Thanks And yeah, this was mostly an exercise in coming up with a theme and building characters around it. A few of those characters are unlikely to see much actual play time (in particular, Mother Sun, Erdmädchen, and Fille de Jupiter), simply because their archetypes (defender, controller, and tanker respectively) are more team-oriented and don’t have enough damage output to solo effectively. I leveled Erdmädchen to 6 last night, and while her survivability was great, it just took way too long to defeat her enemies. And looking at her upcoming powers, there’s not a whole lot of damage going on there.
OTOH, I also leveled Venus Lass to 6, and had an absolute blast doing it. I’d never tried the Gravity Control or Earth Assault PSs before, but I have to say they make a great combination.
Meanwhile, I’m still locked out of my main character, Flaminatrix (who had just hit 42 when everything went haywire). The Paragon Market is still insta-crashing my game client, and Flaminatrix is still stuck with the PM window open. I’m slowly working through the instructions Support gives me to try, and I know they have certain steps they need to go through. But it’s frustrating when they’re walking me through all sorts of fiddling with my graphics settings when it’s clear even to me that this isn’t a graphics issue. I mean, I can select a server where I have no characters, so that there is no 3D model of any kind on the Character Select screen, click the Store button, and promptly crash.
Regarding soloing some ATs - I suspect you’ll find them more effective than you think if you give them a try. There are definitely some powersets that work better than others, but you can find a way to solo pretty much anything.
The “support” ATs tend to have lots of damage mitigation, which means you can stay in the battle longer - I find it easier to solo a defender than a blaster at times, because of the glass cannon problem. If I can’t kill things fast enough, I will die, because I have no way to heal myself or debuff my opponents in a meaningful way.
Try an Illusion controller, by the way - Deceive is better than a hold, because it makes enemy mobs switch sides. The downside is that you don’t get XP for enemies defeated by Deceived foes, but I find that a totally worthwhile tradeoff. You also get Phantom Army at 18, which is really nice. I’m working on an Ill/Emp controller right now, which is great fun in a duo. Ill/Rad should be very solo-able, with monstrous debuffing potential. Some temp powers for additional attacks would be nice, but is not essential.
Not quite. You get no XP if they are defeated only by confused enemies; you get a share of the XP if you damage them, a bigger share the more damage you do.
My only level 50 hero Entropic Girl is an Ill/Rad, and yes it’s very soloable (and powerful). Ill/Rad was the build that soloed Lusca the giant squid back in the day, there was a thread about it.
One of several builds, actually. That guy’s hobby was apparently soloing giant monsters with controllers and defenders. There have been quite a few dark defenders that have soloed archvillains and GMs, too, but it was always time-consuming.
That’s quite a bit easier now, of course, with the advent of Incarnate powers–my emp/dark defender can solo AVs these days. I played him mostly solo all the way to 50, though, long before Incarnates came about. (Culex recently jacked his costume and made a character named “Solo Empath” to tease me.) I even held the top of one of the kill boards with him for several months, back when the info terminals still worked.
The Rad/Fire and Plant/Storm should be extremely soloable. Storm has a relatively steep learning curve, but even without optimal use of the Storm powers, Plant is very powerful.
I have a Plant/Storm too; Greenwrath on Virtue. A pretty powerful combo, thematic, and pretty spectacular in action. Also starts getting strong early with the Seeds/Freezing Rain/Roots combo, which is nice.
I’m not sure. I’ve read two things–that they were being used by RMT spammers to target people, and that they caused performance issues. That’s not from any official source, however.
My understanding is that the information kiosks were introduced as leaderboards for PVP, PVP flopped hard, and the kiosks were simply never repurposed.
ETA: Never mind, the kiosks were added in Issue 2, well before PVP. Still, I think the end result is the same: nobody actually cared about what they reported, and they never got repurposed to something useful.
I used to use them all the time to check where my characters were ranked. I even sought out a few rivals to team with. What a waste. The devs should just remove them if they won’t reactivate them.
When I started playing they would rank the stats for players in that Zone. Damage, Healing and a bunch of others. At some point not long after they were deactivated. I read in the forums that an update bugged them and since they were mainly used by Spammers, the devs decided to leave them alone and shut them down.
It seems to me they should at this point probably either re-purpose them for something or remove them.
Kiosks should give you access to the Auction House and difficulty level settings. That would make sense (in the case of the AH, as much sense as the auction house remote access power does).
I miss the information on the kiosks, though. And I think with Freedom, they may bring the kiosks back.
Ah, that makes sense. They could get names of players who were offline, increasing their ability to send spam emails. Those seem to be pretty much gone now, I’ve noticed.
Now that the Time of Madness is over, how did everyone fare with double XP? I got my languishing dark/dark cheerleader to 50 at last, ran my tiny Titan Weapon scrapper to 20, and made minor progress on several other characters. Nothing huge, in part because I also spent quite a bit of time running my ill/storm in DA for Incarnate stuff.
I did jack all. I spent a couple hours powering my level 48 Titan Weapons Brute to 50 and got an Elec/Fire Dominator to level 14 with two DFB runs, but that’s pretty much it. I’ve got a project with a self-imposed deadline and I’ve been goofing off far too much, so I didn’t get to enjoy the weekend.
No matter, really; I have so many Experienced temp powers from vet rewards and super packs that the next several characters I play will never want for XP.
With my 14-hour works shifts on Fri-Sat, Sunday was pretty much all I had. I mostly played low-level toons, but I did get Bruised Violet, my main villain, to level 30. She’s only my second level 30 character; my main hero, Flaminatrix, is lvl 42. I’d probably have my #2 hero to 30 by now, except I inadvertently clicked the “Shop” button in the Wentworth’s interface while playing her, and now I’m locked out of her the same way I’m locked out of my main.
And speaking of Flaminatrix, it’s now 20 days that I haven’t been able to play her I did go ahead and roll a clone of her on a different server, but I’ve only gotten the clone up to level 7 so far. And darn it, Flaminatrix #1 is sitting there with over 30 million Inf that I can’t access to bankroll my alts. Fortunately, Teardrop, my level 25 SS/Inv brute on Defiant, has gotten lucky with some pricey salvage drops and has about 15 million Inf, so she’s taking up the slack.
I got 6 characters up 3-4 levels by doing Moonfires (and really burned out on that TF). I got my Energy/Traps Feloni up to 28 on a Renault, my Ice/Storm Corruptor Winterqueen from 32-35 on another.I got my Bots/Storm Deus Ex Machina from 22-24 solo, so now he has both Protector Bots. My Fire/Storm controller got to 38 on an ITF, and right before having to go to bed I soloed my Grav/Rad long enough to get him to Singularity. Plus some levels here and there on various characters.
Beast Mastery was released today. So far seems pretty fun. Only bad part is I had this great Idea to make a Mutant beast master so I said…I’ll make her look like an Animal. I discovered that Bioluminescence with the right colors looked a lot like tiger strips so I went with that. Added some details here and there and then finished the costume and went into the game when it it hit me: I created a Cat Girl!
It happens to the best of us. Even I have a catgirl on my account. (She was made by my niece, who was playing with the costume creator, and has been standing at the zone-in point in Outbreak for about six years. Still, I haven’t deleted her, and that means I’m at least somewhat responsible for her.)
And yeah, this was mostly an exercise in coming up with a theme and building characters around it. A few of those characters are unlikely to see much actual play time (in particular, Mother Sun, Erdmädchen, and Fille de Jupiter), simply because their archetypes (defender, controller, and tanker respectively) are more team-oriented and don’t have enough damage output to solo effectively. I leveled Erdmädchen to 6 last night, and while her survivability was great, it just took way too long to defeat her enemies. And looking at her upcoming powers, there’s not a whole lot of damage going on there.
I did go ahead and roll a clone of her on a different server, but I’ve only gotten the clone up to level 7 so far. And darn it, Flaminatrix 
