brophog02

It's decent for what it does.

What it is, however, is replaceable by Trip mine, thereby making it functionally irrelevant.

The same could be said for most stealth powers. Heck, several of the Devices set alone is now functionally replaced with IOs.

Intangible powers are functionally irrelevant in 99.9% of teams.

Same goes for Sleeps.

For some Defenders, their tier 9 nukes are "useless" in that they come with an end crash.

The fact that Time Bomb is tier 9 in some ATs doesn't matter. It functionally makes something like a Traps set an 8 power set, and that's no different than a lot of sets. That kind of set does limit variability a tad, but most find that something "skippable" is handy in order to get all of those pool powers.

Of all of the things that could possiby need endurance lowering, I think sprint is at the very bottom. Toggles aren't what ultimately drains you, anyhow, it's your clicks (which is why Brawl made a much bigger end drain at the low levels than sprint). If I have a Broadsword Scrapper, for example, I need Sprint to be toggled on for almost a full 30 seconds to equal what a 1st level Hack is using in endurance for a single click.

What needs to happen is for you to take advantage of the accuracy boosts at the low levels, and slot endurance into you clicks, instead. That negates that paltry .29 at that time, and that's really the only time this is even an issue. Of course, when you're needing click powers that are draining the end, you can always just turn sprint off. It's designed as extra speed, not the default speed.

Outside of the ultra-low levels, the amount of endredux you get by even frankslotting makes this argument moot.

Rather than try to fit CoH into traditional roles, it is better to look at the sets and see how individual characters are put together to re-define roles, entirely.

Tank: Defense - Melee
Scrapper: Melee - Defense
Defender: Buff/Debuff/Heal - Blast
Controller: Control - Buff/Debuff/Heal
Blaster: Damage/Control - Damage/Control

Then the Warshades and Peacebringers which can do quite a bit of everything with both secondary and primary.

Lots and lots of overlap and you build towards that overlap. Anything "pure" is going to have a major weakness of some kind in this game, because as you can see above, basically every AT has several possible functions within a team. Unlike a great many other games, there isn't much of an advantage to loading up into a "pure" role, but instead an opportunity to make varied characters that are both self reliant and beneficial to a team.

It does make it an awkward transition from a game with a more narrow focus (I truthfully think the biggest hurdle to innovation in the industry is players staying to familiar old ways and always trying to move any new system into something more familiar). However, it also gives this game an enormous amount of flexibility and replayability. Your team compositions can be just about anything. You may like a certain archetype, and because of the varied nature of the game you could build highly contrasting characters within that archetype. A lot of people love their controllers, and while there is a lot of similarity in function, anybody on this board would tell you that their Illusion/Emp plays different than their Illusion/Storm, and their Earth/Emp and Earth/Storm play little like their Illusion counterparts. While it could possibly be said that the "role" of the controller is to mitigate damage, they can go about doing that in extremely different ways and are an AT capable of some truly amazing things.

If dying all of the time annoys you, then you just multiplied that problem by at least 3.

The Genin make the Arsonist look tough. Only the Jounin really have anything that amounts to defense, with the Oni living pretty good due to his hit points and level. The Genin are basically cannon fodder, which is why I prefer Ninjas with a set that can rapidly debuff tohit or otherwise really increase their meager defense. (Do note, I really like the Ninjas, but their frail nature can't be underspoken. You have to be very active with Ninjas or very willing to replacing the Genin.)

That said, the thermal shields can help, and you have some heals at your disposal. Thermal is a great MM set, but it is still mostly reactive and the Genin go from alive to dead in a blink of the eye.

I would recommend Air Superiority early on, even if you have to respec it later. Early on, you may find yourself very frustrated with the Ninjas because Thermal's resistances are meager early, and you'll find yourself healing a ton. Air Superiority will help by giving you some active mitigation (whch is really what the Ninjas are based on, at least in theory).

Thermal's best debuffs come clear at the end of the set. This will be a combination that will be very rewarding late, but frustrating early. You'll want Heat Exhaustion with a lot of recharge, because that's your key damage debuff, and the Ninjas need all of the protecting you can give them. Your best defense is gonna be a good offense, and Smoke Flash and Forge will come in handy in killing mobs quickly. Once you get those two, I recommend your difficulty settings being set to higher conning enemies, but not very many of them. You'll get overrun trying to heal up the damage that gets through, but you'll be a very quick killer of even high conning enemies (that's true of Ninjas in general, as they are a far better ST set than an AOE set, but even moreso with reactive based sets such as Thermal and Pain. The Ninjas are pretty good at debilitating an enemy or two with all of their knock effects, stuns, holds, and slows......but they dont have much for group mitigation).

I don't have an Energy/Energy/Elec, and I don't consider myself a pure blapper of sorts, but I do have a 50 Eng/Elec/Elec and I do utilize my melee attacks a lot (so much so that on a team, I'm either using AOEs or melee and not a lot of single target ranged attacks).

For me, I could care less about melee defense. Everything I melee is either getting up, or hit with one or both of my two holds. If I'm stealthing a mission and see a boss I want to take out quickly, I'll hit buildup+aim, hit him with Shocking Grasp, my ranged hold, and finish him with the other melee attacks.

To me, at least, one of the beauties of heavy melee with an Energy Blaster is that you create your own safety through knockback. I may just as well have hit power push, and then jumped in for the melee, or have blasted from range, saw him knockdown via one of the ranged blast powers, and then jumped in. If I wanted to go the defense route with that toon of yours, I'd still do it via ranged defense because the times I really needed defense would be when I had to stay ranged. My mitigation is through knockback, sleeps, and holds. I rely heavily on power push and the holds for targets I don't want to mess around with.

If you're only blapping, and I mean to the exclusion of anything else, then maybe melee is the way to go, with enough recharge to keep that chain flowing smoothly. Look for Oblits in your nuke, Touch of death/Kinetic Combat in your melee attacks, Extreme measures in the snipe, Gauzzians in Aim/Buildup, and Razzle Dazzle in stun.

I don't know what servers people are on who can't kill these banners, but I have still not seen a trace of this.

Even on the villainside, where populations are smaller and a little more coordination needed, I've still not seen anything remotely resembling the "need" for any such thing.

Tanks aren't tanks in this game until late 20s, early 30s at the earliest.

The game really screws the AT over in the early levels by not providing the tools necessary to fill its usual function. You can't judge tanks until about 32, imo. It isn't that it is completely ineffective until then, but the idea behind the AT as an indestructible object just doesn't cut it until about then. Even after then, and well slotted, most tanks have some form of weakness or situation where they are not optimum.

The 20s get better after SOs and stamina, but you still have to be a bit careful. The pre-stamina days are no time to judge a tank, whatsoever.

I pity tankers in the low levels when a team won't start without one thinking they're getting a tank. It's one of the things I'd definitely change in this game, because most ATs do not suffer the kind of penalties early on that tanks do.

I'm not quite as burnt out this year as last year, but that's probably because I spend more time on 50s these days and far less time leveling up (most of my lowbies are SG toons for regular nights).

Last year I was tired of it at this point, though. No one wants to do TFs. No one wants to do missions. Its all Trick or Treating, with an occassional stop to do some banners. (I have run an occassional TF so far this event session, but they've all been a pain to get enough people to get started.)

Taking down GMs never gets old, for some reason, so I kinda stick to doing that.

That depends on who you ask.

Some people, literally, think every Blaster is a fire Blaster (the team is providing mitigation so your 'job' is to just do damage), much in the same way every Defender is naturally an empath, and every Tank should be made of granite. Those roles are so stuck in their head that nothing else is worth playing nor adding to a team.

The truth is, everyone has AOE. I've done invincible ITF's with an Energy/Elec/Elec where I'm the only Blaster/Corrupter on the team and we're doing great. I don't need to be a fire Blaster to 'pull my weight', because I am but a sum of the team's AOE (that Blaster, with 3 AOEs, gets played just the same as I would a fire blaster on teams, just with more care taken in terms of positioning and timing). I may be the biggest chunk of AOE damage on a team like that, in most cases, but everyone else is contributing as well (unless you have people that want to play with incomplete toons with pigeonholed roles, but I rarely play with those kinds, anyhow).

That's a big reason why I try to make a point every time someone skips a power like Explosive Blast (or the equivalent).

"Well, I'm not an AOE blaster" is the common response.

But you are part of the AOE component of your team!

Most blasters have a cone + targeted AOE as part of their primary, and therefore the possibility of adding a rather substantial amount of AOE damage to a team. The ones that don't still tend to bring some AOE to the table and make up for it by providing other valuable tools (such as the holds in ice).

I may not have answered your question, but that's because (outside of intentionally built concept toons) I don't think there really is such a thing as an AOE or ST blaster. Some sets tend to have a little more of one or the other, but all sets provide some of both, and therefore those components are added to the team's overall damage output if the player decides to use them.

The problem is never empathy in those conversations. In fact, it has nothing to do with the powers of empathy whatsoever.

It's the secondary that people are really talking about in that conversation, and to a lesser extent the power pools.

For the purpose of those discussions, and I saw at least bits and pieces of what you are referring to, ignore the fact empathy is mentioned. It could be any powerset, really.

Empathy simply draws a certain player and a certain mindset from players to do things in an extreme manner and therefore we erroneously tend to call that type of player an empath (much in the same way that player and his compatriots will erroneously call themselves 'healers'). They weren't saying that empathy sucks in that conversation, or even that the players that are playing empathy are sucking but that players taking those sets tend to build characters and play characters in such a manner that they become less useful.

Not everyone, of course, but enough that those conversations become common both in game and on the forum.

It really isnt that complicated, and a lot of what is posted is just making things more complicated than they need to be.

The problems people have are pretty simple:

1)Not knowing the Deadly Apocalypse even exists.
2)Not knowing what the banners are or how to find them on their map.
3)Not realizing that all 4 banners need to be cleared simultaneously to bring vulnerability.
4)In rare cases, not realizing they need to attack the banner when the notification comes up.
5)Not realizing/using the nav to find the GM.

In other words, mostly it is interface and introduction issues (and covered well in the OP of this thread). The GMOTD didn't exactly work in relaying the basics, partly by its own fault and partly by users not really utilizing and reading the message. For most users, once they find a single banner and see the UI change, they figure it out relatively quickly. From what I've seen in the chat and on the board, that single hurdle seems to be the biggest one for most people.

Once that basic introduction happens, it's a very simple mechanic and doesnt require the kind of complexity and strategy that people are trying to apply to it. Where it works well, past that introduction, is that it takes very little complex teamwork or specifivity to function and that makes it pick up and play for all........once they understand the raw basics.