How to survive being sidekicked to L50?

Unless a Willpower armor melee character is really built out with I/Os these high level steamroller teams will always be tough, even when you're 50. I have run a Willpower brute at 50, built for fun, rather than off tanking. I had to judge very carefully when to be in with the first wave of attackers. -and I was running the two extra fighting toggles. (for me it was so much end, why not?)

I have also taken A willpower tank to the other extreme and softcapped to all damage. Wow. Even in giant ugly melees versus AVs he would just stand there, might as well have been in AP. He even tanked Lord Recluse once, and that guy hits over the softcap, one of the few exceptions in the game. I pulled him to the cubby door for 5 minutes while team killed towers. Never even used inspirations, but of course he didnt notice my dage either. we just stood there agro-ing each other and making ineffectual combat motions.

Or just play an Archery character.

That bonus accuracy is delicious!

It was particularly confusing to me because the leader of a recent team of 50s was a dual pistols blaster, and he was jumping in and taking every alpha as a matter of course. My old--and clearly outdated--notions of the limitations of blasters was perhaps doing me a disservice in terms of setting my expectations for what I could survive or achieve as part of this team. "Well if he can just jump right in as a blaster, then I should be able to join him and survive just as well!" I couldn't have been more wrong.

Then you sort of have your build choices at odds with your desired play style.

You have a bit more HP than a scrapper, but if you're not building with tough, etc, you're not taking advantage of the brute's higher resist caps, so the difference is going to be minimal. We're talking the difference between having accolades and not having accolades minimal. And if you're not building with Weave, maneuvers, etc for Def, then you're definitely not optimized for +4/x8. I bet you'd be fine soloing at +2x5 though. Which is substantially harder than the old "invincible" setting.

So if you really want to play at +4/x8, and you're on a willpower, you need to be running in the 30s on s/l defense at a minimum (possibly e/ne as well). And you will need something like tactics or focused accuracy or a lot of acc slotted to handle the 5 level difference. Do you have the kismet +acc yet? It never goes above level 30 so might as well slot it now, it's not like you'll get a 50th level version of it later. =)

Still are effective. I bet that if you swap them out with 50s you'll find the difference is less than 1 extra set bonus.

My fire/shield brute is mostly decked out with level 20-36 serendipity and one set of mid-30s luck of the gambler. She can run most stuff at +4/x8 but I don't normally bother because I don't consider it fun, that just adds grind by making things take longer to defeat, they still act the same. I could replace her IOs with better ones, but all she really needs is more recharge. So I haven't bothered.

My elec/elec brute went with capped melee as an experiment and she's runnning mid-30s titanuim armors. Her touch of death attack sets are level 40, and so are her oblits. If I moved up to level 50 resist sets, her defense would be the same, and her resists would move a smidge. Not enough for me to bother with it since she also runs standard at +2x8.

Check in Mids, you might not "need" to upgrade when you hit 50. Then again, it might make a huge difference on your build, I dunno. But it's worth checking.

Rather than take the alpha, hit the fringes. Especially on Arachnos. Get those Mu Guardians and Adepts, the Tarantula Mistresses, and the fortunatas. Especially if you want to play like a scrapper rather than a tank. Hunting down these guys will make hte spawns easier to defeat, plus they hang back while the rest charge in. So while you're fighting them you're not being overwhelmed by all the riff-raff.

In all honesty I don't.

But I sometimes find myself on these teams that do and was wondering where my understanding of the game was failing me. I think I was merely underestimating the impact of the higher difficulty settings. Unfortunately, I get the feeling from some of the team chat that anything less than +4/x8 is deemed unworthy of their time, as if only amateurs play at lower settings. Which is fine except I always knew CoH as a game where playing smartly trumped slotting (unlike other MMOs in which having top-tier gear means everything). I am learning quite a bit about how the game has pushed its own boundaries, here and there, over time, and consequently how my understanding has become outdated.

As I've stated in a previous thread, I prefer to play "casually", which is to say I don't want to obsess over min-max builds. I'm willing to investigate set IOs a little, but I'm not interested in becoming an expert, as it were. If that means I'll always be woefully outclassed at the insane difficulty settings then I'm actually okay with that, and I'll just try to avoid those teams in the future.

It's a shame it seems most things heavily resist lethal damage. At least on +4/x8 teams, your archer can be a practice butt for the enemy and vengeance bait for your team.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I didn't see a link to the Purple patch explanation above, so there it is.

Assuming the level 50 characters had at least their Tier 3 Alphas slotted, then at +4/x8 they were fighting enemies at +3 levels to them, while you were fighting +5. As you can see from the numbers, that's a pretty big difference.

Run into the middle of a spawn and /em dance.

There's no reason not to hang back a bit and soak XP. At +2 or more, mobs are +3 or more to your level. It can be hard on any toon to deal with a max spawn of +3 or more.



This too.

Yeah, but weapon redraw sucks! (playing Beam Rifle now )

I'm one of those 50s who will invite any level to join the team. However, I provide free T3 barrier and speed boost to members. The following temps may help:
- Kinetic dampner: if for some reason, the mobs ignore the 50 or the 50 agro caps, turn on when getting too much agro.
- Recovery serum
- Stun grenade: use with too much agro
- Smoke flash: use with too much agro

Bring lucks and insight. You may want to slot a Kismet +Acc if you join 50+ teams often. Pop 1 or 2 lucks and insights and bang away. If you are getting too much agro, just run around the corner to break line of sight. Kill any that follow. If there are less than 20 in the mob, and the 50 has a dmg aura, you can try hiding withing the dmg aura. The aura should keep the mob's attention on the 50. However, if the mob does AoE on the 50, you are caught too...

As the leader, I don't expect lowbies to do as good a job as an actual 49. I just want to provide lowbies a team to join.

Or you're just playing with elitist jerks. Basically there's a lot of epeen contests out there in any game. City's version are the people who you've just described. I also run into the occasional one who's like "BAF Forming PM with AT and if you're not +3 don't bother". Honestly, they're not the majority, and they're not right. If that's fun for them, great, but it's not what the game assumes, it's not what most people are doing, and it's not the only way to have fun.

In other words, don't conform to them, play the way you want to play, form your own groups, and you'll start to collect a group of global friends with similar play style over time.

Can't get that outclassed. I have yet to meet anyone worse than me at making builds and I can manage to do ok. Plus, you just post a crappy build and ask for help and usually a few days later you have a functional one.

I really should do that more often actually...

I think you said "you" when you really meant "I".

Proper inspiration management is important. Spamming them willy-nilly gives results on par with what you'd expect if you spammed your powers randomly - it can work, provided the opposition isn't strong enough or your own team is tough enough, but given harder situations you might indeed need to use your brains a little.

Only in terms of perception, not actual effectiveness of the attack. The redraw animation is taken into account when the attack is fired off, and the firing animation is shortened by the same time that the weapon draw animation takes. If the weapon is already drawn, the full animation will play.

The end result is, if the perscribed animation time for an attack is 2.3 seconds, it will take 2.3 seconds regardless of whether the weapon is drawn or not.

No. I meant "you". In the generic and non-specific sense. Not YOU as in "You, Nihilii"

Granted, some of this depends on the team and the speed at which they're burning through, but in some cases you still aren't going to be able to carry enough inspies AND pick up enough during the course of a fight to remain consistently useful from entry to exit.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Touché.

Nope, this is false. It used to be bandied around as a truth but the Devs discovered they were wrong about it (BaBs and Castle tried to fix it I think but it broke lots of other things)

Powers with "baked in" weapons like Fire Swords it is true, but any set where you pick a weapon model you can suffer from redraw.

Ummm can you provide link to what you are stating... since what was stated with redraw and animations was accurate from what I can vaguely recall...
Either way both need to be confirmed otherwise it a he said she said issue

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

This is very sound advice, and I will definitely follow it from now on. I will note, however, that it doesn't always work as well as might be expected.

I was on a team doing L50 Hero tips the other day and everyone was scattered around the map taking on +4 Arachnos mobs on their own. I didn't know who to pick as mamma bird, and since no one was a tank, there was no obvious choice. All of these players were exceptionally good at drawing aggro, but none of their toons were particularly effective at keeping it. Letting them take the alpha was one thing, but avoiding the swarm that inevitably followed became the next survival issue that I wasn't equipped to cope with. Rather than just quit the team, I followed the team leader around and kept a safe distance from most of the enemies, picking one-on-one fights with lieuts here and there on the periphery of each combat. This strategy "worked", but it wasn't very glamorous.

Picking one on one was the right idea. I think wading in when you're worried about being overwhelmed could be as simple as maybe turning off any damage/taunt aura type powers and avoid using your aoes when surrounded by more mods than you think you can handle. As a brute you dont have inherent guantlet like tankers do so that might mitigate some of your inadvertent aggro drawing.

Not when your self rez deals damage :P

I dont do teams that are + anything if I have the option for it. Kill speed is too slow and its actually worse xp/inf over time than if they are +0 to you. The teams would have to be so optimized to the point where the purple patch didnt matter then I would do it.

I don't think these guys do it for the xp/inf. They are 50 (+x) toons, set-IOed up the butt, and probably sitting on 2B infl on-hand plus whatever they can leave sitting in Wentworth's. They seem to be in it purely for the challenge of +4/x8.