I rolled an Illu/FF troller recently and since I realized it's a VERY tight build I want to use the opportunity and go either with a teambuild and also with a solobuild.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: curious

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!

I'm thinking of rolling up a Fire/Ice/Tank specifically to take advantage of the Burn/Ice Patch/Quicksand combo. Because the idea amuses me. I would like to take Combat Jumping, Super Jump, Acrobatics, Salt Crystals, Quicksand and Stalagmites. It also looks like I want to take every power in both the primary and secondary. This leaves no room for Fitness at all.

1. Does a Fire/Ice/Earth tank need Stamina?
2. The only power I can convince myself to eliminate from the Primary or Secondary is Build Up, and even then I am hesitant. What powers from Fire/ and /Ice do you consider skippable?
3. Does a Fire/Ice/Earth tank need Acrobatics? (Dropping it would help with the end issue, and would also make more room for Stamina, but I really like that KB protection...)

Luckily it looks like I have enough SLOTS, just not enough power choices. Any help is much appreciated, thanks! :]

I'd just like to say a very big ThankYou! to everyone who has been commenting on the builds thread I posted earlier.

Some of the ideas there are great, and I look forward to trying them out as time goes on.

I'm not sure I'm going to suffer the alt-itis that some of you crazy folks suffer with (grin) but I did roll up an AR/Dev Blaster and a Mace/Shield Brute last night. :)

Again, thank you to everyone who has posted!

Well, now that I have hit 50, I need to start thinking about my next toon...

So, I thought I'd ask my fellow CoH LJers..

What is your favorite build to play, and why?

Thanks in advance!

Current Mood: curious

Just out of curiosity more than anything, but when you roll a new character what do you do.

1. Pre-determine a build and base all the concepts around that Hero/Villain right from the start, but you don't care what that character does to level?
2. Pre-determine what your build will do and run story arcs/power selections based on that theory?
3. Determine a base set of stats and 'evolve' your story around what the character can do?
4. Come up with a concept and test it to a set number of levels and then see if you feel like continuing?

Inspired by peronal LJ post today

Current Mood: curious

With hitting lvl 50 last night my friend celiaelani mentioned to roll another fire blaster on a different server. Suffering worst altitis evar I already think about a partner for her new toon.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

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

Can someone explain to me what's so über about Fire/Kins? I've got a lvl 41 and she loves making out with the floor. She's the only Controller that I haven't been able to shift to Invincible once my pets were slotted.

This is the best I can do without purple recipe's at trying to overcome Granite's negative effects. With this build you overcome all damage reduction and recharge, putting you at base levels. If anyone can do better, I wanna see it!

( Read more... )

Anyone suggest a build for a Kin/Rad defender... I am thinking I want to go with SJ (and gain SS from my own powers). I wanted to go with Rad because of the debuff, and it looks awesome...

any hints, and/or advice is welcome.

~Elvnsword

Current Mood: calm

I'm building a Grav/Kin and could use some input on power selection.

( Powers I'm planning to take )

Thematically, he's a Master Magician and I'm trying to cast him as a Dr Strange/Fate type of player. Obviously he's mostly support but I do want him to do some damage where possible.

Any real obvious mistakes/gaps here? I can't find a good guide for Grav/Kin so I'll take links if anyone knows of any.

I'll also note my cockeyed optimism that I take this guy to 50. Probably be about 2 years!

Thanks, as always, for your feedback.

( Stone/stone tanks )

Current Mood: amused

...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 have seen so many people complain about having to skip over a bunch of powers in order to have Stamina and a travel power by level 20-22. I felt it was time to throw things at people. How could you guys have missed it?! I thought of this tactic immediately when announced...before we could even play with it!

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Multiple_Builds

This feature was added in Issue 13. This allows your character to have more than one build (currently it is limited to two, or "Dual Builds", but could be expanded in the future, though no dev comment says yea or nay).

Let's pretend we have a Fire/Fire Blaster. We'll build this character up to level 20 the "normal" way.

NORMAL: Fire Blast (Level 1), Ring of Fire (L1), Fire Sword (L2), Combustion (L4), SWIFT (L6), COMBAT JUMPING (L8), Fire Sword Circle (L10), Fire Ball (L12), SUPER JUMP (L14), HEALTH (L16), Blaze (L18), STAMINA (L20).

This means that a whole THREE POWERS are taken up by utility powers that don't really do very much for you, they're just lead-ups to TWO MORE powers that aren't available until 1/5 the way into your character's career! (Yes, level 20 is generally considered about 1/5 the way through progression...progression is heavily weighted toward the higher end levels...the halfway mark for XP is somewhere around level 40!!)

Well....Issue 13 introduced Dual Builds! This means, since players have access to a fly and jump pack from Safeguards/Mayhems, and villains have access to the repurchasable fly pack in Grandville, you can skip your travel power for a little while. And since all Swift/Hurdle/Health do is lead up to Stamina, and that doesn't come until level 20, they're kinda just taking up space, right?

Let's build a character from 1-20 with the intention of switching over to the second build at level 22! We have up to FIVE! extra powers to play with!

DUAL BUILDS: Fire Blast (Level 1), Ring of Fire (L1), Fire Sword (L2), Fire Ball (L4), Combustion (L6), Rain of Fire (L8), Fire Sword Circle (L10), Aim (L12), Fire Breath (L14), Build Up (L16), Blaze (L18), Blazing Aura (L20)

How much more fun would that list of powers be than the previous one? More things to do, faster killing speed, and you don't really lose a WHOLE lot. Heck, you can even substitute Swift in for one of the powers if you like the movement speed bonus, or play with random power pools...because it doesn't matter, at level 20 or 22, you're just going to switch over to your second build anyway, so who cares about taking weird options you wouldn't ever have at level 50?

REMEMBER YOUR "POTIONS"!
Three inspirations of the same flavor and level can be combined to create one of another flavor of the same level. Three small reds (or whatever) combine into a small blue, and small blues recover 25% of a character's endurance in one click! Medium blues recover 33%, and big blues recover 50%!

UTILIZE ALL YOUR OPTIONS!
Slot endurance reduction enhancements in your powers, especially low level when you're doing piddly damage, and therefore damage enhancements don't increase damage output by much. Invention Origin Enhancement Sets include set bonuses to boost recovery and boost maximum endurance. Remember, more endurance means the same percentage of recovery rate recovers more at a time! There are special IOs that boost recovery or have a chance to grant endurance to the target of the power. There are accolades that boost maximum endurance. There are Day Jobs that boost recovery and maximum endurance. There is an Empowerment that boosts recovery.

SWITCH WHEN YOU WANT TO!
Feel free to push back the switch by as many levels as you like! One of my characters STILL hasn't picked up Stamina, and she's level 44 (plant/rad controller)! She may or may not spec into Stamina sometime down the road, but right now, she has no true need of it.

MULTIPLE BUILDS...learn it, live it, love it!

(xposted to villains)





This guide exists on the Paragon Wiki, and that version contains pertinent links to important information contained in this guide. Further updates of this guide will only be made at Paragon Wiki.

Current Mood: curious

I rolled a dark/elec defender and actually she's pretty nice. She's great solo and in teams but somethings weird about her.
Her gamepartner is an elec/energy blaster and I think that's the snag. I also got a kin/elec and I'm not sure if I want two /elec defenders.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: pensive

With last night's hitting of 50 on my Ill/Rad, I need a new project. I've decided on taking up my Claws/DA Scrapper again, but he's historically posed some challenges, and not necessarily because of the one non-standard build item I've given him. Anyway, I thought I'd turn to you all for build and/or powerset advice as this guy kinda needs it.

( Current Build below cut )

I finally decided to revamp the way I display my City toons' builds on their pages.

Here's an example of how I do it now. In the "Build" section there is a thumbnail of a screenshot of the character's build, for both IO and Sets, and then below that I explain what set pieces I'm actually using. There are several problems with this method:
1. The thumbnail files are hosted on LJ, and LJ sometimes says images are broken when they're not. I also don't really want to host anything on LJ anymore, so I have to move everything that's left on LJ over to my domain.
2. It's ugly and hard to read. When I'm looking up whether or not I need to keep the recipe that just dropped, it's hard to find in the list because of all the abbreviation... but if I don't use the abbreviation the list would be even harder to read.
3. If I want to tweak the build, I have to take a new screenshot, upload it to LJ, and then redo the HTML for the toon's page.

So I came up with a new method. Like the whole City Toons site itself, it's a LOT OF WORK on the front end, but it will save a lot of time and work in the future. So eventually each of my toons will have a build section that looks like this. I spent quite a bit of time coding this and creating the little "detail dots", such as acc/dam and end/rech and so on. I will continue creating more of them as I need them, and it will take a long time to get this done for every toon that has a build (thank goodness it's only a fraction of my total toons!), but when I'm done it will be very easy to read and I think it looks cool.

I really didn't want to bug yall with these questions but I trust advice here more than I trust it from the official forums, so...

Rad/Sonic Defender - She is my "Solo-fender", a counterpart to the Emp that I rolled up to be team reliant. Radiant Siren is on Triumph, and will get to 50 (someday) without ever having been on a team. Thus, I am skipping Mutation and Fallout. I know these are great debuff powers, but since she won't be teaming, they'd be less than useless.

My main questions are about slotting, I know roughly what powers I want to take, but how to slot them? If it matters, I want to take hasten and I am pretty sure I can fit it into the build with three recharges.

RADIATION EMISSION
oAccelerate Metabolism - Obviously three recharge IOs (the third brings the recharge down from 234 seconds to 212, so I do think it's worth it), but what else? Do you slot it for endmod as well?
oRadiation Infection - I'd go for two endredux, two defdebuff, two tohitdebuff. But that's just me, and I'd bet money that no one else would do it that way! So please, tell me how you slot this power.
oChoking Cloud - two endredux, two hold, two damage procs?
oLingering Radiation - Accuracy, two recharge, one endredux? Should there be a slow in there?
oEM Pulse - I'm tempted to skip this if only because it's one of those powers that completely drains your end, but I know it's a good idea to keep your "oh shit" powers handy. Thing is, how do you slot it? Should I slot it for recharge? My hope is that I wouldn't need to use it often enough to need recharge, but maybe I'm missing the point and this power will be oft-used?

SONIC BLAST
oSiren's Song - Should I even take an AoE sleep, as I will be using a lot of AoE/cone powers? If so, how should I slot it? I could six-slot it (ACC ACC SLEEP SLEEP RANGE RANGE) but that feels like such a waste.
oDreadful Wail - Again, I could six slot this, but it's another total end-drain, so I'm not sure what direction to go. Usually this doesn't bother me on other toons, but they'll usually be on a team where someone can help with recovery. Siren won't have that luxury.

DARK MASTERY
oOppressive Gloom - Two accuracy and two stun? I dunno, I've never actually taken the dark epic pool.
oDark Consumption - I want to put ten slots into this power. Help!
oSoul Drain - This may be my level 49 power so I may only have four slots, but if I absolutely need six slots I can move something else to 49. So, slotting advice please!

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Now that I've hit 43 I want to respec my Rad/Dark Defender for the push to 50. This guy only plays on our SG and the party is made up of my guy, a Tanker, 2 scrappers, a Blaster and an Earth/Rad controller. Given the team only nature my attempt is to build Ol' Dark Rad Lad as full blown support for the team with little expectation for damage output.

Please provide me with your feedback, especially on my slotting choices. Thanks!

( The Build )