Muon_Neutrino

As a side note, Bill, do yourself a favor and pick force bolt up at some point. The damage on it sucks, yeah, but the 100% knockback is just glorious. It's super accurate, recharges fast, and doesn't cost that much end (and if you want there's an uber-cheap KB set damage proc you can stick in it). Sure, the energy blasts can often pull off the same thing, but you just know that if you give him a chance, Mr. Murphy will step in and stop the KB from proc'ing just when you need it most. When you want to bounce the baddest **** in the room in the corner until he dies, there's nothing better than force bolt. And you should have the power room if you're setting up a soloing build and not taking the shields. Nothing says you have to cut into your DPS to use it when you don't need it, but when you *do* need it, it'll be there.

And yeah, dispersion bubble is hold/stun/immob *protection*, not resistance. Isn't it awesome? Once you get yourself softcapped to ranged, it just gets silly. Force bubble + softcapped ranged defense + partial mez protection feels just *wrong*, and yet oh sooo right. It's a pretty sick combo - if I were you, I'd start lowballing thunderstrikes now, so you can whack in 3 sets once you get to 30 or so. 6 red fortunes in dispersion (and maneuvers, if you get it) would also be helpful. Combined with a pair of BoTZ in each of fly/hover, that'll get you quite a bit of ranged def. I don't remember - are you allowed to run hover and CJ at the same time? If so, that'd also be pretty good. It's just amazing how survivable a defender you get with that much ranged defense.

As far as worthwhile powers go, my personal opinion is that everything from the primary except black hole is worth taking, and everything from the secondary except moonbeam (the snipe) and torrent (KB cone) is good. However, in this particular combo, twilight grasp outdoes life drain in every way possible, so that's another skippable power in your secondary. You can fill that hole with moonbeam or torrent if you like (neither are *bad* powers, they're just not needed in my opinion) or take an extra pool power. I wouldn't skip petrifying gaze - while by itself it's nothing special (although taking an annoying lieut or minion out of the fight for a bit is still nothing to sneer at), once you get to your epic you can pick up a second hold and go instahold bosses.

As for slotting, with SOs here's how I would go:

Tar patch: 2-3 recharge (2 is passable, 3 if you've got the extra slots)
Twilight grasp: 1 acc, 2 heal at minimum, up to 2 acc, 3 heal, 1 rech if you have the slots.
Darkest night: 3 tohit debuff, 1 end redux
Howling twilight: If you're strapped for slots, you can get away with 1 rech since the stun is autohit. Otherwise, 2-3 rech and 0-3 stun depending on how many slots you've got free. This is both a rez and a debuff/stun power.
Shadowfall: 1 endredux, 0-3 resistance if you have the spare slots.
Fearsome stare (aka 'I win'): 2 acc, 2 fear, 2 rech. This is the most important power in the set - most controllers would *kill* for this power. 6 slot this bad boy immediately.
Petrifying gaze: 1 acc, 1 hold, 1 rech early on, if you want to stack it later, beef it up to 2 acc, 2 hold, 1-2 rech.
Dark servant: 2 acc, 3 tohit debuff, 1 heal/hold/rech/end/etc - your choice. The thing fluffy does best is tohit debuff, and he should be slotted accordingly.

Dark blast, Gloom and Moonbeam (if you take it): 1 acc, 3 damage, 1 end, 1 rech. I almost hesitate to suggest this, because I hate running with less than 2 acc in a power, but there aren't enough slots. This is the one place I would suggest grabbing some sets before 50 - 2 maelstrom and 3 ruin can net you 60% acc, 95% damage, and 35%ish end and rech in only 5 slots with level 30 IOs, and are usually very cheap.
Dark pit: 2-3 acc, 1-2 stun, 0-1 rech. This power has an accuracy penalty, so acc is important, but since you'll usually be stacking it with howling twilight, rech is less important.
Tenebrous tentacles and Nightfall: 1 acc, 3 damage, 1 end, 1 recharge. Again, frankenslotting some air burst and detonation sets could really help these powers.
Torrent (if you take it): 2 acc, 0-1 end, 0-1 recharge.
Blackstar: 1 acc, 3 damage, 0-2 recharge. I am a fan of defender nukes, and blackstar carries an absolutely *crippling* tohit debuff (62.5% *unslotted*), making it one of my favorites.

As far as epic choices go, I would choose between electric and psychic, just because they both have a hold to stack with petrifying gaze. Psychic gives you your hold earlier and has some other control tricks, while electric fence would help round out your ranged attack chain and power sink would solve any end problems. Both are great pools. If you don't want the hold stacking, then I would go dark mastery. Oppressive gloom would stack well with dark pit and howling twilight, soul drain + blackstar would be awesome, and soul transfer -> howling twilight would allow you to rez the entire ream at once including yourself, which would be a neat trick.

The wording is certainly confusing, there. I *think* I know what it's doing, though:

The first line is the PvE effect. It does, as you surmised, indicate that the effect is a -13% endurance drain. The second line is the PvP effect (note the 'if target is a player' tag). Notice that in this case it says '-X endurance' rather than 'endurance -X' - comparing this to other endurance drain powers, we can see that this is the notation for draining a fixed number of points of end, rather than a percentage based drain.

So, in PvE, the proc will drain 13% end if it goes off, and in PvP, it'll drain 3.33 points of end. The proc has a 20% chance to go off, so on average, it'll drain 2.6% end in PvE and 0.66 end in PvP. Charged bolt has a 7% (PvE) or a 1.25 (PvP) end drain, so an endmod enhancement would net you an additional 2.33% (PvE) or .416 (PvP). For lightning bolt, the bonuses from an endmod are 3.33% (PvE) and 0.666 (PvP).

So, the times when the tempest proc wins are in PvE and PvP end drain on charged bolt. However, given that the endmod enhancement should also boost the end refund and would almost certainly be easier to get, I'd just go with the endmod enhancement - that is, if you bother with either one. Given the extremely small benefits either way, I would most likely fill the slot with more acc, dam, end, or rech, or just save the slot for somewhere more useful.

My personal 'just a tiny little change' I'd like for christmas is to get a taunt effect added to black dwarf mire. It's getting tiresome to not be able to hold aggro on more than 6 enemies at once, especially if I'm actually trying to off-tank.

I personally would slot it with 4 dark watcher's despair and 2 generic accuracy IOs. Accurate tohit debuff would work for those powers that require an accuracy check, but due to the way enhancements interact with pet powers, they wouldn't enhance the tohit debuff on anything that *didn't* require a tohit check, such as his 'chill of the night' aura. 4 DWD + 2 acc lets you max tohit debuff, get a bit of end redux and recharge in case you need to recast it, has plenty of acc for whatever it needs, and you also get the tasty bonuses from DWD.

Pretty easy to calculate. All we need to know is: how many mobs were there, how many of them were dead, and what's the chance for an individual mob to revive?

Something I don't think I saw mentioned in here:

Now that black dwarf mire is on a 20 second recharge, the fact that it doesn't have a taunt effect has become really annoying. White dwarf flare gets a taunt, but not black dwarf mire. It makes it really hard to actually hold aggro on more than 6 targets at once (5 from taunt, 1 from hitting him). It didn't make much sense to give it a taunt when it took 2 minutes to come back, but it's beyond me why it didn't get one now that it's effectively the black dwarf's AoE attack. I'm getting tired of jumping into a group, taunting, and then having 2/3rds of them peel off as soon as anyone tosses an AoE.

I've got two 50s, and yes, for an altaholic like me, that did indeed feel like quite an accomplishment.

The first for me was my ice/ice dominator Kaylee Ice. While leveling up this character I realized something: At least in part, my altaholism is driven by the search for the 'perfect character' for me - I saw this once I played my dom because I realized I had found that character! Conceptually, I had always liked ice and cold themed powers for some reason - I had gone through an ice/ice tank and blaster previously, but their concepts had never clicked for me. But on my dom, thematics, concept, and playstyle just came together in an absolutely perfect blend. She started off with nothing, but within a matter of weeks had leapfrogged over all of my other characters, hero and villain both. In only a few months, she became my first 50.

Doms in many ways are my ideal fit in an AT (especially now that they do so much more damage) - control the fight, and then beat the stuffing out of you enemies! Make a single mistake and you're a greasy spot on the wall, but play well and you feel like a god (well, everywhere besides PToD fights, but whatever...). While many other dominator concepts have visited my mind since she hit 50, I don't think that any of them will ever capture the rush of my first dominator.

The second was my longbow themed FF/energy defender, Longbow Tac-ops. The story is rather fortuitous: my brother was passing through atlas park one day, when he heard a person say over broadcast that they were about to free up the name "Longbow Sniper" (by deleting the character) if anybody wanted it. He went off to find the guy, who was (naturally) standing under atlas, and was impressed to realize just how closely you could mimic the longbow costume. As soon as the guy logged off, my brother popped out to the character screen and ran up a AR/nrg blaster with the name.

At this point, I wandered by the office and asked my brother what was up, and he explained the story to me. At the time, we were on a kick of playing specific duos of characters together (this was before pacts). So, I pulled out my laptop and ran up a longbow themed character to run with him. Now, most of the time we ran a pair of characters for a while and then got distracted. This was the first time, though, that one of our duos had been planned (and thematically matched) from character creation, and something about the pairing just clicked for us. While we're both altaholics and the characters didn't really advance *that* quickly by anyone else's standards, by our standards they just flew up the levels. Our progress took a hit when he decided to let his sub lapse while waiting for GR, but over the last double XP/reactivation weekend, we ground out the last 5 levels to 50. For both of us, our longbow characters are our highest level heroes by at least 15 levels.

Mechanically, my FF/nrg defender doesn't play like any other character I've tried. Having a defender with strong personal defenses is quite a novelty, and especially since I softcapped his ranged defense, he feels practically unstoppable. Not that he'll necessarily kill everything especially *fast*, but his killspeed is respectable enough, and his survivability is very good. Between his softcapped ranged defense, quite respectable S/L resistance, knockback and repel effects to keep everything out of melee, and PFF if things go truly wrong, the only time I usually die is if my computer or connection betrays me, or I do something truly stupid.

Hey all,

As I finally got a hero 50 last double XP weekend, I've been slowly leveling up a warshade. And while she's an absolute blast when things are working properly, I've noticed an increasing amount of strange behavior from her form-switching binds that's really getting on my nerves.

I've got what I imagine are three very standard form change binds:

/bind g "powexec_toggleon Dark Nova$$goto_tray 5"
/bind j "powexec_toggleon Black Dwarf$$goto_tray 6"
/bind h "powexec_toggleoff Dark Nova$$powexec_toggleoff Black Dwarf$$powexec_name Gravity Shield$$goto_tray 1"

The vast majority of the time, all three work just fine. However, on a number of occasions, I will hit one of the three and my tray will change, but the transformation will not take place *and the binds stop working*.

This is *not* the same as simply trying to drop a form before a power is finished animating. I've had that happen too, but all that requires is that I wait a split second and then hit the human form key again. What's happening here is that I hit the key, the tray changes, but the transformation (either way) doesn't happen, and the bind key no longer responds.

For example, say I'm in nova and I want to drop to human to mire and stygian circle, as I'm getting low on health. So I hit 'h' to drop to human, the tray swaps back to 1, but all the human form powers remain greyed out, I don't drop the nova form, and hammering the 'h' key just doesn't do a darn thing, no matter how long I do it - I've sat there hitting it for easily 5 seconds, more than long enough for any animations to finish (and I'm not mezzed). I can't even get back into nova mode by hitting 'g', as that key doesn't seem to do anything either.

The only way I've been able to find to get out of this stuck mode is to hit the key for whichever form wasn't involved - like 'j' for dwarf in the previous example. Of course, by the time I realize that it's not working, I'm usually dead (and even if I survive, I don't end up in the form I originally wanted to be in). This can also happen when trying to switch from human into a form, or trying to detoggle dwarf instead of nova. Needless to say, I'm getting tired of being smushed because I got stuck unable to execute any powers or switch forms.

Has anyone ever had this happen to them? And if so, does anyone know how to *stop* it from happening? It's really getting on my nerves.

What were you fighting? Some enemies (like clockwork) are weak to knockback, such that attacks which normally only knockdown function as knockback against them. Also, if you were fighting significantly lower level enemies, that could also cause knockdown to turn into knockback. And this is a silly question, but check to make sure you didn't accidentally slot a knockback enhancement into GD, which would do the same thing.

I think that the reason for a lot of it is that many don't realize how good the power actually is. Many probably just look at the power and think: 'Maneuvers? Doesn't that give like, 2% def?" and skip it. They don't realize that even widow maneuvers is almost 50% stronger than the 'normal' one, let alone soldier maneuvers, which is almost 200% stronger.

Many people just aren't interested in learning detailed information about the powers in this game. If it sounds or looks good, they take it, if it doesn't, they don't - and maneuvers is about as un-flashy as it gets in this game. Unless you go off looking to try and understand the numbers, it's not easy to see what it would do for you.

Hey, an energy defender can kill stuff too! Granted it'll probably take a bit if it's not a minion, but said target isn't likely to be doing very much in the meantime. Gale, though... yeah. Only non-harmful time I could think of to use gale on a scrapper's target is if said target is the only one left, is a boss, and is already stuck in a corner - in which case I have more interesting things to throw at him anyway.

Recalculating the endurance used by the attacks and cranking in 3 slotted stamina (and still assuming no endred in the toggles - and dispersion bubble is .52/s, not 1.04/s), he ought to be out a net of about 29.41 end over that 8 second period. That's not even *close* to being "virtually out of endurance". He would've had to use the same string at least 3 times to even come close. Which, of course, means that he's not telling us the whole story. There's not just a missing attack or two in there, there's two or three entire attack strings.

I find these threads highly amusing. I have a FF/nrg myself, and I always have to wonder just how Ultimo must have built his defender to have such problems. I softcapped mine to ranged once I hit 50, but I played the heck out of it with just the defence that dispersion bubble and maneuvers gave me for a long time before I ever hit the magic 45%.

I have to wonder, because I find so much of my experience flatly contradicting Ultimo's. As a FF/nrg I have three damaging AoEs. Between all of that I can *easily* kill the spawn surrounding a boss before he unphases - esepcially since opening with repulsion bomb puts everyone including the boss on their butts right off the bat. I've juggled scads of bosses on their rears in a corner with force bolt until they died, and it's a very rare case that I find a boss that tactic won't work on. Even before I soft capped my ranged defence, I could solo just fine - not nearly as fast or on as high a difficulty setting as a blaster or scrapper, of course, but without any real difficulty. Insps dropped more than fast enough to top up my health or end occasionally, and a pair of purples would cap my defense for plenty long enough to defuse any out-of-control situations (which were uncommon solo - detention field and force bolt are wonderful precision tools. It's on teams where things more easily get chaotic).

I've done it over and over again - repulsion bomb -> jump in close -> explosive blast -> energy torrent and pick off the weakened foes as they stand back up, force bolting as needed. If there's a boss, cage him after the AoEs go off and force bolt the heck out of him once the cage drops. End result, one dead spawn and I've taken perhaps 2 or 3 ranged hits, tops. This isn't theorycrafting - I've done this many times. It works. I don't run out of endurance before I clear the spawn, and they don't do very much damage to me either. Now, I'm not exactly fighting 8 man spawns of +3s here, but this is plenty sufficient to solo on a reasonable difficulty setting.

One note - singy does *not* have a high accuracy bonus. The power may list a 100% bonus, but that is common to many pet summoning powers, and does *not* carry over to the pet's own powers. In fact, singy is one of two pets (animate stone being the other) to actually have a tohit *penalty* - singy and stoney only have base 50% tohit, not 75%. Singy's grav distortion and crush do both have the standard 20% accuracy bonus, and his attacks don't seem to be typed at all (meaning he should ignore defense), but I'd still put in at *least* two accuracies. Acc/mez hamis could also be useful once you near 50.

Unfortunately, I can't come after all. Apparently the extended family are all coming over tomorrow afternoon for the big dinner (why does nobody ever tell me these sort of things in advance?), and so I won't be able to get away with hiding away in the computer room being 'antisocial'. Hope it works out well regardless.

Let's see - that's 4-7 eastern? I think I can be on, for an hour or so at the beginning anyway. For now, put me down on the main group - GeoFlare, low teens elec/stone. If I can't be there after all, I'll let you know.

Well, I've had three online names over the years. The first was rather childish, and I eventually swapped it out for a reference to a book series. I used that name for a good long time, but I decided I wanted a different name to use in counter strike - one people would be less likely to recognise and pester me about in the middle of a round. I decided that *this* name would reference my overriding passion in life - physics and astronomy, and so I decided to pick the name of an obscure particle. Thus, MuonNeutrino was born.

Neutrinos are weird, ghostly, almost massless particles that barely interact with normal matter. Muon neutrinos are the variety associated with the muon, a heavier cousin of the electron. I feel that it reflects me rather well. I am a huge geek - check. I am mostly a lurker, and extremely shy in RL - check. I am strange and full of obscure references - check.

Eventually, I decided that I didn't like my old name - said book series had long ended and my interest had waned, and I found that I *hated* what they had done to the characters in the subsequent series. Thus, whenever I signed up for something new (such as CoH), I used MuonNeutrino - although it is just my handle, I have no characters named that. Eventually I shortened it to just Muon in counterstrike, but everywhere else on the internet (bar one message board where I still have my old name) I am known as MuonNeutrino.

Tanker tuesday is a long running player event that began a number of years ago on the champion server on the first tuesday of each month - basically as an event where people brought all their tankers, formed massive all-tank teams and went forth to beat stuff up. More recently, they've been expanding to other servers with the 'tanker tuesday tour', where they go to other servers on the other tuesdays in each month. It's not an 'every server' thing, but a 'wherever we're holding the event this month' type thing. The first tuesday is always on champion, the second is on justice, and the remaining are the tour and whatever other servers they want to try. I'm not aware of anyone ever hosting a tanker tuesday on any of the EU servers, but all that means is that nobody's tried yet. If you want to, why not try organizing one?

Every charity has to be based somewhere. Just because a charity doesn't extend beyond its country of origin doesn't necessarily equate to a '**** foreigners' attitude. Also, did you actually click through to the site and read the descriptions?