Hart

Depends on whether you solo or play in teams. Solo, it's nice to have an extra AoE to follow up with after Thorn Burst. It helps wipe minions out quickly, and since you'll be using your holds on lieuts and bosses this basically stops all incoming damage. It's also nice to have the negative energy damage, since Earth/Thorns is mostly smashing/lethal damage which is highly resisted.

If you play in teams, nevermind your AoEs, concentrate on improving your control and single target attacks. Since just about everything you have is a defense debuff, and Quicksand can't be resisted, you might swap out the 2nd accuracy for a damage on each of your powers, for an overall increase in damage done.

Most dom AOE damage is pathetic compared to corrupters and brutes. The exceptions are Fire/ with /Fire or /Psi. Those two can do good AOE damage, but since the PSW nerf they're both forced to jump in for PBAOE and back out for cone. This reduces the damage from Hot Feet and is just more work than it's worth for the moderate damage increase compared to spamming single target attacks while the PBAOE is recharging. Once they're held, your team is going to steamroll them anyway, so whatever damage you add is just gravy.

Focus on using Domination to control bosses, slotting recharge sets to get it perma, and then just scrap for a bit while the rest of the team steamrolls the helpless targets. Earth has a crazy number of different controls, so you're still an asset to any team without the patron AOE.

Parton Pools? What, they give you the Most Common Superpower?

Also, you'll almost certainly want to skip that power unless it's an RP thing.

Check out http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=124926 for the detailed explaination, but basically it's a pain to maintain and doesn't provide nearly as much of a benefit as the numbers say it does.

Most Potent goes to Hasten, with Stamina coming in second only because it requires 2 filler powers before you can select it. There's a reason they're practically considered mandatory by power gamers.

As far as single-target attacks, Energy Transfer is probably on top of the heap. The most damaging AOE attacks would be the nukes - IIRC Blizzard is the hardest-hitting nuke on average, provided all the ticks hit. Rain of Arrows is probably the best nuke overall, since it's up every pack and doesn't tank your damage for 15s after use.

As far as attacks that require conditions, I'd say a Corrupter's Ignite patch on an immobilized enemy is probably the highest DPS, especially pre-nerf. IIRC it used to do more damage overall to spam Ignite than to use every other power in the set combined, thus the nerf.

Wow. So there -are- people in the woodwork. I'm 100% redside so king's row is less of a place to meet and more of a target for mayhem.

It seems like there's enough interest to put together a 'LiteRP' channel. So, now all I have to do is figure out how to put together a persistent channel and administrate it. You'd think there'd be a help file for that sort of thing so I could RTFM.

I wonder, would a lite RP channel attract noncommittal trolls?

Hello, world.

So, I've been on Virtue since the dawn of time. I have a general concept for most of my characters, and I occasionally spend the time to write up descriptions for the ones I play most. If you've met Somnia or Tabula Raja, that's approximately what I mean. I lead teams frequently, and I like the idea of RPing as part of the team experience.

..but I hate drama with a passion that can weld steel. I have absolutely zero interest in participating in an ongoing plot, I'm aggravated by the lack of creativity in character development many people show (I'm a brujah! I'm a lycan!) and I generally think the whole concept of MRP/ERP belongs on Tapestries or IRC, not a superhero MMO.

Is there any interest in the sort of 'skin deep' RP I enjoy, or am I neither bird nor beast when it comes to munchkins vs RPers? Are there any groups for this sort of thing? I see the typical RPVGs around often enough, but I've got a VG I'm quite proud to lead and it's based on a totally different premise.

~Hart

Actually.. I'd expect it's actually pretty decent for AE boss farming.

No, I was serious.

Okay, okay, you can stop laughing now.

So here's the deal: boss farms are all bosses, which can be ballpark 16-20 bosses per pack. The maximum number of baddies that'll pay attention to a single target at once is 16. So, what happens if you pull two packs? The other 16-24 bosses all agro whoever happens to be around.

Since the AOE cap and the agro cap are both 16 anyway, you may as well shift out the extra pack and let them shift back in while you're mopping up the first one. I haven't tried this, but it's my experience that the duration of other controls is pretty sharply limited by the level of the target - so hopefully 52-54 bosses will phase back in faster than 50 minions.

How does this work with the special +resist aura IOs? I slotted both of the defense and one of the resist special pieces in my Necro/Dark, but I still can't take an alpha - Fearsome Stare, queue up the heal, I'm dead before the heal can go off.

Actually, maybe someone can direct me to a recent tankermind guide that better explains these IOs and how to build?

AR/Cold has both Sleet and Heat Loss, so you can have a nice 60% resistance debuff every 2-3 packs and a 30% resistance debuff all the time. Also, Snowstorm + Sleet + Immobilize + Ignite is pretty much a boss killer while solo - they won't have enough recharge to do anything about you incinerating them. There's also stacking AOE -res + Flamethrower + Full Auto. This is probably the most team-friendly AOE damage-y goodness.

AR/Storm is everything that's good and bad about knocking stuff all over the map, possibly in a semi-controlled manner with Hurricane. Nice resist debuffs, nice defense against melee, but difficult to set up and you'll have to redraw if you use 02.

AR/Rad has defense and resist debuffs, but they're anchored which can cause some frustration - especially on fast-moving teams. EM Pulse is niiiiice. AM is also niiiiiice. Being able to heal yourself is good as well, but causes redraw and may cause positioning issues if you're asked to heal the tank - the tiny cone width on full auto makes it hard to hit more than a couple targets at point blank. Being able to use Slug and Buckshot to move your anchor around helps this set more than the others.

I'd say that there's another category, maybe 'power gamers'.

When I look at your list, it seems that wealth is the main goal of the types of players listed here. That's the difference for a power gamer - it's not the wealth that matters, it's the game outside the crippled artificial economy of CoX. Wealth is a means to an end, where the other types see wealth as an end in itself.

Case in point, Nethergoat posted a thread called 'Temptation', in which he described a battle against the ebil marketeer in him. He had a character advantage, and had to resist the temptation to turn that into an economic advantage at the expense of character performance. I'd never make that decision; it just wouldn't occur to me.

These are people who destroy generic IOs when they replace them with set IOs instead of respeccing and carrying them to the market. They're an irrational part of the market because they'll spend millions more to buy it now, but only if it's something that will really impact gameplay - for example, I recently blew 15m on a kb protection IO so I could stay standing during a farm. I could've gotten it for 10m if I waited, but that would have negatively impacted my gameplay.

Careful ebil dudes. These guys are probably most of your high end customers. Putting in a 'bid' and 'waiting' for a purple rec is less fun than farming, so guess what they're likely to spend their time doing?

Seems to me that it depends on the power. For example, if you go from holstered to full auto, you skip the draw animation.

Well, actually, I'm not 100% sure on that. Whenever I use Full Auto, I queue up Flamethrower after it.

Then I go make a sandwich.

The other side of the coin is that villains don't fall into the typical MMO formula of healer, tank, dps. A tanker, two defenders, and any five people with a pulse can go from 1-50 in CoH. A brute and two corrupters don't need the five people with a pulse.

Uhoh. Someone said the 'h' word. Here we go again. -.-

All fail aside, you're probably better off bringing the minimum number of players to anything except STF/LRSF. It's easier to find 4 good players than 8 good players, and it's MUCH easier to find 4 players you can rely on to stick around for a few hours than 8. STR and LRSF are special cases because you have to handle big groups of AVs, so you typically need a full contingent of debuffers and controllers to make it work.

..which'll be one of the 3 active people in the guild, which'll be fine.

I'd just like to start recruiting before that date comes without worrying about the star landing on a hapless newbie who logs in early. I'm also locked out of rejoining my coalition until after the star passes to me.

So my only option is to wait? How frustrating. I deliberately set the top 2 ranks to be able to adjust the autodemotion before I went off to buy a house, and thanks to the 'red star' patch I've been demoted to rank 3.

I'd recommend against AR/Thermal. AR/Cold works because you generally want to cast your Cold debuffs at the beginning of the fight and then start doing damage while they cool down. Thermal has heals, which you'll need to cast during the fight, which will cause the redraw issues to be much worse.

As far as Rad/Cold, that could work - after the fight stars, you'll want to be close for Heat Loss anyway, so Irradiate + the ranged AOE could be a good followup. Sleet + ranged AOE + cone would be OK as well, but the cone has knockback that can blast stuff out of the sleet. The single target chain is good, but nothing to write home about. You can slot Achilles Heel: Chance for -Resist in any of the Rad powers, but you can do the same in most of the AR powers as well. You do totally avoid the redraw issue, if that's a point.

Rad/Thermal could actually work pretty well, with Irradiate and Healing Flames both being PBAoE - you'd have to watch your agro pretty closely. My only Rad/ is Rad/Kin, and FS + Irradiate + ranged AOE does great damage; I'd expect Melt Armor + Irradiate + ranged AOE to do similar. You'd miss out on the slows and great shields from cold, and you'd be spending more time during combat healing and less time blasting.

My first char at CoV release was a Rad/Kin and with the level 40 cap, I couldn't fit in the goodies I wanted without giving something up. I decided to go with Inertial Reduction as my travel power, and after going from 1-28 without one I started going longer and longer without travel on my other characters.

Lately, I've completely given up on travel powers, opting for the temp packs from Grandville instead. Used sparingly, they can last me around 2 weeks - I only ever need them when I'm going up something.

The exception is MMs. I -hate- getting stuck behind my own minions, or having a minion get permanently stuck in scenery, so I take teleport on them.