MTS

*cough* Master Illusionists *cough*

Back on topic, the reason I think it's "unfair" to attack through the shield is that a tanker type can't taunt the AV and lead it away from the group. I don't think you can say that a group that dies when it randomly targets squishies wouldn't be able to survive once the shield was down and they had control over its aggro. Even targeted AoEs are centered around the original target.

Rad's puny heal is just about the weakest in the game, it'll never be able to keep up with the incoming damage, no matter how many you stack. I doubt any "healer" will do you much good without a lot of other support -- many of the AV's attacks are capable of taking anyone except tanks and brutes down to 1HP almost instantly (and two-shotting them a second later).

Rad is a very strong debuff set, and while it has a lot of tasty -tohit, -dmg, -regen, none of that will be able to affect the aspect while its shield is up. It will merrily blast your group back into the stone age. You'll want one or two for the -res so you can drop the AV faster when the shield drops, but dark and sonic are good there also.

Team buffs are the way to go in there. Lots of FF/Cold/Sonic/Thermal. Keep everyone res capped and with as much def as you can, so that you're more likely to survive the cheating AV's attacks. Pray that you don't get the storm one.

The only thing that a fully IO'd out group would be able to do better is pump out more damage to take it down quicker. The defense bonuses and such won't really buy you much, since if you want to have a chance anyway, you'll need to be packing enough buffers to put you well past the effective caps, way beyond what IOs can do.

I've done this as well, including on a couple of static teams who meet for one play session a week, since large teams tend to level too fast to hit all of the arcs and get the moral choice missions. I left it as an option to the team members, and the entire team decided to turn off XP in order to follow along.

Though, maybe we shouldn't talk too much about that. The idea of intentionally turning off XP in order to read the story content (sorry, I mean "flavor text") might make the OP's head explode.

Ah, the X-Box live / dungeon finder model. That works somewhat well in games where you have a fixed tank/healer/damage model, except most of the time the damage dealers just end up stuck in long queues because there aren't enough tanks available. WoW's cross-server random instancing has pretty much killed any sense of server community there, and common courtesy too (easy to be rude when you know you'll probably never group with any of these people again).

I'm going to have to agree with the people who said that you don't really understand how the game works. CoH is designed to not have "class needs" for 99% of the content in the game. A team of eight Defenders (squishy, low-damage support class) is a perfectly viable, and in fact quite awesome steamroller team. Any sort of automatic LFG system would have to be truly random, because it's impossible for the game to build a cookie-cutter team since such a thing doesn't exist.

After you do a morality mission, you get a temporary power called "Countdown to X", where X varies depending on which alignment you switched to. The power has a 7 day (real time) expiration, once that expires you are granted the alignment power and the badge for staying that alignment for 7 days. It's not based on the "Time played as current alignment" that showed up in the tips tab.

That means that if you're a villain, simply logging in isn't enough. You have to do 10 villain tips and a villain morality mission to "reinforce" that you really want to be a villain. Then wait 7 days after that.

Since you've already started doing rogue tips, you'll either have to do villain ones instead and lose your rogue progress, or just live with not getting the 7 days as villain badge until you come back at the end of your circle.

It does relate to your problem, if for no other reason than it's a useful data point that can help the devs to narrow down the issue.

Well, OTOH, I think "invalid target" is handling it better than popping up an annoying prompt on somebody's screen to accept a buff that they already have.

That's one nice thing that I like about Vanden and Corva's icon packs. The Fortune buffs are in a distinctive color so it makes it easier to see who already has one. Just be careful it it's the to-hit one because Secondary Mutation also uses that icon.

This. We have no way to tell exactly what people would be willing to sacrifice to keep their idyllic life if nearly the entire world were suddenly overrun by monstrous beings that had wiped out most of humanity. It hasn't ever happened, so we have no basis for comparison and can only speculate.

Sure, you can talk all you want about *stop reading if you don't want spoilers* mind control drugs in the water supply. Truth be told, I'm not sure how effective Enriche really is. I mean, the resistance exists, and surely they don't have access to an uncontaminated source, at least not one that would provide enough for everyone. I doubt a loyal citizen like Kang would be drinking black market water, and it doesn't stop him from turning coat when he finds evidence of what Cole is up to. Ditto for a lot of the wardens who are more or less ordinary citizens. The stranglehold on the media seems like a much more effective way to control what people think than some vague relaxing agents.

I think Enriche and Seers and "Re-education" are really just red herrings, and would bet money that if you took all those things away, the majority of the Praetorian populace would be demanding them back. They want to be controlled, because they prefer it to living in fear. I'm not saying it's right, but don't underestimate the depths people are willing to sink to in order to hold on to their way of life.

I agree with the poster a few posts back who said that if Cole were a good leader, he would simply let the Resistance and other dissenters leave the city and form their own settlement. The fact that he doesn't is really the main thing that makes him tyrannical.

Even in the ideal world I'm not sure that would have worked. If you've done that arc and saved Cleo, you've seen just how easy it was for her to convince White that the evidence proved Washington was the traitor.

In any case, once Washington confronts her, it's all but inevitable. Cleo isn't one to run away and give up her undercover position -- she'll stand and fight, intending to kill Washington (and you, if you side with him) and frame him. Washington goes in determined to do whatever it takes to not to let her escape, because once she leaves that office and runs to White, he knows he won't be able to pin her down again, and a resistance spy responsible for the death of at least one PPD officer will remain in a position to do more harm.

Sure, you could try to talk to Washington and convince him to do something else, but assume you tried that and he wasn't impressed (don't forget about his rank, either). If you go to White, chances are he'll intervene and Cleopatra will eventually succeed in killing off Washington, and probably you as well. The only third option possible in that scenario is to be indecisive and just stand back to see who wins -- in other words abandon your duty.

It's a very real world choice. We wish there was a better, "perfect", option, but there just isn't. Sometimes even heroes have to face that.

You're right, of course, I was deliberately troll-baiting. Was hoping to provoke something with the Responsibility = Hero line before someone called me out, but ah well.

Probably closer to "short-sighted" but I couldn't come up with a good inflammatory term for it.

Watching people's reactions to GG making sweeping generalizations about the most morally ambiguous content in the game is amusing, even if it has gotten a little old after the first dozen threads.

It is when applied to the Wardens.

BIG SPOILERS BELOW - DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED












They blow up an Enriche distribution plant. It will prevent the mood-altering drugs from affecting the populace, but will also leave them without fresh water. People will get sick. People will die.

They unilaterally decide that the best way to "save" people is to sacrifice some of them to do it. The people in question have no choice in the matter, the Resistance obviously knows what's best for them. They're no better than Cole and his gang of Thugs.

Keep trolling and spouting your Anarchist propaganda.

Only the true fascists see the world in such black and white terms. What you're saying amounts to, "You are either with us or against us," and ignores the good that people working within the system can accomplish, just because its leaders are corrupt. The Wardens are blind to the consequences of their actions.

That's why Wardens are Vigilantes, not Heroes. Responsibility is for Heroes. Powers path is for Rogues, and Crusaders are Villains.

The heroic path is simple (some spoilers, but keeping it purposely vague):

1. Follow the laws, arrest the terrorist in the tutorial.
2. Work for the chief investigator and put criminals (syndicate) behind bars.
3. Stop the resistance from bombing a hospital.
4. Reluctantly execute a resistance spy whose connections would enable her to escape the justice system and continue spying.
5. Stop a serial killer in imperial city, find some hints that the Seer program isn't completely on the level, but no definite proof.
6. Stop rogue clockwork from killing people.
7. Take down the Praetorian equivalent of the mafia.
8. Help people that Neuron has been neglecting.
9. Stop seers from being used as psychic bombs to kill many people.
10. Realize that a certain praetor is completely nuts and choose to let the one person keeping her in check go free. (THIS DOES NOT MAKE YOU SWITCH SIDES)
11. Investigate why strange people in funny costumes are breaking into labs.
12. Stop even stranger people in different costumes from setting off bombs around the city.
13. Meet DW (no, not Darkwing). Figure out that not all of the weird costumed people are the enemy, and let them know that not all Praetorians are.
14. Stop plot to destroy Neutropolis, defying Tyrant's orders in order to do so.
15. Take Kang's advice and get the word out about what Tyrant is planning. (this technically switches you to Resistance, but there are no more missions anyway, so you never have to work with them...)
16. Portal to Paragon. Find a tailor and some spandex.

Obviously the heroic path. It's as simple as that. I'll even throw in a GG to fuel the fire

The problem with trading information is that you can't "give" information, you can only copy it. If you tell Serge where the Crey's molecule shipment is, you still have that information. You could in theory trade it to someone else again before Serge has a chance to act on it.

Sure, the more people who have the information, the less valuable it is, but the value diminishes for everyone, not just you. If you go broadcast the location of the shipment, then Serge's information that you gave him is suddenly worthless.

No, the morality mission is a different type of tip. Once your alignment gauge maxes out at 10, you need to abandon one of your tips, and after enough kills you should eventually get a morality mission as your next tip.

You can get a morality mission even if all 5 of your fame slots are filled.

Rumor has it that those were meant to be part of an upcoming booster pack.

Actually, I went out of my way to disable Aero when running CoH fullscreen, and still encounter the "freezing" when it loses focus. This is especially annoying since it's a dual-monitor setup, and anytime I click on Mids or Pidgin on the other screen, clicking back on CoH causes it to freeze until I lose and reacquire focus again.

It works perfectly fine in windowed mode, whether Aero is enabled or not. However, that kind of defeats the purpose, since the reason I wanted to run it fullscreen in the first place was to dedicate the full graphics capabilities of the machine to rendering Ultra mode. There is a definite FPS loss (not to mention screen real estate loss) when running windowed, and a bigger one when compositing is involved.

Replicators and nearly limitless energy sources by harnessing antimatter.

If a replicator were invented tomorrow, we would still very much be using money, or something similar. Only instead of rare earth elements, the resource we'd all be clamoring for control of would be energy, given the immense power demands of such a device. We're already well on our way to such an economy (energy being the only truly limited resource).

That's true for salvage, recipes, and other drops. However, I've personally received tips from very gray (-20) enemies.

Only ones I can think of are:

1. You don't get it until level 38, so you'd have to respec then.
2. If you exemp below 33 to do a SF/TF, you lose access to it.
3. It might be worthwhile to switch from Granite to regular armors + Minerals if you're up against heavy psi-wielding enemies

The only times powers have been nerfed because of IOs are in cases where certain slotting had unexpected interactions with the power that caused disproportionate effects. In other words, bugs. Damage procs in Poison Gas Trap, for instance.

Shield Charge was nerfed, and rightly so, because a math error had made it be massively overpowered. We're talking about a power that's not only a secondary power for the characters who it was doing massive damage on, but one that's in a defensive set. I can't emphasize that enough. A secondary, defensive power was doing as much damage as a blaster nuke (which is a primary power in an offensive set), on a shorter recharge and with no ill effects such as an endurance crash. It was completely unbalanced.

Sure, it was fun, but it needed to change, and everybody knew it.

I don't think that's really an issue. The game already has code to handle that and figure out if you're in location AoE targeting mode or not. Turn on click-to-move in the options and see for yourself.

That said, I'd be more in favor of it as a click power rather than a toggle.

I love teleport as a travel power, it's just clunky to use in combat due to the activation time and the forced flight/immob at the end. A fast activating teleport with no root, even if it had a small recharge to it, would be very cool and fun to use.

I'm not sure if this could be added to the pool though, because then the other power pools would still only have 4, so it would be a little odd for one pool to randomly have 5.

Replacing Team Teleport isn't an option as it does have a few use cases. Masterminds come to mind, and a kin team-TPing everyone in for a fulcrum shift could be a viable strategy on well coordinated teams as well.

This. Oh very much this.

Ironically, I was in the tutorial not too long ago and accidentally hit Self Destruct. The weird thing is that the power didn't actually kill me (went to 1 HP instead). I'm not sure how, but somehow I survived it...