Fulmens

I'm just in this thread to say two nonconstructive things.

1) There's a typo in your sig. This hurts my brain.
2) I'm a lover.

Your Mastermind thing: You aren't just paying someone to be your friend...
you're paying someone to make you part of a clique.

Generally, depending on your Blaster, recharge gives you more than damage. Your AOE's and your Tier 3 blasts (Blaze, Bitter Ice Bolt, things like that) are usually where the pain lives. That and Build Up & Aim.

Without knowing what kind of blaster you have, all I can say is that OFTEN the melee hitters are surprisingly fast and full of juicy damage. Give 'em a try!

Edited to add: I like the way you think.

/em colors the powers on his second build while supersidekicked down and getting XP

Sorry, I was distracted there for a sec. Could you repeat your post?

Work it.
Work it.

Now I'ma go back to the other thread, ok?

There's always room for math.

I frankenslot around 35, because the idea of leaving all that recharge and endred on the table makes me itch. But I can see how other people would want "less stress".

Empathy duos are VERY tough to kill. I'd recommend, if starting from the ground up, two Emp/Sonics so that you can stack resist debuffs and do huge amounts of damage. Also, the "Green Machine" trick is to take the Leadership pool and Hasten instead of Fitness. Recovery Aura means very little time when your blue bar is moving; Adrenaline Boost means NONE. One Fortitude plus two slotted Maneuvers is 32% Defense (close to SR levels) and alternating Regen Auras means "Instant Healing" level regeneration rates.

There will be some downtime on the auras until you get Adrenaline Boost- at which point you get perma-Hasten, perma- Adrenaline Boost, perma- Regen Aura (and perma-Recovery Aura if you want it) and you're running around 2000% Regen rate. Zero to full health in 12 seconds or less.

I haven't done it myself but the theory, and other people's stories, indicate that it's pretty gaudy and unkillable.

"do it appropriately" is sort of the key.

I remember one time I got very good usage out of Detention Field, and I think there was another one. (that's in 135+ levels of Force Fields, if you're keeping count.) I was playing with two /Dev blasters, and for whatever reason we kept getting pairs of Paragon Protectors. Phasing one of them was very helpful.

But, normally, that 30 second duration is about 15 seconds longer than the rest of the fight.

I feel that if the team has only one Defender, that shouldn't be a Sonic. If the team has a Defender and one [useful] Controller or Defender, Sonic is probably a VERY good choice for the second one. Most Defenders, in combination with characters' own builds, can put enemies close to the ToHit floor. Sonics add a lot of Resistance, which is almost never wasted.

Plus, you should never underestimate the benefits of a layer of idiotproofing. Lord knows I've autorun, fallen down the layercake room, turned left when the team went right, beaten the tank to the alpha, etc, etc, plenty of times in my life.

Thank you, Panzerwaffen, for finding that.

I wish I'd copied out my "ignore" list before we switched boards. . . coulda saved me a lot of time in this thread.

On a duo, an Emp/* and a Blaster are a very impressive team.

For your own defender needs: Rad/Sonic is a very good combo of powersets. I recommend it.

General: At one point they fixed Detention Field to cease working on AV's; did they change it back?

Ultimo: By many definitions your original post was trolling. You're very close to putting the "No disagreeing with OP" tag on your thread... in which case, what you really want is a webpage, with no comments.

B L Angel said

In other news, a pickup truck has worse cornering than a Porsche 911, worse gas mileage, it's worse for picking up chicks and neither one has a back seat. If it wasn't for the ability to throw 1500 lbs of bricks in the back there'd be no reason to buy one at all.

Force Fields is a flawed set that I love. I just ran through a Positron with my latest lowb FF and two blasters.

We cleared several missions in under four minutes.

I know, I know, where are you going to find Blasters that appreciate force fields?

Someone posted numbers once- and I don't remember them well enough to talk intelligently about them.

What I remember at that time:

1) Infinity was #3
2) #4,5,6 were very close to #3
3) #1 and #2 (Freedom and Virtue) were a LONG WAY OFF from #3.

Basically, it was something like "Freedom had more people than all the other servers except Virtue, combined."

As long as you join a couple global channels you'll probably find good people on any given server.

I'm one of those ebil marketers everyone talks about up there. (Well, so are most of them...)

There's a bunch of stuff in the miniguides in my sig that covers a lot of what you might want to know. I'm going to mention two things here.

1) What IO's to buy?

I tend to think of the IO system as about 4 levels of expense/efficiency:

* Generic IO's. Work like regular SO's but ssssssssslightly better.
* Frankenslotting. Gets you "a couple extra slots per power" for nearly the same price as SO's.
* Moderate set bonuses. Things like Thunderstrike sets, where you can spend 10 million per set and get some pretty good results.
* Ultimate, no-expense-spared, gaudiness. Numina's, Purples, Blessing of the Zephyr, real diamonds on your tiara.

I've only gone to the third level a few times, and near the fourth level once (my attempted AV-soloing stalker). On the other hand, I frankenslotted a level 50 Scrapper once for 6 million inf for the WHOLE THING. I'm cheap, really, is what it is, and that works out well for me. If you go cheap and you want to upgrade later, you haven't spent much [comparitively.]

2) How to start out making money: If people tell you "Buy recipes, craft and sell" the next question is always "What do I buy?" Look at what you want, yourself. Now look at the max-level IO for that recipe. Probably there's a 5-10 million inf difference in price. (remember that Wents will take 10% and remember to count ALL the cost: salvage, crafting, and the recipe itself.) Buy two, craft two, slot one and sell one. If you find a good niche, you can sometimes sell a bunch, but niches collapse every once in a while. So don't get TOO far ahead of yourself.

Hope this helps.

I'm pretty sure the deep entitlement is the reason most people, at the core, don't PVP.

Even if it's coinflip PVP, you're going to lose half the time. Which is obviously too much. Nerf "heads".

I don't know if that was clear or not. And I love to see my words up in public.

Therefore an example:

You're shooting at an even-con badguy with Energy Blast. You do 100 points of damage, say.

You shoot that same Energy Blast at a +2 and it only does 80 points. (100* .8 = 80)

Likewise, a 40% To Hit debuff on an even-con will turn into a 32% To Hit debuff on a +2 enemy. (40*.8 = 32)

To make it worse, debuffs are also affected by resistance. So if you're using a [nominally] "40% To Hit debuff" on a Spectral Lord who is your level, but 50% negative energy resistant (I don't know... are they? Pretend I know what I'm talking about here.) that's only a 20% debuff.

Softcap is at 45%, any combination of final To Hit Debuff and Defense.

OK. The basics of a bind are something like this:

/bind g "say gratz!"

bind, then the key, then (in quotes if there are spaces) the actual details.

I use shift-1, shift-2, etc, to select my teammates. Shift-8 is beyond your comfort zone, however. (my whole routine goes shift-1, 6,7,shift-2, 6,7... shift-8,6,7 .) Since I'm playing Force Fields and the force fields ARE the most important part of my job, I don't think that stopping everything to click on FF buttons is unreasonable. However, with things like Sonic and Ice that's not as obvious a decision.

To figure out what people are talking about upthread: You can make a file that contains binds. It'll have a name like "Binds.txt" or "c:\Programs and Files\City of heroes\binds.txt" or "Myclevertrix.txt" or whatever. It will be full of lines like
bind g "say gratz!"
bind f "say I nearly autoran there! Good thing I had a bind."
bind h "powexecname inferno"

(I don't know if I got "h" exactly right. I'm a little out of my depth myself. If I set it up right it will trigger the power "Inferno", as we know and love it.)

You can then, at your keyboard, type in "bind_load Myclevertrix.txt" and it will put all those binds in place at once. You can start a new character, type "Bind_load Myclevertrix.txt" and all the stuff you're used to will work.

These are relatively normal uses for binds, and bind files.

What we're suggesting is gratuitously complex and I myself have only ever done it once. At least three things are happening here:

1) You can bind a key to do more than one thing, as long as only one is a power.
It goes something like this:
bind g "say grats$$/em bow$$powexecname inferno" Which should, in some order I don't understand, say "Grats" AND do a bow AND trigger inferno. Explosive delight!

2) A bind file can load another bind file. So "Myclevertrix.txt" can have a line in it like this:
bind_load Moreclevertrix.txt

3) You can therefore create a text file that does something, then loads another text file to OVERWRITE THAT BEHAVIOR. Some people create "cycling taunts" this way:
tauntfile1.txt has a line in it that says
bind p "say yer mamma$$powexec taunt$$bindload tauntfile2.txt"

tauntfile2.txt has a line in it that says
bind p "say yer daddy,too$$powexec taunt$$bindload tauntfile2.txt"

Assuming those binds work- try 'em first, I'm pretty weak at this-

You set up tauntfile1. When you hit p, you taunt the enemy, while saying "yer mamma" AND you load tauntfile2.txt
tauntfile2.txt overwrites "p". Now, the NEXT time you hit p, you taunt the enemy, while saying "yer daddy, too" and it loads tauntfile1 . It will flip back and forth between those two taunts until you get bored and edit the files. You can have tauntfile2 load tauntfile3, which loads tauntfile1 . Your boredom with grinding out bindfiles (and of course avoiding typos) is the only limit.

Likewise, you can have one key that alternates between (say) using Deflection Shield and Insulation Shield. If you're really cool you can have one key that uses Deflection Shield on character 1, then uses Insulation shield on character 1 and selects character 2, then uses Deflection Shield on character 2, then .... etc. It would take about sixteen bind files.

This is solid in theory. I have never done it myself. I hope someone with more bind experience fixes my mistakes.

Lotta people been stomping the original poster.

I'm going to try a slightly different tactic. Admittedly, with roughly the same aim...

Here's how the game works. If you take a Blaster with no defensive powers, and you heal them for their entire HP bar every fight, you make them twice as tough.

If you give them 75% Damage Resistance you make them four times as tough.
If you give them 45% or more Defense you make them ten times as tough. (oddity of the game math- Defense basically counts double.)

So you can play "Whack-a-mole" with health bars, honing your razor reflexes, and never seeing the rest of the game... or you can use buffs intelligently and the health bars don't move very much, leaving you time to do useful things like bump up the team's OFFENSE.

Did you notice that Fortitude gives someone (if you slot right) 21% Defense and about +30% damage ?

Come to think of it, did you notice that if you don't slot your "lolenergy" blasts for damage they do about half as much as they could?

Farming in this game is something I don't understand. People get good at the game and then they set it EASIER. Not my style.

I hope your future experiences in the game are more interesting and more balanced. Cause there's stuff in the upper game that, if you don't know what you're doing, will eat you for breakfast. And Freaks and Council aren't it.

I'm still not quite sure I understand the keyboard issue. Is it that you don't want to move your fingers off "WASD"? Are there any keys (like "G") that you could use?

Two Elec/* blasters are very effective (or an Elec/* blaster and a */elec defender) but one is ... on the edge of "Very effective" and "useless".

For a all-duoing pair, I'd recommend them as one of the fun options.

One pair that my wife and I did, which both work well soloing as well, was a MA/SR scrapper (you could use MA/"almost anything") and a Rad/Sonic blaster. MA is very single-target oriented, which helps you keep away from the "kill the anchor" game, and the pair can slap around archvillains from Faultline on.