Top 10 Most Useful Game Elements People Never Use

Originally Posted by Lemur Lad

That's because you're anti-SG and anti-base Sam, trust me, you're not the norm.

You choose not to use a game system? That's fine. However look at the thread title.

As you said, you've been here years. If you'd chosen to, you could have learned about them easily. You're a smart guy. However you chosing not to use it for reasons of your own doesn't detract a whit from their usefulness. Just puts this on the list of things you're willfully ignorant of.

Originally Posted by Dementor_NA

An ongoing discussion of very useful game elements in City of Heroes that people don't use, don't know about, or don't appreciate enough.

1. Empowerment Buffs.
For the price of three pieces of salvage (two common, one uncommon) you get a full hour of a buff of your choice from the Empowerment Altar in your Supergroup Base. Your dominator still 3 LotG's away from perma-dom? No problem, get a 20% boost to your attack rate for pennies. You have issues with endurance below 20? The Empowerment Altar can grant a recharge rate boost as well.

The altar also grants bonuses to resistance of various damage types, and even protection from unusual and annoying effects like knockback and endurance drain.

Somebody cranking up the price of Demon Blood today? No problem, each buff has three recipes, one for each salvage tier!

2. Confusion
In the category of "Something people don't appreciate enough", I hear all the time people complaining about confused creatures "stealing exp." This is true to a point, but the math behind how confused creatures' damage effects the rewards gained at the defeat of an enemy means you won't get a better deal on exp/time than pitting confused enemies against each other.

Think of it this way: Say it would take you 30 seconds to defeat monster X with your normal rate of damage. That's too long! Lets enlist monster Y to help us out by confusing him: You and monster Y both wail on X and it takes you half the time to defeat the enemy, so about 15 second.

But wait, Monster Y dealt half the damage! Now he steals half the exp, right? Nope. Monster Y only steals 20% of the exp, you get a full 80% Do you see what just happened there? Your exp/time just went up by 60%

Let's say you're fighting really tough critters, and your damage is just piddling compared to theirs: in this situation, Monster Y deals a full 90% of the damage! Well, surely you'll get a piddling percentage of the rewards, right? Wrong. You get a full 30% from a mob a confused creature dealt 90% of the damage to. It would have taken you ten times as long to kill this guy by yourself, which means by using confuse here your exp/time went up 200%! That's three times as much exp as normal. Unless you're facing enemies you can one-shot kill, confusion is ALWAYS a bargain.

Add the fact that confusion is a hard control: confused monsters will not attack you. Even better, confused monsters will actually turn around and buff you if they have buffing powers. Confusion is, quite frankly, overpowered. However, the intense misunderstanding of how it works by the playerbase have kept is fairly safe from the nerfbat all these years.