at what level do you view the game - spawn, mission, arc, character?

as a blaster I saw the game spawn by spawn. Each one was a real fight that I had to pay attention to.

as a stalker I skipped whatever spawns I wanted and focused on the overall mission.

In task forces each mission is a blur and I am focused on just getting the whole thing over.

I never focus on a character. I don't have long term goals. Don't plan builds, etc.

Most of my play is in teams where the missions don't matter, they aren't arcs. So it really is spawn by spawn. Missions are just an a way to get to more spawns.

how about you?

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I plan out every character to excess. Including characters I never play. And then I completely ignore the plan as I go along, rarely getting to the point of IOing, and often picking powers I'd have not planned to.

With my current character, a StJ/EA Stalker, I've been running many things solo. SSA, Oz TFs, Tips, and all sorts of other things, absolutely SMASHING anything that dares get in my way. I've ran a few TFs/Trials, when I can get on them, but monitoring the /help channel for them being started always results in me doing a grand total of nothing for a play session.

In combat, I'm often thinking of the current spawn. If there's a major threat, then that often trumps the group, and I adjust tactics accordingly. When on a team that's just steamrolling? Unless I'm on a Dom/Troller or Def/Corr, I'll basically just be in 'scrapper lock' mode and kill anything that moves (and many things that don't).

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As a Scrapper, I saw a breakdown of the group. Herd the melee over next to the ranged to get them all in the cone, blow Build Up and burn down the debuffer quickly, and FFS get a hold on the sapper pronto.

As a Mastermind, I saw the group as a series of dangers and counters. Boss runners can't be finished quickly, call off your minions when they flee and catch them when they come back. Grab the aggro from an AoE enemy and stand away from the group, you've just reduced the damage they do by 90%. Drop your debuffs on the biggest group of enemies and immediately queue up a heal to patch up after the alpha. It was surprisingly tactical for an MMO.

As a Blaster, I saw each group as a serious threat. Imagining each contingency, planning for possible complications, waiting those endless seconds for Rest to come off cooldown so I could go into combat without risking instant death. Being a Blaster was very binary, either you kill it or it kills you, there's no long, drawn out tactical battle with you weaving combos of buffs and debuffs to overcome incredible odds. Just very quick pulls or very long walks.

As a Stalker, I saw each group as a combination of hard and soft targets. Open up and pick off the hard targets with AS, then slog your way through the softer ones, using the new and improved AS to one shot them as it comes back up. If a group is too threatening, just ignore them. The world isn't very dangerous when you're a Stalker.



I always plan a build at around level 40, then burn a vetspec at 50 and get into my endgame build. Before that I usually don't know enough about the AT and power sets to make an effective build. I enjoy the storylines though, while a lot of them are the generic "stop villain group A's generic villainy" there were a few, like the Freaklympics or the Crystal Thorns, that were really enjoyable.

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At creation I almost always put some thought into my characters background and motivations and before I play any character up to his/her teens I'll make a full Mids build for him/her and reference it when levelling up (I have too many characters and hate doing respecs to do it any other way)... I still need to respec now and then, due to learning better about the character during play...

At 32 I'll start IOing them out instead of using TOs/DOs/SOs - I dislike doing it sooner and don't see the point in denying the characters that advantage before they hit 50, so I never make builds that only work with with level 50 sets (at 47 I will ocasionally use a HO, though, and replace all my non-set level 35 IOs by level 50 ones, though I won't touch the set IOs).

So I always pay attention to all my characters, possibly from level 2 or 3 on.

Pre-trials I play mostly solo, and even when not solo I play only in pre-arranged duos (used to be trios a while back) that only play and level together and do the same arcs together.

So I always see a lot of the story (though by now I know most of it by heart and hardly ever read any of the old texts anymore).

There is some content I don't like as much, though: overly magic enemies in general, such as the non-DA Pantheon with their damned lts and the CoT with the stupid Oranbega maps (interesting, I really like fighting Tsoo who are also magical, although in a more martial-arts way)... So I hardly ever run those. There are arcs I might never have run in all these years playing! But I'm sure I went and read about that lore in the Wiki at some point... Then again, some arcs I will always run, especially blue side: I can't imagine not running Faultline, the Midnight Club, Croatoa, the RWZ and the two Praetorian-kicking arcs... Redside it's all the bank missions and RWZ mostly that I'd rather not miss (though I like getting the Mage-killer badge, too, just cause I dislike most mages so much).

My first character, first 50 and first incarnate is a formerly-squishy rad/rad defender who grew to his 40s without inventions (and hit 50 before I knew my way around making decent IO builds), so I was always very aware of mezzers (and later sappers, though I never worried TOO MUCH about them with my defender) in every group. I never learned, however, which enemies where tough due to high def (damned Rikti Drones) or to-hit debuff (CoT again), since hitting things with my rad was never a problem short of godmodes being used. As I played other characters, I started learning to pay attention to other stuff...

Most of the time I quickly (usually real quick, at a glance, after years of training) analyse every single spawn I'll attack, no matter what character I'm playing, to quickly remove threats/annoyances - and there are threats/annoyances for every character I have made to date:

• DE eminators that mess up my defenses and damage even on my tough chars;
• mez that shuts down my squishies;
• heavy psi or toxic damage dealers against meleers who have a hole against those damage types;
• sappers that can be a threat to all but a handful of my characters who can simply ignore them due to high drain resistance;
• tarantula mistresses and their cheating debuffs;
• things that summon other things who I'll feel obligated to defeat even though they give no xp (and are often annoying in their own merit like shield generators);
• Cimeroran healers undoing my damage (especially annoying when the other cims lock shields to make hitting and dealing that damage harder);
• CoT Ghost Lts and hurricane-toting Tsoo sorcerers messing up my to-hit;
• slow patches keeping some of my meleers away from their enemies;
• dangerous foes who heavily resist mez when mez is my primary form of mitigation (my plant dom, for instance, despises things that heavily resist confuse... especially those with an aura that grants such resistance);
• vengeful Nemesis Lts who must die last (and if possible all together with well placed AoE);
• bosses with god-modes who must be mezzed, knocked-down, hit with high DoT or just quickly damaged before they can turn their god-modes on to make me wait in boredom (or more likely move ahead and come back for them after a while);
• and I'm sure I could think of more if I tried...

The point is, if you play at least most of the content without cherry-picking the opposition, and especially if you do it solo or in a small team, there should be some things to pay attention to no matter what character you're playing with. Some are more common, some less, but they will eventually be there.

So I always pay attention to my opposition, no matter the level or character (it also makes the game more fun, for me)...

From all my characters (including the army that is being played but hasn't reached 50/incarnation yet and won't show in my signature), the only one who probably could get away with just jumping into every single spawn without looking first is my Illusion troller... He jumps in invisible and PA quickly takes care of things... Even in this particular case, it can still be less efficient to just jump into certain groups (for instance those with foes who ignore stealth and have mezzers, such as Rikti and Rularuu, possibly stopping me from using Fulcrum and my epic AoEs before PA reaches them), but it's hardly ever actually dangerous... Maybe my masterminds can be played without paying as much attention to the opposition... except when my pets decide to be dumb or there's a lot of AoE or damage patches flying around... Still, even in those cases I still pay attention to the spawns, just out of ingrained habit...

Damn... I always pay attention to everything! I feel OCD now!

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Playing CoH with Gestures

I play roughly "character-based" (in the roleplaying sense) and "story-based" in roughly equal parts.

When I say "roleplaying", I don't mean actual acting out my character with other players; rather, I mean I approach my characters as characters in a larger story/world. I don't do any kind of preplanning of characters, as in "here's where I want to be at level 50". I look at it the same way your "typical" comic book superhero/supervillain would go about it: "Whoa, I have superpowers! Let's see what I can do!" And then as I level the character I try to make it feel like a natural progression, with my character learning and improving as he/she goes along and gains experience. This sort of goes along with something I brought up recently in another thread: are the different powers within a power set all different powers, or are they all basically the same power being used in different ways? For example, the Fire Blast power set. Most of the powers all boil down to the same thing: flinging a ball of fire. You start out with one way to toss the fire around, and then as you gain more experience you figure out different ways to use that ball of fire. Throw a bunch of small balls. Combine those small balls into one bigger ball. Save up and charge that bigger ball into an even bigger ball that explodes when it hits, or simply hits harder. Focus that ball into a beam. And, assuming I haven't played with a particular power set before, I don't "look ahead" to see what's coming and think about how I'll use future powers. I try to approach it the same way my character would: "discovering" new ways to use his/her abilities.

Granted, this approach makes the most sense for Mutation origin characters (who spontaneously manifest their powers at some point) or Science/Magic origin characters who gain their powers via some kind of scientific or magical accident and suddenly find themselves with strange powers. Pre-planned Natural or Technology characters make more sense to me. A Natural origin character learns through training, and can plausibly know ahead of time what skills he'll learn in the future ("Once I've mastered this attack, I'll be ready to learn this other attack"). A Technology character can plan improvements to his devices/gadgets/power armor in advance. But even a Tech character can be "accidental", like the guy who finds an abandoned power suit and has to figure out how it works.

Storywise, I try to approach every mission as being "brand new" to the character I'm playing, even if I've already done it several times before on other characters. I try to look at it as each character playing out their own, personal storyline. To do that, I attempt to select different contacts whenever possible when a current contact wants to introduce me to somebody, so that every character follows a unique path.

Of course, I can get away with a lot of this because I play entirely solo (at least for now - I've only been playing since September 2011), so I'm not worried about being a liability in a group situation.

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