madsness

Luckily when I started playing the game I had a friend who had made up a spreadsheet with all the enhancements by name, origin and type, which I used to carefully plan my purchases until I finally got the hang of the colour code and which name was used for the alphabetic ordering. It doesn't need to be that hard
/signed

I agree with this my ice/ice is level 33 and a joy to play solo or in a team even just with SOs.

As an Aussie (so on US servers) currently on holiday in Europe, I'd really like to be able to log in to the European servers. And at home to have the option of playing EU servers when the US ones are quiet, so I vote 'yes' to a merge of the server list

Certainly psi/MM is a very survivable solo blaster out of the box, MM gives good control - and the damage is respectable. Controllers and doms take a bit longer to get going, defender damge is still very meh, so if you are not sure how long you'll be playing the character, I'd go blaster.

If you don't want to be a buffbot I'd suggest dark as the secondary it has a great heal (with an accurracy slotted) but the other powers are debuffs etc ( and dark servant will do the healing for you!)

yes - it's annoying - the rocks used to be so much better.
But they have fixed the npcs in the Vault, who are once again sitting on the chairs not standing in them, so there's always hope.

I've teamed with a 70 yr old who was taking a break from WoW

Have to agree, earth/storm is great fun and being able to lock critters in stone (or crystal) means your storm powers are much more team friendly.
And then you can take the fire app and be a full elemental earth, wind and fire!

I like it - something useful gained from a badge and a soak for all those multitudinous tailor tokens I have

Also...um...didn't name any characters after Buffy the Vampire Slayer...a show I never watched past the first season.

So they are coincidently called Buffy, Sara, Michelle, Eliza, Dawn... Oh and Buffy says 'I'm going back to cheerleading' when rescued

A better team search would be great. It would be nice to be able to see if a team was looking for members for example.

More low end content for villains, especially the 'special' missions for VEATs. And more variety in missions - even something as simple as heroside ambushes in radio rescue missions

There's another way to exit the sewers?

once you enable the option then play with /suppressclosefxdist values till you find what suits you. I find 30 is fine for me, but you may want to set it higher. I just tried setting it to 100 and that allowed me to zoom right out without seeing the auras

I'd agree with the suggestion to suppress close effects, I use it all the time on my fire/fire scrapper and don't notice the aura at all. Blazing aura is a big help in finishing off minions and just adding to your kill speed once you get the endurance issues under control.

If you want to go in with guns blazing then try thugs rather than bots. Not quite as easy a ride - no healer bot and both the arsonist and bruiser have suicidal tendencies, but fun and you do get dual wield pistols and your own gang. Dark, traps and storm are all good secondaries with the set, depending on your play style. Dark is probably the best newbie choice

Hover is probably better than fly for actual combat, using less endurance and adding some defense. Air Superiority is a good power for melee as it knocks back your opponents, but flying blaster tend to avoid melee.

As others have said, CoV gets closer to this balance. And I do find that it does mean people are less willing to team and when they do, often don't try to work as a team. I love Villains when a team works together in creative ways to steamroll missions, rather than just the tank, hold, blast, rinse and repeat pattern more prevalent in Heroes, but other teams can be sheer hell as members just do their own thing despite it resulting in the deaths of team mates.

One solution could be to make the teaming bonus greater for smaller teams. On a team of 8 I find that i tend to use my 'specialist' skills almost exclusively - my blasters for example rarely do more than cycle through their attack chain, with smaller teams I need to use their full range of mitigation skills as well just to keep me and others alive. For me small teams are much more fun because of this, but the xp rewards aren't as good, so most leaders are intent on getting and keeping a full team (with the resultant standing around outside missions waiting while they recruit) and people will leave a team if it drops below 8.

On rare occasions the patch downtime warning appears on the updater screen, which I find a much better way of letting me know it's coming than having to check the forum announcement pages.

And I agree with Min-Min that a consistent approach to specifying time would be really great. I have enough trouble remembering when my time-zone goes to daylight saving, far less the US ones.

Being in Australia and so usually playing 'off-peak' I only managed to do the banner event on a couple of my characters, as after the first weekend there were not enough interested people online to form even a single team of 8 (and that was blueside) so if this needs 3 teams it's just going to be a non-event as far as I'm concerned.

But I do really enjoy these zone-wide events when I can get on a team, so it would be good if it could be fixed to allow a single team of 8 a reasonable chance. I know it's a difficult balancing act, it was annoying that one of the few times I was on a team for the banner event the GM was defeated before any of my team got to his location.

De-toggling also sounds a really annoying feature, it's bad enough that the de-toggling on entry/exit to missions seems to be happening again on a regular basis.

Thanks Ocho, but like a number of the rest of us, I was already aware of the problems with managing apps on servers and are quite aware that patching and fixing has to happen and developers aren't godlike beings that always get things right first time. So the issue is not that it has to happen, but that it has to happen in my prime gaming time every time. Regular maintenance yes, we Aussies can plan other things for Thursday nights (though the TV schedule is lousy:-))but patches and fixes surely could sometimes be done at another time.