I’m reluctant to make anything other than a tank because, quite frankly, no basic archetype is as effective alone, and I enjoy just wading in there and whaling on someone. On the other hand, ranged attacks would be nice…
Give some others a try anyway. Every AT can solo. Once you get the hang of them, they all do it well.
A scrapper is actually better, in most people’s opinion, both solo and on teams. They aren’t as bulletproof as tanks, but they can really mow down the opposition, which a tank cannot.
In particular, give Regen a try. It’s not much like a tank, but those guys can soak up an amazing amount of damage and keep on swinging. (You should have seen them before several issues of down-adjustments.)
Personally, I love to solo on a blaster. Sure, I hit the floor fairly often, but I love blowing things up. And I can usually keep them upright for hours at a time.
I am going to agree with Saltire, yes you should make other characters. When you do it is up to you, but the diversity of powersets and playstyles are where COH really shine. Even 2 ATs as close in concept as a Scrapper and a Tank play quite differently, even solo.
This can lead to the occasional problem. I am testing the increased difficulty on my main, an Inv/SS tank, at +1 level, 8 man group, bosses spawn. This gives me red and purple bosses, but I can pretty easily solo them. (IO sets for the win! :D) But when you get used to running into huge groups like that, then get on a low level scrapper to test new powersets, it doesn’t work out as well. I actually have an easier time switching to a squishy from my main, because the playstyles are so different.
Don’t be afraid to try the different possibilites in the game. You may find one that you enjoy more than your tank. But don’t get so involved in alts you don’t progress to the higher levels. There are some very nice stories and fun times in the higher levels.
Scrappers are better solo. Much, much better. Yes, their defense isn’t quite as good as a Tanker’s, but frankly, if you’re not protecting a team against the increased number of enemies that spawn for teams, that extra defense is really wasted. Scrappers’ defenses are more than sufficient for the number of enemies you’ll encounter solo, and their offensive power is significantly higher than Tankers’. Granted, they still don’t have ranged attacks. Alternately, you can go Villain and play a Brute, which have better defenses than Scrappers and better offenses than Tankers. They are so much fun to play.
If you want ranged, you can solo a Blaster. Hell, you can solo any AT, but Controllers and Defenders take a little more thought and tactics than jumping into the middle and whaling on people. Blasters have incredible offense, and though they have few options for defense you can pick powers that help you. One basic power I usually take on a ranged character is Hover. The endurance cost is cheap, and it keeps me out of melee range. Most enemies still have ranged attacks, but they’re usually much weaker than melee. I have a Fire/Devices Blaster who’s an utter blast to solo, pardon the word choice. While my melee fighters are lots of fun, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as annihilating a group of enemies with fiery death from above.
I’m getting a bit WoWed-out, so I thought I’d fire CoH back up and reacquaint myself.
But no joy: it doesn’t seem to want to run under Windows 7. In poking around NCSoft’s site, I was surprised that even Vista is not officially supported as a platform. My symptom: the updater starts fine, downloads and verifies fine; I click Next, and I get the “Loading” banner, then the circular mouse cursor for a few seconds, then a blank screen where presumedly the login screen appears. I hear the background music, and if I start pressing keys I can hear the “dnnnkk” sound that CoH makes on the menu, but still no video.
I am re-installing from scratch right now, and I hope it fixes the problem. I know some people are running fine on Win7, and mine was a brand-new Win7 install on a brand-new hard drive, so it is as vanilla as it gets.
Does 7 have a Compatibility Mode like XP and Vista? I think that is how most people run it under Vista, by using XP under that setting.
Thanks for any ideas, Lok. I did try it in “XP” compatibility mode, and running as Administrator.
The game doesn’t “lock”, because I can hear the background music, and hear the expected sounds responding to my (blind) typing; just no video. I am very hesitant to mess with my nVidia drivers (8800GTS), because absolutely everything else (WoW, PhotoShop, etc) works fine.
What the… what ?
OK, maybe the game has changed a heck of a lot since I quit it, admitedly. But still… WHAT ? If you think tanks can solo, make a regen scrapper. Any primary (although Thorns has always been my favorite. Impale for the win !) Seriously : you will wade through crowds of mooks in 1/3rd of the time it takes your tank to dispatch them, without a second of down time. Hell, you’ll even be able to solo bosses !
And if you’ve got City of Villains, look no further than the Mastermind, especially the Robots kind. They just sprint through solo missions. And they’re ranged, too ! 
Use TweakCOH
http://www.net-marks.com/software/tweakcoh
This is a program designed to let you change CoH’s graphics settings from outside the game.
Try launching it windowed instead of full screen.
E-Sabbath, your next SDMB (if there is one) renewal is on me. That enabled me to sign in and play. I tried forcing full-screen once I was in, but when I re-entered it was back to a blank screen, so it looks like I’ll have to play windowed always. Screen performance was just fine, though - looked the same as always.
Thanks again.
Controllers start being horrible solo characters. But once you move to the pet stage, you come with your own team. Takes a long time to get there. But I like soloing my controller now that she is in her mid-30s.
I have two characters I can’t solo - one is my tank. She just doesn’t do enough damage. I probably have her poorly optimized (she WAS created 60 odd months ago and is still at level 16). The other is my empathy defender - who wasn’t created as anything other than a Blaster’s sidekick. Her secondary is energy - so about the only attack she has is “get them off me! get them off me!”
I have a bunch of characters I seldom solo, but I’ve solo’d them all.
It depends on how you define soloing. There’s survivability and speed. Controllers are very survivable solo; once you have a couple control powers, locking down a spawn of 2 minions and 1 lieutenant is cake, and it’s easy to come out of the fight taking little to no damage. They are, however, exceedingly slow, slower than even Tankers. Even if you pound on a single enemy to take advantage of Containment, you’re sitting there for a very long time watching health tick off in 1s and 2s.
It’s possible to solo with any archetype in the game provided you take a balanced mix of available powers. The only thing that changes is speed.
Actually, Illusion ( past 18 and Phantom Army ) and Gravity aren’t that slow. And Plant isn’t slow at all once you get Seeds of Confusion slotted up.
As for the other sets; take a pool power attack ( Air Superiority is favored ) and slot the immobilize for damage and you’ll solo less slowly. Earth and Ice will still really drag though, unless you have a veteran attack or two ( low level Earth is especially faster with vet attacks, thanks to all the -defense from Earth ).
What kind of tank Dangerosa? The secret to most of the sets is pick just a few powers from the primary and emphasize your attacks until in the 20s. Like for Invulnerability, you take Temporary Invulnerability, Unyielding, and Invincibility in your first 20 levels (Dull Pain is not a bad choice also, but not required like the other 3), the rest are attacks, travel (which can be skipped in these days of easy temp travel powers, especially after I16 hits), and Fitness (which can be skipped by some tank primaries, but not Inv.) And you don’t put more than 1 or 2 slots in them until then either, slotting up attacks first. (This is for a soloing build, if you are a dedicated team tank, you will need to add some slots to your defenses to try and survive. Which you may not anyway, tanks aren’t that much tougher then squishies before SOs.)
Well, I’ve returned to the world of CoH. A lot has changed since my last foray; I think my sabbatical started right as inventions were added. But, as Brainiac4 and Dangerosa can attest, I can kill a blaster (disguised as a Peacebringer) as fast as ever.
I was able, over the weekend, to finally get my first (and only) controller to level 32. It was like hitting an easy button. Even with the extra attack powers, controlling was slow. Now, I don’t even need to attack.
What is the end game? Once a character hits 50, other than trying to optimize him or her (ugh!), what is there to do, especially if I don’t like PvP. I pretty much retired Jim Beam once I finally helped beat Hamidon. Anything new for these characters, or do am I better off trying to learn how to beat mezzes with a blaster for 10 more levels?
Not a great deal of end game in CoX ( although there are rumors Going Rogue will add some ). You can use Ourosboros to do low level missions you passed up ( especially useful if the missions didn’t exist when you were that level ). You can do the 45-50 TFs, Lady Grey, Barracuda and Kahn. You can further tweak your build and acquire expensive IOs. You can get purple “ultra-rare” IOs, which are more powerful and can only be slotted when you reach level 50. You can do Mothership Raids starting at 35; with Super Sidekicking though that won’t be as heavily focused on 50s.
By the way; as far as blasters and mezzes go one change is that blasters can still use their first two primary and first secondary powers even while mezzed. So these days getting the first relatively weak blast is considered a good idea. Plus, they do more damage than they used to. And Flares is especially nice these days; they changed the animation so it’s much faster.
Hey, welcome back. I had to give up on my Peacebringer. Maybe I’ll try again sometime, but the Keldians just didn’t do it for me.
Dangerosa’s musing has made me miss my Tank. I think I’ll log him back on. There’s just something nice about being surrounded by dozens of baddies, none of them touching you.
Slow to me is horrible. Anything CAN solo - but if it isn’t enjoyable because you are attacking greens to survive (empath defenders don’t have a lot of primaries to keep themselves alive) or it takes you forever to kill something (my tank), then it isn’t fun.
That’s what I was afraid of. Other than farming for salvage / recipes, there is really nothing to strive for. I’m as addicted to the little circle lighting up as everyone else, and when the circle doesn’t light up, I get bored.
Fortunately, I have 4 characters on Virtue between 32 and 40, plus one at 17, plus a few characters scattered on other servers.
Kheldians were buffed a while back; if you haven’t tried them recently you might do so again. Some I recall are more damage, ability to shift into Dwarf while mezzed, and a side effect of non-offensive toggles not dropping while mezzed is that when mezzed in Nova you don’t instantly drop to the ground in shieldless human form. Warshade Dwarf Sunless Mire does good damage now; it’s been called a cross between lower-damage Foot Stomp and Follow Up.