Noxilicious

You could also roll a new toon and play with him, that way he gets to experience the whole level-range with rather than just skipping right to your level-range.

You know, one thing I cannot stand about the early signature TFs and what I really loved was different about Strike Forces is that the signature TFs (with the exceptions of the old Posi and Numi TFs that have their own problems), you only ever fight one enemy group, in the case of the Citadel you fight only one enemy group on one map-type!

Take for example the Silver Mantis SF. It's story isn't exactly the most engaging and you fight the Sky Raiders in every mission, but it makes use of lots of unique maps that were already in the game, and there's enemy groups aside from the Sky Raiders in every mission but the last one. As a result, you always know you're doing a Strike Force, as compared to the Citadel where you might just start thinking the leader's just selecting radio missions involing the Council.

Having a variety of enemy groups to beat up, at least, is important to me on a TF. Maybe in one mission you also run into the Freakshow, considering that it's often implied that Crey supplies them with Excelsior. Maybe that Shadowqueen person decided to make a deal with the Banished Pantheon so they show up in her mission. And as Calaxprimal has said, Arachnos is rather underrepresented blue-side, so maybe have them show up in another mission to trade research data with Crey (with hints towards The Web maybe?).

None of these things would really change the mission objectives per sé, but it gives us more enemy groups to see and fight rather than wail on Crey for five missions.

On another note, what I really liked about SFs and what I really miss about signature TFs is ending on spectacular high notes. In the Virgil Tarikoss SF you travel to a prison hell underneath Cap Au Diable, in the Silver Mantis SF you destroy a Sky Raider fortress and watch it catch on fire, ín the Renault SF you poke a giant beast in the eye in a Coralax temple and in the Ice Minstral SF you jump into a hole in Oranbega to end up in a psi-crytal-filled cavern.

All those missions are something you don't see in a normal story arc. They all give the impression that ****'s about to get real. Compare to the signature TFs. You fight an AV in a generic sewers map. You fight an AV in a generic Council base map. You fight an AV in a generic lab map. You fight a monster in a generic cave map.

These TFs end on formulaic low notes. "Well, it's the end of the TF I guess so let's just throw an AV at the players and call it a day!" It's probably not the devs' thought process back then, but it's the impression I got as a player. I can see you want a revamped Manticore TF on a high note as well by having the players escape an explosion, and while that is a good idea, I'm afraid that was already done twice in the game, first in the Ernesto Hess TF and later in the second villain clone arc. Plus so far I only see the final mission take place in a generic abandoned lab map, which isn't exactly a high point from a map point of view.

Well, this is purely my thoughts on the subject of revamping the signature TFs. I'd also love to see them get the same treatment as the Posi TF.

I never look at build guides, but I always make a plan on Mids and I usually follow that plan.

When I first played the game, whenever I leveled up and got to select a new power or new slots, it always took me five to ten minutes just to decide what to get. As a solution to this I started making builds in mids and haven't stopped doing so since.

I've been playing for almost two years now, so I guess I probably could play by ear now, but at this point I just feel comfortable with having a plan I can follow. Plus, I wouldn't dare touch EATs without a build planned out.

To date I only ever picked Black Scorpion as my Patron, but I do like the guy and his missions, especially the third arc. It has Nemesis storming the beaches of Grandville with his soldiers. On the other hand, It has those mole-drill-things that take for-bloody-ever to defeat, and you need to defeat four of them.

Also for what it's worth I believe Black Scorpion is the nicest Patron, too.

They really ought to make Arbiter Rein a pop-up contact like all the Midnight guys or I17 contacts.

I'd argue that the Trinity applies even to CoH, but instead of just straight-up healing, we have more ways of damage-mitigation. The more support-oriented ATs can do anything from healing to buffing resistance/defense to debuffing damage and tohit. These are all arguably better than healing, too, considering that Empathy and Pain Domination are reaction sets that only get useful when things go wrong whereas other sets turns the whole team into invincible juggernauts while simultaneously turning their enemies into declawed kittens.

This is the only MMO I ever seriously played, so I can't really compare it to most other MMOs, but I get the impression that in other MMOs, buffs and debuffs aren't all that useful and healing is the only type of support, so when people come to CoH from other MMOs, they just don't know that here, buffing and debuffing is equal to or better than healing.

And as for needing a tank? Considering that buffs and debuffs are useful in this game, if ATs with support sets are on the ball, you won't even need a tank. In fact, I think you'd only "need" a tank if you only have Empathy defenders. If you got, say, two Force Field Defenders, you'll do fine if the rest is Blasters.

Hell, given this game, you'd do fine with just Blasters because then you got a dervish of death as a team, annihilating everything in a matter of moments.

Quite honestly, I empathise with the kicked, inefficient people.

Since the OP has a very clear idea of what he wants on the team, I'm gonna assume he sends tells to people with the right AT rather than just relying on broadcasts.

So here's how I imagine it goes. So the OP sends a tell to a VEAT, asking him to join his team. The VEAT was probably already doing something. Maybe he was looking at the market, maybe he was just soloing. Maybe he was tweaking the MArc he was working on.

But he got a tell asking him to join a team. He thinks "hey, teaming's fun, I should better take this opportunity!" and he drops whatever he was doing. So he accepts the invitation and heads to the OP's zone. Or worse, he was currently half-way through a mission, but he left so he can get invited.

And then he's kicked from the team. Is this a joke or something? Is the leader just some troll who gets a kick out of inviting people just to kick them? He's about to send the leader an angry tell, but before he can finish he gets a tell himself, 'politely' explaining that his build isn't what he was looking for, and that he'd be much better if he took his Tactical Training toggles. Sure, the leader had the best of intentions when he gave that advice, but at this point it's just adding insult to injury. "He asked me to join his team only to tell me I'm not good enough for his team?"

The VEAT dropped whatever he was doing only to be told to go away. At this point I can hardly blame these people for sending the OP angry tells.

'course, that's assuming that this is the OP's modus operandi. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But since this appears to be a pretty common occurence for the OP, I'm gonna assume that he's being vague about what he expects from people.

Now, before you get the wrong impression, the OP is free to form whatever team he likes. I'm not refuting that. But if he wants VEATs with the TT toggles but keeps running into VEATs without, the obvious solution is to send them a tell asking if they have those toggles. If they yes, great, invite them to the team. If they say no, keep looking. That way, there's not gonna be hard feelings.

See, kicks are like break-ups. There are no nice break-ups and there are no nice kicks. You cannot break up with someone without hurting their feelings, and you cannot kick someone and expect them to be jovial about it. He obviously ran into a lot of VEATs without TT, but instead of learning from this and asking them if they have the powers beforehand, he continues to invite them, and then kick them if they don't, which will always lead to hurt feelings.

It was basically a calculated risk, especially since most of the team was pretty frail and wouldn't be able to withstand more than three, four good hits.

We weren't a dedicated Hero killer team and even one Signature Hero posed a great challenge. The only reason we managed is because we worked around all the predictable elements. An unpredictable element like another human player could've just made this impossible.

And yeah, that's the inherent risk of PvP zones. I wouldn't have blamed that person if he persisted in attacking us. I'd have just left the zone in that case.

Well, I'm not sure how mez protection PvP changes worked into this. All I know is that it worked out somehow.

And for what it's worth, we only got attacked by a player hero once, but we explained to him we're hunting Signature Heroes, he apologised, and we carried on. I imagine hunting Heroes would be a lot more annoying if an actual players keeps meddling with you.

If I remember correctly, it's from the Mario Kart DS commercial, the Japanese one.

Except for the Dramatic Chipmunk. He's from the Dramatic Chipmunk movie on YouTube.

You should be aware that RV is a PvP zone, so don't get mad when some PvP happens and interrupts your AV hunt.

Joking aside, I managed to take down a couple of Heroes in RV with a team of four. One was a Mind Dominator who spent most of his time making sure all but one Hero was asleep, os really, it was more like three taking a Hero down at a time while someone else made sure we don't get ganged up on.

It was slow and tedious, but it ultimately worked out. I think with a full team and three Heavies, you should be able to take on at least two or three Heroes, a couple of deaths on the player's side included.

Your edit is bolded and I repeated it again afterwards, so it should be impossible for people to miss.

Again, awesome job, Neo Shadowdream!

Hey, Shadowdream, would you mind if I quote your post with the example picture and link in my opening post?

This is supremely awesome and I think it deserves to be seen by anyone who clicks this thread.

Are you perhaps talking Build Up or Build Up clones in Tanker secondaries? In that case, their purpose is a damage self buff (which unfortunately cannot be enhanced), and I generally ignore the accuracy buff, only slotting for recharge reduction.

You know, the worst part of actually liking Lord Recluse and Arachnos is that all the criticism about them makes perfect sense.

I don't remember there being any Nemesis hunts red-side, so I'll just go ahead and assume you mean blue-side.

Depending on your level, Crey's Folly and Peregrine Island are your best bets. If you're just 40, you can find several Nemmies on the roofs of Crey's Folly, roughly around the center in the map. They'll be around 35-39, so definitely manageable.

If you're higher than that, there's plenty of Nemmies around the docks in Peregrine Island, and they're a lot easier to find than those in Crey's folly.

And of course there's the option to just grab a radio mission with Nemmies, that would probably be the easiest way to do this.

Just to clarify, when I say physically frail I don't mean that they cannot dish out damage, but they can't take it well. After all, Scrappers can consistently dish out more damage yet the less-powerful Tankers get the intimidating Super Strength set while Scrappers are stuck with the weaker-looking Martial Arts set. That doesn't really make sense at first, especially when looking at numbers, so I figured when the devs decided who to give MA and who to give SS (or who's the "Big Tough Guy" and who less so), they looked at the defense and resistance values of the ATs.

(I also think Castle voiced concerns over giving Kinetic Melee to RAWR SMASH Brute AT for thematic reasons, so the devs do seem to care about thematic fits. I don't have any links to this right now so feel free to just dismiss this).

But hey, if this would turn out to be a fun set, then ultimately I won't care whether it's a thematic fit or not. If the devs decide to proliferate War Mace onto Stalkers, I won't protest that change, either. I just think that if the devs do care whether a set is thematically appropriate to a given AT, it's easier to sell them on the idea if we don't deviate too much from those themes.

And for the record, if you wanna make a little girl Tanker or Brute, that's a perfectly valid choice and I sincerely doubt anybody would tell you to change your toon to something more "appropriate" or whatever. But as you said, it won't affect your survivability, your tiny schoolgirl Brute will still be a brickwall and your body-building Defender will never never be able to take as many hits as your schoolgirl Brute.

And to reiterate, in the spirit of fun, if that set would actually be fun to play, all this won't matter. I personally cannot gauge enjoyment from a set sketch, so I'll leave that for others to decide.

At the risk of either sounding like a broken record or like I'm backpedalling, Memphis, I never said it's an unsurmountable issue.

When I started playing this game, we still had mouse-overs and before that bug showed up I switched to regular IOs myself, so for the longest time this hasn't been an issue for and I haven't thought about this, as is the case for about everyone on this forum, I imagine.

But that's because this isn't a change intended for long-time vets or those that like the game enough to regularly post on its forum. It's only after a couple of my friends started playing and pretty much all of them became a bit confused when they got to DOs.

So I've been thinking whether the enhancement vendor as it is is really optimal and I figured there's room to improvement to make it a lot more accessible to newcomers to the game.

It's definitely not a big issue and it's something one can get used to after a while. I just don't think "get used to it" is a good way to sell this game to unconvinced people. The devs repeatedly ironed out kinks to create a smoother game experience, after all, like the decreased travel distances in starter arcs or earlier access to phone numbers to blue-side contacts. I just figured this would be another way the devs would smooth out the game experience.

I'm not dead-set on an icon change, either. I actually think Fleeting Whisper's idea is far superior to mine, and your idea of putting the enhancement type under (or next?) to the name gets the idea across just as well while preserving the flavour icons.