Word. The first few levels go by so quickly and TOs do so little that it’s not worth spending your inf. You’re going to want that inf as auction seed money or at the very least just to save for DOs or SOs.
If you’re new to COH, playing a fire/dark corrupter and having survival trouble at low levels, don’t fall into the common newbie trap of misunderstanding Dark Miasma. While most MMOs revolve around the tank + healer + DPS mindset, COH pays them little attention, especially on the villain side, and Dark Miasma is one of the best examples of it. New players frequently fixate on its first power (the heal) as its primary defense, when that’s a distant third to its main thrusts of debuffing and control. The centerpiece of the set is Darkest Night, an area of effect toggle ability that massively reduces the damage output of all enemies inside it. Get it as early as you possibly can, and keep an eye out for other hit debuffs or defense buffs to couple with it, as those multiply each other’s effectiveness. Dark Miasma is one of the strongest defense powersets in the game and is right up there in potency with many tanker powersets in its ability to reach near invulnerability. Survival trouble is something for other people to deal with 
Sorry about that. I spend too much time on the CoH forum. :o
Oh heck, I didn’t know that. Darkest Night looked kinda weak at first glance, so I picked up another attack so as not to rely on Brawl and Charm so much. I kinda had that idea, but I really guess I don’t know which powers are good, even after looking at the wiki and boards. I may try an Earth/Willpower Brute Villain/Rogue since that appears to be harder to screw up.
FYI Expired accounts are being reactivated over the next few days and the free to play accounts start next week. Info here.
Indeed. Hello, my name is Rik, and I’m an altoholic. (Hi Rik!) It would appear the game designers encourage this, since I see I can have, what, four dozen characters per server? But like I said, I make a bunch and see which ones grow on me. I’ve already deleted a couple that were just making me say “meh”. I’ve got something like 43 different WoW toons, but only 3 of them see any regular play.
I’m running with my graphics slider set to “Performance” (one notch above minimum), and that seems to be working pretty good. Though I was doing the last bit of the [del]quest[/del] mission chain involving Matt Habashy where I had to enter an Arachnos facility, and simply walking into that place was an instant lag bomb that I could only fix by moving the slider to the lowest setting. That was weird, though, because I also rolled a villain in Going Rogue who had to enter a very similar Arachnos facility in one of the early missions, and I didn’t have the lag problem there.
I actually tried doing that, but clicking the Save button didn’t seem to do anything at all. My main thing is that after the first few new characters, I decided I didn’t need all those damned popup alerts any more so I was trying to turn them all off globally.
I’m going with flight on my toons. As I mentioned in an earlier post, yeah, superspeed is hard to control. Of course, the main reason I’m going for flight is that I’m kind of having trouble finding my way around the streets, partly due to the relative lack of distinctive landmarks that can be easily seen from street level, and partly because I’m having trouble figuring out what, exactly, is a street when looking at the map. I’m thinking a plain street map would be better suited to this game than the current sorta-topographical thing it’s got.
So … a couple minor annoyances:
• Is it “normal” that the various “hold” abilities (Ice Manipulation’s “Chilblains”, Fire Manipulation’s “Ring of Fire”, etc.) consistently “miss” enemies that are a mere 1 level higher than the character? My level 8 Archer/Ice Manipulation hero got into a mission where most groups of three enemies had two level 8 mooks and one level 9 guy, and her Chilblains just Would. Not. Stick. to the level 9 guys.
• Flaminatrix joined a SuperGroup, and the group requests that everybody stay in SG mode so that the team gets whatever bonuses that gives. Problem is, turning on SG mode causes the team emblem to get printed on my character’s chest, overriding her chosen chest piece. Her spandex “undershirt” shows up, but the Barbarian Leather chest piece she wears over it vanishes, replaced by the team emblem. Is there a way to disable the team emblem thing while in SG mode? It wrecks the costume I carefully assembled.
This requires a general explanation of several things in COH. First, “Hold” is a different type of power, one that renders an enemy completely unable to act. The powers you listed are “immobilize” abilities, which simply make an enemy unable to move.
Second, the abilities you listed have the standard accuracy for powers, which isn’t terribly high unless you enhance for it, which you should. Low level characters have a “beginner’s luck” accuracy bonus that decreases as you level up, so all powers will begin to miss more if you don’t use enhancements to counteract that. You’ll see a miss as a distinct Miss! popup, assuming you have the combat popup text enabled. If you don’t see that, or Deflect!, which is the target’s defense dodging your attack, it’s not an accuracy issue - the power is on the target and is conferring all its effects. Higher level enemies do have a higher miss rate, although a mere one level isn’t that dramatic, and it affects all powers equally. This is also fairly unique in the category, as most control powers actually have higher than standard accuracy, unless they’re area-effect controls, which usually have much lower than standard. Also, regardless of how high your accuracy is, all abilities always have a 5% chance to miss (or 5% to hit, on the opposite side of the spectrum). When it’s an ability you’re really counting on to save your bacon, you’ll notice that miss a lot more than its frequency might justify 
Third, it matters very much which level 9 mooks you’re talking about. Those immobilize abilities are not a guaranteed immobilize, they simply apply a certain value of strength of immobilize. For most minions and lieutenants, it’s enough to immediately take effect, but for any Boss grade enemy, or enemies which have specific protection to immobilize, it will take repeated applications before the immobilize goes into effect. Vahzilok zombies are a low-level example of an enemy that’s difficult to stop: even though they’re minions, they require boss-strength immobilize to be rooted. You will have to use the immobilize on them twice, and they’ll still only actually be immobilized for the duration that the two effects are overlapping.
Fourth, not all immobilize abilities are equal. Chilblains, among its many other effects (it has a lot), has a snare as well as a root, and on the zombie example, even if the root doesn’t take hold, the snare will still slow them down, as they don’t have slow protection. Ring of Fire will just do some fire damage. Also, some abilities have greater strength than others. The controller version of Chilblains will affect the same zombie in a single application, because it’s just plain stronger than the blaster version. I’m fairly sure all the first-tier Blaster roots are of equal strength in their immobilize, but the secondary effects vary wildly.
Yep. I can’t remember what the button is named exactly, but in the SuperGroup window pane there’s a button marked Settings or Edit or something. The first screen will be a bunch of stuff you can’t edit unless you’re given permissions, but the next screen will be a list of body parts, where you can elect to either use your costume’s colors or your SG’s, with the option to turn the emblem off. Whatever you choose is what will be displayed when you’re in SG Mode, so you can opt to turn everything off and keep your costume as is.
This is honestly a pretty poor implementation, I think; since most SGs want you to leave SG Mode on, what most folks do is use one of their extra costume slots for an SG-specific costume for formal grouping with SG members.
Yeah, if there’s one great failing of the game, it’s that the combat mechanics are pretty complicated and they don’t do much of a job at actually explaining them anywhere. The text power descriptions are pretty vague, and even though they actually show you the power numbers now, for powers like Darkest Night, that’s not real helpful on its own. “-11% chance to hit” sounds pretty mediocre unless you also know that it’s subtracted directly from an enemy’s baseline 45% chance to hit and stacks additively with other hit debuffs and defense buffs.
The game is almost too complex for its own good. Someone familiar with what’s going on under the hood can build disgustingly powerful characters that can trivially solo end-game team content, but on the flip side, someone coming in cold, or worse, with preconceptions from other MMOs, can wind up making an extremely weak character without even realizing it. The gap can be vast and yawning, and I just feel bad for everyone that tries to remake their WoW holy priest in COH only to find out 75+ hours later that they’ve made a fifth wheel for team play.
Still, at least it’s possible to recover. I can see someone making an Empathy/Dark Blast Defender and only taking Empathy powers, then discovering how dumb that is. They could restart, but they can also respec and start taking Dark Blast powers.
The nice thing about City is that it’s basically impossible to permanently lock a character out of offensive potential. Of course, if you decide you want different powersets or a different archetype, then you’re boned, but that’s generally true except in classless games.
Actually I tend to do that early on myself. Early on with weaker enemies and weak enhancements Darkest Night is both overkill and a severe endurance hog (and you should be glad they made Stamina into an inherent instead of having to wait until 20 to get it). But later when you are fighting more serious enemies and can slot it properly for endurance reduction and -tohit it’s a great power. Fearsome Stare at 20 it another great survival tool; best slotted with more -tohit than fear, despite the name. Also, don’t be fooled by the fact that Howling Twilight is technically a resurrection power; it’s enemy targeted, and serves well as a disorient, a slow, a tohit debuff, and a -regeneration power. I often forget that it is supposed to be for resurrecting people.
Settings.
Or if they don’t have a respec, use the second build feature at the trainer and give themselves a pseudo-respec.
Yeah, I couldn’t remember off the top of my head which was which 
Specifically, what I was seeing on the +1-level enemies was sort of a blue frosty effect on their chest, and they would maybe hesitate a bit, but then they’d just come at me full speed. By comparison, casting Chilblains on a same-level enemy would result in the big blue ice crystals rooting them to the spot. On the mission in question, I promise that it failed to immobilize the level 9 enemies every single time. I wish I could remember what those level 9s were named, specifically.
Awesome, thanks
That’s the key thing. It’s not that they’re higher level that’s making them ignore the roots, it’s what type of enemy they are. The frosty chest effect is also Chilblains, or specifically, the movement and attack speed debuff portions of Chilblains. If you see that, that means the attack has landed successfully, they’re just shrugging off the ice-crystal immobilize portion of it. Even when you’re much higher level than them, it still won’t immobilize them in one shot.
Higher level has two effects on control powers: it makes them less accurate, and it reduces their duration. It doesn’t make a control no longer control, except in very roundabout way. An enemy that requires two stacked controls before they’re affected can, with high enough level, reduce the duration of your control effects so much that you simply can’t cast them fast enough anymore to have two overlapped at once. That’s it.
Heh. I play regularly with a “hardcore” supergroup, where we treat any defeat as a permanent death and delete/kick out/stop playing/remake the character. Yes, it’s crazy.
Even on those hardcore teams, where a resurrect is useless, we use Howling Twilight, and it’s so effective we started referring to its distinctive sound effect as “the Sound of Victory!”
How often do you guys get to 50?
Also, it’s gotta be tough for some builds. I mean, for Fire Armor, rezzing is part of the attack chain.
Oh yeah, one more question:
Do I honestly have to click “Agree” to the ToS every freakin’ time I log in?
Sadly yes. And yes, it’s irritating.
But the Stealth Buff is fanastic. In solo play I can just race past so many enemies.
Bloody AGREE! A larger, more artistic map would be far more useful.
Thanks for all the advice and tips. I made a Kinetic Melee/Willpower Mutant Brute Hero and am easilydominating things so far, but am still low level. Jaggy the Fire Blast/Dark Miasma is having some trouble here and there getting knocked down, but after gettign knocked back to the hospital twice I’ve mostly figured it out. I may need to go hunting some lower-level mobs until I can get to level 10.
Actually, let me say this: this is game is a remarkable mix of awesomeness and half-assery. There’s a great deal of good work on some parts, and then thre’s just elementary stupidity vomited up on top. You could fix so much of the crap with a single good week of work.