PhroX

Haven't read the manga, it's on my list of things to read, but said list is way way too long already. And yes, there are loads of injokes (often made doubly awesome by the fact that the spoof characters are voiced by the same person who did the original) but I suspect most of the people reading this thread are already anime fans.

I'm with you, Maria is hawt

Personally I thought that Ergo Proxy was, well, the phrase that comes to mind is "trying too hard". It really wants to be complicated and strange and deep, but it doesn't always succeed. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy it, but it could've been really good, rather than just decent, if it was a little less convinced of it's own importance.

Anyway, a few more recommendations from me:

Hayate no Gotoku (Hayate the Combat Butler) - Not quite sure why I haven't recommended this yet, as it's one of my all time favourites. It's an utterly insane action comedy about a poor young man (the titular Hayate) who becomes a butler to a very very rich girl. Hillarity most definitely ensues. As do ridiculous amounts of shout outs and cameos and a complete lack of respect for the fourth wall. It even sort of has a catgirl (hehehe ). Oh, and it's narrated by Norio Wakamoto.

Saikano (She: The Ultimate Weapon) - You know the drill, boy meats girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl turns out to be a living weapon of mass destruction. And of course hillarity ensues. Well, no, actually it doesn't. If my earlier recommendations of Narutaru and Bokurano weren't emotionally painful enough, try this. It's not subtitled "The Last Love Song On This Little Planet" for no reason.

Now and Then, Here and There - Seems that I've been recommending loads of depressing stuff recently, so this'll be the last. And most certainly not the least. It starts with a pretty familiar scenario, a young boy meets a strange girl, they're attacked by machines and then sucked through a portal to another world (where the girl an machines come from). This is not your usual alternative world though. For a start, it was inspired by the various civil wars in Africa, in particular the Rwandan genocide. It's one of things you should certainly see, but will never want to do so again.

Legend of Black Heaven - After all that misery, lets have something that rocks. Something with this as a theme song. An alien race can only be saved by using a superweapon powered by ***-kickingly awesome rock music. And the only person who can play it is a washed up salaryman pining for his glory days playing guitar for an ***-kickingly awesome rock band. Hard rock will save outer space!

Ultimo_ is the CoX equivalent of My Immortal (the fanfic). Either he's not serious and is just looking for a reaction, in which case it's a masterful piece of trolling, or he is serious, in which case you despair for humanity's future...

To some extent I agree - a fair few of the suggestions here are just two strong sets which don't have any paticular synergy but work well due to the fact that they're both good - but synergy doesn't have to be two weak things becoming stronger. It can well be taking two good, or even excellent, sets and making them even better (ie 10+10=30). The real key is when some aspects of the sets mesh together in a manner that makes the outcome more than the sum of it's parts.

An example of powerful sets getting even more powerful would be the Ill/Rad controller. Compare to, say, an Ill/Kin. In isolation, I wouldn't say there's much difference strength wise between Rad and Kin (obviously, theres a huge difference in how they work, but overall, I rate them about equal). But for an Illusion controller, Rad is much much better due to the way that debuffs interact with PI and illusionary damage.

Ironically, I don't actually regard Dark/Dark to be *that* good a combo for a defender. Don't get me wrong, they're both great sets, and pairing them up works fine, but the problem is that, IMO, it's got more than it needs in some areas. THDebuff for example: Dark Miasma alone can floor anything shy of AVs, so you don't need the extra from the blast. Same with healing, DM has one of the best heals in the game, so why would you want Life Drain (or is it Siphon Life? I always get them muddled up, anyway...)? Better to take a set with a full strength T3 blast. I would combine Dark Miasma with, say, Ice or Sonic blasts, while Dark Blast has most synergy with Storm (as I outlined in my earlier post).

We had "Vision" back in the early days. It sucked. The game has gotten a hell of a lot better since the people (well, person) with Vision left....

If they're beliefs, how come what I said made perfect sense when I used the word opinion?

Beliefs and opinions are pretty much the same thing. And while there are some that can't be wrong, there are many that can.

Where does this idea come from? I've seen it going around a bit recently and it's remarkably stupid. Opinions can be, and frequently are, wrong. Some people were of the opinion that the Earth was the centre of the Solar System. They were wrong. Conversely, opinions can be right. To continue the same example, most people are of the opinion that the Sun is the centre of the Solar System. Their opinions are right. Opinions are just beliefs, and just like beliefs they can often be easily disproved.

Agreed, Ultimo_'s ideal game sounds, dare I say it, pretty unfun. I want variety, I want inequality - though not imbalance - I want things to be different. Why? Because it's interesting and fun. Which is partly why I love CoH so much: there are so many different possible characters and they all play differently.

I'd do pretty much what you suggest.
Couple of things:

It's probably just your wording that's throwing me (this talk of building from uptimes for example), but to confirm, the way to calculate the end cost of an attack chain is to add up the end cost (not EPS or EPA) of each power used (obviously add it twice if the power is used twice), then divide it by the total time taken to complete one cycle of the chain (reached by adding up the time taken for each attack including Arcanatime). This will give you a nice simple EPS of the chain, to which you can add toggles.

Also, rather than just comparing end use, I'd compare the net endurance change, i.e. end consumption minus end recovery. Lets you include any endurance increasing powers: Stamina, QR, Power Sink etc.

I wouldn't even really say the CoH ATs are that specialised, at least compared to classes in many other game. I've had scrappers tanking (or at least taking the alpha), controllers DPSing and so on...

Just as an additional note to this, -dam is one of the few debuffs not affected by Archvillain resistance, so you still get the full effect on AVs (after considering level differences and any damage resistances of course).

And Empaths aren't healers. They're buffers who do a bit of healing on the side

Resistance resists damage debuffs for the appropriate damage type, so there are quite a lot of foes that do so. Conversely, if you also have -res, then -dam becomes even better.