Reading through this thread will actually give you some good info – there’s a pretty good discussion on playing as a tank, with help from Justice Blues, if I recall correctly.
Or you can find a CECILian in game and we’ll team up with you. Most of us have alts down in that range – Dangerosa just started a new character (Ms. Eyre, a katana/inv scrapper), and I made a defender for her to hang with (Mr. Rochester, empathy/dark). We’ll no doubt be playing tonight.
I posted over on the CECIL board a topic relating to membership rules. There aren’t too many of them, but one deserves a bit of discussion: what to do with characters that haven’t been played in over a month.
http://sdmb.culex.us/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=495#495
If you’re playing in CECIL, come vote and respond. If you’re not playing in CECIL, then come to Virtue, make a character and sign up. And then vote and respond.
Over on Warcry.
Sounds promising.
What is everyone’s opinion on getting healed by a stranger? Of the two people I play with most often, one says it’s rude to affect someone else’s gameplay without them asking and the other says it’s unkind to be an empath and not heal someone who’s obviously in trouble.
Opinions?
Hmm, I just started a healer and haven’t played her much. Do heals reduce the fighting PC’s EXP/give EXP to the healer? If not, then the former is definitely wrong.
Maybe I’m just used to playing EQ, where healing/buffing doesn’t hurt the EXP of the one who receives those.
Woohoo!
Just got the game, will need to join CECIL (I was in Beta, but just got an actually copy of the durn thing).
My usual Virtue person is ‘Meggido’ (Dark / Regen scrapper) , but I also have ‘Tamishiwara’ (invuln / strength tanker), and I may be making a new controller. We’ll see.
[QUOTE=Ferret Herder]
Hmm, I just started a healer and haven’t played her much. Do heals reduce the fighting PC’s EXP/give EXP to the healer? If not, then the former is definitely wrong.
[QUOTE]
No.
I’d like to see some xp - not from the kill, but just a small amount of “free” xp, giving to defenders when they buff a “random” player.
I’ve never had anyone complain, and a couple of people lay down and worship at my feet when I’ve randomly healed. I do prefer to watch and heal as needed - and stick out the whole battle.
I’ve never had anyone complain about me healing them, and I do it a lot. It’s not like it costs them anything, and it reduces their downtime at least and saves them debt at most. I spent nearly an hour hanging around a couple of underlevelled teams of hydra hunters in Perez a couple of nights ago, healing them when they got in over their heads. They seemed confused, but grateful. I didn’t get anything out of it; it’s just an in-character sort of thing to do.
I also have a bind for targeting the nearest hero, and I tap it when I’m flying over a zone. If I spot someone in trouble, I go to follow mode and fly down to heal them. I don’t attack what they’re fighting, I just keep them alive so they can finish it off. I know I appreciate it when someone tosses a heal or buff my way.
Culex (Toaster) is the real giveaway zealot, though–he’s funny when he hangs around the train station, bubbling passerby. “The power of bubble compels you!” 
Heck, even as a scrapper I can do something: I taunt baddies off people, if they’re going red. Then I hang out and dodge punches till they get ready to go. It’s more than acceptable. (Mine is on the edge of acceptable, but as long as I don’t attack them, it’s cool.)
Stop by Gemini and say hi sometime.
I give Speed Boosts all the time. (It increases your speed, endurance recovery and recharge rate.) The only complaint I’ve ever got is from Fulgur (because then he moved too fast). Boosting people as they come out of the train station is very popular.
I also give heals and damage debuffs/buffs. If I feel like sticking around, I’ll turn on Maneuvers (gives a defense buff when near me). No one has ever complained to me. I also rez fallen heroes, but I always ask first, because of the risk of a second death. I think the next Issue will include a yes/no prompt to help with that.
I think many Defenders give out buffs just as a matter of course.
Let this be a lesson to you - don’t be in any rush to wrap up missions and arcs from your contacts.
When I leveled to 34, my contacts all gave me one or two new contacts, which gave me missions at level 35. I was on a soloing kick for a while, and I wrapped up all the missions from all the contacts by the time I was halfway through level 37. Now the contacts won’t give me new contacts until I’m level 39, and those won’t give me missions until level 40.
I’m 1.5 bars into 38 right now. I solo at the rate of about one bar of xp every 2-3 hours. If I want to open any more contact for this character, I need to grind for about 40-60 hours, or find some players around level 40 who are killing things around level 43 and have no problems with me tagging along and leeching, and do that for 10 hours.
Grr.
Um, Pleonast? Sorry to break it to ya, but the Leadership line is Team-only.
Oh, hee.
I don’t think that was me who did it, but yeah, that mostly tends to be the reaction we get…there’s a SG I won’t mention the name of that we’re keeping a strong eye on at the moment, just waaaaaaaatching…when it gets to the point where you RECOGNIZE A CHARACTER NAME and, for that matter, an SG name, because you get SO many petitions on it – especially at a time like right now when we are getting relatively few petitions, it kind of attracts our attention.
We have a new policy now – bad names are replaced immediately with GenericHero### names. No muss, no fuss, no having to fricking well deal with VV0LverYne saying “I don’t wanna!” Just Boom, changed, send us an email with the new name you’d like, thanks for playing.
Oh, and speed apparently does add to jumping. My mistake.
New favorite power: Hurdle. Faster than Sprint, and you can jump…er, over tractor-trailers, basically. I just go Boing…Boing…Boing through the city now.
Hi, ArrMatey! – look us up and we’ll bring you into CECIL. There’s almost always a Captain or Leader on. (Or whatever we’re calling them these days; Toaster was having fun with our titles, so last night they were Troll/Gardvord/Caliban and Cog/Sprocket/Oscillator.)
On drive-by healing and buffing:
We were discussing this in our CECIL channel. I do it a lot when I play Super-Collider, healing people who seem to be in trouble and giving the gift of Accelerate Metabolism when I can. I’m not sure if my debuffs cause me to steal xp from arrests, so I don’t use those.
Toaster has apparently had lots of angry responses to buffing, and so is doing it less these days.
Balanced, what’s your bind for targeting nearest hero? I’d find that useful for my defenders.
Little Plastic Ninja, can you tell us anything about these “prestige archetypes”? I saw mention of them in that linked article, and have seen them come up a couple of times in the COH boards, but can’t find a clear explanation of what they might be. Are they functionally different from the initial set, or simply a renamed/different-looking version (like Prestige Power Dash is just Sprint with a different visual effect)?
I use “t” for my targeting key:
/bind t target_enemy_near
/bind lshift+t target_friend_near
The “t” key alone targest the closest enemy for pulling, and shifted it targets the nearest good guy (any hero plus the police drones). It has the advantages of being mnemonic and of being positioned conveniently for use while flying. Also, the default “follow” key is adjacent, so it’s very quick and easy to zero in on whoever’s in trouble.
I don’t use all that many binds, but I like this one. I think I’ll cross-post it to the bind thread on the CECIL board for reference.
Really? I could’ve sworn I’d seen the little shields floating around them. Haven’t done it lately, maybe it was a fluke.
I’ve bound the backquote key (`) to target nearest friend. It’s close to the tab key which targets nearest foe.
Does “friend” always mean any hero? I was playing around with a bind the other day and I thought I couldn’t get it to target a hero not on my team.
Am I the only person who has trouble clicking on moving targets? I like to see what level other characters are and it usually is fairly hard for me to click on them if they’re moving. I’m uncoordinated, I guess.
On Drive-By Buffing
I was on a team last night where a defender (I think) made us all invisible. We all got a little ticked off. We had trouble seeing what we were doing. She said we could just change our gamma, but that wasn’t really the point.
So, I gotta say, drive by buffing is bad, because you don’t know how it will affect their gameplay or what they are trying to do. The healing doesn’t really cause any affect beyond allowing them to continue to fight.
Valdermic says… something about Issue 2 will be on the web site in the next few days.
Rock on.
I’m pretty sure being on a team doesn’t restrict it. I can double check the next time I’m teamed with someone.
I have fits tracking non-teammates in fights sometimes for my drive-by heals. Having to point at a hero in the middle of a muddle of hydras to see the health bar is tricky. I need to looking into a bind that will flip through selecting everyone, like the default tab binding does with bad guys.
Hugh, I probably wouldn’t use Invisibility on someone without asking, mainly because in can mess with their aggro control approach. If you Invis a tanker that needs to pull for a team, they’ll have trouble until it wears off. You have to choose your buffs carefully. As I said, I’ve never had complaints about heals. Now that I’ve had a chance to try it out, I can’t imagine anyone objecting to getting a Recovery Aura either. A quick Rec/Heal Aura combo can turn a fight around, especially for lower-level teams.
Something kind of fun last night: A GM possessed a police drone and followed me around Boomtown so I could show the way into a geometry glitch (sorry, folks, we’re not supposed to use it again). Police drones look funny when they hop (the GM had to grant it Fly to get into the underground). So, Little Plastic Ninja, you wouldn’t happen to know (or be) GM_Critters, woud you? Fulgur expressed an interest in getting a movie of the drone goofing around. 
That was after all the oddly-placed Rikti spawns, when stress-relief was definitely in order.