Frostfire! He is the first really tough fight a soloist will come across. I remember I must have died a dozen times before I beat him with my first character, a blaster (and back then you ended up in the Atlas Park Hospital when you died, yeesh). That was also my first “MMO’s are different from regular games” lesson when I quit and went back the next day and realized I had to do the entire mission from scratch. Seems obvious now but I was new to MMOs then. Some suggestions:
As someone else wrote: get purples. Buy at least three purples from the Nurse and just before the final fight eat them.You will hardly take any hits with them active. Learning the value of purples is like an epiphany in this game.
If you have any kind of ranged attack, try to peel off the minions that are furthest from FF and lead them into the hall and kill them a few at a time. At the very least you should have your Origin attack which is enough to get someone’s attention.
When you do engage FF, don’t waste any attacks on the Fire Imps he summons. They will despawn when you kill him.
Actually give up the mission; I pretty much never do this, but I recall it being an option.
Talk to the contact who gave you a mission and automatically complete it; you can only do this once per 24 hours (I think, been a while since I did this).
“Abandon a mission in progress” simply by switching your active mission to a different one; you’ll get a warning that you will lose progress on the currently-active mission and need to click OK. This is handy for resetting missions when team size changes, as well as for resetting them when you change difficulty. As noted above, logging the character off will also reset mission state.
If these are not available to you (and you’re not dealing with the time limit imposed for choice #2), file a bug report. The switch to Freedom has introduced a variety of bugs and decreased stability overall.
Exactly. People who come to City from other games often seem to underestimate the power of buffs/debuffs, including–maybe especially–inspirations. Even the small ones are cheap, readily available game changers. I agree that purples are the best bang for you buck; three small purples gives you defenses approaching those of a high-level Super Reflexes scrapper, on top of whatever you already have. The math behind this is available at Paragonwiki, if anyone wants details, but the key is that mobs have a base 50% chance to hit you, and your defense stat (which purples add directly to) is subtracted directly from that base before any other modifiers. So, a small purple, which is worth 12.5% Defense, actually reduces the damage you take by 25% on average, and they stack.
The downside to Defense is that a bad run with the random number generator can still kill you. With a high enough Defense, though, it would have to do the equivalent of rolling several natural 20s in a row.
For Frostfire, specifically–
In addition to purples, you probably want at least a couple of Break Frees, because he’s a controller. Don’t pop them preemptively, though–hang onto them in case he mezzes you when you need to move.
Which brings us to the second tip for Frosty: Run away.
Seriously. He won’t chase you very far. You can take some shots at him, hurt him as much as you can, and when you start taking too much damage, run. Once you’re sure he’s not following you, use Rest to recuperate, then go back for another round. He will have regenerated some of the damage, but hopefully not so much that you can’t whittle him down.
My idea was to abandon it, reset my combat parameters, and then re-obtain the mission. I had a weird problem on another character with an AE mission that I couldn’t quit too - the “Quit” button wasn’t appearing in the AE window, and the “Abandon” button was disabled in the Mission window. I finally had to click on “Team” and then “Quit Task Force”.
Ooo, I didn’t realize you could stack those things! Thanks for the tip!
That’s what I was hoping for when I logged that character out and went to bed. Hopefully when I try again the enemies will be adjusted according to the “-1” I selected.
Well, for me it’s not so much that they need to be nerfed. This level 11 character can handle a level 11 Lieutenant just fine. It’s the level 12 Lieutenants that are giving her problems, and they keep showing up in large numbers in missions that are clearly labeled “Level 11”. What’s odd is I’m only having this issue with this one character. None of my “Hero” characters have run into this, nor have my similar-level Villain and Resistance characters. Just this one Loyalist.
Heh. I’ve resorted to just buying all my inspirations from vendors, because I seem to be some kind of magnet for those blue “Breath of Air” (or whatever they’re called) ones. I get piles and piles of them. Why, I don’t know. Running out of Endurance is not a problem I’m having in any way, shape or form, at least at these lower levels. Yet those things drop like candy.
I really starting to enjoy playing my main villain. The redside storyline & missions have a sense of humor to them that is lacking on the blueside
Regarding the “frustration =/= challenge (or fun)” concept Bosstone has mentioned, I ended up sending a polite suggestion on that topic to the author of an AE story I gave up on last night. The description of the story warned that some enemies might have custom power sets, and I think I met those enemies in the second mission of the story. I was on my “main”, who is level 21 and is fully loaded with level 24 DO enhancements, and doesn’t have much trouble fighting enemies at her level. She’s even taken down a few “Boss” enemies solo. But I got into the second mission of this story (and it was an interesting story, no complaints there), and suddenly every enemy I encountered had the ability to deflect my attacks. As a result, she was getting her butt kicked over and over by mere Minions, not because they were hitting hard, but because she just couldn’t hit them with much of anything. So they weren’t going down fast enough, which meant they got to hit her many more times than would normally be expected. Even though she survived the fights against these groups of three Minions, her hitpoints were so depleted that she had to stand around for a few minutes after every single fight to let her health regenerate. And that’s just boring, so I dropped the mission.
Praetoria was sort of mishandled in that it’s the first area in a very long time that was created for levels 1-20. The vast majority of new content that got added to the game before Going Rogue was for levels 30-50.
As a result, the team that created the Praetorian enemies were used to creating high-level enemies that would steamroll you if you didn’t at least have SOs and high-level defenses. They did try to tone the enemies back, but they didn’t go far enough. If you compare Praetoria enemies with enemies of similar level from Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, Praetoria is simply evil.
This is exceptionally ironic when you consider that Going Rogue was originally designed as the new new player experience, and for a while there you had to start in Praetoria and could only make a heroside or villainside character after your Praetorian got to level 20.
If you have three of an unwanted inspiration, you can right-click one of them, select ‘Combine 3 into…’ and choose an inspiration you do want. It frees up some inspiration slots and gets you a useful insp.
You definitely want to get into the habit of using inspirations. Like any consumable, the temptation is to save them until an emergency, but you soon get to where you just don’t use them at all, and they drop so frequently that thinking them as rare things to be hoarded is not at all useful. The more you use insps, the faster you mow through enemies, and the faster insps drop. You’re almost never wanting for inspirations except in protracted boss battles.
One of the marks of a scrub is someone who dies with a full inspiration tray, and it’s obvious when that happens because a teammate will try to hand them an Awaken and won’t be able to.
Custom AE mobs are generally tougher than regular mobs, unless some munchkin is trying to build a farm. They tend to have more powers, and often have powers you don’t see many standard mobs using. I once built an incredibly rude mission full of Storm mobs on a set of floating islands; they were all stealthed with Steamy Mist and had a -Fly power as well as lots of knockback…on the one map I’ve ever found that could actually kill you with falling damage. It actually killed me on my first test run, and I knew what was in there.
I think it’s normal to encounter some even-level and some +1 enemies in an even-level mission. Maybe it’s different solo, but I don’t remember that. I’m never surprised to see +1s here and there. I think it’s intentional, to keep things from being too predictable.
One way to make money, set your search on the AH UI for level 50, then go into the recipe section, under the set IOs. Place bids for 100 or 200 Inf on some of the rare (orange) recipes from the sets. Then sell them to vendors for 10,000 inf each.(It is also possible to buy them cheap, then sell them on the AH for a lot, but that depends on luck, patience, and knowledge of what does and doesn’t sell.) You can start by bidding on just one at low level, then increasing the number you bid on as you sell the early purchases. Soon you regularly spend 1,000 Inf to get 100,000. I usually do this right before I log off, when I get back to the character, they usually have a stack of stuff to sell of.
Yes, it is the Super Tailor access on the Market, for 800 points. You can find a complete listing of everything on the market at this player ran database.
Some people complain about escort missions a lot. I don’t have much problem with them. I just head back to the entrance with my map open, watching the indicator for the NPC I am escorting. If I start to pull away, I stop for a second.
If you really don’t like that stuff being there, I believe you can turn it off in your Map Options at the bottom of the map window. Or you could just close your map.
Mister Rik, AE missions are all set up as Task Forces. The only way to quite them in the middle is by opening the team window and quitting the TF.
Wouldn’t work for me. I’ve got my map window stretched to full-screen. Is it possible to set up two separate map windows? It would be cool if I could have a “permanent” mini-map in the corner and then the full-screen map I can bring up with “M”. But with only one map available to me, I gotta have the big one.
And speaking of maps, I’ve discovered one mission type I really don’t care for: big, wide-open outdoor maps with the objective, “find the McGuffin”. There seems to be at least one of these in most of the longer AE stories I’ve done, and now I’ve encountered a couple “regular storyline” missions like that. My villain, Bruised Violet, got a mission from The Radio to steal some drugs and a list of dropoff points, and then go to Paragon City to make the drops and take the money for herself. She ended up in a section of the city hunting for glowies. I was thinking that, if there was ever a case for marking every objective on a map, that was it. She has the list of locations in her hands, and logically, that should translate to the locations being marked.
OTOH, she got her first Mayhem mission yesterday, and I’ve got to say that was more fun, if easier, than the Safeguard missions my main hero has gotten. Largely because it pointed me right to the bank, something the Safeguard missions haven’t done. It was also kind of fun running around slapping civilians
I know it always asks me if I really want to quit my TF, but every other AE mission I’ve quit in the middle has had a big “Quit Story” button in the middle of the window that comes up when I click the “Architect Options” button at the top of my screen. Click that button, and then it asks if I want to quit my TF. I’d never needed to open the Team window before. This particular story, that “Quit Story” button wasn’t there.
The minimap in the corner IS the one you can bring up with M. I’ve never really been in a situation in City where I had to have it out to full-screen, though I do admittedly play at a high resolution.
You cover your entire screen with your map? Really? I’ve never needed to see anything on it the close up so I just leave it small. Just zooming in has handled everything if I really wanted to see close up. And it lets me have the map open on TFs/Trials when I am checking on the rest of my team.
The big out side hunts can be a pain. The good news is, you can learn pretty quickly where to find most of the stuff in the regular missions. There just aren’t that many spawn points for objects in the outside maps. The bad news for AE authors is you can’t control where stuff spawns at all on those maps. The general controls you have on regular maps (which can be a hassle to use themselves) don’t work at all on outside maps.
I find Mayhem missions more fun than Safeguards because I get to break stuff as I go. It can be especially fun on an MM, just set the minions on Aggressive and let them wreak havoc.
Yeah, I knew that. What I meant was “is there a way to set up two instances of the map, one permanently visible and one I can call up as needed”.
Blame my age and eyes. With the map in a small box at the top of my screen, if I zoom out so the whole map fits in the box the details get lost. On indoor maps, that means I can’t distinguish where doorways and side passages and such are, but if I zoom in then I can’t see where the passages lead and I keep running down dead-end corridors or into areas I already cleared. On outdoor maps, at least the main city zone maps, I have a hard time when the various contact/location markers get all bunched up and go scooting around when I mouse over them. I had a heck of a time trying to click on Blue Steel’s marker when Ms. Liberty sent me to talk to him because I hadn’t figured out yet how to zoom in; there was Blue Steel’s marker, a separate mission-objective marker, and several vendors near him, and when I point my mouse in there to target him after I got off the monorail, all those markers went scooting out from under my mouse. Basically, I like being able to see the “big picture”. It’s easy enough to just call up the map as needed and then dismiss it when I’m done.
Been playing this a lot lately, first out of nostalgia since I played CoH for several months before WoW launched, then just because it’s a lot of fun. Was trying to upgrade to VIP after I decided I could waste a month or two playing this, but it seems NCSoft doesn’t want my money - they reject both my Paypal and my card, both of which work just fine anywhere else (Amazon, Steam etc). Annoys me to no end, it does.
Yeah, they have some issues with overseas transactions. In the US, the perform a $0.00 transaction to make sure the account is real for fraud protection. And in Europe, a $0.00 transaction is sometimes seen as the prelude to a fraud attempt. People do manage to get stuff through, but I am not sure how. Checking with NCSoft CS is your best bet unfortunately.
Regarding +1 mobs in missions - in AE, you can choose between options for level distribution within a mission. It’s been a while, so I don’t recall precisely, but I think it’s something like:
even throughout
hard beginning (i.e., +1 minions to start)
hard end (i.e., +1 minions to finish)
The idea being that this is more interesting. I usually like seeing the groups of +1 minions when soloing; they’re worth more XP and not that much harder to defeat. The key is to know your attack chain and how you control the situation. Be willing to run away if things go pear-shaped.
The system in the AE is the same one in the regular missions. Even level is just that to you, Ramping up is -2 levels up to +1 from the beginning, Ramping down starts at +1 and goes down to -2 at the end. But all of them have a variable +1 for any individual spawn, which can cause some real problems. And they are affected by your mission difficulty settings. If you have -1 level selected, you will be fighting greys at some point on either of the ramping choices.
I don’t understand the question. As far as I know, my “view” is default.
I use the arrow keys next to my number pad for forward, back, and strafe movements with my left hand. I use the mouse (in my right hand) to click on the action bar, and to change character facing (right mouse button). I move my left hand to smack the backspace key for “target nearest”.
The distinction I’m talking about is first-person view versus a view from behind the character. You can adjust this with the scrollwheel. If you’re in first-person or close third-person, the game may not think the critter you’re trying to target is in your field of view. You could try backing out to a more distant view to see if it makes a difference with your targeting.
Is there a way to set up my camera control to work similarly to the way it works in WoW when moving? Specifically, use my right mouse button to steer my character (both games work this way), but use my left mouse button to change my camera angle without affecting my character’s facing/direction of travel (WoW works this way by default, but so far I don’t see how to do it in CoH)?
The thing is, when I’m flying, I don’t like the camera to be almost directly behind my character as it is by default. I like it to be behind and above, at about a 45° angle (or maybe a bit steeper) so that I can see the ground in front of my character. That’s just more “comfortable” for me. Same thing with ground travel — I like to be looking down at a slightly steeper angle than the default. It’s also nice to be able to look behind my character, or to one side or the other, without having to stop and turn my character around.
I see how to rotate the camera by holding down a key (Page Up by default), but it would be nice if I could do it without holding down a key. I guess what I’m looking for is a way to separate “mouse look” from “mouse steering”. Though I guess one problem is the fact that CoH uses <Left click> to interact with objects/NPCs, where WoW uses <Right click>. I guess I’m just used to being able to adjust my camera angle on the fly, at will.
One: You can rotate the camera by holding the middle mouse button or scroll wheel, provided you have one. If you don’t, I’m not sure. I’m fairly sure I mentioned that earlier in this thread.
Two: Unfortunately, the camera when flying is borked. While you can rotate it around your character horizontally, you cannot move it above or below; even when moving the camera, your pitch changes to keep the camera directly lined up with your body. I hate the behavior, but it’s always been like that.
