Sardan

There are many times I disagree with Perfect_Pain, but in this case I agree with her and think you're overreacting and mischaracterizing what she's saying. First of all, she doesn't want something for nothing, as your silly examples in the first paragraph imply. She farms, and wants to be able to PL, but she works for her rewards and/or XP--she doesn't expect anyone to hand it to her with no risk.

The extreme cases you cite of people PLing all the way to 50 are rare. I've seen it done in the past mostly by hardcore PVPers, and those people were expert players usually utterly bored by PVE. They wanted to get their characters quickly kitted out so they could fight other players.

The most common PLing I see (and participate in!) is to get quickly past the low levels, either to get a travel power, or to get Stamina and be able to slot SOs. The devs even tacitly admitted that after the first time or two those aren't the most fun levels, by their decision to ramp up 1-20 leveling speed.

The devs rightly come down on players like a ton of bricks when players use exploits like the Rikti Comm Officers or the Hami Mitos. But notice that they haven't banned maps of all bosses. That's because if you can clear an all boss map, you deserve the XP that comes with it. If you can clear that map and take some lowbies along for the ride, no harm no foul.

EDIT: by the way, lest you think I'm just some ebil PLer, the main use I'm going to put the new Super Sidekicking mechanism to is to team with my 2 kids. It's always been hard to put together teams because I need to get another mentor who will be cool with a sidekick that may abruptly announce that they're bored and want to stop playing. With this new system I can finally SK both of them at once. This is one of the best innovations EVER in COH.

One last bit of advice: it takes a while for any tanker's defenses to mature. If you try handling the full aggro for a team of 8 when you're level 10, you're going to get killed pretty fast. But by the time you're in your mid- to late-20s, you'll be able to especially if you have a bit of support.

Oh and since you have experience in other MMOs, don't make the mistake of thinking support has to be in the form of healers. CoH has defenders that have heal powers, but there are many defender and controller powersets that have no heals that will do wonders for team survivability.

If it's any comfort, I don't think this method is intuitively obvious at all. It's something that is commonplace only because of the absurd accolade requirements.

Plus, even if a person knows a programming language and has been through the full product lifecycle on a large team numerous times, the fact is that doesn't equip them with any knowledge at all of the code situation of CoH. The fact is they have tons of legacy code and they're stretching it to do new things. That is tough, and can result in bizarre bugs.

Willpower is a great first armor set. It's strong out of the box without needing a ton of investment and has toggles rather than click-type powers so you can just turn it on and not have to worry about micro-managing it.

I'd avoid Stone for your first tank or brute. It is without doubt off the charts in terms of survivability once you get Granite, but it comes with significant movement, recharge, and damage penalties. Plus virtually all Stone tankers end up taking Teleport as their travel power, which is the trickiest of the travel powers to use.

All quite true. Except you didn't mention how one goes about memorizing a recipe. The way you do it is by getting memorization badges.

Er, no. Anything not on the schedule is still on the wishlist. I'm sure they've kicked around designs for many things that will never, ever be implemented. I'm all in favor of cross-server teaming and cross-server PvP, just saying we need to be realistic.

If they don't make changes to get more people involved in PvP, it's hard to see how cross-server PvP could have a good ROI. Unless they conclude that cross-server PVP itself would make it hit critical mass and draw more players, perhaps.

Feel free to ask those questions in this forum, Sydney. As you can see, the forumites here are a super friendly bunch. The only times I've seen folks get beat up in this forum is when they are whiney or rude. If you ask your question in a reasonably articulate fashion, no matter how basic you think the question is you'll get a ton of helpful replies.

I strongly second this. It's easy to accidentally skip Faultline, but it's a very well designed zone. Contacts from the early days of the game tend to send you all over the place, whereas when they redesigned Faultline they did some smart things, chief among them being that the contacts there keep all their missions in Faultline.

There's only one tricky bit in Faultline. The zone is split by the dam in the north. There is a door you can enter which will lead you through the dam to the other side. There is also a tunnel complex towards the east edge of the dam that was built by Arachnos agents. If you do the mission arcs in Faultline, at one point you'll get a mission door that is in that tunnel complex. The first time I got that it was confusing because I followed the mission waypoint marker and it seemed to just be pointing to a bare dirt area. What it was really pointing at was *underneath* where I was standing, and the trick was to go West a bit to find the dug out tunnel entrance.

Once you're in the tunnels the first time, I recommend having a Luck or two on you (the purple shield inspirations that add defense). The tunnels have lots of Arachnos soldiers that don't take too kindly to the intrusion so popping a Luck can avoid a lot of the pot shots they'll take at you as you go running by and figure out the tunnel layouts.

It's a really fun zone with some good stories. You'll get to know Penelope Yin (whose grateful dad will open a pretty nice store to you), and the heroes Faultline and Fusionette, who all show up again much later in the game in the Rikti War Zone.

Agreed. I'd be in favor of them bumping the drop rate now, but in the future if they enhance PVP such that more players participate they can always drop the rate back down again if they feel the recipes are becoming too abundant.

Regardless of the outcome of your Rewards Team (aka Synapse ) analysis, this is why you guys rock: thanks for the feedback, Castle. I love that you take the time to post an "I hear you" reply, rather than staying silent and having us wonder if you know or care about the issue.

I think that's the core of the OP's complaint. I can see where he's coming from and tend to agree. My Widow is a fantastically effective character, but is pretty much a Claws/SR with some terrific team buffs.

Occasionally the devs introduce a truly new set in terms of graphics and animations (Dual Blades and Shield Defense come to mind), and it's been a ton of work for BaBs every time. Even then, he was limited to the way the power system worked and the lack of programming resources. He has mentioned he wanted Sheild Charge to really be a literal charge but in the end they had to settle for the TP attack because that's what they could get to work.

I bet the new Earth Assault set that Sunstorm put together typifies the approach they've used to cobble together a set quickly. It'll recycle existing animations and all the work was basically in the spreadsheet controlling damage/end/recharge.

All that said, I'm very hopeful that we're going to see more true animation innovation over the next couple of years. They've added programmers and I think BaBs has help in the animation department now.

They should indeed be rare. But "rare" is a very flexible term. I think most players would say that a recipe that goes for roughly 1 billion inf is too rare. I wouldn't mind seeing the drop rates increased for PvP recipes. This isn't the same as the "how can a casual player purple out his warshade?" scenario.

It doesn't matter what player A thinks of player B. What matters is the devs' opinion of the practice. We've seen they're not opposed to fast XP gain if it's not done via an exploit. That's why they banned players that zoomed to 50 via the Rikti Comm officer farms, but it's also (apparently) why they've done nothing about all-boss farm maps: if you're facing the risk of fighting a ton of bosses, you're fairly earning the rewards those those bosses are designed to give.

I'm not part of the beta so I don't know how this all works in detail, but I'd be surprised if they will allow the kind of adjustable sidekicking you're proposing. That falls into the "something for nothing" camp that the devs seem to be against. What they're more likely to offer is adding options for harder enemies (a combo of higher level and greater numbers) than was possible in the past. That way everyone earns XP commensurate with facing a harder challenge.

People pay for convenience. If you compare the cost of buying a recipe + required salvage + crafting costs, that almost always adds up to less than what the equivalent IO sells for.


Here's a guide to memorizing recipes. When you get a memorization badge for a class of recipes, you've memorized those recipes. You don't ever have to buy the recipe again, and your crafting cost is dramatically reduced.

Smuggled video of the new Rocket Punch blast set!