Kelenar

"Welcome, new players from WoW! You'll be pleased to know that Freedom has the highest percentage of pure healers and tanks who insist on taking the lead of any server! We're sure you'll feel at home there!"

Really, this. Right-click->Delete Recipe. Hooray, I have defeated the gadget recipe menace! I gain 3,628 XP and 2 mithril platemail!

Remember that you should have near-saturated Soul Drain up a substantial amount of the time when fighting masses of enemies. That alone will solve pretty much any accuracy problems you should have for its duration, and you can have it up more than half the time as an /Elec.

As far as end drains in Lightning Field, if you go that route (and I did), I highly suggest frankenslotting similar to how Julius showed. You can slot it to get both good damage and good end drain out of it.

Man, what server are you on? If I open the search window and invite the first seven people I find, half the people I grab are Blasters or (usually Elec/Shield or Fire/Shield) Scrappers.

Any Anything/Anything Anything. Really, without IOs, the game is pretty well balanced, with a handful of outliers. That said, I've found my Dark/Elec Defender and Dark/Elec Brute to both be capable of handling darn near anything the game can throw at them without significant IOs.

Slot early, slot often! Just picking up what sets I could get with the money from drops, my Earth/Fire dom was at about 40% global recharge by the high 30s, which really helps while levelling up.

Well, we had double Snow Storm on him and he didn't seem to mind it. Just kept hurling spiders out of his butt like it was going out of style.

And here we have the core of my issues with villainside writing. Yes, they basically had to stick with a contact system. And there do have to be some constraints on the content, so if your villain's concept is 'he just wants to freeze the world, so anything other than that doesn't interest him,' then you're probably not going to work out too well.

If they'd just reworked things to include some vague hints that helping X contact will further your plans, and a lot less 'You! Fetch me these psychic rocks!' or 'You crack your knuckles. Boy, you sure love hurting people,' I'd feel less marginalized on a lot of my villains. It would still make it hard to play a villain with some actual principles, so it'd be nice to add the ability to just up and abandon a contact or something, but that would solve some of the annoying, easily avoidable aspects. And then we just need to take a giant hammer to Arachnos...

Something which my heroes pretty much never have to do. Villains do have more varied outlooks and goals than heroes, which is where the whole problem came from to begin with... but at the same time, the guys making the game should have kept that in mind instead of just expecting everybody to stick to one character type. If I started a new character today and played through CoV without planning out what contacts to take ahead of time, odds are pretty good that I'd run into a mission that just doesn't make sense for that character in any way before I hit 50. Probably several times. For some valid villain concepts, literally dozens of times. Heroes don't have a similar problem.

That's really the core of my whole problem here. Everything I've complained about could have largely been avoided, but they didn't put in the effort. Have the contacts work for me, not vice-versa, or at least hint that I'm getting something out of it. Let me easily abandon contacts or arcs that don't work with my concept, or better yet, give me some indication ahead of time so that I never run into them in the first place (whoever introduced my principled megalomaniac to Westin Phipps has issues.) Let me play a villain in my own right instead of defaulting to Arachnos Flunkie #3659. All of these are within the engine's grasp, and they didn't do them. And that is what infuriates me.

Mostly this. For high-level TFs, trials, and teams, though, my character of choice is usually Qiao Huang, my Cold/Ice Defender. I've got a jillion Defenders, but that's the combo that feels useful in the widest range of situations to me.

Well... Rularuu toast a lot of my characters, but my /Elec Brute laughs at them. I expect Dark Armor would, too. So it's not so much that they're the all-killer as it is that they negate a lot of popular builds.

Yeah, I almost added a caveat at the end that some of this stuff would be more acceptable at the low levels, when you are getting a start to your career. But still, random people have no business using established villains as lackeys.

I never said misunderstood hero. My two examples were Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom, pretty much the two most iconic supervillains I can think of. I can't picture Lex Luthor beating up a bunch of guys just to keep an exterminator in business, ruining people's lives just sorta because, or most importantly, doing a mindlessly evil organization's bidding without question for months and months just for a shot at a little power within it.

Those first two examples are both near the height of your power (40+), but even if you stripped away all their resources, that stuff's below them. They're supervillains, not mindless thugs who will murder indiscriminately for anybody who will sign a paycheck. Which is pretty much what CoV has you play if you follow the main plot. You're not Lex Luthor, you're not Doctor Doom, you're not Magneto, you're not allowed having any moral compunctions or disliking Arachnos unless you read every single contact ahead of time to vet them. You're a thug who just fights whatever random people point you at. And you're only presumably getting paid for it, since very few villain contacts even hint that.

I mean, give me some incentive, at least. Heck, look at Psymon Omega's first arc. "Hey, <character name>, go get this stuff to make me more powerful and beat up my rival for me." He outright orders you to do this stuff. There's no hint of him paying you or sharing the spoils or even asking nicely. It's just some jerk you have no reason to care about saying, "Hey, you. Go get me stuff." And this is how the arcs where you do have to do horrible things are, too. It'd at least make a little sense for many villains to do horrible things in exchange for big rewards, but arcs of "Well, you firebombed some houses, because this one guy told you to!" make your character out as a two-dimensional idiot who just wants to hurt people for fun, not a supervillain in their own right, possibly with their own plans and preferences.

The point is, you're having to avoid huge chunks of content and plan out your contacts ahead of time, just to play a concept that the entire game should have had in mind when it was built. It's like if half of heroside missions explicitly involved murdering villains, thus precluding you from playing a hero based on Batman or Superman.

All collected on this special edition set of two compact disks! Call now, operators are standing by!

Hmmm, but isn't there some decent synergy between MA's stuns and Oppressive Gloom? I wouldn't be surprised if MA/Elec or something was a bit lower.

This is beyond a horrible idea. And this is coming from somebody who takes no real efforts to hide their real name online. I can't even think what would motivate them to think this is a good idea on any level. "Hmm, what would be good for business... ooh, MASSIVE PRIVACY LEAKS! It's a feature!"

Unless, you know, your name is all that unique. There are a small handful of people with my name. I have cousins with completely unique names.

... seriously? I suppose it might be relevant if you're getting hired as a forum mod or online public relations guy or something, but this just seems irrelevant to 90% of positions.

And a lot of this. I also know people with gender dysphoria who play the opposite in games as a way of coping. I can't imagine that abruptly exposing all of them in WoW is... good in any form.

The big part for me was figuring out exactly what it was I wanted out of the game. In my time here, I've sampled darn near everything there is to try--PvE, PvP, RP'ing, soloing, teaming, farming, raiding, base building, marketeering, soloing AVs, Master Of task forces, speedruns... it really took me quite a bit to get an idea of what it is I even enjoy. If you figure out what that is, well, find some way to make it happen. For me, it was PvE teaming, so I joined my server's teaming channels and started assembling my own teams when I couldn't get one quickly.

When it stops being fun, I take a short break. It's amazing what a few weeks away from the game can do to reinvigorate my interest, and judging by other people, I'm not alone there.

I'm with Nethergoat here. When I just can't stomach the idea of fighting Bloody Vicious one more time, I hit the AE and search for low-level story arcs. It can take a while to learn how to pick out the decent ones from the bad ones, but my suggestions: Expand the GUI until you have all the options available. Choose a faction (Neutral is the default, so lazy arcs are often Neutral), choose the completed state (same reasons as faction), choose to search within your level range. Don't start anything with a really lazy description, and any mission with a lot of Custom Enemies is probably doom at low levels.

Alternatively, if my character can handle it, I just hit hazard zones and let 'er rip. I like beating up lots of things, and hazard zones are good for that.

Global channels helped me a lot, as did being active on the forums. But then, I don't care a ton about having a SG or anything as long as I can get PUGs reliably, so I may not be the best point of reference.