busting heads and making a name for myself!
PToD EB: Maniacal laugh.
Dom: Well crap. Has it been 3 days since my last auto-complete?

Granted, many EB's are soloable by a Dom if you carry the right inspirations and know what you're doing. Or have a tricked out build. Or are superbly lucky. Or all of the above. I used to regard them as a challenge. But after so long of slogging through arc after arc of them, I'm just sick of it.

Paragon City will be a nice home for my Doms I think. There are EB's there too, I know. But there are also 9 billion crazed scrappers I get to use as cannon fod-, um, I can team with and make the whole thing just so much simpler.

Move.... villains... to blueside?...? Bwahahahaha.

Why on EARTH would I do that? So I can do stuff like, oh say NOT run Technician Naylor's arc so I CAN run the stunning wonders embodied by the Janet Kellum arc? [am aware these contacts are in two different level ranges, just sayin'.]

You mean I should be planning on NOT clearing out Mole Point Bravo so I CAN defeat a whole base full of Crey, then kill 45 Crey, then kill another base fulla Crey, then hunt 45 more Crey, then go to a third base full of Crey.... ad nauseum.... This sounds like an excellent idea! How. About. No.

The markets have been merged, or will be in a few days and I keep people blueside because I have many friends who, for some unknown reason, vastly prefer the blandness and repetition of blueside contacts. If I tried to move my villains over there I would have to sleep with one [virtual] eye open. Some of those folks are short-tempered

Merits.

Here's the funny thing, though: my villains have many more merits than my heroes.

They have them because my villains will happily run contact mishes, while my heroes will do almost anything but run them, because killing 45 Crey/Freaks/Council/you name it every other mission gets so old, I can't even tell you. Defeat all! Then hunt. Defeat all! then hunt. Defeat all yet again! Then another hunt....

I forget which contact it is, I think its one of the Talos contacts has you clear out a succession of Tsoo warehouses. In a row. One right after another. And those are big warehouses.

Whoever thought that arc up needs a Doc Marten to the shin. Repeatedly.

In a few weeks, it won't matter. With Going Rogue you'll be able to switch to whichever side you prefer to be on regardless of where you started.

As for the Rogue Isles being dead, at least on Virtue where I play, at any given time there are roughly twice as many heroes online as villains. And it's pretty much always been that way. The idea behind this thread is the notion that of those that currently play redside, mostly they play there because of the ATs and not for any other reason. Thus all these people will wholesale abandon redside in favor of Paragon City where the grass is allegedly greener.

I don't know about the grass, but certainly the beaches are cleanear. I mean, go take a look at Grandville's coastline sometime. What a dump!

So you're just not a really a good Dom player? I'm asking because I cannot think of one EB that I ever had to auto complete a mission for with my fire/fire dom. And he's using mostly common IOs. All the EBs I have fought are +1 to me and I even smacked down Back Alley Brawler(sorry BABs...but you had it comin'). I play solo most of the time.

How is doing it with a Dom much worse than doing it with a blaster?

I'm not saying it's a cakewalk for every EB...but that sounds kinda whiny. Use inspirations. It's not like you really need them for most of the rest of the mission.

I love inspirations, I can have yours since you really don't need them?

Lisa-Needs all the inspirations she can get..especially purple ones

The blueside arcs and TFs may be longer and more boring, but they pay better. Level a hero to 50 and a villain to 50 running arcs and doing TFs in your level range and the hero will have substantially more merits. I view 50 as both the destination and the start of a new journey, so when I get there I like to have more chips to cash in.

I'm not ridiculing your choice. If there were no rewards I would much rather run content as good as the redside arcs.

Same merits per minute both side.

With Going Rogue, you will be able to start in Paragon City, the Rogue Isles, or a new area called Praetoria. If you start in Paragon or the Isles, you will be limited to the appropriate character archetypes. If you start in Praetoria, you will be able to choose any Archetype you like.

Praetoria is all new content for levels 1 through 20. By the time you get to Level 20, you will have made certain morality choices which will determine if you become a hero (and go to Paragon City) or a Villain (and go the Rogue Isles).

If you have an existing Hero or Villain (or start a new one in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles) and want to switch sides, you will need to wait until level 20. At level 20, you can begin to run morality missions that will help you to adjust your level. It's meant to be a gradual transition. It is not designed to be used as "Today I am a hero! Today I am a villain!", just at the flip of a switch.

There is actually a transitional "alignment" in between the shift. If you are Hero turning into a Villain, you will first become a Vigilante. From there you can become a Villain.

If you are Villain trying to redeem yourself to become a hero, you first become a Rogue, and from there can continue to redeem yourself to become a Hero.

The advantage of Vigilantes and Rogues is that they can visit both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. You can join teams on both sides, but you can only get contacts on one side. Vigilantes can get contacts in Paragon, and Rogues can get them in the Rogue Isles.

Note: I am not in the beta. All of the above is based on my own understanding of how things will work based on various information that has been made public by the developers. As it is my own understanding, it may not be 100% accurate, but if so, someone should be along shortly to correct me and tell me I'm a moron. Please note, they may be just as wrong as I am unless their name is in Red.

Now, about whether or not you should be worrying about whether or not to leave the Rogue Isles, I would wait 10 more days and see what happens. If you actually read through the thread, there are going to be quite a few people moving toons TO the villain side. The Villain side has always been quieter than the hero side. Part of this has to do with the fact that City of Heroes was out well before City of Villains. By the time it came out, people had established themselves on the Heroside and could easily give new alts a boost with money to get em started (as of the release of Going Rogue and Issue 18 this will no longer be a barrier. Even without the expansion, you will be able to send cash back and forth between your heros and villains). Another part is that some people just find the Rogue Isles dark and dreary. They prefer the bright and shining streets of Paragon City. It's a matter of preference.

A large part is also that there are a lot more zones and a lot more content on the Blue side. This is ironic since a lot of people (I said a LOT not ALL, so if you don't do this I am not talking about you) completely ignore the content and just run radio missions.

For me, I find the Blue Side content to be much more time consuming and that there are lot more "filler" quests in the chains. For example, go to your contact...pick up the mission...go talk to some content at the far side of a zone 3 zones away...go back to your contact cause you can't call em yet...pick up a mission.... go back to the zone you just came from 3 zones away, to the far side of the zone, and kill 45 of some random NPC group...go back to your contact (cause you still can't call em yet)...

With fewer zones you don't see that on the villain side. Of the 7 Red Side Zones, 5 of them are accessible from one ferry. The other two are both directly accessible from Cap au Diable (Port Oakes through a separate ferry, and Mercy Island through the Black Helicopter). For this reason, even if you DO have to go to another zone on the Villain side, you are never more than 2 hops away. These numbers exclude PvP and Co-Op zones, but the maximum number of hops to get from ANY zone to ANY of those zones is only 3, and that assumes that you are in either Mercy Island or Port Oakes. If you are anywhere else, you can get literally anywhere in 2 hops.

And yes, I know the blue side can use base teleporters. The Red Side can too. The difference is, on the Blue Side they are almost a requirement in order to get around quickly.

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

1. Blasters need not ever deal with the PToD. Not ever. Not once.

2. Fire/fire is a special case. Fire/fire is very heavy on the damage, esp. if playing a blaster. I admit to never having played a fire/fire Dom, but level a Mind/energy Dom to 50 and then get back to me. Have fun with those PToD btw. They're a blast, and I speak from experience.

I am confused. Your argument here seems to be that because a Blaster doesn't have Control powers... that the Triangles don't exist. Blasters can then freely wail on EBs and kill them with their damage? A Dominator, though it does have control powers... will still deal its damage no matter what the amount of Status Protection an EB has... same as a Blaster. I guess I must be missing something?

Saving multiple realities or being the hired stooge of a trainee mad scientist.

HARD CHOICE!

Dominators deal the same damage as Blasters?

I was about to ask the same question. Add in the pretty hefty dominator damage buff that was given recently and I can't see what the point of his argument really is.

Maybe mind/energy is an especially difficult combo to level. But then again, there are many available combos for doms. So what is actually the issue then?