Sailboat

It's not a serious post. But there is that little twinge of surprise at bidding ssuper-low and getting it right away that says "ya know...I coulda gone a shade lower..."

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No, I wouldn't say now is a good time to return, sure theres lots of new content, but be careful, because if you choose the wrong content or level too quick, that's an exploit, and you'll be hit with a Ban stick.
Whats the "wrong content" or "too quick"? No one knows.
It's a minefield.
And this has seen a lot of Veterans leave.

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This is grotesquely overblown. You can, and I have, level like a rocket with absolutely no fear. I think a great deal of what you read about this is deliberate spin and exaggeration.

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If there's not, I suggest such a mechanism be created... Say, invitation by ingame email...?

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I'm all for the ability to invite yourself to a solo SG, but please, don't encourage the Devs to allow "Join my SG" solicitations through the in-game e-mail system. *shudder*

In particular, at good graphics resolution, Brimstone is beautifully detailed; the lava moves slowly over your body.

Typed defense bonuses, Tough & Weave are the way to go, maybe even Maneuvers. Try for the softcap or close, then get regen bonuses to stack with Rooted, and you should be able to build a pretty capable tanker without Granite. You can always hold Granite in reserve for emergencies.

I think that all these changes move Stone toward Invulnerability and Willpower. I think it's unique and interesting as-is.

People pay tons of money for purple recipes -- why is that? They are a significantly better than all the rest at what they do, and you cannot get them with merits or tickets -- so people will pay full price for them. Similarly, Granite offers significant survival advantage. The penalties seem severe, but plenty of people, myself included, have endured them to get that top-end durability.

Conceptually as well, to me anyway, it makes sense that "turtling up" into the super-heavy armor involves tradeoffs. You become the ultimate anvil for foes to beat against.

I suppose I wouldn't be totally opposed to some kind of changes, but I am opposed to watering it down with weaker durability in exchange for fewer offensive penalties; it's too close to homogenization for my taste.

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Now to go find me the other 5 parts of Alpacalypse!

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A terrifying prospect indeed!

Note that for some reason both Interact and sit use the bolded i, but 'i gets you to the Interact submenu, you have to mouseclick on the sit menu to get to the sitting position emotes.

Presumably this could be fixed by making sure that the fairly small list of bolded letters doesn't contain any duplicates.

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So in the OP's case where he is looking to get some drops, how else would he accomplish this if not by farming a high level non-AE mission?

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Stuff drops in normal play too, ya know.

Yeah, Shields should be a reasonable medium-strength team Tanker by itself -- with a capable Empath, it should be more than strong enough for your needs, and you can eventually get some IO sets to help out even more.

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We want to be grouping with 6+ at all times if we can help it.

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At the risk of stating the obvious, I would caution you that the quality of the people you group with is more important than the quantity. A few solid, entertaining teammates will be more fun for you AND faster leveling than a full team of whiners, slackers, or idiots.

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A big problem with designing MA's is that newbie authors don't understand that if they have a neat concept mob, it might not necessarily be a good thing to make every pack full of them.

Imagine fighting Malta where every minion was a Sapper. Yeesh.

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Or where every minion was a Sapper with knockback resistance, Hold, Sleep, and Disorient protection. And huge perception radius.

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For example I had a friend make a "Matrix Revolutions" MA, where every mob was an Agent Smith who spawned more Agent Smiths. Simple and neat right? Except everyone one of them was an MA/SR Scrapper ... kind of annoying to just whiffle yourself to death.

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I've played that one! It wasn't too bad, but my character had two to-hit buffs (Invincibility and Rage) so it was probably worse for everyone else.

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Nexus Ar'gos, a 5 yer old character with a 5 year old costume, was generic'ed by the GMs. SO griefer reported that the character was a Captain Mar'vell ripoff and that's all it took

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What's "SO griefer"?

I have never heard of a toon being deleted after being genericed. Could this be an "abuse of Mission Architect" deletion being misrepresented?

People get hot and bothered over strange things sometimes. Just yesterday I had someone quit a task force in fury because the character was exemplared and not getting exp and the player felt that no one had mentioned that. Despite the fact that I'd been spamming a task force invite text that mentioned level range and explicitly added "above X will be exemplared, but still get merit rewards." The other players tried to calm this person to no avail. So, a situation in which one player suddenly INSISTS something happened or did not happen, when everyone else present knows otherwise, is quite possible.

I think that when someone is really emotional, it's somewhat more possible there's some aspect of the situation they're not fully understanding. That's just natural.

Has this been escalated to a supervisor of the GMs? They do that, you know.

At one time there was a guide to average times to complete task forces for merits. My memory says it might have been in the market forum for some reason.

Does anyone have a link to such a guide?

The wiki doesn't venture to guess how long TFs might take. I know there's a lot of variation; I am just looking for a reasonable answer when people (quite reasonably) ask me "how long is this likely to take?"

Thanks!

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so there is no end-game, is that what I'm hearing.

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There's no need for an end-game. What does "end-game" mean, anyway? In COH/COV there's lots you can do at 50 even if you're not advancing; if you don't want to do it, you can roll an alt; alts play much more differently than the classes in most games, so there's more variety to replying on an alt, and more content than one character can do anyway.

Ultimately it's like chess, baseball, football, charades, or any other game -- play it for fun if you like doing so.

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why no love for the axe? all the builds with a few exceptions seem to avoid it...

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For me it's the draw times of weapons in general and the general anti-thematic theme to the comic book genre.

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"Poor wretches -- it's not their fault the villain mind-controlled them into fighting us. They were productive citizens just this morning! Be a dear, and help me pick up all the severed heads, would you? I think one rolled under the couch. Careful, it's pretty slippery with all the blood."

There's nothing that can kill everyone and has no weaknesses. Another AT or build that will handle Brutes will just go down to something else.

There's absolutely no doubt that a certain number of mission designers make the missions deliberately hard. Whether trhey're seeking challenge, trying to piss people off, or just measuring their self-worth by the toughness of their creations, I don't know. in far too many cases the bad guys are not just hard, but have a selection of carefully-mixed abilities to negate as many standard player powers and tactics as possible. The old end-sapping/toggle-dropping/holding/stunning/knockback-proof/self-healing /to-hit-buffed/resistance-debuffing/blinding/critting/slowing/minion trick, as it were. With gigantic aggro radius and enhanced perception.

That kind of thing could have been fun in limited quantity -- the sad fact that it's a major theme in MA missions is kind of tawdry, though.

Gah, I just got this...or just noticed this...on one of my guys! Was on a TF, exemplared, and afterward happy to get my higher-level powers back -- was loking at that and noticed Prestige Power Slide grayed out. Guess I'll bug it.

Big fan of Tough on a Fire primary. It immediately improved the feel whenever I've taken it.

That siad, Hasten will help a ton with your recharging heal and the nice Dark effects. If you could work both in, even at the cost of not investing a lot in an epic pool, I think it would be worth it.

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I have a Claws Scrapper and am in the process of leveling him up, I would like to slot Evicerate and one more Aoe type attack, but I don't need Both Spin and Shockwave, can anyone give me their oppinion on these two attack's?

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If I can fit in Fitness, Leadership, Fighting and all three AoEs, how can you not fit in both of those?

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In other words, maybe it would help to post the whole build so we can bombard you with opinions.

Are you having this trouble in regular contact-generated missions, or Architect custom missions?

I have an Inv/SS soft-cap build mostly matured. I am trying to get the typed defenses as close to the soft cap as I can without giving up too much offense and mobility (I already have a Stone Tanker, thanks!)

Slots are screamingly tight, as you might imagine. I've managed to cram 40-75% end reduction into the attacks, and will be further reducing the end cost of Jab a little with final slots, from 41% to 57% endred on my most-frequent attack, and could give up a proc to get even more endred on this power.

I have not been planning on slotting the Performance Shifter proc, so far. I do already have a Numina unique slotted.

I am still feeling the bite of endurance -- probably because the Rage crash knocks off 25 every 2 minutes. In long fights I can eat blues to some degree, but still, I've been struggling somewhat when spamming powers thik and fast.

I had been planning to put my last slot at 50 into 2-slotting Char, and throw in a pair of Basilisk's Gaze IOs for the 2.5% En/Neg defense bonus. But I am starting to wonder if I should grab Conserve Power and 2-slot it with recharges. I will have mediocre global recharge (30-45% I think) and no Hasten.

How helpful would that be? I've never had Conserve Power on any character so i have no sense of the relative uptime and how much it helps overall. My sense of things is that when it's running, one recovers a full end bar to spend back down while waiting for CP to recharge. In that way, it might be pretty helpful.

Alternatively I could throw that last slot into Stamina and slto 4 Perfrmance Shifters including the proc, then 1-slot CP.

Thoughts?

What about punching stuff? I'd bet that some players log in mostly to do the combat because combat is fun.

Not necessarily mindless racking up of kill numbers, but the actual animations and tactics of battle. People who line up to kick a foe off a ledge might be in this category. People who kick a gray foe off the ledge, for no reward, probably are in this category.

Whether it is carefully planned to produce optimal reward or not is relatively unimportant to the pastime; it doesn't necessarily involve exploring; story and RP may be ignored. Teaming is fine -- both to see more "action" in a given fight, and to have people around to ooh and ahhhh after a really good punch.

I don't know what you'd call this...uh...sphere of interest in the game -- combat artist?

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Wealth decay is the devil.

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Don't open any 401K statements you might get in the mail.

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Also, if an attack is two different types of damage, say smashing/energy, and you have 20% smashing defense but only 15% energy defense, it will use the lower number.

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Say what?

Doesn't that contradict what EvilGecko just said? Or are you saying typed defense works differently than positional?