Opening address and Going Rogue preview.

Upcoming guest authors for AE: Mercedes Lackey and Troy Hickman.

Preview of Going Rogue: phenomenal! New graphics settings "Ultra Mode" puts things like shadows and more realistic looking city settings.
Preview of dual pistols was amazing. Think John Woo action flick with lots of movement and tricks. Dual pistols avail for blaster primary, corruptor primary, and Def secondary.
Going Rogue will be a transitional storyline that your character goes through.
New zones in Praetoria look amazing. New start area and new tutorial too!

Totally awesome!

-Hot Mamma

Hey guys. I've been back and forth in the city, trying to decide if I want to keep up my subscription. Now I have a toon I like as much as my one and only 50, and want to keep up with him.
His name's BlackWing, he's an archery/energy manip. blaster, currently at level 26.
He's great fun to play now, but I want to give him a boost to his defence (after playing a scrapper for 2 years, everything is wussy!). A scrapping friend recommended the fighting pool for Weave and toughness, which I think it a good contender. He also recommended hover, which will be useful, since I have the flight pool already (oh, and fitness).

I just thought I'd run it by you guys. What else is there to add some armour to this guy?
Thanks in advance :)

( Screenshot behind cut! )


EDIT
Thanks everyone for your inputs. There's a lot of good information for me to have a look through and check out the specs. Thanks again!

INOYA SHAW. Fire/Energy Blaster.
Since my dear gaming partner and friend kin_thalas has already posted about our new two 50s, Kerrin and Inoya, here the promised pic of Inoya's great moment. We were not in a level pact, but we could manage it, to level up right at the same moment, as you can see on the left side.




Inoya is my 6th fifty now, the first on Justice and the very first blaster reaching this level after 287 hours. She made me love blasters.
After the visit at Ms Liberty, we had a nice little party together.



Who will be the next one?

So I am making this test character. Don't take any power pools except hover/fly until I am forced to do so. So I chose a sonic/mental blaster: siren's song means I can run in and drain psyche at the beginning of a spawn, then blast away to my heart's content. Even hitting only three dudes gives me like 5 end/sec, so this is viable even solo; dp is up every sixty seconds, meaning basically I have endless end, and to top it off, I threw in endrdx almost everywhere.

**NOTE:** I've disabled comments here...please comment over there.

Current Mood: curious

How does Ice Patch [point-blank ground-placed knockdown] affect an already-in-place Frozen Aura [PBAOE Sleep]?

For instance, I know if you drop Ice Patch (or Ice Slick) and then hit the mobs with an Immob, the slick/patch is now wasted.

Is knockdown enough to wake up sleeping foes? Or will they just start falling down as soon as they wake up?

...but it seems I fell in love with a Blaster.
You read right. Lenya-fell-in-love-with-a-blaster.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: curious

I've been looking at respecing my main for a bit now and I was wondering if anybody would be interested in taking a look at my build and make suggestions on whether I should change anything. I know I'd like to have max flight speed but at this moment I'm not sure if I've done that or not and what I need to change to get it if I haven't.

Anyhow, ( here's the mids screen: )

Thanks in advance to anybody that takes a look and has any comments.,

Current Mood: curious

I tend to think of things in terms of spectrums (spectra?), instead of trying to put things into nice neat categories. Because often times things can possibly fit into multiple categories, and sometimes things don't fit neatly into any. So I got to thinking about defenders as AoE and Single Target, and as Enemy Effects versus Ally Effects. Because, you see, one day it popped into my head that in many ways Trick Arrow is the opposite of Empathy. Whereas Empathy affects only Allies and is slightly more Single Target oriented, Trick Arrow affects only foes and is mostly AoE. So I decided to actually create the spectrum and see how it went.

Yes, I realize this is further proof that I am a total and complete City geek.

Powers like Howling Twilight affect both allies and enemies (ally heal, enemy debuff). Powers like Repulsion Field and Disruption Field target allies, but only actually affect enemies. Please click the thumbnails for larger images.

DEF: // BLA: // CON: // TANK:

Please Subscribe to this post if you would like to be updated as I do more of these.

Sorry, but I had to do it before the name was taken on ALL the servers (it was already claimed on 5 of them).

Being AR/MM makes for a real maverick, you betcha!

I thought I saw a post on this some time ago, but I can't seem to find it. What powers / IOs are out there for Blasters that seek mez protection / resistance? I've got Acrobatics (Hold, KB) and Aid Self (Stun). Others?

What's the most ridiculous AoE AT and sets? I know Spines/Fire scrappers and Spines/Dark are both good, but is there anything else? What would you say is the most AoE damage heavy combo? AoE toggles are ideal but I'm looking for anything AoE damage. Just wondering if I'm missing anything obvious. I know ice tankers get icicles, but then they can't get anything from their secondary.. Fire blasters have some AoEness... what else?

I missed the 'what ATs do you just not like/not play' thread, but I just read it. Interesting.

But I must ask all my fellow players afflicted with altitis - what do you find yourself rolling up over and over, and what have you told yourself 'okay, this time I'm gonna roll this and actually PLAY it'?

Hi, I'm A2K, and I'm a kinetics FREAK. I have more played more kinetics than anything else - it's a swiss army set of FUN. Everything I need but defense. I've been trying to get off my kin jag and let other people play it - so now I'm hooked on my TA/A...and I now have four varieties of TA running around! Sheesh!

Next!

Okay, I am not trying to call Doom here. But these kinds of statements scare me.

July 17, Castle says:

Buff/Debuff effects are additive, and are massive "force multipliers" for teams. In theory, buff/debuff sets pay for this with lower offensive/soloing capability.

In practice, do to the additive nature of things, the benefit is grossly better than the cost. We've known that for a very long time. Even if we hadn't figured it out ourselves, Repeat Offenders publicly leveraged the mechanics to do stupidly difficult things easily.

So. What are we going to do about it? Not much. There are a few points that I want to iron out (exploitive stacking of Vengeance *is* going away once we get things settled) but the general case of additive Buffs/Debuffs is going to remain as is. Why? Because changing that would alter the core teaming dynamics of the entire game. It would be a change far greater in magnitude than either ED or the GDN -- probably more far reaching than both combined. Simply put: Despite it being a weakness of our system, it is not a weakness we can address without changing the very nature of our gameplay.

All of this isn't to say that all content everywhere will obey the same rules. There may be times, places or specific encounters where we change those rules. To date, those are few and far between, but I do expect there to be more of that sort of thing in future encounters.

I'd argue that the defensive capabilities of the other ATs are FAR TOO HIGH. When I was reworking Defiance for Blasters, I tried to slip in a major decrease to their defensive caps. I don't recall the exact numbers now, but it was something like 33% max defense and 50% max resistance. Obviously, that was shut down since the values remain unchanged.

Why should AT's be confined to one side or the other?

Discuss.

So here's the deal. I have characters for team play, with my SG. I also have a solo character, for those times when nobody's on or I just feel like playing for 20 minutes. For some time now, that solo character has been my DM/Regen scrapper. But he's at 49.5 and when I'm done playing him, I'll be semi-retiring him, as badge hunting doesn't hold much thrill for me.

Therefore, I need a new solo character. This is for pure soloing, not PUGs. I don't join PUGs except for TFs or on double XP weekends. This is why the /regen scrapper worked out so well for me. I could just wade in and he could handle himself pretty well in battles - not always, but often enough to be fun. :)

What I currently play heroside are the DM/Regen scrapper and a fire/elec blaster (I also played a storm defender for some time). Villainside, I play my fire/thermal corruptor almost exclusively, but I have a thug/dark MM I bring out once in a while. I haven't created new alts in ages because I wanted to concentrate on my mains. The blaster, defender and corruptor are all "team players" for my SGs.

I don't mind creating another /regen scrapper if that's the best pure solo option, but I'd also like to try something different. What recommendations are there on either red or blue side for a pure solo AT?

ETA: Wow, so many suggestions! Thanks to everyone, I'll try to respond individually as time allows, you've all given me lots of great ideas. Thank you!

I was talking to a RL friend that plays the game and we were discussing ATs that we didn't like. His was Kheldians and mine was Defenders -- he was surprised by that because he knows my game play history. When I first started playing CoH, I used to play defenders mostly. With all of the changes that have come down since the early days of the game, I now shy away from them, it's almost as if they don't exist for me now. I haven't played a defender in years. I tend to solo more these days and defenders are not solo friendly at all now -- IMO. On some level, I really don't see the point to playing them. If I want to a be a team support I just play a controller. Are there ATs that you guys don't play and why?

So, I was looking at my characters and their relative levels and got curious. I have a hard time playing any AT with a buff/debuff powerset (and stalkers), and I'm curious if other people have patterns of ATs as well (don't play meleers, etc.).

So, I'd like get some info about the highest level you've reached with each AT (excluding EATs). I'm going to graph it and see if anything interesting pops up.

Check my comment for the format I'd like to see used (for ease of data entry). If you have no characters of that AT, enter "0".

Current Mood: curious

I have a question about the Numina's +recovery + regen.

What happens if you slot it in an "always on" power, such as Fast Healing?

I'm assuming that if you slot it in a click power or toggle (reconstruction or integration,) that it only "goes off" when you click or turn on the toggle.

I got it as a drop from an ITF along with another Numina's drop. I think it would be absolutely SICK to slot them on my /regen scrapper. I collect orange salvage drops, so I already had the salvage lying around. If it doesn't work, I can always respec and sell them.

Hi Everyone,

I just recently was introduced to City of Heroes 2 months ago, and I'm addicted.  I play it all the time, throughout the night sometimes.  I have one character so far (on CoH), I haven't had the urge to make any new ones yet.  I have a level 31 blaster...who never seems to kill anything.  His attacks keep missing things, and it seems that I have to be on a team in order to deal any damage.   Since I'm still pretty new to the game and don't totally understand everything yet, would it be ok if I fill his enhancements up with ones that are for a higher level?  Right now they are really outdated, I'm not sure why I didn't do something about that earlier.

I'm really excited for double experience weekend.  I am still learning as I go and would like to make some friends as well, it's a really great game!!  I have seen lots of characters that look like superheroes...like an Iron Man clone, a Spidergirl clone, etc. 

Thanks for reading ! 

Current Mood: mellow

here

Might not want to cite Blaze and Bitter Ice Blast as evidence to support your request for buffing Shout's animation time.