Doctor_Kumquat

Of note for those who miss Phase Shift - if you run the patrol mission in Warburg, you can get a temp power version of Phase Shift that lasts for 30 minutes of on-time, and can be repeated if you burn through it all. Since 30 minutes of phase shifting translates to 120 uses (at minimum, assuming you stay in it for as long as possible before it shuts off), it's a pretty easy swap to make.

Minor correction to Jack's info - the Shard actually has five contacts which can provide repeatable missions - General Hammond (Rularuu, kill), Dr. Boyd (Rularuu, analyze monuments), and Lt. Volkov (Nemesis, rescue patrols) are in FBZ, and Dr. Huxley (Rularuu, gather Kora Fruit) and Lt. Col. Flynn (CoT/Nemesis, rescue/defeat) are in Mole Point Charlie in the Cascade Archipelago.

In any case, if you haven't done much in the Shard, testing your mettle against the soldiers of Rularuu is good fun even if you don't like doing TFs. They were among the original end-game butt-kickers, and have a pretty wide variety of tricks up their sleeves. You can try the repeatable missions of your choice (Kora Fruit collections are amazing sources of mid-tier inspirations, if you want to store some up in your SG base or something), or hit the Storm Palace and just sweep. You will almost never bump into other heroes when wandering around the Shard, since it's both huge and pretty unknown, so doing Storm Palace laps has an interesting sense of isolation amid the awe-inspiring ruins. I'd suggest pulling up a map of the zones from vidiotmaps.com so you know where the gravity geyser paths are, although the site may still be partially down while transferring to the new server. Once you learn how to get around on the geysers, you can get around MUCH faster than by flying from point A to point B. The Raptor Pack vendors are handy in case you slip and need to get back on solid ground.

If you'd rather do story arcs so you can earn both influence/drops AND merits, then you're limited to Ouroboros once you finish your regular contacts. You don't have to stick with just the mini-TFs from the contacts in the zone, you can go through the crystals to run any story arc in the game. You can see how well your character exemplars down, and run some of your favorite low/mid level arcs, or maybe even collect souvenirs and try and complete every arc in the game (if you are already a badgehunter to some extent, this is an alternate variant on it; if you don't care about badges or anything badge-like, then nevermind). I remember getting a few hundred merits when I was earning all of my Ouroboros challenge badges, so it's a pretty lucrative option for soloists - especially soloists that are stealthy and/or do better against a couple baddies at a time than facing off against huge hordes.

The magnitude of a knockback effect simply determines how far the target will be knocked back, and/or how much knockback protection it can cut through and still have an effect. If a knockback power has a magnitude under .7, then it becomes knockdown instead.

Therefore, the magnitude isn't the important part of the proc, it's the %chance of activation. At 20%, the Ragnarok proc is handy, but not lifechanging. Every time you fire into a crowded group, a couple targets should fall down; nowhere near the entire group, but anyone busy picking themselves up off the ground means that they aren't hitting you. If you put it in something you spam (like my blaster's Fistful of Arrows) then it translate into a noticeable survivability increase but not a very large one.

Bottom line - if you aren't giving up anything else particularly important to squeeze it in, and you are comfortably wealthy enough that you can buy one, then go for it. The only potential problem is that Drones fly and are therefore knockdown-proof, and monkeys that get hit by the proc but not killed outright by the blast may get knocked backwards, since they fly farther from knockback.

I've got a Fire/Earth dom I've been enjoying quite a bit lately. He's still in the 30s, but the damage is glorious solo or on small teams and I love having a second single-target hold in Seismic Smash. Currently, I'm just built like a blapper (I've only taken Char, Hot Feet, Flashfire, and Imps from the primary so far), but will probably respec into Cinders as well, and may consider taking one of the immobilizes (if for no other reason than to help with AVs on teams). Once I put together the cash to IO him out for more recharge, he should be monstrously effective.

I'm split between taking the Widow or Mu patron pool; I know that I want another endurance recovery tool so that I can afford to run Hotfeet (and potentially Mud Pots) more often. Power Sink recharges three times as fast as Dark Consumption, but Soul Drain's damage buff is very tempting. I'm waiting to see just how much of a difference proper IOing makes to my endurance drain before I decide for sure.

That last one looks pretty nice, assuming that you aren't using anything outrageously overpriced to get those up there. Of course, it'd be impossible to know for sure how solid the build was without looking at the enhancement values in the places that matter.

As for Strength of Will, using it for the Steadfast unique would be fine, though I'd personally try to squeeze a bit more +Res out of it unless I absolutely couldn't spare any slots. It can't be affected by recharge and there's little reason to slot it for +recovery, but squeezing out some more +res could help for those ugly encounters that you take SoW to prepare for in the first place.

For reference, a brute using HPT, MoB, and Tough (all three-slotted for +res) will have 52% S/L resist - unslotted SoW brings it up to 72%, a Steadfast res/def will take it to 74.5, and three-slotting it for +res gives 83%. If you don't take Tough, then subtract ~17.5 from your totals. Determine your own priorities from that.

My main blaster is an Archer, but I will assume RoA / FA / HoB are irrelevant to this discussion. Skipping them, or not using them regularly, would just be silly (marginal case can be made against HoB).

I take my conventional nukes on Blasters and Corruptors to use whenever it is tactically appropriate to do so. When I see two spawns stacked on top of each other, or an unexpected ambush pops up, or the RNG just hates us and a battle is going poorly, nuking works as a reset button. The otherwise ugly horde of baddies is now mostly a pile of bodies, and any stragglers can be dealt with much less hassle.

I take my nuke on Defenders that are not largely dependent on their toggles - my Sonic/Sonic skipped Dreadful Wail despite its awesomeness because he runs 7 toggles all the time and the retoggling would drive me insane. My Kin/Rad nukes every time it recharges, because with Fulcrum Shift and Transference there is absolutely no reason not to. My Emp/Sonic is from Green Machine and runs with other Empaths all the time, so he also nukes every time it recharges because he has enough +recovery with Adrenaline Boost and stacked Recovery Auras to negate the crash.

General tips on nuking - if you are using it as an alpha strike to thin out a really hard group, you can use stealth to get in position without getting attacked first. You can also joust the PBAoE with a bit of skill; by jumping out of the group right as you hit [nuke of choice], you can land several yards away and avoid any melee retaliation. If you are nuking just for the heck of it, against something not immediately lethal but annoying enough to want to kill NOW, then you should preface the nuke by hitting the boss with a couple single target attacks. This will build up some defiance boosts for the nuke itself, and soften up the boss so it will hopefully die to the nuke as well. If you are popping it in response to a battle suddenly going south, getting into firing range should be no concern, other than fighting your instinct to run away and charging head-on to finish the fight.

Howdy. I've been trying to wrap up my last few badges (before GR adds hundreds more to get), and given how dead the Arena is most of the time, Pentad Victor is one of those that I can not realistically acquire without the help of 9 other badgehunters. I'd ask ingame through the Freedom Badge channel or equivalent, but those are at the max. capacity.

Are there any other heroes on Freedom who would like to band together and get the badge for winning a Pentad arena match? A team of heroes vs. a team of villains may work too, if we did it through Pocket D. We can duke it out for real or just take turns letting the other team win by default, at your preference.

If you are interested, please post when you would be available to do this. I can get on pretty much any time over the next week or two, aside from this Friday. With a little luck and cooperation, a bunch of us can check this nasty one off our lists in just a few minutes.

Well, if you're building in a defense buffer over the softcap, you can go a little bit over or WAY over. By far the most common -def around, standard lethal attacks from swords and machine guns and such, typically come around 7.5%. If you run ~52% def, then you have enough to take one successful shot and still be capped against the next one. That way, despite your total lack of DDR, you have to take two consecutive debuffing shots before your defense actual lowers and cascading failure becomes a potential concern.

If the defense debuffers are pulling out the BIG guns - that is, you're up against Earth Thorn Casters, Longbow Radiation wardens, Antimatter's radiation bots, or something of that sort, then one false move will smack you with enough -defense to blow conventional softcapped builds away. For those, you'd need more like 70% defense, which is not realistically possible / practical in any sense (without external buffs), so I wouldn't worry about it.

In general, I'd say that if you're already running 50+ def to all positions WITHOUT weave, then you're likely going to get more mileage out of Aid Self to patch up occasional lucky streaks from any enemy than you would taking weave, which would only matter when you're getting heavy fire from a LOT of -def debuffers. Again, I don't know what you usually fight - if your playtime is typically centered around beating down endless seas of Cimerorans and Nemesis troopers, then yes, Weave (and Tough) makes more sense.

Re: purchaseable, 30-day jetpack

That bonus item was introduced before the readily-renewable Raptor Packs we enjoy today were available. You could get a Raptor Pack from the Atlas Park Mayhem/Safeguard mission (since those were introduced in Issue 7/8 at least), but those only carried 2 hours of fuel and could not easily be replaced; once you wore it out, you'd have to take a 'conventional' travel power, or make do without. There were short-duration flight packs available from PvP areas, and Villains had a couple extra ways to get temp travel powers in any case, but for Heroes, you were pretty much out of luck once you ran out of the first Raptor Pack. The $5 pack was a way to keep flying in style with all of your characters, without any hassle or need to take the actual power.

I wouldn't have gotten it then, but under the current system, there is close to zero logical reason to shell out the cash when you can shell out 10k influence every so often.

If Power Boost (or a variant thereof) is in effect, then any power you activate will receive the effect for that power's full duration. That is, PB + a Forcefield will amp up the +defense of the shield for the next four minutes.

However, for toggle-based powers like anchor debuffs or leadership auras, the duration of the power tends to only be around a second - toggles constantly reapply non-stacking, short-duration buffs so that once you deactivate the toggle the effect will fade in short order. As such, if you slap down Radiation Infection on an AV and then activate Power Build Up, your debuff will start at regular power, be amped up shortly after you hit PBU, and then fade back to normal strength shortly after PBU ends.

Well, even the Eye of the Leviathan is PUNY compared to Rularuu the Ravager in his full glory, and the Eye is more or less at ground level anyway. Rularuu is an order of magnitude larger than any other Giant Monster in the game. Lusca and the Jade Spider would barely be able to reach his knees. His center of mass would be over a hundred yards in the air.

Getting power ranges and target boxes to function properly against something so mindbogglingly out of proportion with anything else in existence was not exactly a trivial matter. That said, it'd be one hell of a fight; Rularuu the Ravager is basically a god, and fighting him would be somewhat akin to taking on Galactus.

In short? No. At least, not when you can get better results with IOs anyway, and without the obscene endurance cost.

I'd only call it "worth it" if you're someone like a /Kin with infinite endurance, and are either on a very tight budget, market-phobic, or a very high-end challenge-seeker who really does need all that accuracy for PvP or hunting +4 Nemesis or something

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Enhancements

There's a link to Paragon Wiki's page on Enhancements. Paragon Wiki is one of the most comprehensive sources of CoH info around, and it can fill you in on most any basic questions you will have.

In short, TOs = Training Origin (weak, but available early and to everyone); DOs = Dual Origin (limited to two origins, like Natural / Tech, but 2x as powerful as TOs and available from the stores from level 12 on); and SOs = Single Origin (specific to one origin, 2x as powerful as DOs, and available from the stores in-game from level 22 on).

As a followup, your characters' origin doesn't have much of an in-game effect beyond the cosmetic. You get a very weak origin-specific ranged attack to start (Throwing Knives for Natural, etc.) that's equivalent to Brawl, and they determine which type of SOs you use (although this has no statistical effect; a magician and a cyborg can use the same basic slotting, just with a different name and from a different store). Hero-side, some of your starting contacts differ depending on your origin, sending you against thematically-appropriate enemies (techies start out dealing with the Clockwork, etc). Basically, don't sweat the choice - your Archetype (AT) and power sets are what really determine what you can do.

IOs, or Inventions, are special player-crafted enhancements that never degrade as you level up, and sometimes can enhance multiple things at once or add entirely new abilities. They may be a little complicated for a brand new player, but don't worry. If you're on the forums you might also hear about HOs, which are powerful Hamidon Origin enhancements that are level 50 only. Again, don't worry about them until later.

Your brute sounds fine, if that pairing appeals to you. Shields are one of the most offensive protection sets available to meleers, offering a taunt aura that increases your damage and a very powerful AoE (Area of Effect) shield bash later on, though you might find yourself a bit more fragile than other brutes.

I think your problem is that the final accuracy number you see on Mids is rather simplified. It combines your +tohit bonuses and +accuracy bonuses and pits them against an unmodified, even-con enemy. As such, it will show the unmodified accuracy of most attacks as 75%, and if you're running Tactics, Mind Link, Follow Up, Aim, and Vengeance on top of heavy accuracy slotting in a power and +accuracy set bonuses, it very well may display as over 400%.

The ~200% cap you mentioned earlier is specifically the +tohit cap, not the +accuracy cap, and as Harkness' equation showed, those are treated separately. Without getting too mathy, +tohit is added to your base tohit chance, and then multiplied by +accuracy. Ideally, you will want a balance of each for maximum effect. +Accuracy works better against higher level enemies' level mods, while +tohit is more valuable to counteract an enemy's +defense or -tohit debuffs; if you're trying to hit a Nemesis boss that just got 5-stacked Leadership from his lieutenants' demise, all the +accuracy in the world won't make much difference, but a lot of +tohit could let you slice right through them.

As to your initial question, don't just look at what the simple box on Mids' says if you're trying to see if you are "accurate enough" - look at what you are trying to plan for. "Accurate enough" to not whiff when running +2 radio missions against generic baddies, or "accurate enough" to keep hitting against +2 Nemesis with X levels of Vengeance up, or "accurate enough" to hit +4 Captain Mako through his Elude on the STF without needing to pop yellows/Geas?

Generally speaking, I don't find Focused Accuracy that useful, at least for the cost. It doesn't do much +tohit anymore, so for situations where you want +tohit, you're better off with Tactics for more oomph and much less endurance. It does a decent bit of +accuracy, but only the equivalent of a shiny +3 DO, or a standard Insight, or ~3 medium set bonuses' worth. If you genuinely have bottomless endurance (you're a kin after all) then you might as well grab it if you have nothing else that interests you, but it's not all that wonderful.

On doms with strong ST focuses, like a Mind/Energy, +3/0 or even +4/0 is pretty viable. On doms that can wreck crowds, like a Plant/Psi, then flip that.

I think my early 30s Fire/Earth dom had been soloing on +2/0 lately, but I could certainly push it if I wanted to and was paying attention.

The same power from the same caster generally won't stack the effects if it's primarily a buffing power (like Fortitude, or Forcefields, or Sonic Siphon) but will if the debuffing is a secondary attribute of the power, as is the case with most any attack. So, if you had enough recharge to reapply the -damage from something like Dual Wield (w/chem rounds) before the first debuff faded, they would stack briefly, and if you fire off Empty Clips and Bullet Rain in quick succession, you will have stacked AoE debuffs.

Robots will resist more damage, but Longbow tend to be far nastier to fight than any robots (unless they are all energy blasting robots and you have no knockback protection, or all rad-blasting robots and you are a defense build with little/no DDR).\

As to why Archery wins: You're a blaster, you have Aim + BU + RoA, you are probably doing more AoE damage (and therefore much more damage overall given a large number of baddies), and heroes don't really fight Longbow outside of the RWZ.

@Talen - If you had a Regen Tissue and Numina unique in Health, and also had it slotted for ED-capped heal, this glitch meant you were effectively getting an extra ~65% regen boost. If you were someone like an Invuln tanker who wanted to build up some layered protection, that could be pretty meaningful, considering that even purple sets' regen boosts are only 16%.

Minor nitpick, Necro - those are the caps for their damage buffs - technically, their damage caps are 500% and 400% respectively (factoring in the base 100%).

That being said, I'm planning on making a DP/Kin once GR goes live. Either way you build it, you'll do a lot of damage once you get Fulcrum in high gear, but corruptors will get higher base damage + higher damage cap (which you WILL spend a lot of your time at) + Scourge. Defenders get more potent damage debuffs in Siphon Power / Fulcrum / Chem rounds, and 25% bonus damage instead of 20% on each layer of Siphon Power / Fulcrum, but it won't likely enough of a difference to tip the votes.

I'll throw my vote in for Stalkers (esp. Elec/Nin stalkers), followed by scrappers. Lightning Rod + guaranteed crit Thunderstrike on a stalker is crazy-good AoE burst damage. Electric Melee is far and away the most AoE-centric set stalkers can use, both because of its natural AoE focus and because most other sets lose AoE power when converted to BU/AS/Placate while Electric only loses Thunderclap and Taunt. If you want to build a stalker that rips through hordes of enemies in PvE, Electric is probably your best bet, and if you want to build an Electric Melee powerhouse, Stalkers make an excellent platform for it.