I just finished that Red Coral mission arc on my main villain, Bruised Violet. That was … epic. Especially the ending!
I’ve gotten more of my characters into CIT, along with uploading in-game images to replace several of the Character Selection Screen shots I uploaded initially. I’ve noticed one oddity with that site, though - it sometimes arbitrarily decides for itself whether a character is a Hero or Villain, regardless of what I specify. If you look at my list, check out the characters “Chowderhead” and “Triple-N”. The first is a villain, but has been given the “Hero” thumbnail; the second is a hero, but has been given the “Villain” thumbnail, (though the small icons to the right of the thumbnails show the correct factions). This has happened with several other characters. If it was just the thumbnail it wouldn’t be a problem, but while attempting to manually enter badges for one of my heroes I discovered it was giving me the list of villain badge names (for those badges that can be earned by either side, but have different names). Example: My hero character, Teardrop. Click on one of the “Toggle Details” links, and you’ll see the “Villain” versions of the badge names. Obviously, this makes trying to find the badge names very difficult. I had to open the Badge Hunter site in another tab, to the page that showed the Hero/Villain badges side-by-side so I could choose the right ones. Pain in the neck. I don’t think I’m going to bother entering badges any more.
I got some good advice in Help chat the other night, regarding enhancements. I’d been getting frustrated at the way Brutes in particular seem to just burn through Endurance, and somebody told me to slot 3 “Endurance Modification” enhancements into Stamina. OTOH, I’m kind of puzzled about why some powersets drain Endurance so badly while others don’t. For example, my Fire Blast/Fire Manipulation hero, Flaminatrix, has never had problems with running out of Endurance, even at low levels (leading to my wondering why those Breath of Air inspirations dropped so frequently). Meanwhile, my Assault Rifle/Devices blaster has to stop after every 3-4 enemies to let her Endurance recover. My Dark Melee/Dark Armor brute runs out of Endurance all the time, while my Super Strength/Invulnerability brute has no Endurance issues.
Also, is Kinetic Melee just a weak powerset? I was playing with that power set last night and was astonished at how many times I had to hit the bad guys before they would go down.
Well, that was the easiest 15 million Influence I’ve ever acquired, though it seems I’ve obtained it due to a programming glitch or oversight, so I’m not going to push it for more (and may report it as a “bug” so that I don’t get busted for an “exploit” or something).
Basically, I wanted to change one of my main’s costumes, since I’ve just unlocked the “Tech Sleek” armor set. But a complete costume redesign was going to cost about 800k. I remembered somebody here (I think) mentioning switching over to a level 1 secondary spec to avoid the high prices, so I flipped over to the secondary spec and proceeded with the costume change. It showed me a “price” of -7,600,000 Inf. And when I continued on it gave me 7.6 million Inf, while failing to actually change my costume. So I tried again, and got another 7.6 million, and again no costume change. I went from having a little over 19 million Inf to 34.3 million just like that.
Well, disregard that. The “bonus” 15.2 mill went away on its own.
I just came across this thread on the CoH forums:
It was originally posted a year ago, so some of you may have already seen it, but I wanted to share it just in case. It’s quite possibly one of the funniest things I’ve read on a forum in a long time 
My favorite bit, in the section on herding enemies while in a group:
“Advanced players may find it more rewarding to die quickly while out of line of sight of the rest of the team, or while trying to bring the spawn back to the team. Ideally, the tank will die precisely as everyone else starts fighting, allowing aggro to be spread evenly among the blaster.”
(bolding mine)
One of the worst PUGs I’ve ever been in did just that. All the glass cannons wandered off, then started saying things like “why doesn’t our tank have Taunt?”
Hello? I have taunt but I’m over here under this pile of mobs! Dropped those idiots when I got to the hospital.
Try a team like that from an empath’s perspective. If I am to help you, you must be close to me, or at least in line of sight. When you split up so much that it is not possible to have LOS to more than on of you at a time, I can only help one of you…and frankly, if you’re that stupid, there’s only so much I can do. Clear Mind, alas, only works on the character.
Slotting End Mod is one of those fundamental things that we forget to mention because it’s so important, if you know what I mean. Sorry we didn’t go over that. While we’re on the subject of enhancements, you are (I hope) aware that Enhancement Diversification means that you get diminishing returns from enhancements when you slot more than 3 (or more than 2, for high-level IOs) enhancements, right?
I am going to guess that the reason you’re seeing some characters have more End issues than others is due to toggles - Dark Armor has lots of toggle powers, which continuously drain Endurance, while Invulnerability has a number of inherent powers that are simply always on at no End cost.
Your /Dev blaster is probably running Targeting Drone, which drains End all the time that it is on. To counteract this, slot and Endurance Reduction enhancement (or two, if you can afford the slots) in toggle powers, along with Endurance Modification in Stamina.
Hasten also creates Endurance issues, in two ways: by decreasing recharge time, it lets you fire off powers more often (and thus increase endurance cost per unit of time), and it costs End when it wears off. Don’t bother slotting End Reduction in it, though - just slot 3xRecharge and call it good. 
Kinetic Melee is decent when fully slotted, but its damage type is smash, and many/most low-level enemies are resistant to smash and lethal damage. I have a 35 Kinetic Melee/Shield scrapper, and he’s… okay. Damage output is pretty good, but I find the attack animations annoying.
Also be sure to use Endurance Reductions in your attack powers. I’ve heard it suggested that an EndRx in an attack is worth 2-3 toggles.
For example, Buckshot costs 10.192 endurance per activation and can be activated every 8 seconds. If you hit it every time it refreshes, that’s 1.27 endurance per second while you’re in combat.
Targeting Drone consumes 0.156 endurance per second. I believe it’s per second but toggles vary on how often they ‘activate’. Even if it was five times a second though, that would still only be 0.78 per second and it’s not ‘activating’ anywhere near that.
You almost certainly aren’t running out of endurance when you’re just standing around or moving between missions (unless you use Teleport), you’re running out in combat. A 30% endurance reduction enhancement is worth a lot more in Buckshot than in Targeting Drone. The down side, of course, is giving up the slot’s potential accuracy, damage, recharge, etc. You can work around this by using the Invention system if you have access to it. Otherwise, I’d just use the slot anyway and comfort yourself in knowing that you won’t be doing ANY damage if you’re out of endurance and can’t fire off any attacks.
This doesn’t mean not to use EndRx in your toggles but realize that the major offenders are primarily your click powers, not your toggles.
Also; for Dark Armor the biggest culprit for high endurance cost is Dark Regeneration. It’s a great power but an endurance pig; I slot the equivalent of 2 SO Endurance Reduction in it as soon as I can.
I’ve seen the loading-screen tip that says you can slot multiples of the same enhancement, but there will be diminishing returns.
That makes sense. I figured toggle vs. auto had something to do with it.
Those “windups” are pretty … amusing.
Oh, I finally have all of my characters entered over at CIT, complete with in-game screenshots: @Mister Rik's Public Profile - City Info Tracker
ETA: I just upgraded my system to Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”. Holy crap, what a difference improved drivers make. This game runs smooth like butter now, and I’ve been able to “up” some of my graphics settings.
Wait. The CityInfoTracker application works on a Mac?
Nope. I’m just using the CIT site to keep track of all my characters in one place, so I enter and update them manually. And since I have to update them manually, I’m only keeping track of badges on a handful of “main” characters.
I was playing one of my low-level brutes, Teardrop, last night in Steel Canyon and annoyingly ended up getting two consecutive street-sweeping missions from the same contact. Both missions had the same objective: “Defeat 10 Council”, and the same basic reason: “The Council is causing trouble in Steel Canyon…” Lemme say I’m not sure why the contact needed me to deal with this — the 5th Column seemed to have the situation well in hand 
Seriously, Council mobs were as scarce as hen’s teeth. I found a very few lieutenants standing on boxes (doing their recruitment speeches, I guess), but other than that every Council mob I found was either unconscious on the ground, surrounded by a squad of 5th Column, or else engaged in a running firefight with the 5th Column. The result was I had to beat up 3-5 5th Column mobs for every Council mob I defeated.
I’m working on putting together the Devastation IO set on Flaminatrix. I’m curious about slotting the IO sets - am I better off slotting them all into the same power? I know it doesn’t matter for the purpose of getting the set bonuses, but I can see that putting them all into the same power will end up making that one power vastly more powerful.
I’m thinking “Yes, put them all in the same power”, mainly because the boosts on an individual piece of the set are smaller than the boosts from a same-level, single-stat SO. For example, If I have a +ACC/+DAM IO, the boosts it provides to those by itself are only 24%, while the individual ACC and DAM SOs provide 38% or thereabouts. SO since the IO is going to have to replace an SO I already had slotted, slotting just the one IO into a power is going to decrease something, no matter which SO I replace with the IO. But if I slot all the IOs into the same power, by the time I have the full set I’ll end up greatly increasing everything.
Did that make any sense?
Invention IOs have to be in the same power for the set bonus. You can’t split Kinetic Combat between three different powers for instance and get the bonus.
You can use Devastation in multiple powers and stack the set bonuses (up to five times) such as “Minor Increase Accuracy” x5. I just made that bonus up since I don’t know Devastation’s bonuses off hand.
Another tactic is to forgo the set bonuses and mix different IO sets. For instance, using a 30% Damage/Accuracy/Recharge from two different ranged sets into a single ranged power to get +60% Dmg/Acc/Rchg between two enhancement slots. I haven’t played for a while so I don’t know what the market is like. Last I played, low level enhancements were hard to find so this “frankenslotting” was getting difficult to do cheaply.
I think a bit of clarification is in order: to get the set bonuses, the IOs must be in the same power. With that understanding, there are two main approaches to slotting IOs–slotting for bonuses and frankenslotting. Most strong builds go for a mix of the two.
Slotting for bonuses is straightforward. You try to put as many IOs of the same set in a power as possible, to get the maximum number of bonuses. Individual set bonuses are mostly rather puny, but they add up (at least until you have five of any given bonus–after that, no more of that bonus apply). It’s often not the most efficient use of slots; many sets have enough of at least one enhancement type to put you past the point of diminishing returns for that type. It would be more efficient to use one or more of the slots to enhance some other factor, or to use the slot in a different power entirely.
Consider an extreme case, the Apocalypse purple IO set. Slotting all six of them adds up to 145.76% damage enhancement, but you only get to use 101.86% of that, due to diminishing returns. Meanwhile, the total accuracy enhancement in the power is 59.62%, the endurance discount is 33.13%, and the recharge reduction is 89.92% (and already beginning to diminish). In terms of simple power efficiency, you’d be better off enhancing accuracy and/or endurance reduction. You’re basically spending a slot to get the sixth set bonus (which is a fairly unimpressive +5% defense to Psi damage).
That’s where frankenslotting comes in; it’s mixing and matching IO set enhancements in a given power to maximize the enhancement to that power. You’ll pick up some set bonuses along the way, but they’re not the focus. Looking at the Apocalypse set again, we could ditch the pure Damage IO from the set, and replace it with the Accuracy/Damage/Endurance IO from Thunderstrike. That brings the damage down to 97.09%, but increases the accuracy to 79.74% and the endurance reduction to 54.33%. By sacrificing ~4% damage and a weak set bonus, you’ve increased the total enhancement of the power by 36.55% (and probably saved a couple hundred million influence, besides–Thunderstrike is an Uncommon, while Apocalypse is a Very Rare).
Looking at the Devastation set you’re working on, we can see that if you slot the full set, at level 50, you’d have the following values:
Acc 66.25
Dam 97.89 (diminished from 119.25)
End 45.05
Rech 66.25
Total: 275.44
Set Bonuses: 12% Regen (good), 2.251% Health (not bad), 3% Damage buff (not bad for a blaster), 3.3% Hold resist (weak), 3.75% Defense to Psi (weak)
Swap the Acc/Dam and Dam/End IOs for the Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/End and Dam/End/Rech IOs, and you get:
Acc 60.95
Dam 96.3 (diminished from 108.65)
End 60.95
Rech 85.71
Total: 303.91
Set Bonuses: 12% Regen (good), 2.251% Health (not bad), 3% Damage buff (pretty good for a blaster), 2% End recovery (weak)
So, that trades in a little accuracy, a tiny amount of damage, and two weak bonuses for substantially improved endurance reduction and recharge, plus one weak bonus. It may also save you a couple of million influence, because the Thunderstrike IOs don’t require rare salvage to make. (The recipes may cost more, though; Thunderstrike is a pretty popular set.) This is a pretty good trade, especially since the power will have a Hold proc from Devastation–you’ll want to put it in a fast power and fire it often to make the most of the proc, so recharge and endurance reduction are particularly valuable.
Sometimes it’s worth trading off the efficiency of individual powers for set bonuses. My main, for example, has a build that is designed to provide him with a lot of ranged defense. As a result, I have a couple of full Thunderstrike sets slotted to get the 2.5% ranged defense from the 6th set bonus, even though that leaves the powers seriously over-enhanced for damage.
It’s a good idea to plan out your build in advance, and have an overall goal for it. Look at the things the character has trouble with, and aim for enhancements and bonuses that will improve those areas. If you get clobbered a lot, look for defense bonuses; if you run out of endurance often, look for endurance reduction enhancements and unique IOs that give endurance bonuses.
Okay, thanks for the explanations. It looks like I may need to run the Invention tutorial missions again, just for a “refresher course” (it’s been a while since I last did that). I don’t remember seeing the part where IO sets had to be slotted in the same power; I just remember something about how an individual set IO was “unique”, which I misunderstood to mean a character could only have one of that particular IO, total. Or is all that explained somewhere other than the tutorial at the University?
Fortunately, I had already slotted the first two Devastation set IO’s I’ve obtained (the Acc/Dam and Dam/Rech) into the same power
There’s varying grades of unique. The most common version is that you can’t have the exact same named IO in one power. So you can’t have two or more Devastation Acc/Dams in one power, but you can have as many Devastation Acc/Dams as you have powers that will take it, one to a power.
Then there are genuinely Unique IOs. These provide significant bonuses, such as +3% Defense (trust me, it matters), added Regeneration, added Recovery, and so on. Also, Purple/Very Rare set IOs are Unique.
Common IOs (the ones that are just Invention: Accuracy) can be slotted without restriction.
Heh, yeah, my blaster will take all the +Defense she can get 
I forgot to add that you can only have one genuinely Unique IO in an entire build. That probably goes without saying, but given the degrees of ‘unique’ that distinction should probably be made anyway.
I have been playing since 2008 and never knew you can use the same IO set on more than one power. I knew you could mix and match but I thought once you had a certain set IO you couldn’t have another copy of that same one…you learn something new everyday!