Muon_Neutrino

I don't know about anyone else, but I was seriously unimpressed when I tried flash freeze on my ice/ice, even after leveling again and getting it to 4 slots. I was hoping to use it for exactly that purpose - alpha absorber - but I found it didn't actually prevent the alpha. Every time I used it, I would take a shot from at least some of the spawn, and it seemed random exactly how many got to shoot me. I think it's because of the tiny tick of damage and the sleep therefore being delayed for a quarter-second, allowing some mobs a chance to que up an attack before being slept. Regardless, I respec'd out of it since, imo, an unreliable alpha absorber is worse than none at all.

Regarding the 'illusion wouldn't benefit from domination' concern - while other sets may *technically* have more powers that benefit from domination, the real question is how many of those are *useful* powers or benefit in a meaningful way from dom.

For example, domination is nearly irrelevant for immobilizes. They already have very long durations relative to their recharge, and those same fast recharges mean that even mag 3 is plenty enough (and the ST ones are even mag 4). Similarly, the fact that salt crystals, flash freeze and spore burst benefit is not very meaningful, since none of those powers are especially useful or commonly taken.

So in terms of useful powers that benefit in a useful manner from domination, there's usually not more than 2 or 3 in a set *anyway*. Let's look at the list:

Earth: Fossilize, stalagmites
Fire: Char, flashfire, cinders
Gravity: Grav distortion, grav distortion field, wormhole
Ice: Block of ice, glacier
Mind: Mesmerize, dominate, confuse, mass hypnosis, telekinesis, total dom, terrify, mass confusion
Plant: Strangler, seeds, vines

Illusion: Blind, decieve, flash

Of the existing sets, only mind control has more than 3 useful powers that benefit strongly from domination. Illusion is on par with most of the existing sets in also having three useful powers that benefit from domination.

And benefiting from domination is not the be-all end-all of control sets. Look at earth - there are only two powers that benefit, but it's still a very strong control set. Even if phantom army and spectral terror wouldn't benefit from domination, they'd still be quite potent powers - invincible taunting tanks with 50% uptime on SOs that work against PTOD EBs and a perma-out-of-the-box AoE fear? Yeah, I'll take that.

So, in summary - gimme illusion!

Ice slick doesn't absorb an alpha. Cast it under the baddies while you're within line of sight and you'll be attacked by everyone in the spawn who wasn't hit by the first KD tick of the ice slick (and that's a flat % roll, not an acc check, so it can't be improved, and it's not high enough to get most of them on the first go). It *reduces* the alpha, but it doesn't *absorb* it.

In my book, an alpha *absorber* is one that's able to reliably prevent the whole spawn from shooting back - something like stalagmites, once sufficient accuracy is slotted. If you can get up near the CTH cap, you'll prevent 19 out of every 20 targets from shooting back, which is IMO what it takes to truly *absorb* an alpha.

Now, ice does have advanatages, especially in the toggle-up - ice slick - jump in simplicity you mentioned, but it still does have to worry about alphas.

Being perma *before* hasten is so uncommon, though, that I honestly wouldn't consider it in terms of talking about the types of control each set offers. Mind's staple controls are still soft, massive huge recharge just lets you make extra staple controls out of things which usually aren't .

My FF/nrg is gonna end up with conserve power, assault, and maybe tactics - not sure, end use will be a big concern. None of those need extensive slotting, though, which is definitely the real issue.

Mind isn't really all 'hard' controls. The two major 'every-spawn' controls are both soft-ish - fear and sleep. Sure you have total dom and mass confusion for hard controls, but those aren't what you're using every time you roll up to a group of baddies.

If you want lots of hard control, I'd go with plant. Seeds of confusion is basically the best mez in the game, and it's a lot harder of a mez than sleep or fear. Plant/fire is a really great combo.

Warkupo, the issue here is that the market doesn't seem to be obeying those rules. If there are sales going through for, say, 18 million, it means that those bids were, at that point, the highest bids out there .... despite the OP's 25 million bid sitting there.

OP, I'd try canceling your bid and rebidding on the off chance that the market somehow forgot about yours.

Heh, I bugged this the day i18 went live, nice to see it's still broke. Pretty weird bug, too, you wonder how *that* crept in.

Shields is nice not only because of shield charge (which is still amazing, even post-nerf), but because of AAO jacking the rest of your damage through the roof, positional defense having far fewer holes than typed, and some nice layered mitigation in the form of +max HP and resistances.

Both sets have roughly the same amount of base defense. Ice has aggro control, extra def and end, and hoarfrost. Shield has offense out the wazoo. It's an offensive game.

If you want to use mace mastery, you'll have to unlock it villain-side as usual by doing a patron arc, but once you've done that then you can go hero and still keep it. You will have to level to 40 in the isles first, though, or else swap back over to full villain temporarily once you hit 40.

I honestly wouldn't bother with much of anything else from mace. You've already got 3 holds so you don't need web cocoon, you've got slows out the wazoo so you don't need web envelope, and focused accuracy is a definite meh. The pet might be cool, but it's not worth the useless power you'd have to take to get it, IMO.

Frankly, I'm not even sure mace'd be worth it given that there's really only one useful power in it. YMMV, but I'd rather get more than that from my epic pool. I'd personally take literally any of the other patron or epic pools first, simply because they each offer more than one useful power. I guess it depends on how important defense is to you - mace is the only place to get it, but you do pay a hefty price for that.

In terms of 'what powers are good', here's what I'd do:

From fire, I'd definitely take the three ST blasts (blaze is omfg amazing), fireball, aim, and inferno. Blazing bolt, like all snipes, is more of a 'for fun' power and is not necessary. As for the other two AoEs, it depends on what your style is and what you take from /mental.

From mental, the 'must haves' are mostly concentration, drain psyche, and at least one of the AoEs. You have to take subdual, but I wouldn't do much with it other than immob things while I'm mezzed since you have much better blasts in fire/. Mind probe is an OK melee attack and I'd take it on most other builds, but again fire/'s ST is so good you may not need to bother. TK thrust is a useful 'get out of my face' utility power - the nice thing about KB is that it works on bosses with one hit, unlike most types of mitigation blasters get. On the other hand, world of confusion and scare are both complete junk, mostly because of their cripplingly low durations. The choice of psychic scream, psi shockwave, or both, again comes down to playstyle choice and synergy with whatever you chose for fire/.

The AoE question mostly comes down to 'cone AoE, radial AoE, or both'? Fireball, rain of fire, and psi shockwave are all radial AoEs, while breath of fire and psi scream are cones. If you want to fire a chain of AoEs from range, you'll want breath, scream, fireball, and possibly rain, while from melee you'll be tossing fireball, shockwave, and again possibly rain. If you only want to do one or the other, you can skip an AoE or two. If you want to retain the ability to do both, you'll want all the AoEs. Fireball + psi shockwave is certainly a good 1-2 punch, but it's definitely not the only AoE trick you could have in your bag. (If you really wanted to get silly, you could even take static discharge or repulsion bomb from an epic pool and have a full-fledged AoE attack chain. )

With the fitness changes in i19 finding free power choices for everything isn't going to be a problem (at this point, assuming a travel power in every build, every skippable power in your primary/secondary directly translates into a slot to take a pool or other minor power - and you have 4 skippable powers). The real issue will be getting enough slots into all those attacks. For that reason I definitely recommend taking as heavy advantage of sets and frankenslotting as you can. If you can get stuff like 5-sets of posis, thunderstrikes, and oblits into your blasts and AoEs, the recharge, accuracy and recovery bonuses will make it a lot easier to get away with fewer slots in everything else (and, for that matter, only needing 5 slots in those attacks). Hasten will also be a good choice to save on recharge slots.

As far as epics go, I think all of them except munitions have something to offer. The all have an armor to give drain psyche time to work its magic, and there are several other offensive and defensive options available - snow storm, hoarfrost, and hibernate, static discharge, shocking bolt, and surge of power, PFF, repulsion bomb, and force of nature (and you have spare power choices enough to pull off the PFF + aid self combo), or char and RotP.

Domination lasts 90 seconds and has a base recharge of 200s. The final recharge is 200s / (1 + recharge bonus), so the needed recharge bonus for a given recharge is (200s / final recharge) - 1.

If you want dom to recharge in 90s (perma dom), you'll need (200/90) - 1 = 1.22 = 122% bonus recharge. If you want it to recharge in 45s (perma double dom), you'll need (200/45) - 1 = 3.44 = 344% bonus recharge. This is, as far as I know, impossible solo - in fact, it's only 56% short of the 400% cap. (As an aside, even at that cap dom takes (200/5) = 40s to recharge, so perma triple dom isn't possible.)

And to echo what Carnifax said, there isn't much point nowadays. The mez buff is binary (either on or off), so you don't get any extra mez from stacking dom. There's no damage buff anymore, and the base mez protection should be more than sufficient given how much mez of your own you'll be throwing around. The only real benefit would be more frequent end refills.

Due to an annoying series of events, the only internet-connected computer I have access to at the moment is the one in my grad student office at school. My gaming desktop isn't working right now and I don't know what's wrong with it or have the time or money to repair it, and my laptop can't run CoH.

On the other hand, the computer in my office at school is a relatively modern mac with a 3ghz processor, 4 gigs of ram, and a radeon 4670 gfx card. However, I don't have the permissions to install anything on it. I had heard, though, that it was possible to play the mac version of CoH from a flash drive without installing anything. Obviously I'm not going to be playing CoH here during the day (as if I would have the time anyway!) but since I have a key to the building I don't see any reason why I couldn't come back after dinner or stop by on a saturday to play for a few hours.

So there's two pieces of information I would like. First, if anyone has done this, a rundown of what you did to get it working would be great. Second, I need to know how much space the mac install takes up at the moment so I know how big a flash drive I need. If anyone could help me out with these two items I'd appreciate it.

On my shield/WM I usually go at +0/x4/no bosses. Given that I am softcapped I could certainly go higher, but stuff starts taking long enough to kill at that point that it gets tedious. WM is a relatively AoE heavy secondary which, combined with SC, means that I prefer to have more targets rather than harder targets.

Once your mitigation matures you can jack your level and spawn size fairly high without worrying much about surviving, so your choice of difficulty setting more depends on the interaction of your offensive capabilities and your patience. My method (for all ATs, really) usually is: for AoE heavy builds go for spawn size, for ST jack up the level, and in both cases do it until you start dying or stuff starts taking too long to kill for your taste.

Wow. How did I miss this thread before? Please, never stop going on TFs baka...

Unfortunately, most armor sets are full of pretty necessary powers. That said, there are still some sets where you can get away with skipping a power or two.

Dark armor has a stealth you can skip, and you don't need to take both mez auras. Some also skip the rez, although it's a pretty nice power considering you don't get a traditional tier 9. You don't get knockback protection, though, so unless you get a -KB IO you'd have to use one of those freed power choices for acrobatics.

Willpower's self-rez is skippable, and since quick recovery is better than stamina you can get away without fitness (you can take it later on if you want to run expensive stuff like tough/weave, but you certainly don't need it at 20). This is probably the best armor set if you want build flexibility in the early game, since the fitness prereqs usually put such a squeeze on your pre-20 choices.

Fiery aura used to have a lot of skippable powers, but since they buffed the set a lot of those are now worth taking. The most skippable power left is temperature protection, but even that is decent for the slow protection.

On stone armor, if you don't mind relying on granite most of the time you can respec out of brimstone and crystal armors once you hit 32. Again, though, that doesn't help early game.

Energy aura has a junk energy/negative resistance passive that can be skipped, and conserve power is completely redundant when you have energy drain, so that's two skippable powers in that set. One even comes before 20.

Really, though, what'll actually help your build problems the most will be when the fitness pool becomes inherent in issue 19. Once you're not spending 3 powers by 20 on every build to get your endurance under control, builds are gonna be a lot easier to figure out early level. If you don't want to wait for that, then I'd recommend willpower.

I might try leaving speedfan up and quickly alt-tabbing to it next time you see the funny graphics - while your temperatures might not be too high normally, they could be spiking in some of the really graphically intense GR zones.

I really don't understand why you seem to think that a ST hold is capable of completely preventing you from being mezzed. While there are not usually *too* many mezzers in a spawn, if its one of the factions that has them there is usually more than one (and that's ignoring the possibility of it being a boss). In the real world powers miss, chaotic situations are difficult to keep track of, and the foes don't always meekly follow your plan for the battle. Having bubbles means that you're likely to survive even in the (not very uncommon) situation where something goes wrong.