PuceNonagon

As someone who plays tanks frequently, what you describe can be an annoying tactic that ultimately draws out battles that could be ended much quicker. Here are some instances:

1) It's great that you can survive that other mob all by yourself. Your toon is obviously very powerful. However, those 12 baddies you took down would have gone down far quicker were they covered in your team's radiation goop cast on an anchor near the tank, or the PBAoE ally sonic debuff cast on the tank, or the fulcrum shift being cast by the kin. Those baddies also aren't catching any splash damage from the AoEs being sprayed by your blasters.

2) You don't have a taunt, therefore your ability to hold agro is inferior to the tank. You may be able to withstand the agro, but you are bound to have stragglers that take longer to track down and kill with your melee.

Here's how you adjust your strategy to maximize efficiency: Let the tank get agro. Go to your other mob and drag them into the main mob. Let them catch agro from the tank and then go off and get another mob. Feed the killing machine that is the tank-buff-debuff-damage machine. This way after the smoke clears, the room is nearly done and no one moved anywhere (except you), getting more use from stationary buffs and debuffs and keeping agro off the squishies.

You are playing like a soloer on a team. Either adjust your strategies to fit with the advantages of teaming, or simply solo. Brutes are great for that.

For most of my toons, I think I play best when I do most often with the toon what that toons does best. Any time and effort spent trying to count kills with a Granite tank is not time well spent, either on teams or interminable soloing. Any time spent trying to farm with a Dark Melee scrapper is probably not going to be a productive as that same time spent with any number of powersets.

For defenders, probably more that any other AT, the secondary is very secondary. The defender blasts are VERY weak, almost annoyingly so. If my buffs and debuffs weren't so godly in this game, I'd probably complain. It didn't take me long to realize that this game is not about damage and defenses; it's about buffs and debuffs. Teams of eight defenders absolutely mow through everything and it's not because their blasts are so potent. They rock because that many defenders can buff their defender attacks to actually decent level and debuff enemy defenses to nearly nil. I was on an 8-man rad defender superteam that did Lusca in 6 minutes... without even trying to speed through it.

Perhaps a defender -as it exists in this game- shouldn't be called that. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it a Protector, which probably more accurately describes what it does while still conveying the element of offense purported by the OP.

I run a 50 DP/MM and it's a blast, no pun intended. The damage is not as great as on a fire blaster, but it's good enough that I'm still doing considerably more damage than any other non-blaster on the team. Paired with MM, I get an Aim and another decent PBAoE and Drain Psyche which is a big ball of goodness. And the whole set LOOKS great. Take that for what it's worth, but it's FUN, and isn't that really the ultimate goal? This game is so damn easy that doing those extra few bits of damage probably isn't going to make a lick of difference outside of PvP. Enjoy what the set offers. Then play a fire/fire and enjoy what that set offers; it's different, but still cool.

Play your controller at work. If you get caught, you get fired and get to go home and play your controller. If you don't get caught, you got paid to play your controller. You win any way you slice it.

Me and a pair of pals had been running the same PnP Champions campaign for 15 years, since the time when we were kids. We were living across the country from each other, but would get together a few times a year and game. We were hoping that when CoH came out, we could change some of our trips into cheaper online excursions. So we remade in CoH dozens of characters we had made over the years and played.

That's what brought me in.

"D'Shan. Shut your whining or I'm dragging your @$$ to Monster Island and turning off your toggles. Or I'll strip your enhancements and give them to the new scrapper I'm building. Or the next time free server transfers come around, I'm shipping you off to Protector."

Similar concept in a book called "Creator" by Jeremy Leven.

I rarely craft more than 10 recipes at once and so I usually have no trouble with fitting all my salvage in my sack. What I do is this:

• Put up my recipe window on the right and my market window on the left. Make these two windows fill up the screen. Open all the recipes so I can read what salvage is needed.

• Start with the first recipe, first piece of salvage. Say it's Kinetic Weapon. Then I quickly scroll down and find how many Kinetic Weapons I need for all my recipes. Buy that many. Go to the next piece of salvage, repeat.

• Close the recipes that get complete.

• The first few recipes take a while, but once you get rolling, the last few are often complete -or nearly so- when you get to them.

• Then I head to base, craft away, and deposit any extra salvage worth keeping.

Just on a lark, I emailed some influence, salvage and many temp powers to a lowbie in Praetoria. AWESOMENESS. He's now got Med Pack and the endurance boost and PPD summon and several attacks. It's making playing the lowbie so much more fun.

I'd love to be able to recharge the temp powers I already own, but the way it works now is okay for me.

Wow. I occasionally run three on a very limited basis, but EIGHT!? Criminy.

Happy Birthday, Ms. Darkblade.

Happy Birthday Chloe!

-Nakoa

I suppose I can't speak for every person on every server, but easily 80% of the channel chatter that I hear that is not casual conversation is some sort of TF/Trial recruitment. People play TFs all the time. We do not need AE to generate Merits.

To each his own, I guess.

I've never really tracked how many merits I've earned altogether; I play many alts and keeping track would drive me bonkers. I do occasionally log into a toon and find 4000 merits just sitting there. Per evening, I don't know, but I do know I've done Hess/Hami/ITF/LGTF/STF/Manti in one evening. I don't know the merit counts on those offhand, but it's lots.

I find the most fun way to earn merits is rapid-fire TFs. I'm usually the weak link on the team and I have a blast trying to keep up.

This is where this game mirrors life. Play with people better than you and the rewards are great, just as in real life you should always hang out with people smarter than you. All the good stuff dribbles down to you. The seagulls flying over the city dump are the same that fly over AT&T park after a game, but those seagulls are eating garlic fries and $16 crab sandwich scraps.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this... but as a general rule, if you want lots of rewards quickly, use SS/CJ/Hurdle with a stealth IO, hand out the buffs and debuffs liberally, and play with Pum.

Just a thought to consider... the PvPIO PBAoE set Fury of the Gladiator offers a -KB bonus and is very affordable. Minus the unique, you can get the other five for 50 million (or less) if you shop for it. It's not the greatest PvPIO set, but it seems to be perfect for the Fire/Fire tank.

I believe Glad Armor also has a -KB bonus, but is considerably more expensive.

Funny, he doesn't look Newish.

I was tanking Yellow Mito #4 and my Secondary Mutation recycled. I waited until the instant the mito went down and I hit it and monkeed, so it looked to everyone that a Rikti monkey had tanked a mito. So, you could see the usual ring of tanks around the goo, with one little jumping monkey. It was something you don't see every hami raid.

If you are conserving slots, then Superspeed is much better than Ninja Run. I have two toons that are Ninja Runners and have builds to maximize Ninja Run: defensive builds so I can slot five Gift of the Ancients: +run speed, slotted Swift and Hurdle and Combat Jumping, sets with Movement bonuses. Both toons are about as fast as a Superspeeder (without the stealth of course), and about as jumpy and a Superjumper. It's a very cool thing to try but not especially efficient build-wise. If you are counting slots, don't do it, because it takes many slots (10ish) to make it work.

I saw Cai do it this way on Fuschia Moon and I just had to see if I could. Now, I call it "Cai Run" when anyone tries to do it that way.

They are also good at targeting rezzing mobs before I can. Usually, the rezzer dies before he's done with his overly dramatic rezzing animation. I like that about my imps.

English lesson for the day:

Actually, what you are looking for aren't "hybrid" names. A "hybrid name" would be similar to a "splice name," which would be akin to my claws/elec scrapper named Slash Dynamo. "Slash" to represent the claws and "Dynamo" to show the electric. Both words combined, or spliced, into one name. It's a more general term than what you are looking for.

More specifically, what you are looking for are Portmanteau names, like Blackula (Black+Dracula), Manaconda (Man+Anaconda), Mandroid (man+animal), for example. Portmanteau words are two words jammed together that form one word that retains both meanings, like smog, blaxploitation, slithy, fugly, brunch, fantabulous, flare, Reaganomics, altaholic, Spanglish, infomercial...

Have fun.