Blood Red Arachnid

Don't have a "main" so to speak, but I have rerolled one toon.


My Energy Melee / Elec Armor stalker. In his initial concept, his weapon was a pair of kinetic generators attached to his fists, powered by dimensionally displaced giant capacitors. The closest thing to fit the bill was energy melee, so I had to go with that. IOed him out and raised him to 50.

Then, when Praetoria and Kinetic Melee were released, I decided to just delete the original toon and then get to work with on a Kinetic Melee / Elec Armor Stalker, going through Praetoria instead of rogue isles. I raised that one to 50 and IOed him out, too.

I am fairly certain that the global boost from the enhancement only applies to the person using it. The effect doesn't come from the power, but the proc, so using the power on others shouldn't give the bonus.

It would be awesome if it did, though. Imagine if everyone stocked up Maneuvers with LotG +Recharge and Kismet. Turn them loos and suddenly we all have + 50% recharge and +24 To-Hit.

You know, I'm not sure if it had been suggested as a way to improve the transformation of PBs, but is there reason why they can't just shift the resistances of the Dwarf Form and the damage of Nova to make them, you know, stronger? I suppose if it is too strong at lower levels, there can be a level scaling effect provided to give a more gradual increase in power until it peaks at 35 or 38 (when light form appears). Combine that with changing Nova from having a +dmg effect to merely having more powerful attacks, and it should make a bland in-the box but effective solution.

So... does that mean I should go with Nvidia for the graphics card? I know my current Macbook has a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, and that runs alright (when soloing and inside instances), and I assume that the problems I'm getting are from there being only 256 MB VRam, half of what the low-end Macbooks currently offer.

Right now nothing is set in stone as far as expenses go. It changes depending on if car troubles should arise, how much I'll get for trade-isn, ect.


However, I am expecting the "peak" to be around $1500. I am staying with Mac, btw.

EDIT: You know what? No, skip the slow and steady. I'm looking for which kind of Graphics cards would be best, whether by brand or by model. Whether or not I can afford it should come later.

Planning to get a higher-end computer soon enough. This is important mostly for the games I play, with this one being the primary game. I would love to be able to run this game on a setting other than low graphics, but I am not sure what hardware to get a hold of to do this.

Particularly I am asking about graphics card. If I want to run this game on higher quality, what graphics card would be best to aim for?

#1: The community. Hands down, the game is funner than other MMOs I have played simply because the people who play this game are funner than the people who play the other MMOs. Through I suck at roleplay, I don't mind being around it because it is actually entertaining. Other games? Don't see it, ever. Another benefit is that the people who play this game don't do so just to be as rude and offensive as possible. I was actually a mod in a previous MMO, and I was a hated person simply because I stopped people from bullying other players and from linking them to malware. Not just hated by the rulebreakers, but hated by the community in general. The only satisfaction that I got from community interaction was bringing the hammer down on those punks.

In CoX? There's a 90% chance I will like the next random player that I team up with.

#2: The game is equal opportunity. If you play any other MMO on the planet, there is going to be an economic system that strictly binds player performance based solely on the materials that they can afford to buy with in-game currency. This system is usually dictated by either a system of random rare drops that coerce the psyche into continuing dedication, or an expensive NPC store that requires mass money farming to afford items that are a necessity. This forms the following class system:
80% Have Nots
10% Enough wealth to enjoy the game
8% With disposable income and higher rank equipment
2% Superelite players who have the peak equipment necessary to preform well in the most entertaining capacities of the game.

And which class you are in is chosen randomly by the prince of darkness himself, the Random Number Generator. It doesn't help that the game builds around the top 10%. Now, in City of Heroes there are three counters to this. First is that the majority of "upper level" stuff in the game isn't too expensive to get. Second, is that the game isn't based around the assumption that you are inevitably building toward that upper stuff and thus makes it required for content. Third, there are ways to obtain every single enhancement in the game that does not involve the RNG. The only non-evil laden way to ascend in those classes is to farm endlessly, which brings up my next point.

#3: No Grinding. I enjoy playing this game from level 1 to level 50. There is not a single point in the game where I have to sit back and go "Hm, I'll need to spend 10 hours doing a repetitive task to get to the part of the game that is actually enjoyable". No, you have fun at the game, and then after you've had enough fun, new stuff opens up that you can have more fun in. With #2 above, there is very little to actually force you to play the game for longer than you want to. Even the most grindy-est part of the game, the Incarnate System, pales in comparison to the length of time I've had to dedicate to other MMOs to actually be entertained. And I couldn't imagine what would be required for a Korean MMO. This doesn't change the fact that the Incarnate trials are fun. They are not "click tree, get wood, click tree, get wood, click tree, don't get wood". They are "quickly position myself between IDF and terminal, use Hurricane and Gale to draw aggro and push them away, run to center room and lay down hazard patches, then position myself to snipe Technician from another terminal I have not Aggroed, then quickly duck Maelstrom's kick".

#4: Open ended non-traditional elements. The game itself isn't about getting armor, being a better mage, or learning magic. The highly customizeable characters and the highly customizeable powers leave you an all but blank canvas for you to create. Do you want an autistic anarchist villain with a self-made power suit? Just make him! Do you want to have a pseudo-demon possessed hero who goes berserk and tries to destroy everything? Just make her, and then make the demon inside of her. Do you want to have a magic powered robot that teaches physics to underprivileged children in Ubekistan while night-lifeing as a masseuse to dentists? There's nothing stopping ya, pal.

#5: The AE/Demorecord. This is the first game where I've found that I was allowed to make my own missions filled with my own enemies or other enemies under my own stories and mechanics. The system itself can't be perfectly fine tuned to always produce the results you want, but if you get creative you can do some interesting stuff. My two favorite things I've done so far is set up a Circle of Thorns civil war with wandering friendlies that fight CoT with you, and an AV battle where you are assisted by a squadron of Crey critters but the AV has a nuke power that only gets used when low on health that wipes out the Crey team that is helping you in one shot. Those elements, the sensation of mortality and chaos that you the player experience, the open ended and dynamic design... I made them! I've run missions in the AE before where I had to use powers that I never had to use before, tactics that I had to invent while on the fly, and bosses so hard that Power Analyzer MK III literally saved the day.

I discovered the true versatility of Demorecord a little more than a week ago. Done on a whim in the middle of the night, I discovered that I can not only record in-game video, but I can also customize and edit that video to do crazy things. I changed the ending of an UG trial to where we were all fighting Statesman, and I was Dr. Vozhlok. I can switch out the maps, characters, movement, motion, camera position, all to create customized images and videos using the games own engine to make. If I wanted to tell a story for this game in a movie, I don't need any expensive video editing software. I just need the knowhow, and Text Edit.

They... do not handle too well.


I'm currently running content with my widow that alternates between Fortunata and Nightwidow. Night Widow goes up to 56/64/56 defenses and has a few -ToHit powers, so it isn't much of a problem.

But my Fortunata build has 47/57/49 defenses, and during incarnate content she is essentially a squishie. I have to alter my behavior with her from a tank mage style to a dominator style. I imagine that a pure defense scrapper, brute, or talk would have to alter their tactics in a similar fashion.

When I say "dominator style" I don't mean just mezz. I am referring to the method of target selection and damage focus. Using your offensive power to quickly dispatch targets that are at threat to reduce the amount of damage that you are taking. It isn't the best way to deal with enemies, but unless you are dealing with large spawns/ambushes by yourself it should be enough to get by.

Just put rest back onto your power tray, since You'll be using it again.

I do wish that the cage powers were better. Currently I have aim on my sonic, but that power is basically a throwaway power. I used to use cage as a low level mez so I could hold the boss and use rest to heal up.

N00b question here, but during what parts can you use cages on the Sutter TF and the STF?

I run a grav/thorn dom, and the wormhole+thorntrops combo is awesome, especially with damage procs in thorntrops.

I myself have been "cheated" in the sense that I should've received my paragon points 8 days ago.

So, I just did part four, and I am confused. What is with that whole "Aurora Borealis trapped inside" thing? I don't get what was going on there.

I sit firmly at F.


When I get amount of wealth that exceeds one billion, I have a habit of spending it.


Also, I find it interesting that the distribution resembles Chi form.

It is really hard for me to pick one of my concept toons, since they are all concept toons that I like. From my first character who is a bit of a knockoff from Bleach, to my latest one who was a drug-using Nihilist who ate a Kheldian she found while wondering through the woods during a bad acid trip, grabbing one and just one is hard.

But, there is one idea that I would say would be one of favorite ones I had, even though it spans multiple toons.

It is a reoccurring story that I have on two of my characters, and I plan to put it on more characters I make in the future, and probably my second AE arc. I call it Bartholomew's Legacy. The story is that a doctor named Adrian Bartholomew, a geneticist workaholic who worked at both a fertility clinic and a sperm bank in L.A. 25 or so years ago, discovered that his own genome had a mutation hot spot that was primed to create super powers in future offspring. The (not so good) doctor already had a chauvinistic god complex, and so upon discovering that his future children would have super powers, he silently self-proclaimed himself the progenitor for the future evolution of all mankind. He experimented on his own genome until he was capable of producing sperm that were guaranteed to have the mutation, and then he got to work in switching out all of the donations in the bank with his own. Also, all fertility assisted pregnancies from the clinic were thereafter done with his own genes.

Due to various explanations, denial, legal proceedings, relocation, unions and such he kept at his "work" for years before he was finally arrested. But, damage had been done and no one is still sure if all of his "essence" had been removed from the medical field, let alone how many of his offspring are out there. It became a media controversy when his kids suddenly started developing super powers many years down the line.

Each of the characters that I have made, and will continue to make under the Bartholomew Legacy all have two features in common: pointed ears, and red hair. Another kind of a joke feature is that the women from the legacy have disproportionately large breasts, and men have a similarly shallow endowment that can't be shown in the game. But as far as the backstory goes, it is less about each of the character's origin, and more about how they handled being a part of the controversy and how their predicaments changed depending on what their parents were like.

I can't fit all of that onto a character's profile, but I have a super-condensed version that I put into the profile of each Legacy toon. The grand idea that I envisioned is that it would catch on with other people, and soon there are dozens of players other than me who have a Bartholomew child as a character. It would be like some sort of fannon mass-event that spawned the future toons. Now, I know that is never going to happen, but a man can dream, can't he?

It isn't always about winning or losing. Whenever I play a competitive game, I don't always mind losing as long as I put up a big enough fight and a flashy enough show while going out.

An idea that I had before I realized that AE didn't have victoroy/defeat chains was for there to be a mission arc where, as a villain, you build up a massive army and then lead them into battle against the heroes, but ultimately get defeated at the end. There would be a mechanic in the final mission where the enemies would not only be endless, but also slowly getting stronger due to a map wide Defense, To-Hit, and damage buff that would kick in and then slowly ramp up over time. After awhile, the Heroes (even signature Heroes) and the besieging enemies would become invincible, unavoidable, high damaging enemies. Then, people would be bragging about how long they could last in a mission like that.

A second idea would be a mission in a custom map where you have defenses that can slow down and make vulnerable the endless horde of nearly indestructible hero enemies, but these defense systems slowly fail due to damage and what not. So, the mission is where you have to keep backtracking into the base, until the end where you hop in an escape pod and set the self destruct button.


It would be really hard to pull off due to programming issues, but it sounded like a fun project to undertake one day.

Something I really like about the Itrials is they make powers that were once useless become useful.

Take Gale, for instance. All it does is knockback enemies, and other than a second of damage mitigation there is really no benefit to fighting enemies slightly to the left of where they spawned. But during Keyes I discovered that Gale is one of the best powers to move Warworks away from Terminals. So now my favorite thing to do on Keyes while I'm on my /Storm troller is fly up to the top floor of the reactor, and then use Gale and Hurricane to throw the enemies off the top floor. It's hilarious, and it is more effective than if a tanker tried to taunt the WW away.


The roles you can play as a troller or a defender on an Itrial are so much more diverse than what you do as a troller or defender regularly. These roles are out-of-the-box enough that it goes over a lot of player's heads. Doing things like laying Caltrops along the way to Marauder so enemies don't chase you there, holding the Mother Mayhem clones in phase one so players can rez safely, throwing down a hazard patch in the middle of the TPN terminal room to make it safer for players to pull IDF there, running Tactics and Steamy Mist so the Avatar's confuse fades away twice as fast, using -perception powers on Warworks so players can grab glowies without getting aggroed, Immobilizing Voids so they don't run away, using mass confuse on 9CUs so they all turn on each other and blow themselves to bits, the list can go on and on.

Sure, other ATs have more damage. But, with a tier 3 lore pet you can probably dish out enough damage to solo an AV, and judgements let you plow through enemy groups like a crashless blaster. No, what the controller brings isn't more muscle, but a toolbox that lets a player handle the same situation in strange and unusual ways, supporting the team in a manner that some brute would never think to do.

My point being that buffs and debuffs stack, easily pushing stats from nearly maxed to maxed, and having more potent effects the more you have them. A -30% resist on an enemy, for example is roughly equivalent to giving the entire team a longer lasting Build Up, and the only way to truly beat that on a team is if the blaster/scrapper/brute/stalker/whatever you add increases the overall raw DPS of the entire group by 30% + the raw damage the support AT would've brought. Once you get to teams of 5+ damage dealers, that's really hard to do, so after awhile the usefulness of just damage dealing ATs bottoms out. Now, similar things can be said about other abilities: Usually in the form of whether or not the extra damage can kill things fast enough or if the aggro drawn is equivalent to what would be recovered by a heal, what would be mitigated by mezz, and the defense/resist increases from a support AT.

Of course, Support ATs bottom out, too. Once an enemy is held, it is held. Once you are healed, you're healed. Once your defense/resistance caps, it doesn't go higher. Support ATs bottom out later due to the variety of ways you can buff and debuff, and that is why full defender teams get revered so much. The best teams, therefore, are the ones that are a good mix of support ATs and damage ATs. It is not to specific on what you need, as long as you have someone there to do it.


The six scrapper team was a PUG, too.

People really have got to learn not to feed the troll.

One of the biggest issues why I say "No AoE or uncontrollable pets outside" whenever I host a TPN isn't because it isn't impossible to use those things outside, but because I don't trust anyone to do it.

Hell, I don't even trust myself to use AoEs outside, since I know the second I hit that judgement a citizen is going to convert, get slaughtered, and then our PO plummets.

When I play as a tank, I often have to rush forward to the next group because, for some reason, the squishies like to jump ahead of me. It usually follows this pattern:


#1 I am fighting enemies in the current group.
#2 A Blapper or a defender runs forward and draws alpha from the next group.
#3 Everyone follows that toon into battle (because they can't tell the difference between them and the giant electric-pink character with the battleaxe)
#4 Half of the team dies due to the inability to widthstand the aggro.
#5 Half the team complains that I am an ineffective tank.


And so I sometimes feel like I'm have to rush ahead to the next group to stop those stupid squishies from smashing their head against the wall. Those darn things just can't stop trying to kill themselves.

As far as my experiences go, you can run all of the even level content in the game with any mix of ATs and powers and do fine.

The exception to this, however, is when you are doing max difficulty content. I'm not talking about the itrials here (those you can run with nearly any mix of ATs). When you run regular missions at +4/x8, generally you have a certain set of roles that you want to fulfill on the team, and certain ATs fulfill those roles better than others. For example, if you need someone who can run into the group and soak up aggro, you're best bet is a tank or a brute, and your worst bet is a blaster.

When it gets to that level, what each AT and even what each power set brings to the table needs to be considered.

Never played either as either, but with my experience with defenders and trollers, playing as a Corruptor won't really make Itrials better.

The advantage that Corruptors get is more damage, especially against AVs. In every Itrial, however, there are a lot more than just AVs. There are tons of enemies that need debuffing, are better held, or just need relocating.

It sounds too impractical to actually implement. The last thing we need is for powers to constantly be checking for umpteen exceptions.


I am a fan of Ice Slick, and an even bigger fan of Ice Slick + Freezing Rain, since both have a similar slow+KB effect that stack with each other. The best way to deal with the whole "other group immobilize" thing is to not use ice slick on groups that other trollers are immobilizing. In those cases, it is better to try and emphasize the -recharge effect of ice sets than it is to try and get enemies to dance for you. When there are ambushes, it helps to lay down the ice slick in advance to the besieging foes, since the trollers are probably caught up on the other group. That, or the trollers will see the Ice Slick in advance, and go "Oh... I get it!" where in normal combat they don't have that time to think.

Sadly this makes Ice Slick a very situational power, even if it is fun and effective.