Cyber_naut

1)Shockwave is sexy (while offering crazy mitigation and added aoe hotness).

2)Backflips are for cheerleaders not scrappers (but evis does do great damage, and with the larger cone, nice aoe dmg... we do have alternate animations for powers now - how about an alt for evis that doesn't involve gymnastics?)

Cool - but who can the 'greys' (vigilante/rogue) trade with? Not being able to trade on mixed teams BLOWS.

Yes, fire is excellent in terms of single target damage, and I'd rank it right next to DM as the best primary for killing av's. If you don't need any added mitigation like dm's heal, then I'd rank it first. DM and katana are excellent because they both do great damage while added incredible mitigation in a heal and melee defense respectively.

The easiest/cheapest secondary is SR, without a doubt. You wouldn't even need IO's, but you'd probably need a heal for a lot of the av's you'd be facing. SD is awesome once it's softcapped because of the dmg bonus, and WP is awesome once it's at least near softcapped because it's insane regen eliminates the need for a heal.

As others have said, other scrapper sets can work too, but they're more effective when used vs many enemies. You 'could' tow a boat with a corvette, but you'll usually be better off using a truck. I had a kat/da that could solo most av's, but a lot of the advantages da gives you are wasted in such a build, imo, because that set is designed to be more effective against multiple foes.

Both are great sets, but in reality, when you look at the statistics, claws is by far the superior performing set, even when you consider SS with double stacked rage, lol. I'm honestly surprised (pleasantly) that they made it as powerful as they did. But it makes me wonder where their heads are at when they were looking to make the SS rage crash even worse a while back. The endurance crash and ten seconds of impotence and defense penalty, is a pretty excessive price to pay just to do damage on par with other sets, or when compared to claws, less damage.

DM/Shield is a well known top end combo, but can be pretty expensive. It's great because shields with good io slotting caps your defense, gives you high health and good resists, while dm gives you a great heal that combos as an attack. If you're looking for the uber-build, this is the way to go. Great survivability, awesome damage bonuses and increased aoe with shield charge, but again, it's late blooming and expensive.

If you want to go elec or spines, I'd suggest sticking with WP, because WP has great layered mitigation, and it's high regen acts as a heal, you can get close or totally softcap defense to a lot of dmg types, and the hardest one to softcap can be covered by 50% resists in most cases, and you get extra health, while providing a ton of endurance for aoe-centric elec or spines. For poor dmg mitigation primaries, wp is great. Plus no clicking to interupt your attacks.

DM and SR are still good with other primaries, but you might find yourself wanting a heal, which can be done with aid self, but it can be tough to find room for it in a good shield build. But if you want to be really tough to kill on the cheap, I'd suggest SR, which can be soft capped really easily, and put you into god mode for pennies compared to top end builds for wp or shields. But it's a late bloomer, so if you want to feel most powerful leveling up, again, I'd go with WP. But if you're looking for the best end game build and you've got bottomless pockets, go dm/sd.

All I'm gonna say, having worked for a magazine in the past, is that money talks. If I'm not mistaken, Champions Online advertised in that magazine and had a 3 page story with a positive take, then COH got a small article in the back with a negative take.

Opinions are fine, but the opinions you find in magazines can sometimes be skewed by money and special interests. Here's my opinion, and I'm not getting paid by anybody.
I tried CO honestly expecting the game to replace COH. It didn't happen, not even close, as I cancelled my preorder after playing through open beta.

First of all, I kept hearing about how superior the graphics were for CO, but I didn't see it that way at all. CO's graphics look like they were aiming for something like 'archie comics' style, very cartoony and fake. The characters all looked like muppets to me. COH could use some fingers on thier models, but other than that, I much prefer COH's graphics to CO"s, though obviously that's just a style preference. Having said that, you'd think a game that is brand new would blow a 5 year old game away in the graphics department, and that was definitely not the case, styles aside.

Secondly, I thought I would prefer open missions to instanced, but again, I was disappointed. The open missions were a pain in the **** with other players 'kill stealing' my objectives, and sitting around waiting for the objective to respawn was really, really lame.

Next, the teaming situation was horrible. First of all there was no real reason to team, and secondly, the teaming mechanics were a mess compared to coh. And even if you put together a team, they were even smaller than coh's 8 man team limits. This is probably something they can work on and fix, but you'd think it would be more developed by launch, considering the fact the game is a mmo.

The mag article claims there's no reason to play past 20 in coh. I felt like there was no reason to play co after getting 3-4 powers. The way co is set up, you can pretty much do anything you need to do with 3-4 powers, and that's nice at the early levels, but it kills motivation to continue developing your toon. It can be a pain to get to 20 in coh, but now I can see the reason for it, slowly developing a character continually gives you another goal to reach and maintains motivation to continue playing that character.

I thought I'd like the totally open framework for power selection as well, but again, I was wrong. Now I can see why so many games use AT's or classes. Yes it 'forces' variation, but without it, there really is little variation in characters and it hurts gameplay, imo. This is especially true in an mmo, where if you have more variation and specialization, you encourage more teaming to fill deficiencies created by said specialization.

I initially enjoyed the energy builder power idea, but quickly realized the problems with it. First of all, it just seems silly that you have to keep using a lesser power to build up enough energy to use your better powers. But more importantly, it makes the gap between ranged toons and melee toons even greater. Why take a melee energy builder that's really only usefull some of the time when you can take a ranged one that can be used far more often and far more effectively. As much as coh favors ranged over melee, co makes the gap even more ridiculous, and as a melee lover, this was not a favorable move.

Then there is the obvious lack of content, which is understandable since co is a new game, but, they nerfed xp so much that there are large gaps in the later levels where you literally run out of missions and are forced to grind mobs for xp, which is significantly slower than xp awarded for missions. Not to mention the massive nerfing that took place just as they went live, which is something that should have been done in testing, not just as the game goes live, but they had already lost me by then.

I guess CO could get better, but right now, COH is clearly the better game of the two imo. The only thing CO has going for it right now is that it's the new shiny, and many players are simply bored with COH, which really hasn't released a whole lot of new content in the past year outside of power proliferation/customization and stuff like that.

If COH puts out a quality expansion with GR that offers a bunch of new content, and starts advertising it at least to the level champions advertises, it would probably walk away from CO with ease. Then obviously, the next big competitor is DC online, and way after that, marvel is developing a new one I believe. COH will never be a WOW, and with all the new competition, it's subscriptions certainly aren't going to grow much, but so long as COH keeps pumping out quality product, I think it can compete and remain lucrative. The biggest factor working against COH is it's lack of advertising and tie-ins, something that DC and Marvel will have that will give them a tremendous advantage.