ClawsandEffect

I'm actually not 100% sure how it works.

What I DO know is that when slotted into my Death Shroud I stay consistently double-stacked if I stay within range of enemies more or less constantly.

I have a build partially finished saved on my computer at home.

I'll try and post it later today.

Weird.

I have mine in a damage aura, and any time I stay in a spawn for more than 30 seconds it's pretty consistently double-stacked.

Not saying you're wrong, just that your experience and mine aren't agreeing. Maybe the difference is mine is in a damage aura?

You realize you don't HAVE to take Air Superiority to take Fly now, right?

As far as too many attacks? I'm not seeing what you are. I only see 4 attacks from his primary, and 2 that have to be taken to get to other powers (Except you don't need AS to get Fly anymore)

The click powers should be getting Doctored Wounds instead of Numina's. Unless you're seriously wealthy, in which case you can go with Panacea instead.

If Confront were AoE, things like pulling the healing Nictus and ONLY the healing Nictus in ITFs would be impossible. (yes, I know it was altered, but it was a viable strategy before that happened)

I've also used it to pull AVs in the STF, and to pull Requiem and Romulus down from the platform in the 3rd mission of the ITF, without agroing the enemies right next to them.

A single target taunt power has a usefulness that cannot be replicated by an AoE taunt. The fact that very few people take advantage of that usefulness is not especially relevant here.

I can guess without being told which of the Phalanx was a jerk to you.

Because he IS a jerk. That's a core trait of the character.

I didn't even need the clues you provided.

"Hmmm, a Freedom Phalanx member was a jerk to someone? Who could THAT have been?"

To me, where the loading screen artwork fails the most is the lack of any feel of movement.

I can accept a character, male or female, in an awkward position if there is the sense in the drawing that the position is not a static pose. The loading screen artwork fails in that respect.

As far as female characters being oversexualized? There are a few points there.

1) City of Heroes draws its inspiration from comic books. The argument that it is a superhero game and not a comic book game falls flat on its face when you consider that the very idea of what a superhero IS only exists because of American comic books.

2) The target audience of comic books is and always has been teenage males. Your average teenage boy does not want to see a realistically depicted female character. He wants his female characters to be impossibly attractive and improbably proportioned. When a teenage male sees an attractive woman, the first thing he notices is either her butt or her boobs (depending on which direction he is seeing her from). If he tells you otherwise, he is most likely lying. Sure, he will notice other features, but that's what he sees first every time. I won't lie, it's still the first thing *I* notice, and I haven't been a teenager for a while now. I'm not a complete pig, I notice other things as well, but those two features are what draw my eye in the first place.

3) It is exceptionally rare for comic books to get flak for oversexualization from the people who actually READ them. This game has a rather high proportion of female players, but how many of those female players are also comic book fans? Probably not very many.

If you really want to point a finger at something for creating a bad stereotype for women, look no further than the Barbie doll. When you give your 5 year old daughter a Barbie doll, you are tacitly implying "This is what you should aspire to look like", whether you intend to or not.

Then there are magazines such as Cosmopolitan. Those magazines are supposedly targeted at your average woman. So tell me, if that is the case, why is the cover model always supermodel perfect and wearing something impractical and revealing? The same goes for 90% of the magazines targeted at women. Next time you go to someplace that has a magazine rack, peruse the covers of the so-called "women's magazines" and count how many NORMAL looking women you see there.

You can't really point fingers at comic books for futhering stereotypes without a sense of irony. At least comic books aren't pretending to be portraying what women really look like in the real world. Comic books are taking the attractiveness stereotype and making it larger than life, just like they do with everything else. I've never gotten a sense that a comic book artist was trying to convince me that this is what women are supposed to look like......I can't say the same for the magazines I see that are supposedly targeted at a female audience.

Sister Psyche returning makes sense. If her mind jumped to someone else's body when she died, she could return at any point and it could be plausible.

Statesman would be harder to not make it look like a Superman attention grab.

I can get you TO the S/L/E/N softcap. F/C will be harder, I haven't managed it without severely gimping other aspects.

If I remember I'll try and post a build.

Basically, my earlier point is that the devs are screwed no matter HOW they approach this situation.

They gate things so people will actually run the things they busted their butts over the last several months making, people get mad about it and call it bad game design.

If they didn't gate things, the only people who would run it are hardcore badgers and completionists, and they would stop after they got their badges. We wouldn't care much about that, but I'm sure they would.

I find it incredibly ironic that after all the clamoring for REAL endgame content that went on for years....no one seems to actually want to PLAY that endgame content. They just want the stuff you get from it to make the other stuff they do easier.

On the bright side, the way our devs have arranged this is a hell of a lot better than some other MMOs, where you have to run an incredibly difficult raid repeatedly because there is only a 5% chance of ONE person in it getting the Uber-rare Dealybob of Ultimate Awesome that is the whole point of running the raid in the first place. At least in OUR endgame content, everyone who does it gets rewarded for doing so.

My main has a grudge against Crey. He wasn't an experiment, he was actually a scientist who was developing cybernetic limbs to replace ones that people had lost. Crey wanted his research to use in their Revenant Hero project and he refused to sell it to them, so they blew up his lab. With him in it.

After using the prototypes of his cybernetic limbs to replace his natural ones the explosion destroyed.....he's just a LITTLE ticked at Crey.

The devs would have to be frigging morons to not have seen this coming.

But....they've got to get people to run the new stuff somehow.

If they hadn't gated Hybrid behind running this one trial and instead made it unlockable with normal IXP....how many people would have simply burned Incarnate threads, Astrals, and Empyreans to unlock it and never bothered running it at all? I'm guessing a significant number. Because, much to the devs surprise, many people don't actually LIKE the trials, they just run them to get the new shinies so they can make older level 50 content completely trivial.

So, if they hadn't gated it like they did, the devs would have spent the last couple months working on something that ends up being run about as frequently as the Shard TFs. It would suck to work hard on something only to have it ignored.

So they gated it. Now the first part of it is being farmed and the rest of it ignored.

From the devs perspective, having people play the first part of it has got to be better than having almost no one play it at all.

I do the Hollows on just about every character.

The new low level stuff got old fast, so I usually just street sweep up to level 5 or 6 and hit the Hollows. Occasionally I'll do a DFB in there somewhere, usually if I didn't get enough levels in Wincott/Flux to go run Julius.

Then at least Jim and Penny in Faultline, or Laura's arc. Follow that with either Striga/Croatoa, or the newer arcs.

After that I don't have a set plan. And all of those things are subject to change on a whim.