M Your total hours in game on your current character.
Well, it certainly took long enough, but Flaminatrix became my first level 50 character this evening 
Long!? You folks don’t know how easy you have it these days. It took me years, years I say, to get my first character to level 50! Years!!! And some day, I am certain I will get another one to that lofty height. Oh, and GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
So who else is having a heck of a fun time with water blast? Weak as all get out, at least it is on my defender, but so much fun!
But isn’t that only because the game was a few years old before they raised the level cap to 50? 
In my case, I blame my overabundance of alts for taking 10 months to get to 50 on the first one.
My water blaster is only level 9, but the PS feels more powerful than other blaster sets, at low levels anyway.
I made a water blast/ice dom corruptor with the name Wet Willie, who just reached level 30, and it’s a lot of fun. Best on big teams; solo is rough with few defenses. The whirlpool is awesome for damage over time.
A friend on Victory made a water blaster called Aunt Flo, and colored the water effects red.
Congrats. Did you notice that the level-up fireworks for 50 are different from the others? Or is that just me?
Rambling…
Dangerosa and I are playing again, after a Diablo III-induced hiatus. We’ve started yet another pair of alts. These are on Defiant; I’ve made Scraptacular again, this time as a Street Justice/Willpower scrapper. He’s not superhuman, he’s just really pissed off. 
Dangerosa is playing with the Time set, finally - she made a Time/Psychic defender named Trendline.
We just hit level 10, so we’re just a few hours in, but the early going is the most fun - new powers keep popping up, and you feel like things are going so fast. I guess that’s why I have so many alts - not as many as Lok, but that’s a really high bar.
I do have three characters at 50, though - Thermocline (Fire/Fire blaster), Doctor Supernatural (Fire-Rad controller) and Truck Driving Elvis (SS/WP brute). Thermo is old enough that he hit 50 before Enhancement Diversification, and he hasn’t been respecced - still has 5 slots in Stamina.
I’ve been thinking of taking one of the 50s out - probably Elvis - and doing Incarnate content in Dark Astoria. He’s on Protector, where we put the Urban Legends. Anyone who’s tried that care to give me some pointers?
I still haven’t hit 50 with Shadow Stranger. I think I left him at 47.
Apparently the level-up fireworks change every 10 levels, and somebody on the official forums made a video showing them all in sequence so that you can actually see the difference. Alas, I have no link; I saw it a while ago.
I’m up to 85 of them so far Now that Flaminatrix is 50, I have no characters in the 40s. My highest characters after her are:
Teardrop: level 35 SS/Inv brute (hero)
Bruised Violet: level 32 DM/DA brute (villain)
Cobalt Claw: level 31 Claws/Inv scrapper (vigilante)
White Orchid: level 31 Energy/Energy brute (hero)
Steffi McAllister: level 28 Dual Blades/Energy scrapper (hero)
Incinerata: level 27 Fire/Fire scrapper (hero)
Shocking Pink: level 22 Electric/Electric scrapper (hero)
Brain Cloud: level 20 PsyBlast/DM blaster (hero)
Energy Ellie: level 20 Energy/Mental Manip blaster (hero)
Tabitha Target: level 20 Archery/DM blaster (hero)
Mandy Clark: level 20 Street Justice/Willpower stalker (hero)
All the rest are under level 20.
Bruised Violet and White Orchid up there are sisters. Their backstory is somewhat involved, but the gist is that they were orphans growing up on the streets in an undetermined 3rd-world country (where will I find brown-skinned, green-eyed people?). As teenagers they were abducted and held captive for several months by a magic-wielding madman who subjected them to horrific magical experimentation. This caused their own magic-based powers to manifest, and they were able to defeat their captor and escape. They eventually made their way to Paragon City and worked together as heroes for a while, but their ordeal affected each of them differently — White Orchid came to believe it was the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak, while Bruised Violet took the lesson that only the strong survive — and BV veered off into villainy and relocated to the Rogue Isles.
How about a question:
I’ve gotten a handful (3, I think) of Enhancement Catalysts from SuperPacks. I figure Flaminatrix can make the best use of them at this time, but I read this bit on ParagonWiki:
“Note: Standard and Catalyzed Enhancements do not contribute to each other’s Set Bonuses. Having two standards and one Superior of the same set will not count as a 3-slotted set, but rather a 2-slotted standard and 1-slotted Superior.”
It also mentions that currently, they only work with AT Enhancements. Flaminatrix currently has the Blaster AT set 5-slotted, with a 6th that I’m using Converters on in an attempt to turn it into the one I’m missing (five unsuccessful attempts so far).
If I understand the above correctly, I’m assuming that I should wait until I have six Catalysts before using them (and have that 6th AT enhancement properly converted), so that I can catalyze the whole set at once. Does that sound right?
It was actually only a few months. Level 50 was added in Issue #1. And there were people complaining that it took so long to get there. I just spent a lot of time on alts.
And that is pretty much my story with alts. Except I never get to play at all anymore. 
Haven’t been home in 2 1/2 weeks, and when I am there, it is usually for 1 day, which is not enough time to do necessary stuff, let alone spend time playing COH. I don’t even have a Street Justice version of JB yet. I need a better job. (i.e. one that pays really well, but I don’t have to actually leave my house or work. :p)
Found it.
Cool. My graphics have never been good enough to notice any difference. Started to save for a much better machine, but it will be months before I can get it. Then I will just need more time to use it.
The first time I saw the level 50 fireworks was when Justice Blues (the original one, on Virtue) leveled to 50. I was on Thermocline, and we were up against Infernal, I think.
Is CoH free to play now?
Yep, it’s been free for a year or so now. I think the extras you get for subscribing are worth it, but you can have a lot of fun without paying.
Gang, I’m about to make my badger, Sky Hook, into a villain. I don’t really want to be a villain for any longer than needed to get all the badges I can get. Any advice?
I’ve already filled up the Day Job bars for all the Rogue Isles jobs, so I’ll get those badges very quickly. I plan to go through all the arcs in Oroboros, just to be a completist.
He’s an energy/energy/force blaster, level 50 +3. He has all his incarnate slots filled except for Hybrid (only done Magisterium once), though not all are tier 4 yet. I figure Efficiency Expert should be easier for an Incarnate. (He actually has Pither as a contact, having done a few newspaper mishes in Grandville as a Vigilante.)
I spent some time on Flaminatrix picking up all of the sewer exploration badges. I was amused by how the text of those badges is some of the best, most dramatic writing in the game 
I have been playing for years and have a wide variety of levels and have never once noticed this…neat.
Eh, I don’t think it’s graphics quality so much as it’s the amount of time it takes between levels - you just forget what it looked like last time and so don’t notice that it’s different this time.
Heck, sometimes it surprises me how slow leveling can be when soloing. I was playing Teardrop and noticed she was only two bubbles away from level 36. “Hey, one more mission ought to do it,” I thought. It took eight missions, and that was doing full clears of each map (including beating many of those Freakshow twice), in addition to having the XP bonus from being logged out in a police station and earning the Law Enforcer day job badge.