Eiko-chan

But all my peeps are on this server! Why should I have to leave my peeps?

Please, think of the peeps!

Lots of things are too fast. I can never take super speed as a travel power, because I'm just not fast enough to control it. Sprint in a cave map is pretty bad; Sprint + Swift is nearly impossible for me. And random Speed Boosts in caves lead to auto-defeats by running smack into too many walls and knocking myself out.

One of the best parts of this game is the lack of twitch.

I think CoH will still be here in ten years. Everquest is still running.

I still think the Veteran's Rewards are a bad thing.

The difference, Energyman, is back before they added capes, no one had capes. Now, only veterans can have boxing gloves, or angel wings, or samurai armour. They're in the game, but for some inexplicible reason, large swaths of the player base are prohibited from accessing them. There is nothing we can do to earn them on our own schedule.

Veteran's Rewards are the only thing in this game (of significance - yellow titles, Con costumes and the like are insignificant compared to the very real in-game effect of Veteran's Rewards) that a player has no power over when, how, and what they earn. Veteran's Rewards literally reward nothing - not in-game effort, not providing income, not out-of-game behaviour. They are unique in the reward structure of the game - not only do they provide obvious and immediate benefits to players and characters, but they are also arbitrarily and inexorably denied to players that started playing the game later.

Veteran's Rewards are unfair. It is unfair to grant a section of players visible and meaningful benefits (which is how they are separated from any other benefits that have been brought up) that another section of players can do nothing to earn.

And please, refrain from the "but you can earn them, just keep subscribing" trite. That's not an answer - and you know it.

I will point out that, while Mercs is arguably the worst MM primary, it is still a Master Mind primary. The AT and the Summon sets in general are quite powerful, so even a poor MM set will perform better than a lot of sets from other ATs.

I'm firmly against the idea of earning things simply by racking up time.

Just to clarify, when I dis Aquaman, I'm talking about this guy:

not this guy:

From a mechanical standpoint, Bots are generally superior to the other sets. They have fair resistances - includind to both lethal, a common type, and psionic, which is a hole for most other people - and do mostly Energy damage with a bit of Fire - while the other sets do mostly Lethal or Smashing with a bit of Fire or Dark. Doing Energy damage allows the Bots to avoid the most common pitfall especially endgame - the ridiculous amount of Smashing/Lethal resistance in high-end foes.

Bots is also the only set whose protections - the Prot Bots Force Fields - actually help the MM itself. And Bots also have two healers, while other sets have one (Mercs) or none (all others, with a slight caveat on life-draining Zombies).

Thugs comes in second for much the same reason; between stacking Leadership buffs from the Enforcers, the Corruptor Arsonist and Brute Bruiser, Thugs offer a good combination of tough pets and good damage.

Mercs are last because they're the weakest of the sets; the Mercs do almost entirely Lethal damage, and their utility and non-Lethal attacks are on ridiculously high recharges so they don't come up often enough to make them particularly useful. Zombies avoids this pitfall with Dark damage, life-draining (thus self-healing) pets, and debuffs, while Ninjas have the Fire/Dark Oni. Mercs just don't have enough to overcome their short falls, especially their Lethal damage, which is probably the most resisted damage type in the entire game.