macskull

No.

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but take into consideration that these are the exact type of complaints the dev's got which helped them give us what has become PvP today

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No, PvP is what it is today because someone decided skill should have less of an impact than what build you're using. It's been admitted that PvPers were too good at what they were doing (omg, someone who does something a lot gets good at it!?) so they needed to nerf skill so little Johnny could feel like he could accomplish something without having to put any time or effort into learning the game (but go figure, most of those people don't PvP any more now than they did before I13, and those that do are the loudmouthed baddos that all the decent PvPers farm).

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For a second there I thought you were insisting that PvP still required skillz. Good thing I got mad reading comprehension skillz.

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k

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Build > Skill

Always has been. Players see a build that's successful and they copy it. That's how pvp has worked since the beginning.

AE has made copying good builds easier than ever before. As a result, you see the homogeny mentioned in the OP.

I have always wanted a pvp server with an auto-level to 50 feature that would eliminate the need to PL pvp toons. On a server like that, you would likely see a vast majority of players using the same FoTM builds.

People have always wanted to use the best pvp builds, but leveling up new toons takes time, especially for the masses (i.e., those who are not in a group that was willing to level new toons endlessly). That's changed with the introduction of AE.

I think it's a good thing. Now, after the l33t player pwns the nub and broadcasts "reroll nub" the player may do just that and come back the next day/week/month with a copy of the l33t toon.

When everyone's using the same toons, you can begin to see who is actually a better player than the next guy. Unfortunately, that does hurt the l33t player's ego a bit, as he realizes that it's his powersets that set him apart from the nub more so than his leet pvp skills.

Anyway, you can blame the dev's changes to pvp for all the FoTM's you see, or you can THANK the dev's for creating AE and making leveling so much easier. I, for one, thank the dev's.

If AE had been in place (as is) three years ago, you would have seen the exact same impact on the diversity in pvp zones that you are seeing now.


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lol

Build a Fire Tanker around +HP and +recharge. With IOs and accolades you should be able to push past 2700 HP.

Really? I'd put Corruptors only behind Blasters and Dominators in terms of PvP ability.

There are a few vids up from Comic Con, one of which shows some of (all of?) the powers from Earth Assault. Mud Pots!? Really?

That's what he just said.

100% against player targets. It's broken and it's been that way since at least I13 and probably since it was introduced in I11.

Also if you're not using Will Dom solely because that proc is broken, then take the proc out and put a damage proc in instead.

Hurricane + Tornado = lolpets

No, I meant Fire/Storm Troller. Fire/Cold might be good in I16 too. If you wanted a /Storm Corruptor I'd pair it with Rad or Sonic.

42% end redux will not be enough for long fights (such as AV soloing).

^^ This is probably the kind of person that had the chance for stun proc in Speed Boost before they "fixed" it to not work on players (oh, I miss those days).

Things to do:

Find something else to do when tabbed out of the game. There are other forums out there, I'm sure.

As a general rule, custom critters are more difficult than the standard NPCs, especially after all the changes that have been made to reduce farming of said custom critters. It'd kind of suck to get less reward for more risk just because one or two variants are easier, but that's how things seem to go around here.

Fire/Storm, Mind/Storm. Earth/Energy, Mind/Fire, Mind/Elec...

Sure it's possible, much like it's possible to check your Xbox Live friends list or messages without having to use your Xbox, or how you can use many different clients to access the MSN or AIM chat protocols. Of course you'd have to reverse-engineer the code to get access to the chat server without having the game running, and while I don't doubt the tech-savviness of some of the playerbase, that is against the EULA. That being said I'm sure I'd pay a small extra fee on top of my $30/month (two accounts here) to have access to an out-of-game chat client.

The attacks and defenses in the power pools concern me. Pool attacks do obscene damage (remember when pool powers were supposed to be weaker than in-set versions of those same powers?) because of their activation times and also because the devs figure that if your attack set isn't very good, you can just take a pool power instead. Tough providing resistance to all isn't necessarily something I agree with either (I like that APP/PPP shields protect against all types of damage, but I don't think a pool power should). Sadly, rather than looking at individual sets to see where they were lacking and fixing them, they decided to make pool powers completely awesome so that they could just say "take these instead."

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but take into consideration that these are the exact type of complaints the dev's got which helped them give us what has become PvP today

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No, PvP is what it is today because someone decided skill should have less of an impact than what build you're using. It's been admitted that PvPers were too good at what they were doing (omg, someone who does something a lot gets good at it!?) so they needed to nerf skill so little Johnny could feel like he could accomplish something without having to put any time or effort into learning the game (but go figure, most of those people don't PvP any more now than they did before I13, and those that do are the loudmouthed baddos that all the decent PvPers farm).

Bruiser and Enforcers both love some endredux slotting (and the Bruiser also loves the Explosive Strike damage proc since almost all his attacks do KB/KD of some sort).

1. Why bother taking Cauterize and Forge if you're not going to slot them enough to be useful?
2. Not enough KB protection. Grab Acro and pick up lots more -KB IOs - your target should be somewhere in the upper 30s or higher.
3. Hurdle is overslotted.
4. Stamina is slotted all weird-like.
5. Slot Soul Storm for damage before you slot it for hold.
6. Phase doesn't need that much recharge.
7. Stealth is overslotted.

In general on a Therm I'd only go with Soul if I were a team build (PB'd heals and Forge, mostly). Dueling build I'd go Leviathan and take Leadership instead of Concealment, or Mu+Phase if your primary were Elec.

As I understand it, Mids was in the process of cleaning up some of the behind-the-scenes code when he stopped working on the project. Steiner has had to figure out what changes were being made (mostly to how the database stores and loads data). When he released the updated version yesterday, he said you'd have to uninstall your old version and then reinstall a new one (though I'd expect the in-software updater to work again at some point). Guess we'll know more when he gets back on this.

With DR and long recharges on attacks, plus the ability to use the tier 1 and 2 attacks while mezzed, it is an advantage to have an attack chain that you can use consistently until your heavy hitter is up again.

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Fire/Kin/Fire is cheaper and easier than Fire/Kin/Stone, but it's also squishier. Both can farm on common IOs or SOs but I'd steer away from Stone if that's your goal (IO bonuses really help Stone go the extra mile). Some people still go Fire/Kin/Psi but those have been few and far between since I14, that I've noticed at least.

When building a Fire/Kin/Fire, build for +rech, +acc, and +HP (cheaper builds can get away with taking Tactics). Accolades will help as well - you've got no defense and have to rely on your resistances and Transfusion to keep you up, so more HP means more reaction time to click powers. My Fire/Kin/Fire using only common IOs (and a -KB IO) can bring in about 80k inf/minute running the Battle Maiden map on difficulty 5 spawned for 6 (though that was before the I15 spawn changes, which added bosses to spawns like that). Best enemies (outside of MA) to farm with a Fire/Kin/Fire are Behemoths, and Battle Maiden if you bring along a few columns of Break Frees. Freakshow are a bit more tricky and throw a lot more mez, but are doable.

When building a Fire/Kin/Stone, build for +rech and +acc. Given enough recharge through set bonuses and stacked Siphon Speed, you can perma (or even stack, for a short time) Earth's Embrace which means you'll end up with capped or near-capped HP all the time. Considering the Controller base HP is 1070 and the cap is 1606, that's a lot. Grab Weave to add to your smash/lethal defenses, and try and push for that magical softcap of 45%. Tough will help with the attacks that do get through, and when combined with capped HP and the stun from Fissure, you've got a very survivable farming build. Best mob types for a Fire/Kin/Stone are Freakshow and Battle Maiden (bring along a few Break Frees just in case, though your defense will help avoid most of the mezzing). My partially-purpled Fire/Kin/Stone pulls in 90-95k inf/min on 6-spawned Invincible BM maps.

Fire/Kin/Psi is the same general idea as Fire/Kin/Fire - build for +rech, +acc, and +HP. +Rech is more important to a Psi because if you get enough IO bonuses and stacked Siphon Speeds, you can perma Indomitable Will, which means you can essentially ignore most mez effects, making farming enemies like Freakshow trivial.

If the computer in question has a G3, G4, or G5 processor, it will not run the Mac version of CoH (which is really the PC version wrapped in an OS X shell to allow it to run on under OS X, hence the need for an Intel-compatible processor). There's a chance you could use an older emulation program such as Microsoft's VirtualPC but performance would be poor and finding the software might be challenging as it's no longer developed.