Solo stinks

Originally Posted by TheShattered

Make soloing easier by picking your fights carefully. For example, Carnies are pure evil if you don't have some sort of hold. Rikti can be a pain for melee because of Drone squads. PPD Swat Ghosts are also to be watched out for.

My advice is to be sure of what you're going to face. The enemies in CoX are diverse enough that you can't just launch a few attacks and be done with them unless you're built for that sort of thing. Which is of course, the main point.

If you plan to solo often, the plan a solo build. I've never played a Dark/Fire Brute, but all i know is that it isn't something i've heard often being used as a solo build.

Also, from other posters, gaining XP takes quite a while longer than the previous levels that 'a level a day' is exactly that. Or at least, it has been for me. More often 'a level and a bit in about 6 hours in a team' ..

Originally Posted by Jade_Dragon

Altitis, my friend. Give in, we all have.

Maybe it's me, but I don't have trouble soloing anything in this game. I don't have any trouble levelling every two or three days on the majority of my characters, in the 20s and 30s. When I get up into the 40s, it's noticable, I can get 1/3 to 1/2 of a bar that represents 1/10 of my way to the next level. It can be kind of jarring to go from filling the bar 3 times in a session to seeing it only barely move.

You've just got to accept it. That's the way RPGs are, as you reach the higher levels you get less progress for more effort. That's how they pull you in, the levels come easily when you are developing your character and concept, and then once your character becomes complete and more balanced in its capabilities you have to work harder and harder to get any stronger. A large part of it is that you are nearing the limits of what the game system can handle, once you hit 95% of the time, and are missed 95% of the time and take only 5% of the damage when you are hit, there is little else the game can do to make you any better.

At least this game isn't like some, that make you gain 10 more levels and do raids for several months, repeatedly, in order to gain about 5% in some stat. And it really is unique that you can just create yet another character, even on a server you have another character on, up to 12 more times, and even more if you pay for some more slots.

I'll also add that maybe you aren't as balanced as you believe yourself to be. You speak about the defensive characteristics of your character being past the ED limits (and you have IOs at this level, which suggests to me that your effort required is more than just levelling) yet you don't seem to mention your offensive capability. At 32 you should have a very balanced Brute built more for damage, the levels at which you were concentrating on defense in order to survive building Fury should have passed in the 20s.

Maybe you should switch out some of those IOs for more damage and recharge, instead of trying to cap defense so early. Especially with the changes to Fury, you can't leverage defense for that max Fury any more.

'Nuther quick point, another advantage of altitis is that Patrol XP really smooths over the levelling curve and lessens the frustration of dying. It's still frustrating, of course, but at least as long as you have Patrol XP left you know your progress won't be slowed any. It's simple enough to just play a character until you have no more Patrol XP, and then switch to another that is still full up.