Ben_Arizona

My normal response: "I will help keep the team going. Healing will probably not be a major part of this."

Shockingly, most people who ask for a "healer" are perfectly happy with whoever can stave off a team wipe, as long as you're reasonably civil rather than throwing a temper tantrum over their choice of terminology.

I guess I should weigh in, because I'm sure everyone wants to hear another guy's feelings on the subject.

Web Grenade is fine. A lot of people underestimate 50% recharge debuff, but I like Webnade better than other blaster tier-1 immobs. I guess I've just never felt that as a blaster I had a shortage of single-target ranged attacks or that I wanted one that did extremely slow DOT.

Taser is fine. It has the same numbers as Energy Manipulation's Stun with a longer range and a faster animation. It's not an exciting power, but it's fine at what it does, and what it does is useful.

Smoke Grenade is mostly fine. The issue with Smoke Grenade is that it's a perfectly good power for what it is, but what it does is something specialized that most people don't care about. Targeting Drone and Cloaking Device both have the problem of being essentially marginal improvements on pool powers with little to distinguish them. Any one of them, in a more attractive set, would be considered "not bad, but skippable", but three such powers in one set is too many. TD and CD both need to be given an interesting and useful distinguishing feature. I don't think a damage boost from hiding on CD would be out of line; someone said it steps on stalkers' toes, but I don't feel it sufficiently intrudes on the stalker's niche to be a concern.

Trip Mine is fine. It is somewhat specialized, but can be worked with and usefully applied (and no, I don't mean "spend four minutes laying down a minefield before every fight" - one in the right spot can be a tremendous advantage.) It's not everyone's bag, but not every power has to be.

Time Bomb is bad. I love Devices, I want to like Time Bomb, but as stands it is essentially useless and not worth taking on any character. I hate saying that about any power, but as much as I've tried to justify Time Bomb, I have encountered one situation in the entire game where it has a practical function that Trip Mine does not duplicate and supercede, and even in that one situation it does not do very well. The "remote detonator" idea to trigger it early is a good one if it's technically feasible. "Stick the bomb to an enemy" is not a good one.

Gun Drone is a decent power but having an automatically-attacking pet is contrary to the playstyle encouraged by Cloaking Device, Smoke Grenade, and Trip Mine. It's not a bad power, I just don't like it.

Caltrops are great. Nobody has any complaints about Caltrops, or if they do they don't know what they're talking about.

tl,dr: CD and TD need to have something to distinguish them from glorified pool powers, Time Bomb needs serious work. With this done, the set will be fine, although leaning towards a play style not all blasters enjoy.

Edit: More thoughts about CD and Smoke Grenade. One thing that would make CD more appealing is simply to make it stealth radius 55 or greater and hence a proper invisibility power. Cloaking Device is presently the only non-pool non-temp stealth power that does not grant either proper invisibility, crits from concealment, or an AoE buff. An AoE buff is inappropriate to the power's theme, while crits from concealment are apparently a coding nightmare to add after the fact.
It could be said that if this is done, nobody will take Smoke Grenade. However, the fact is that people already don't take Smoke Grenade if they just want to sneak around with their Cloaking Device, since super-speed or a stealth IO does the job with much less hassle. Smoke Grenade is taken by people who want the to-hit debuff or want the unique niche benefits of -perception (sneaking past Rikti drones, clicking glowies without aggroing enemies, making room to Recall Allies in crowded areas on task forces). I wouldn't complain about a small boost to the to-hit debuff, but in general I don't think making Cloaking Device proper invisibility would have a major impact on the utility of Smoke Grenade.

I think I may have rumbled it, actually. The thing that changed recently was the release (and my installation) of Steam for Macintosh. The Macintosh version of Steam demands Universal Access enabled for its Steam Overlay nonsense, and (the important bit) I'm not sure it actually lets go of it even if you don't enable it when Steam asks you to. Each time I've had this problem it's been during a session where I'd launched Steam earlier and hadn't restarted the computer since, because I'd been checking Steam for new sales fairly regularly. I don't know if restarting the computer is required to clear this up or what, but when I reset the computer and went into COH without launching Steam earlier in the session it ran without a problem (so far, at least).

I had a bit of a lull from playing COH for a while, so I didn't spot the possible correlation until I had time to think about it. Further testing will be required to confirm the correlation but it seems at least somewhat plausible to me. For bonus comedy value (or depressing value) one of the things being sold through Steam is COH. As I understand Steam, someone who downloads COH through Steam will have to launch Steam to run it, and Steam appears to be incompatible with COH. Good job fellows!

I turned off all the new graphics options; I had thought it might be that because the game decided to automatically turn on Shiny New Shadows as a default for "performance graphics", but even with them all turned off this happens. I am usually running other programs (I play in a window; fullscreening isn't really an option for me), but it doesn't seem to matter whether or not I am, or what I'm running. Other programs do not suffer the same problem when I go into their windows, and the problem persists when I return to CoH.

Which instructions - the ones where I throw out my preferences (again), or the ones where I duplicate my test client (which also has the same problem)?

I mean, I don't mind throwing out my preferences again if it'll actually fix the bug, but I want to make sure I'm actually addressing the issue at hand.

Edit: I realize that sounds a little more snarky than I meant it. Basically I'm asking to make sure this is actually the advice you meant to give, since it seems to be aimed at an unrelated issue.

I love Power Of The Phoenix. I'm more friendly to rez powers than most players on the boards seem to be (yeah, you want to avoid people dying, but eventually something will go wrong) and not only is PotP a pretty good rez, the PotP/RotP animation is pretty much my favorite in the game.

I have the same problem (or a very similar one) and following this recommendation has had no effect on it.

More specifically: mousing over things that normally react on mouseover (buttons changing size, enhancements in inventory showing their names, menus highlighting) does not have its effect. Clicking once causes the object to recognize that it has been moused over, clicking again causes it to treat it as an actual click. This has certain side effects: it renders dragging impossible (so powers or windows cannot be rearranged), it renders locational AoEs largely nonfunctional (due to the targeting reticule not registering mouse movement properly), and it makes mouse targeting nearly impossible. This effect turns on and off for reasons not clear to me.

I am playing on a Macbook Pro running OSX 10.5.8.

The one use I've found for Time Bomb that you can't do better with the other tools at your disposal is using stealth to place it on an enemy who doesn't move around much, getting out of line of sight, and letting it blow up to get some damage without aggro. It's a niche use, and I can count the times this was useful on one hand, but if you're dying to have an excuse to keep the power, that's the best I've found.

I ended up respecing out of it on my arch/dev anyway. Pretty much anything else you would do with Time Bomb can be done better with Trip Mine or just shooting people.

Oh, hey. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who had this problem.

A lot of people say that mind/storm doesn't work well because of the lack of immob, but really all that means is that you use Tornado as a defense/utility power rather than a DPS power. As a utility power, it's a very good one.

I don't end up using Tornado much on competent teams with my mind/storm, but soloing or with PUGs gone wrong it's a lot like having a mini-tank you can whip out whenever you like.

Personally I would be amused by the giant arrows an archer would leave sticking out of him.

So to address the actual question, I find most controllers much more soloable than blasters. They don't kill as fast, but they also don't have to worry about dying the first time something goes slightly wrong. I find my mind/storm controller a lot more fun to solo with than my blasters.

Speed runs are fine for 50s but TFs are also one of the more fun ways to level up a character when you're doing non-speed runs. This can lead to disappointment on one or both sides of the matter if you're not clear when forming a team.

Even on SOs, Shield Defense is kind of squishy compared to other scrappers. It's not unlivable, but be prepared to eat insps and kill things before they can kill you blapper-style.

The mention of BS/SD and DM/SD doesn't really hold much weight here, as those are two mitigation-heavy primaries (and the def bonus and -tohit each stack well with the defense Shield has). An elec/shield on SOs is a lot more fun if you stop thinking of it as the squishiest scrapper and start thinking of it as the sturdiest blapper on the block. This changes as you fill out your power picks (you'll end up with a lot of powers each giving a small amount of defense) but for now just run with it and chug inspirations as fast as they come.

Alternately, it would mean that on a rad/whatever defender, you continue your rad debuffs at more or less unimpeded effectiveness after the nuke so its aftereffects are pretty minimal on a team.

The one thing I would like to see in terms of "character transfer" is a way of readily porting costumes, even if it ports as a "best match" instead of an exact copy due to new costume mechanics.

No need for actual mechanical character transfer, but being able to copy over your characters' looks would be nice.

I've got a kin/rad and like it quite a bit. A quality PBAOE like Irradiate goes great with Fulcrum Shift, the -def is welcome since almost all your primary powers have a to-hit check (even slotted for accuracy, this can be a problem with to-hit debuffers or high-def enemies), Cosmic Burst is great, and the abnormally fast recharge on Neutrino Bolt means you don't really need X-Ray Beam or other filler attacks to keep things going.

I think I see fewer stalkers than VEATs on Champion.

..then again, just because you don't see a stalker doesn't mean there isn't one there.