ClawsandEffect

Illusion/FF gets an AoE attack in it's secondary. So AoE Containment comes in handy before APPs for that particular build.

Problem there is, if the guy you know built that character specifically for PvP, he probably has purples and PvP IOs up the wazoo in his build. You are probably not going to get close to his build without using them.

If you preview your post with the build in it, it breaks the link.

Are all your characters Science Origin?

If so, they got access from the level 35-40 Science Store's mission. It involves time travel and grants you the power. My main and a couple others had it automatically when it was released as well, they were Science origin and had run the mission.

Just ask if someone can drop a portal for you. Most people are happy to do so, and there is a badge at the top of the tower that will grant you the power.

When he starts spawning his bifurcations (clones) they add to his resistance and regen at a ridiculous rate. If he gets more than 2 or 3 out, even the most highly purpled blaster won't make a dent in his HP.

You have to kill the bifurcations in order to kill him. If you just target him and blast away, you will never kill him.

This encounter seems to be designed specifically to be difficult for melee characters, since they have to run all over the room to get to the clones. A blaster or even a defender can switch targets and move very little to target the bifurcations, so it tends to be easier for them.

I strongly suspect this was completely intentional, in response to some people complaining about how overpowered some melee character's builds are.

It helps if you can knock him into the lava and keep him there too. The lava is below and surrounding the platform he spawns on. If you can keep him in it he will lose HP rapidly and the encounter gets a lot easier.

It is doable solo, but it will be more difficult for some builds than others.

Okay, here's the skinny.

This is a highly instanced game. That means that every time you enter a door to run a mission (I trust you have done this at least once) you are not visible to other players in the game. Now, most MMOs have quests taking place out in the open where you can clearly see the people doing them, which leads to frustration sometimes when you have a quest to do something like "Hunt down the Wolves to collect pelts to trade for the bauble you need to do the next quest" and getting to the area only to discover that someone else beat you to it and there are no wolves to collect pelts from.

Since City of Heroes is mostly instanced missions, most missions take place in enclosed maps that other players cannot enter unless they are on your team. That leads to new players getting the mistaken impression that there is no one else playing, because everyone is running missions of their own and not milling around in plain sight.

There are indeed other people playing the game, you can tell by the color of the dots next to the servers in the list. A green dot means the server has a light load, a yellow one means it has a medium load, and a red one means it has a heavy load. Now, it isn't a direct correlation between server load and number of players, but generally the higher the load is the more people are playing on that server.

Also, if you are just street hunting in the beginning zone, you aren't very likely to see a whole lot of players there, because content in that zone runs out at level 6 and higher level contacts rarely send you back to that zone.

Another thing worth noting: The overwhelming majority of players start in Atlas Park, so if you chose Galaxy City it will seem like a ghost town in comparison. Now, if you started in Praetoria and have not created a second character (the game encourages you to play more than one character) you have to finish the Praetorian content before you can go on to Paragon and the Rogue Isles (hero and villain areas respectively)

I believe you can start new characters anywhere you like after your initial character, so you SHOULD be able to create a new character in Paragon or the Isles.

I assure you there ARE other people playing, but the nature of the game means that you don't necessarily SEE them all the time.

I suggest going down to the forum for the server you chose and finding the thread that lists the global channels for that server. Those are channels that will let you talk to anyone else on the channel no matter where they are. They could be inside a mission, in a different zone, or even on a different server, and they can talk to you and vice versa. That is where the majority of the communication in the game takes place, because the other channels are too limiting. Local chat only extends about 50 feet, and broadcast can only be heard in the zone you are currently in (so if you said something in Galaxy City, people in Atlas Park will have no idea you ever said anything)

If you happen to play on Pinnacle, you can join the channel PinnBadges and you will be in contact with anywhere from 45 to 175 people depending on the time of day you are playing. You are silenced in the channel by default when you join (this is to prevent spammers from joining the channel and cluttering it up with their garbage), but you can ask one of the OPs to unsilence you. You can tell who the OPs are by the fact that their name will be in blue and they will have a star next to it, any one of them can unsilence you, and they will be more than willing to do so for a new player. And if you can't get unsilenced right away because there are no OPs online, you can respond to someone by clicking on their name and selecting "Send <playername> a message". So if you see that someone is forming a team, you can still get in on it even though you can't respond in teh channel.

Now, different global channels will have different rules and guidelines, so if you play on other servers I can't tell you what to expect, but for the most part players are very willing to answer questions and help newbies out. We were all newbies once, and most of us received help from someone, so we pay it forward by helping someone else once we have more experience.

I hope your initial impression hasn't soured you on the game and you have read what people have said in this thread, there is a lot of good advice to be had, and the community is what keeps me and a lot of other people playing.

Staffs, yes. Scythes would be a very niche item, and would require it's own animations and powers, so it's unlikely.

Staffs was mentioned by Back Alley Brawler as being one of the single hardest things to do animation-wise, simply because they would have to do EVERYTHING from scratch. It would not share combat stances with any other weapon set, so the very base of the power set would have to be brand new.

Not a trivial thing to do, but I'd like to see it as well.


Gonna have to say no on this one. That would open up a whoel world of balance problems if you could pair any powerset with any other powerset. You'd have characters that would be insanely overpowered (Fire Manipulation/Shield Defense anyone?) and characters that would be completely helpless in a fight (Empathy/Sonic Resonance)

Add to that the fact that they would have to completely rebalance every powerset in the game so it would even work with every other powerset and you have something that would A) take eons to implement, and B) break a LOT of the balance of the game in bad ways.

So, while I support staffs as a powerset, letting us choose any powerset we want and pair it with any other powerset we want is a bad idea.

I actually enjoy PvP when I choose to partake in it.

I just don't want to be pestered by annoying jacktards following me around going "Dool me" "Dool me" "Dool me" in Local every time I happen to wander through an open zone.

The game was not designed with open world PvP in mind, for that matter it wasn't designed with ANY PvP in mind. You see how broken PvP currently is, right? Do you REALLY think subjecting the entire playerbase to that with a flag system is a good idea?

There are a very small number of things they could do that would potentially kill the game. Adding open world PvP to the game after 7 years of it not existing is one of those things.

SR scrappers hit 95% Defense Debuff Resistance without even really trying to. I doubt he was getting debuffed enough to drop his defenses significantly.

Sounds more like the RNG just hated him that day. Sure, a softcapped SR will only be getting hit by 1 out of 20 attacks, but when you're fighting upwards of 40 enemies at once and have no resistance to speak of, those 2 attacks that will be landing are going to hurt.

True, except in the case of autohit powers like Radiation Infection. The best Defense Debuff power in my opinion, because it is one of few that don't require you to hit them first.

As far as this goes, any TF introduced to the game will probably remain in the game permanently. (I assume you're referring to Apex and Tin Mage here)

So far, only the Calvin Scott TF has been removed (and is now available through Ouroboros), every other TF that has ever been released is still here and still playable.

Pull 1 of the To-Hit IOs out of Invincibility and replace the other 2 with 2 Rectified Reticle,it gives 1.88% S/L defense.

Unfortunately, you aren't going to be buying any of the things you need to softcap an Invuln with a 9 million influence budget.

Personally, I would rather get Energy/Negative defense than S/L. My reason? You already resist the hell out of S/L damage, but you barely resist E/N at all. If you have no defense to E/N you're going to get hit with it a lot, and it's going to hurt. Also, if the Energy damage in question is Electric, you're going to find yourself running out of endurance in a hurry. Invuln does get some End Drain resistance, but 4-5 Mu hitting you is still going to drain you. Additionally, most Cold attacks have a smashing of lethal component, so your S/L defense will help with that, but Electric attacks are pure energy, and there are a lot of pure negative energy attacks as well, S/L defense will be useless against those attacks.

My advice:

Run tip missions for Alignment merits, and use the Alignment merits to pick up as many sets of 4 Kinetic Combat as your build will allow you to slot. Gives a 3.75% bonus to S/L defense for slotting 4.

Slot your resistance powers with Reactive Armor instead of Titanium Coating. You get the exact same bonus for 4 slots instead of 6, plus you get some E/N defense as well.

Slot any PBAoE attacks you may have with 3 Eradication, and 3 Cleaving Blow. Combined you will get 4.38% E/N defense.

Slot your Taunt (you did take it at some point, right?) with a Taunt set. You can get anywhere from 1.25% to 3.13% defense to S/L depending on which set and how many you slot (all taunt sets have a S/L defense bonus)

As far as affording all that goes, you have a few options available to you.

Since you're level 47, anything you fight in your missions has a chance to drop a purple recipe, which will sell for anywhere from 20 million up to 600 million. If you get a high dollar one, that alone will fund most of your build.

I already mentioned Alignment Merits, and they will probably be the easiest path for you to take. It's time consuming, but worth it in the long run, since you'll still be gaining levels while you run them.

You haven't mentioned what your Primary is, so I can't give any advice specific to it.

They might leave it that way.

Remember when they first introduced Mayhem missions and it was bugged so the destructible objects didn't scale with you? That ended up being a neat thing because it made you feel like your character was getting more powerful, so they left it in.

Just an example of something that started out as a bug that the devs decided to leave in place. I wouldn't be too surprised if they looked at this one and said "So, Shield Defense players figured out they can get more DDR by using Membranes in Active Defense? Well, it isn't really hurting anything, and it gives incentive to Hami raid or run STF/LRSF, so we might as well leave it."

You have this backwards.

Since Siphon Life is the second hardest hitting power in the set, it is really a damn good attack that doubles as a decent heal.

If you have 3 powers and no slots at all to devote to them, take the Concealment Pool. It has 3 powers in it that can act as LotG mules, and none of them need slots at all to be useful if you should choose to actually use them.

And a great big steaming HELL NO to open world PvP in any form in CoH.

I don't want to have a bunch of jacktards following me around pestering me to turn my PvP flag on so them and their 6 buddies who are standing out of sight can gank me under the Atlas statue.

I like the fact that I can choose when I want to PvP without trying to remember if I left my flag on or not if I don't want to.

Besides, since PvP works differently than PvE, it would be a NIGHTMARE to code it, because I think it is a property of being in a PvP zone rather than an actual change to your powers.

Traveling to Paragon/Rogue Isles at any alignment, sure. But don't add open world PvP to it.

This is DEAD WRONG.

Controller and Dominator AoE mez attacks are, as a rule, mag 3. Controllers get Overpower, and Dominators get Domination, effectively increasing the mag of the mez.

Even if Overpower doesn't kick in, or you don't have Domination up, it isn't hard at all to hit the mob with the AoE mez and then follow up with a single target for the boss. I usually target the boss in the mob and fire the AoE, with the single target queued up to go off immediately following. I have had no issues.

If you are seeing minions and LTs remaining unaffected by the mez, it is because it is MISSING some of them, not because the mag isn't high enough.

There is no chance for NPCs to resist or ignore mez, again, it is because the mez is missing some of them, not because of anything the NPCs have. The only NPCs with mez protection are: Fortunatas, Cimerorans, and obviously EBs and AVs. (that I know of, there may be a few more)

I've actually found it is easier with a Scrapper who actually took Confront (I had it for a while on my BS/DA for tanking the autohit Nictus). The single target taunt effect ensures that you only pull the one you want to and not the whole crowd.

CoH is about the only thing I get to do to relax anymore.

It's cathartic after a crappy day at work to log into one of my scrappers and just beat the snot out of things for a little while. I don't really have time to make progress, so it's not what I focus on doing. For the amount of time I play for, it lets me forget the crap I have to deal with on a daily basis and just.....chill.

I used to play a lot more than I do now. In fact, there were times I'd spend most of my day logged in. Since I can't do that anymore, I stopped focusing on the rewards I was getting and started focusing on just doing whatever sounds like fun when I log in. I still gain levels, and get shards and the occasional nice drop. But I'm not playing to get those things, they're just nice bonuses to my real goal of relaxing and not worrying about real life for a while. If I stressed about how fast I was getting those rewards, it would completely defeat the purpose of me playing.

Maybe when I have more spare time to play rewards will be more important to me, but for now I couldn't care less about them.

I suspect Trapdoor was specifically designed to be difficult for melee ATs to solo, to counteract all the complaints that melee ATs are overpowered and can solo ridiculous things. It seems the devs noted that a lot of players think that melee ATs have an unfair advantage while soloing (whether that is true or not is another discussion, but a lot of people feel it is), so they designed an encounter that is easier with ranged attacks.

I soloed him on most of my characters, and my defender and blaster were MUCH easier than any of my melee characters, including 2 highly IOed scrappers and an IOed brute. I think it has to do with the fact that characters with ranged attacks can just switch targets and kill the bifurcations without having to go running all over the map, moving 10-15 feet at most because the first ones he spawns seem to always be relatively near him.

That aside, I quite enjoyed the arc as well. It is one that I won't mind repeating when my characters in their 40s finally hit 50 and can do it.