Yes, I know that there are already threads for both of these games, but today they basically become one game, and as we now have a whole new wave of heroes and villains coming in, a new thread is probably best.
So, firstly, Villains. I know a couple have been on over the weekend, well done, well done. Hopefully all going well I should be on tonight and I suspect a few others will be for the first time too. Let’s see if we can all meet up as early as possible so as to maximise the levelling potential, but nobody feel they have to commit to a toon any time soon. I would recommend a week or so experimentation. So who’s gonna be there, and what you gonna be? If anyone knows what their name/AT will be post here, so others that go on later can find you in game easily.
I will be Harmful Ray – Radiation Blast/Dark Miasma Corruptor. Come say hi!
As for heroes, the EG men is really looking pathetic these days. Two players at the top, and then a few low levels. I think we should finally get around to sorting it out properly as from tonight we can get can bases and such.
Infor for newbies:
Sever: Defiant
Villains:
Harmful Ray (Rad/Dark Corruptor) - kalel
Ray is one of those toons that you are more likely to notice when he is not there, than when he is. None of his powers are particularly devastating or dramatic, but they do ease a victory, and in extreme circumstances and large groups he can make a massive difference. Basically, most of his powers revolve around debuffing, in this case mostly to hit and acc debuffs. In simple terms, I make foes less likely to hit and, and when we hit them we do more damage, making battles quicker and safer.
I also have a more powerful heal than the Masterminds, so if Fluffly is not around then I take on the bulk of the healing. My heal is AoE around me, so as a general rule you need to try and stay near me if you think you will need healing, although I am pretty mobile and will frequently visit the front line to dish out some heals. I also have a power where by I will “anchor” a foe, creating an AoE debuffing field around him. Again in simple terms, try and kill the guy with the big black cloud around him last!
I too have teleport, and will mostly use it for rezzing fallen teamates. My rez is also an AoE, so I will be using my teleport mostly to shift corpses around. Just be aware that you should not go to hospital until the group leader has decided that it is the best course of action, it usually isn’t.
Ray is a pain to play with in short. Most of his powers require some player knowledge of his team mates, and thus he tends to be a bit of a moaner, just ignore him, he’s only trying to help.gif)
The Wicked Man (Fire/Fire Dominator) - kalel
The Wicked Man is still in very early stages, but he is a high damage dealing, aggro attracting Fire/Fire Dominator. Loads of damage, loads of DoT and AoE and more particle effects than you can shake a leg at. Not a lot you need to know about fighting with him, other than that he will need aggro taking off him and lots of heals…
Kalalien (Ninja/Traps Mastermind) - kalel
Kalalien is in even earlier stages. To be updated.
Abominable Green Man (SS/Invun Brute) - tannerd
Was initially my main toon, but relegated to alt as I got bored with him - I might pick him up again if we hold up the mains for the TF. Basically a damage dealler, with a knockdown, heading into light tank teritory.
Cryptographer (Grav/Energy Dominator) - tannerd
Mainly pushing down the immobilse/hold crowd control route, with a few ranged attacks on top. Have just picked up flight, and at higher levels I'll start picking up heals.
Nightfalcon (Ninja Stalker) - tannerd
Created him just for a laugh, might play him for a while if I get bored.
Doctor Pretentio (Necro/Poison Mastermind ) - Stickman
Heavily slotting the henchmen to deal plenty of melee damage and act as tanks for the group, then taking other powers to eith debuf enemies or heal the team. Can't deal much damage on his own, but not bothered about that. Also taken teleport as my travel, but mainly for the 'teleport friend' power. If we get wailed on, hopefully I can leg it away, then teleport others to a safe place for a rethink.
Lord Alfred Bastwick (mercs/dark Mastermind ) - eviltobz
not taking any blasts, all about the mercs for attacking and the secondaries for aiding them and the team. can do a small pbaoe heal around himself but requires a hit on an enemy. has acc, damage + speed debuffs for enemies. aiming to get pbaoe stealth, defence & resist buffs, leadership pool
Flufflyman (Rad/Kintetic Corruptor) - eviltobz
focusing more on the secondaries than the primaries, attacks are single target oriented. casts a pretty good pbaoe heal around a targetted foe, again requires a hit to work. pbaoe damage buff to team based on hitting and debuffing an enemy's damage. aiming to get enemy speed debuffs, status & damage resists, team super jump friend superspeed/end recovery/power recharge buff, pbaoe on targetted foe endurance boost with major drain on the enemy. large enemy aoe damage debuff and team damage buff. possibly pbaoe foe massive knockback toggle for crowd control and squishies protection.
Et Tu (Dark/Fire Brute) - eviltobz
scrapper with predominantly single target based attacks, but also a fire aura which excells when surrounded by low level minions. no team enhancing abilities, currently has endurance and health problems so likes any buffs that help these, but future powers and SO end reductions, recharges and resists should help these quite a bit.
Smooth Criminal (Brute) - Speed182
Rebuke (Energy/Invun Brute) - Ajay
Reb's capable of doing enormous damage, even more so when the fury bar starts to fill up. I've got a few temporary self-buffs that help with this - a Build Up that increases my damage for a few seconds and Hasten which gives me rapid recharge for two minutes. I'll normally try and save these for large groups containing a few Lts and a Boss.
The invulnerability's mostly passive so far - the idea is to make me as low maintenance as possible, and while I'm not sure of long term MT ability, Reb can certainly hold his own against mobs higher in level and it's usually better for me to take the hits than others - a light tank, if you like. I'm trying to utilise these secondaries to minimise the amount of healer attention I need. I'm taking Fitness too, since I need every last drop of End I can get my armour-plated hands on.
Intent (Ninja/Reflexes Stalker) - Ajay
Originally intended as my main, now my alt. Follows the normal stalker pattern of huge burst damage, the Reflexes tree should hopefully complement the melee abilities without draining too much End.
Kemper (Ninja/Reflexes Stalker) - Nuttah
Slotted mostly for damage/disorient and endurance reduction. Secondarys slotted for defence/endurance. Will be going for superjump as his travel power. does super duper damage, but can be a bit squishy when enemies actually hit me (hard to hit but when I do get hit I get hit for everything) Tendancy to get stuck because so damn small!
Squishy Man (Tech/Shields Mastermind) - Nuttah
Apparantly the most popular power pool setup for masterminds (made the most sense to me when I picked em). Slotted like Stick for damage and accuracy for my minions. Will be getting flight/group flight so I (maybe) will be able to fly my minions with me... or something
Dead Fribnah (Tech/Dark Mastermind) - mentat
Currently running 2 battle drones, super jump which is most amusing, bit like Tobz, got a heal power that only works if i get a hit in and you have to be *right* next to me.
Also have tar patch and another one that i forget that reduces damage.
When i hit 16 i'll be taking protector bots power, which can cast bubbles on stuff, but i'm not sure who's a valid target for them at the mo.
The Tax Inspector (Energy/Invun Brute) - Jetset UK
No idea where I'm taking him, I'm just building him up as I go. Any advise would be appreciated if you think I need it. To be honest I think I may take him up a few more levels and then start another toon when I have a better feel for the game, so I can make more informed decisions!
------------------------------------------------------------
So far any class will be useful, although I suspect we will lack Dominators if anyone fancies one, and we may be a little Brute heavy.
Kal's Basic toon building 101
OK, I’ll add to this as more issues are raised, but it occurred to me that there are some points on toon building that are pretty key to know, but not that well explained in-game.
At lvl 6 you get to pick your first power pool. This is a new set of powers in addition to your primary and secondary. These powers include what will eventually become your travel powers, so it’s key to plan fairly carefully. The pools that include travel powers are:
Speed
Leaping
Flight
Teleportation
The other pools are:
Concealment
Presence
Fighting
Medicine
Fitness (I think that’s them all off the top)
Forget the lower four for now; I’ll just explain the top ones. Now when you first open a pool at lvl 6, you’ll notice that there are two powers available. Neither of these are your travel power, that comes at lvl 14, but only if you already have one of the first two powers. So take flight for example. The first two powers available are Hover and Air Superiority (basically a ranged melee move if that makes sense). Actual flight comes at 14 but only if you chose one of the others at some other point before then. Likewise, you can take the final power in the pool, “group flight” at lvl 20, but only if you have chosen 2 others from that pool already.
So, unless you like walking around the nasty areas at a snails rate, I’d plan to take a travel power at 14 if you can. It’s a pretty standard way of plotting toons.
The only other pool I’ll mention is the “Fitness” pool. Now, pre-Issue 6 this was an absolute essential pool for every toon I ever knew, simply because of the lvl 20 power in it, “Stamina”, which dramatically increases your Endurance recovery and is was simply not an option before. However, following some of the changes made, I’m now not so convinced that it’s as important, but you should still be aware that if you have a very end heavy toon, this is also something you probably will want to plan for. I will still be taking it.
If anyone has any question or wants to do a little guide of their own, post it and I’ll add it all to the first post.
eviltobz' mini guide to slots
When you level up in CoH/CoV you get either slots or powers depending on the level (as a fair rule of thumb to begin with you get 2 slots every odd level). These are important for molding your toon into a powerful character and making your powers work in the way that you want. Each power has one empty slot by default and a further 5 can be added. These are then filled with enhancements to boost a certain aspect of the power. This can be simple things like recharge time and endurance cost that apply to most powers, but many powers have more than one effect and so you can focus your character's powers in a certain direction. As an example, blasts from the radiation set both do damage and also decrease the enemy's defence, so you can choose to slot primarily for damage or de-buffing depending on which direction you want to go.
There are 3 main levels of enhancement available, Training Origin (TO) which offer only small changes in effectiveness, Dual Origin (DO) the medium power boost, and Single Origin (SO) which are the good stuff. The origin thing just means that only certain types of toon (mutant, science etc) can use it, so you'll have to start selling the ones you can't use to afford to buy the ones you need. Recent changes to the game engine (called Enhancement Diversity) mean that you get less effect per enhancement when there is a lot of boosting going on. This kicks in between 2 and 3 SOs meaning that powers with more than 3 SOs get very little benefit from them. that's not to say they are worthless, but generally people are going to be planning to only have up to 3 of a certain enhancement in any power. The relative strength of TOs and DOs means that you won't see this effect (DOs are very very slightly effected between 5 and 6) so you may be tempted at low levels to put more slots in something than you will need later in the game. A good example is that one of my CoH characters has hover 6 slotted for speed, which pre-issue 6 meant it was about as fast as unenhanced fly, and with just TO and DO would still seem appealing at low levels when travel is a grind, but post-issue 6 and as standard in CoV this is not going to be of such value and those 3 slots could go to more damaging use elsewhere.
Finally, think about the powers that you are slotting. Will you be using this power much in the later levels? Some beginner players put slots on the beginning inherent powers like brawl*, sprint or rest. these are useful at low levels, but quickly will become less useful as you gain new attacks and travel powers etc. It is possible to get re-specs for your toons, but these can be hard to get hold of so you shouldn't really plan to need one when your character gets more powerful. The early levels fly past pretty quickly so putting up with a few less powerful moves early on may make your character much more rounded when the time between levels is measured in days rather than minutes.
* Brawl quickly becomes a wasted power for most archetypes, but it does have some applications which may effect your decsion to use it. It is meant to be useful in PvP situations as it has a chance to drop toggles which can be useful for killing tanks etc. Secondly, with the introduction of the brute AT it is useful as a very quick, low-cost attack that helps to boost your fury bar and so there could be some added benefit in slotting for accuracy and damage depending on your attack chain.
kal’s basic slash command guide
/friend, toon name = Add to your friends list. (I recommend doing this to the whole above list)
/t, or /tell, toon name = Send a tell (message)
/team = Switch to team chat
/afk = Show that you are away from keyboard
/hide = Go invisible on toon searches (This is essential at higher lvls to avoid “powr lvl m3 plzzz!!!!” tells every 5 second)
Edited by kalel at 15:25:27 14-11-2005
So, firstly, Villains. I know a couple have been on over the weekend, well done, well done. Hopefully all going well I should be on tonight and I suspect a few others will be for the first time too. Let’s see if we can all meet up as early as possible so as to maximise the levelling potential, but nobody feel they have to commit to a toon any time soon. I would recommend a week or so experimentation. So who’s gonna be there, and what you gonna be? If anyone knows what their name/AT will be post here, so others that go on later can find you in game easily.
I will be Harmful Ray – Radiation Blast/Dark Miasma Corruptor. Come say hi!
As for heroes, the EG men is really looking pathetic these days. Two players at the top, and then a few low levels. I think we should finally get around to sorting it out properly as from tonight we can get can bases and such.
Infor for newbies:
Sever: Defiant
Villains:
Harmful Ray (Rad/Dark Corruptor) - kalel
Ray is one of those toons that you are more likely to notice when he is not there, than when he is. None of his powers are particularly devastating or dramatic, but they do ease a victory, and in extreme circumstances and large groups he can make a massive difference. Basically, most of his powers revolve around debuffing, in this case mostly to hit and acc debuffs. In simple terms, I make foes less likely to hit and, and when we hit them we do more damage, making battles quicker and safer.
I also have a more powerful heal than the Masterminds, so if Fluffly is not around then I take on the bulk of the healing. My heal is AoE around me, so as a general rule you need to try and stay near me if you think you will need healing, although I am pretty mobile and will frequently visit the front line to dish out some heals. I also have a power where by I will “anchor” a foe, creating an AoE debuffing field around him. Again in simple terms, try and kill the guy with the big black cloud around him last!
I too have teleport, and will mostly use it for rezzing fallen teamates. My rez is also an AoE, so I will be using my teleport mostly to shift corpses around. Just be aware that you should not go to hospital until the group leader has decided that it is the best course of action, it usually isn’t.
Ray is a pain to play with in short. Most of his powers require some player knowledge of his team mates, and thus he tends to be a bit of a moaner, just ignore him, he’s only trying to help
The Wicked Man (Fire/Fire Dominator) - kalel
The Wicked Man is still in very early stages, but he is a high damage dealing, aggro attracting Fire/Fire Dominator. Loads of damage, loads of DoT and AoE and more particle effects than you can shake a leg at. Not a lot you need to know about fighting with him, other than that he will need aggro taking off him and lots of heals…
Kalalien (Ninja/Traps Mastermind) - kalel
Kalalien is in even earlier stages. To be updated.
Abominable Green Man (SS/Invun Brute) - tannerd
Was initially my main toon, but relegated to alt as I got bored with him - I might pick him up again if we hold up the mains for the TF. Basically a damage dealler, with a knockdown, heading into light tank teritory.
Cryptographer (Grav/Energy Dominator) - tannerd
Mainly pushing down the immobilse/hold crowd control route, with a few ranged attacks on top. Have just picked up flight, and at higher levels I'll start picking up heals.
Nightfalcon (Ninja Stalker) - tannerd
Created him just for a laugh, might play him for a while if I get bored.
Doctor Pretentio (Necro/Poison Mastermind ) - Stickman
Heavily slotting the henchmen to deal plenty of melee damage and act as tanks for the group, then taking other powers to eith debuf enemies or heal the team. Can't deal much damage on his own, but not bothered about that. Also taken teleport as my travel, but mainly for the 'teleport friend' power. If we get wailed on, hopefully I can leg it away, then teleport others to a safe place for a rethink.
Lord Alfred Bastwick (mercs/dark Mastermind ) - eviltobz
not taking any blasts, all about the mercs for attacking and the secondaries for aiding them and the team. can do a small pbaoe heal around himself but requires a hit on an enemy. has acc, damage + speed debuffs for enemies. aiming to get pbaoe stealth, defence & resist buffs, leadership pool
Flufflyman (Rad/Kintetic Corruptor) - eviltobz
focusing more on the secondaries than the primaries, attacks are single target oriented. casts a pretty good pbaoe heal around a targetted foe, again requires a hit to work. pbaoe damage buff to team based on hitting and debuffing an enemy's damage. aiming to get enemy speed debuffs, status & damage resists, team super jump
friend superspeed/end recovery/power recharge buff, pbaoe on targetted foe endurance boost with major drain on the enemy. large enemy aoe damage debuff and team damage buff. possibly pbaoe foe massive knockback toggle for crowd control and squishies protection.Et Tu (Dark/Fire Brute) - eviltobz
scrapper with predominantly single target based attacks, but also a fire aura which excells when surrounded by low level minions. no team enhancing abilities, currently has endurance and health problems so likes any buffs that help these, but future powers and SO end reductions, recharges and resists should help these quite a bit.
Smooth Criminal (Brute) - Speed182
Rebuke (Energy/Invun Brute) - Ajay
Reb's capable of doing enormous damage, even more so when the fury bar starts to fill up. I've got a few temporary self-buffs that help with this - a Build Up that increases my damage for a few seconds and Hasten which gives me rapid recharge for two minutes. I'll normally try and save these for large groups containing a few Lts and a Boss.
The invulnerability's mostly passive so far - the idea is to make me as low maintenance as possible, and while I'm not sure of long term MT ability, Reb can certainly hold his own against mobs higher in level and it's usually better for me to take the hits than others - a light tank, if you like. I'm trying to utilise these secondaries to minimise the amount of healer attention I need. I'm taking Fitness too, since I need every last drop of End I can get my armour-plated hands on.
Intent (Ninja/Reflexes Stalker) - Ajay
Originally intended as my main, now my alt. Follows the normal stalker pattern of huge burst damage, the Reflexes tree should hopefully complement the melee abilities without draining too much End.
Kemper (Ninja/Reflexes Stalker) - Nuttah
Slotted mostly for damage/disorient and endurance reduction. Secondarys slotted for defence/endurance. Will be going for superjump as his travel power. does super duper damage, but can be a bit squishy when enemies actually hit me (hard to hit but when I do get hit I get hit for everything) Tendancy to get stuck because so damn small!
Squishy Man (Tech/Shields Mastermind) - Nuttah
Apparantly the most popular power pool setup for masterminds (made the most sense to me when I picked em). Slotted like Stick for damage and accuracy for my minions. Will be getting flight/group flight so I (maybe) will be able to fly my minions with me... or something
Dead Fribnah (Tech/Dark Mastermind) - mentat
Currently running 2 battle drones, super jump which is most amusing, bit like Tobz, got a heal power that only works if i get a hit in and you have to be *right* next to me.
Also have tar patch and another one that i forget that reduces damage.
When i hit 16 i'll be taking protector bots power, which can cast bubbles on stuff, but i'm not sure who's a valid target for them at the mo.
The Tax Inspector (Energy/Invun Brute) - Jetset UK
No idea where I'm taking him, I'm just building him up as I go. Any advise would be appreciated if you think I need it. To be honest I think I may take him up a few more levels and then start another toon when I have a better feel for the game, so I can make more informed decisions!
------------------------------------------------------------
So far any class will be useful, although I suspect we will lack Dominators if anyone fancies one, and we may be a little Brute heavy.
Kal's Basic toon building 101
OK, I’ll add to this as more issues are raised, but it occurred to me that there are some points on toon building that are pretty key to know, but not that well explained in-game.
At lvl 6 you get to pick your first power pool. This is a new set of powers in addition to your primary and secondary. These powers include what will eventually become your travel powers, so it’s key to plan fairly carefully. The pools that include travel powers are:
Speed
Leaping
Flight
Teleportation
The other pools are:
Concealment
Presence
Fighting
Medicine
Fitness (I think that’s them all off the top)
Forget the lower four for now; I’ll just explain the top ones. Now when you first open a pool at lvl 6, you’ll notice that there are two powers available. Neither of these are your travel power, that comes at lvl 14, but only if you already have one of the first two powers. So take flight for example. The first two powers available are Hover and Air Superiority (basically a ranged melee move if that makes sense). Actual flight comes at 14 but only if you chose one of the others at some other point before then. Likewise, you can take the final power in the pool, “group flight” at lvl 20, but only if you have chosen 2 others from that pool already.
So, unless you like walking around the nasty areas at a snails rate, I’d plan to take a travel power at 14 if you can. It’s a pretty standard way of plotting toons.
The only other pool I’ll mention is the “Fitness” pool. Now, pre-Issue 6 this was an absolute essential pool for every toon I ever knew, simply because of the lvl 20 power in it, “Stamina”, which dramatically increases your Endurance recovery and is was simply not an option before. However, following some of the changes made, I’m now not so convinced that it’s as important, but you should still be aware that if you have a very end heavy toon, this is also something you probably will want to plan for. I will still be taking it.
If anyone has any question or wants to do a little guide of their own, post it and I’ll add it all to the first post.
eviltobz' mini guide to slots
When you level up in CoH/CoV you get either slots or powers depending on the level (as a fair rule of thumb to begin with you get 2 slots every odd level). These are important for molding your toon into a powerful character and making your powers work in the way that you want. Each power has one empty slot by default and a further 5 can be added. These are then filled with enhancements to boost a certain aspect of the power. This can be simple things like recharge time and endurance cost that apply to most powers, but many powers have more than one effect and so you can focus your character's powers in a certain direction. As an example, blasts from the radiation set both do damage and also decrease the enemy's defence, so you can choose to slot primarily for damage or de-buffing depending on which direction you want to go.
There are 3 main levels of enhancement available, Training Origin (TO) which offer only small changes in effectiveness, Dual Origin (DO) the medium power boost, and Single Origin (SO) which are the good stuff. The origin thing just means that only certain types of toon (mutant, science etc) can use it, so you'll have to start selling the ones you can't use to afford to buy the ones you need. Recent changes to the game engine (called Enhancement Diversity) mean that you get less effect per enhancement when there is a lot of boosting going on. This kicks in between 2 and 3 SOs meaning that powers with more than 3 SOs get very little benefit from them. that's not to say they are worthless, but generally people are going to be planning to only have up to 3 of a certain enhancement in any power. The relative strength of TOs and DOs means that you won't see this effect (DOs are very very slightly effected between 5 and 6) so you may be tempted at low levels to put more slots in something than you will need later in the game. A good example is that one of my CoH characters has hover 6 slotted for speed, which pre-issue 6 meant it was about as fast as unenhanced fly, and with just TO and DO would still seem appealing at low levels when travel is a grind, but post-issue 6 and as standard in CoV this is not going to be of such value and those 3 slots could go to more damaging use elsewhere.
Finally, think about the powers that you are slotting. Will you be using this power much in the later levels? Some beginner players put slots on the beginning inherent powers like brawl*, sprint or rest. these are useful at low levels, but quickly will become less useful as you gain new attacks and travel powers etc. It is possible to get re-specs for your toons, but these can be hard to get hold of so you shouldn't really plan to need one when your character gets more powerful. The early levels fly past pretty quickly so putting up with a few less powerful moves early on may make your character much more rounded when the time between levels is measured in days rather than minutes.
* Brawl quickly becomes a wasted power for most archetypes, but it does have some applications which may effect your decsion to use it. It is meant to be useful in PvP situations as it has a chance to drop toggles which can be useful for killing tanks etc. Secondly, with the introduction of the brute AT it is useful as a very quick, low-cost attack that helps to boost your fury bar and so there could be some added benefit in slotting for accuracy and damage depending on your attack chain.
kal’s basic slash command guide
/friend, toon name = Add to your friends list. (I recommend doing this to the whole above list)
/t, or /tell, toon name = Send a tell (message)
/team = Switch to team chat
/afk = Show that you are away from keyboard
/hide = Go invisible on toon searches (This is essential at higher lvls to avoid “powr lvl m3 plzzz!!!!” tells every 5 second)
Edited by kalel at 15:25:27 14-11-2005
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