Powers and preconceptions...

Why am I posting this? I wish I knew or had a good reason. It just kind of made me do a double take in the game while playing. so here it is.

The last two nights in a row while playing I ran into team mates that were surprised about their own powers. One person attempted to "help" another player on the full team of 8 by casting fences on a full spawn. The two were off on their own and one had aggroed then realized he was alone so began running away to lose aggro. Things should have been fine. I jumped down to make sure things went okay and then suddenly the electric controller casts fences on the spawn, begins to run and uses the jolting chain (the knock down one I forget the name). while running in a circle around the spawn he is shot to hell as soon as they all stand up. He asked why the person aggroed then didn't fight the reply was that the team wasn't all there yet so he ran to shed aggro and wait. Someone said they were surprised the controller hadn't used Static field and that they obviously didn't take it.

The controller replied "A sleep on a team? are you serious!?" then it was explained to him that it was a pulsing sleep and not a normal one time only sleep effect. The controller said "oh. I might respec into it then". Someone else chimed in with "Read your powers man".

Now this got my attention because I have a troller with the power and honestly it comes in very handy even when there is so much aoe DOT that it never sleeps anything. I stack it with my aura and things go to zero endo fast. I don't believe that it is the end all power nore that everyone would or should like or take it but I thought it was rather funny that the person simply saw the word "sleep" in the power and passed it up as useless. Heck even in this situation a normal sleep would have saved himself and anyone else near by.


The second incident was two fold. Our team leader was a demons/pain MM and we were doing paper missions in cap. My brute dinged 20 and two people on the team said "gratz on 20 now you can finally leave the Isles." I was stunned for a moment then replied "Why would I want to do that?" the answer was "Easier to find a team, faster leveling and." I was on virtue with the brute. I explained the the night before at 1AM virtue was in the red while freedom was still yellow. I had gotten on a team after one broadcast and dinged 7 levels in 4 missions (from 12 to 19). Now of course this isn't always the case but honestly I have no problems getting villain teams nor with leveling speed, should I be looking to level fast.

Then I noticed that our leader, the mastermind, was doing missions on -1 diff. It dawned on me that this person just had very different experiences villain side than I had, which would be expected. However he had just assumed that his experiences and conclusions were the truth for the rest of the players on villain side. He kept trying to argue with me which was odd because I wasn't trying to convince him of anything in fact I told him I had plenty of heroes and that the real difference for me was not liking to zone hop and having to do half a TF before getting my contacts phone number etc. I explained that it was just a personal preference and that many people like hero side and that's fine. I just thought that expecting everyone would ditch red side to go blue, just because of his own experiences and opinions was rather odd.

To top it off when he exited the second mish he exclaimed, "Wow, suppress pain is a toggle? I thought it was just a copy of Recovery aura..."

Yet another case of "Read your powers".

Then there was the time I was on a team with a blaster, level 25, and the blaster told me "I don't ever take aim or build up because I don't like those temporary powers that don't last."

That's a whole other thread though.

Yep, there is a very wide variety of knowledge level when it comes to this game. The forumites tend to have very good knowledge, but there can be a whole host of misconceptions ingame. I guess its just what to expect with such a casual game as CoH. Very few take the mechanics of it that seriously. :-)

Still, I would echo the "read you powers" :P

This whole thread smacks of Bill Engvall and "Here's your sign"

Wait someone had the AOE immob in the lower levels?

I never take the Aoe Immob on lower levels because I've never found it useful.

Although In Prea there were several moments where I thought "you know that Aoe Immob would've been handy here."

Sleep is easily the worst power of any kind in the game. When solo it is situational and may save your bacon every once in a while but on teams? I agree with the Controller who said it's useless. Because it *is* totally useless on teams. Better off taking Leadership or something instead.

I'll just do a quick post about reading powers.

I know most of my friends that I've teamed with for years and I see that they made an elec controller/dom and I mention that they should get the sleep power. All of them said, "it's a sleep" (paraphrasing)....then I explain to them what it does and they change to "ooh I might get that then."

It is quite easy to 'skip' over powers even when you're a "veteran" in the game. When I got into the CB of i18/GR and I was going through the descriptions I was like, "sleep, skip..." then after I read the other powers, I went back and actually read the description and was like, "ooooh...that might be nice."

So it can happen to anyone.


Oh and I've been on a villain team a few months ago where it was a team of 5 or so and doing missions in the RWZ and there was a stalker in the team. He was a /Regen Stalker and noticed he kept getting held/stunned/etc from the Rikti mobs and then looked at his powers. Oh look he doesn't have his mez protection power o_O

I send him a tell and asked why he didn't have the mez protection power and he said something along the lines of, "didn't think it was useful (or didn't know it helped against mezzes)." I explained that if he got it he wouldn't get held/etc as much/at all. He then said he'd pick it up later on.

But then in that same team, that same Stalker would run into a group of mobs that we just started to attack and he'd use Whirlwind on them....then he died usually.... yeah.....