DrMike2000

Roots does twice the damage of most AoE immobilises, dealing 18 damage at level 50 per target, so you're off to a good start.

Each Damage SO would add 6 damage per target to the power.

The procs have a 20% chance of doing 71 damage, or 14 on average, so they'll give you more bang for your buck. Slot some accuracy and you'll be good. A Kin superteam shouldnt need recharge or end reduction slotting.

Plus with 4 Kins you're going to be at the damage cap anyway once you all get Fulcrum Shift.

The proc damage won't be affected by +Damage buffs, by the way.

So yeah, sounds like your plan should work very well.

Carrion Creepers at level 26 will up your AoE damage considerably, by the way, and with all the Speed Boost you'll have it availabel at all times.

The servers get listed in order of the last one you played on, followed by the other in ascending order of population at the time.

Virtue and Freedom always appear down the bottom for me, making them the two most populated servers in Australian evenings.

I've hopped on Justice a couple of times, with its rep for being the Antipodean server and done a quick search and found it less full. Infinity often has a bigger population than Justice during my Aussie evenings, in fact.

If the XP gain for teaming isnt enough to encourage people to team at all times, I doubt a badge will do the trick.

And I dont really believe people should be pushed into teaming by the devs if they dont want to. Some people just snub you? As in say "no thanks". That's perfectly fine if thats what they want to do.

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I can see it. You can get away with calling almost every one of the Controller secondaries whatever you want from magic auras to fancy mutant powers to...whatever, but Trick Arrow is just a person with a bow who shoots out arrows that are either scientific gadgets or enchanted or something. Makes the concept hard to figure out.

I made my Plant/TA based on the story of the blind Norse god Hud being tricked into killing his brother Baldur with an arrow made from mistletoe by Locke (google Mistletoe, Locke, and Baldur if you're confused and actually care enough to look it up). My character supposedly wears a bracelet made from the mistletoe that killed a god and the bow that fired the arrow, giving his magic arrows and plant manipulation. It was a stretch, but I hate leaving the description blank.

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Yeah, exactly.
Nice origin for your Plant/TA. I do know that story! Thats how Ragnarok starts, isn't it?

It also makes an appearance in Alan Moore's "Top Ten" - the cops investigate the murder of Baldur in a bar for Gods, only to discover that it happens every day.

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You said, "If anyone comes to the game with a pre-existing character idea that they want to fit into the game as closely as possible, chances are Trick Arrow wont be it.", and I disagree with that assessment because you base it on your lack of concepts for TA or Archery characters, not on data mining, polling other players, simple observation of new players or anything else.


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Yeah, I have to admit I was incorrectly coming from a Western "classic" superhero point of view with that comment.
Its not so much about my own creations - I have a couple of Trick Archers as it happens.
Marvel and DC have a very small percentage of bow-wielders, pretty much one big name each (Hawkeye and Green Arrow) and a number of spin-offs and minor characters (Speedy, Arsenal, Arrowette, "I, Spyder" etc.). Taking that as a base, bow and arrow users are pretty rare compared to "gesture and make things glow" supers.

But, you're right, add in the mythological and high fantasy heroes which this game also caters to, and the numbers shoot up considerably in favour of the bow users.

My opinion there was coloured heavily by my own comics reading habits.

And you are correct that most of the blast sets aren't open to much interpretation. Fire is fire, electricity is electricity. Sonic Blast can double up as TK force blasts or psychic blasts if needs be, preferably without Shout - that power does sound very "Sonic". Radiation Blast doubles up as general light blasts as well as hard radiation.

I'd still assert that some powersets are more concept-tied than others.

I'd disagree that the same can be said for every powerset, Luminara.

Trick Archery looks like you are unequivocally using a Bow and Arrow to fire arrows with unusual devices attached.

For the record, Storm is also pretty unequivocably weather manipulation, and Force Fields are Force Fields.

If you sat down someone who'd never played the game to watch you use any of these three sets, they'd probably describe pretty accuractely what you were doing.

"You're shooting an arrow with a net on the end"
"You're creating a tornado and a Lightning Storm!"
"You just put a Force Field round that guy!"

But Radiation Emission, Sonic Resonance, Kinetics and Empathy are all much vaguer to watch.
The non-player watching would describe that you're just gesturing and making some enemies or allies (or parts thereof) glow a different colour, and making your side win more easily.
Its not visually apparent how, and this does make it easier to kind of stretch these powersets around any concept.

Same can be said of, say, Tanker Armors. Ice Armor is pretty hard to pretend you're anything other than covered in ice. Or crystal at a pinch.
Invulnerability or Willpower, though, could stand in for a metal body, a stone body, Superman style classic Invulnerability, being a big tough lug like Marv from Sin City, having a personal force field like Captain Britain or tech armour like Iron Man.
Ice Armour is therfore more narrow in terms of the concepts it supports. Not a worse set in any way, but narrower in the concepts it supports.

I'm not bagging Trick Arrow in any way. Its no worse mechanically than other sets, but it does have a tighter range of visual definitions than some other debuff/buff sets.

Untargettable seems like a good idea.

Invisibility is an intriguing option, if you did that I'd suggest adding a short duration stun when they come out of shift.

It works thematically, and would also prevent "surprise attacks" by the enemy as they re-enter normal space.

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He knew more I think than they usual AE baby, but was still had been only playing a week. Got his first 50 in that time. I thought about global friending him, but I didn't want him to think I was a creep or something

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Kudos to you for helping, but anyone who has been playing for a week and has a VEAT will get no help from me.

If people don't do the dirty work themselves, they don't have a right to the spoils IMO. Let him suffer through the learning process, he should have done it the first time around.

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We are talking about electronic recreational entertainment here, arent we? "Let him suffer..." Jeez!

Mngwa - good on you! I remember how much the game confused me when I started.

For a solo-er I would recommend Illusion, which I know isnt on your list.

Your Phantom Army are not buffable from your shields, because they dont need to be. But you can use them as a mule for Sonic Dispruption when they're up, and take advantage of that -22.5% Res debuff from level 18 onwards instead of level 32 onwards like most Controllers.

From your list I recommend Fire then Earth then Ice. Soloing an Ice controller is painfully slow, even by my admittedly low standards for such things. Earth is low damage too, but can at least use the -Def to get Sands of Mu hitting reliably.
Fire/Sonic also means your Imps dont get mezzed, Stony and Jack frost lose that advantage of Sonic since they both have some mez protection of their own.

Neither Ice nor Earth have any special compatibility with Sonic.

Cool! I especially like tying in a character to Irish mythology since we actually have Tuatha De Dannan and so on in game.

Is it fair to say you're something of a mythology buff, Milady's Knight?

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The likely reason for Cold not being as popular for Defenders is that the ATs hero-side tend to be much more focused in their particular goals, making a specialist with a single focus quite useful. Whereas villain ATs tend to be much broader in their style.
I.e., a Blaster already brings a ton of damage to the table, so make it invincible with FF or whatever. A Brute on the other hand, while not weak, only needs some defensive support to be made invincible and once survival is shored up, the rest of the time can focus on its killing power.

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Thats a really good point.

I'd also suspect that the purely defensive gap between FF and Cold is narrowing hero-side these days as well. Its becoming increasingly easier for squishy heroes to get their own modicum of Defence through set bonuses and so on to close the gap between what a Defence-specced Cold Domination Defender provides and the soft cap.

Cold with Manuevers and Arctic Fog slotted for Defence give you about 37% team defence? Its pretty easy for any teammate, even a Blaster, to make up the shortfall with Hover or CJ and a few sets.

I cannot disagree with any of these - all sensible suggestions that dont break any precedents in other powerset changes.

Maybe only 2) or 5) is needed, Wormhole doesnt need to be aggro free if you can find a corner from which to cast it around. And a range increase woudl help a lot there.

Talionis, Milady's Knight, and Local Man - those are cool backstories.

However, if I may ask, did you come up with the backstories first, or decide that you wanted to create a Trick Archer of a certain kind and then fit the backstory to it?

I'm not trying to knock this powerset in anyway, just pointing out one of the reasons people may not play it. If anyone comes to the game with a pre-existing character idea that they want to fit into the game as closely as possible, chances are Trick Arrow wont be it.
My first Controller, for example, Anemone, was a superstrong telepathic mermaid from a Freedom Force game mod I made. She ended up being Mind Control/Kinetics because it didn't burst my bubble much to see blue and green waves emanating from her as she gestured every now and then, whereas carrying a bow would have looked out of place.
Same for every other Aquaman/Jean Grey/Magneto/Doc Strange/Jonn Jonn'z wannabe or analogue out there.

Nothing wrong with making a character either way, backstory first or powerset first, but this particular set will be a turn-off to the backstory first crowd.

I've got to say, decisions like that really puzzle me.

Take a situational power, or one that's hard to leverage in most situations, and apply some special tweak that further downgrades it just when it might be an unqualified success.

I felt this way when I discovered (the hard way) that Malta Sappers are for some arbitrary reason totally immune to Energy Drain themselves.

Ive never rolled a Trick Arrow Controller, or even considered rolling one, because its probably the hardest set to come up with a concept for.

Or to put it another way, the most visually obtrusive secondary.

Rad Emission, for example, looks like you're, well, doing something. Could be light control, could be magical, or probablity control or whatever. The glowing effects could be no more real than the way your head glows different colours when you experience a moment of Inspiration.
The same can be said for Sonic Resonance or Kinetics.

But Trick Arrow you're unquestionably pulling out a bow and firing off an arrow with a gadget on the end. And never firing a normal pointy arrow.

I've always found that a bit hard to reconcile - if you can control the very earth or flame, or gravity, why are you carrying some gimmicks-on-a-stick around?

I have seen a few good bio's: Like a stage magician's assistant with Illusion/TA powers, but they're few and far between.

I've dual-boxed the following duos:

Emp/Energy twins (with Assault and Manuevers): Two empaths absolutely cream everything once you've got all your primary powers rocking. Stopped playing at 39 because they were too good - +5 bosses were a cakewalk.
Emp/Sonic would be even better, sickeningly so, in fact.
5 stars.

Fire/Rad twins: interesting combination, can be vulnerable to long range attacks. Up close, Choking Cloud, Hot Feet and stacked AM and monkeys hold everything and then burn them to a crisp.
3 stars.

Sonic/Energy Def + PeaceBringer: The Peacebringer easily gets 85% resistance to non-Psi damage in human form, and you both have lots of AoE knockback. The PB also packs self and other heals to complement the Resistance provided by Sonic, both spike damage and slow attrition of health are covered.
Duo'd Nemesis Rex Av the other day.

Trick Arrow/Archery Defender twins with Manouvers: Manouvers and Flash Arrow x2 is 30% Defence equivalent, easy to cap vs ranged at least with set bonuses. This was a tricky duo, if your initial volley of debuffs missed you could wipe very easily.
2 stars.

Dark/Rad Defender and Fire/Fire Blaster.
Very fun combination of safety and firepower. I took Stimulant for mez protection.
Duo'd most of the Praetorians as AVs with these two.
4 stars

Sonic/Energy and Fire/Fire Blaster: very nice with the Fire epic shield in high levels, maybe a bit squishy before then. Damage output is godly with Fire Blast and -Res.
3 stars, 4 later on.

Dark/Energy Tank + Psi/Sonic Blaster.
Any tank and blaster pair can play hammer and anvil
3 stars

A thought experiment:
2 Kinetics of any kind - mutual Speed Boost means you dont need travel powers or Stamina.
2 Electric Blast characters could drain every group with x Short Circuit.

Yep, Defence slotting is good. Fulmens has named my fave two sets already - Thunderstrike and Red Fortune.

I really question the Defence Debuff IO's you curently have slotted. Against normal Invincible mission enemies, most level 50s should have a 50% chance of hitting anyway.

Against enemies with Defence or To Hit Debuffs, Irradiate alone adds a whopping 37.5% Defence Debuff without slotting. That should allow your team to hit Rikti drones pretty much dead on.

Slotting for damage is still helping your team. FF/RAd can have 4 good AoEs with Repulsion Bomb, and the damage from them can add up once the tanks gone in.

Cosmic Burst could be slotted a s acontrol, ie put more Stun in there.

And Neutrino Bolt is crying out for procs - special IOs with a chance of an unusual secondary effect per hit. The Devastation hold proc is a good one.
All your attacks can also take the Achilles Heel -Res proc, 20% chance per hit to cause -20% Res debuff, only one can stack per user. Stick one of these in Irradiate, Neutron Bomb or Electron Haze or all three and you're a much better force multiplier for a team.

EDIT: you have a few wasted slots in Flight and Swift. One in each will put you real close to the flight cap at level 50.

I'd maybe drop them in Aim and PBU and invest in some sets like Gaussians or Adjusted Targetting to give you some nice bonuses and a higher To Hit Boost from both powers. This way if you do come across soemthing your team cant hit (eg an activated Paragon Protector, Captain Mako), you can power up a big juicy To Hit buff to tag them with your rad powers a few times and bring them down in Defence. It helps avoid the Catch 22 of "need to hit em to debuff em, need to debuff em to hit em" that Rad Blast can suffer from.

Wouldnt Tough, Unyielding and TI be better slotted with all Aegis (+4.6% Fire/Cold defence) or all Reactive Armour (3 separate smaller typed Def bonuses)?

You've kind of fallen between the two there without gaining any extra Frankenslotting bonus either.

I'd go Aegis myself, and pick up the Smash/Lethal Defence from Kinetic Combat.

If Hover and CJ are just mules for BoTZ (ie you dont care about the actual movement bonuses), you may as well swap them out for standard IOs.
Both would give +1.5% Defence to everything for three IOs instead of +3.125% vs Ranged and Aoe (which will get lost against your Elemental defences to all but ranged/AoE psi attacks) and +1.56% vs E/N/F/C.

At level 42 I'm packing five full sets of Thunderstrike in my ST blasts, four sets of Positrons Blast (5 pieces each) in my AoEs and 3 sets of Aegis in the Shields, and a -KB proc in Absorption (? the passive tier 1 shield).

That gives me:

+20% Recovery
+71% Accuracy
+19% Recharge
+20% all movement speeds
+18.75% Ranged/Energy/Neg Defence
+14% AoE/Fire/Cold Defence

My next move is to swap the -KB in Absorption for a Steadfast Unique for +3% extra Def, and three slot Combat Flight with Blessing of the Zephyr for an extra 3.125% vs Aoe and Ranged, and get my KB protection there.

The downside is my dwarf powers and heals are totally unslotted. The above is pretty much all I have, and I dont have either melee attack yet. Its primarily a Human/Nova Blaster-ish build.

Light sabers arent going to happen for copyright reasons
A lot of your suggestions are already in the game, or very close equivalents are:

Energy Blast on Blasters or Defenders makes a very good water blast set - blue bubbly beams that knock the target around.

Magnetic Powers - check out Gravity Control for Controllers. Grav/Force Fields is a popular combo for this.

Eye Beams - Radiation Blast Defenders get one power called X-Ray eyes. Tankers and Scrappers get Laser Eye Beams at level 44, but thats some way off I'm guessing.

Time Travel: Use the teleport pool. Maybe Kinetics to speed up/slow down time.

Telepathy: Mind Control and Illusion Control for controllers, Psychic Blast for Blasters and Defenders.

Give some of these a go and see how you like them.

Play a Fire/Energy Blaster.

Energy Manipulation has a number of powerful punch attacks that could easily be passed of as Superstrength, one of which hurls the target a distance of 20 feet or so, the others all stun the target with a big satisfying "BA_DUMP!" noise.
Your fists glow when using them - pass that off as a fiery effect.

You dont need anyone to tell you this could get dodgy very quickly.

Are you playing it for laughs, with the character obviously being in the wrong all the time?
Or going for a more serious saga where the character has their rigid worldview broken down a bit (or not)?

With strangers or just close friends?

I wouldn't for example, recommend playing this straight with a PUG youve just met. If you're going to talk about gassing catgirls in a wacky Nazi scientist voice, you'll probably get a few "lol"s and be OK.

Even so, I find characters like this hard to play. One of my old game-mod creations, King Zero, is a blustering misogynistic Victorian adventurer. He was great to write about in a story-based single player game, but roleplaying him with a group of other people via the sarcasm free medium of text often just came across as offensive.

Playing a Nazi puts you on much thinner ice.

Its just a matter of scale.

I remember reaching the point where I'd pay 2000 for any piece of cheapo salvage which I might pick up for 100, just to save time.

These days I happily pay multiples of 250,000 for generic IOs after levelling up if I dont have any sets in mind.

One day I'll be happily shelling out 10 million for convenience, I'm sure.

Nah. Allow me.

I reckon pretty much every set has something annoying about it. Rad and Dark Defenders (and Storm and Cold) complain about teammates killing their anchors - this can get old for the teammates.

Force Field and Storm have knockback issues if played badly.

Kinetics' Speed Boost can cause problems for players on low end machines, or with poor reflexes or medical conditions.

Sonic Resonance used to give people migraines. I think its OK now, although Sonic Dispersion can suddenly fill your screen with ornage spots at just the right distance.

And Cold Domination obscures the costume of the recipient of its buffs.

Now, go and find any review of City of Heroes, and what's the first thing they always seem to mention? "The costume creator alone is worth the price of the game" "I could play in the costume creator all night without getting bored" and so on.
This isn't the game with the most stuff to do, or the one with the best combat mechanics, or the slickest graphics, but it is the MMO with the best character customisation system.

Having a powerset that obscures everyone's costume seems kind of wrong in light of that.

Would anyone here really object if the Ice Shield and Glacial Shield graphics were swapped for something less obtrusive, like a light frosting with sparkles? I'd be all over the set like a rash if they did that.

PS - Arctic Fog is a lovely looking power, and puts Steamy Mist and Shadowfall to shame IMHO.

I did that on my Dark/Rad/Dark Defender too.

Worked really nicely - I never had anyone get hurled away from me that I didn't want out of my face.