Man I Miss COH's attitude about gear ...

[Tenzhi]

For the most part, however, getting purples and inf was easy-- you just had to put the time in

I suppose if you have gobs of time just lying around, having to put a great deal of time into each character might seem easy.  And it probably helps to be lucky.  In all the time I played, I think I got hold of a single purple IO recipe and it was a pretty useless one - which is to say I couldn't directly use it and it didn't go for much on the AH.  A fair amount of that time towards the end was spent building up Incarnate abilities on my Elec/Energy Blaster.

In my opinion, if you're more experienced with/putmore time into a game it should show in your skill - both at playing and building a character - rather than in your remarkable loot.  The more CoH became about putting in time to get the shiny loot, the more it became like other MMOGs in that regard.

[LydiaFrost]

Basicly there are two ways to achive a perfect Char.
Luck and Time. Both routes lead to your perfect char, where the Time route is better for the game live, since it keeps players playing. So most MMOs use the occassional lucky drop to motivate the Gamers to invest more Time.

I didnt feel the need to fully deck my char out in Purple IOs. I tried to cover for weaknesses, like end reduction, but CoX never forced me to be Top. My chars were all playable, and fun. The incarnate system helped me even further, since with just a few trials you could get enough threads to buy some needed power ups.

Sure there were people stronger than me, but they still played with me, even if I died sometimes in a Mission or couldnt hit anything because it was set at+4.
The power of CoX was, that your powerlevel was relativ unimportant. That kept me playing and obviously with more playtime I became stronger.

Lydia Frost

[Taceus Jiwede]

I remember having a character who for some reason could always get like these sleep purples.  That character was the only one that ever got purples, but he got them frequently.  Other then that I would just do the tips for the hero merits, save up reward merits and then use them to buy LOTG.  Then sell those LOTG I had bought with merits for influence, which would then fund my main/other characters. It took some time but it worked.  I tend to have bad luck in games so I figured I would find a way that is slightly slower but more steady for income.  Of course once you over a billion inf THEN the purples start dropping.  I would give those to SG and chat channel friends at that point though.

[JetFlash]

It was slightly annoying seeing some people get 3-4 purple drops in a missions while others played just as much and played just as hard and never even seen a purple drop. And of course those getting the good drops keep saying ,"Oh it's easy to make inf." Of course it's easy to make inf when they keep getting IO drops that rake in 50 million to a couple 100 million a piece while the other guy get drops that dont even bring in 1,000 inf if it sale at all.

There was a three day stretch where my luck had changed for the better (for once).  My main tanker got a purple recipe AND a Luck of the Gambler +7.5 Speed recipe running a single ITF.  The next day, my sufficiently IO'ed scrapper scored a purple recipe, and the day after that my main blaster scored another purple (both Armageddons IIRC).   Sold them all off and cleared about 1.2 billion inf, which was promptly spent to IO out the aforementioned tanker. 

Other than that particular week a purple drop was extremely rare for me.  Knew I should have bought a Powerball that week...

[Golden Girl]

I never used purples - I just gave them away

[SARobb]

I never used purples - I just gave them away

IIRC, to many purples could screw up a perfectly awesome build... depending of course, on where you put them.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Ya purple didn't mean good.  I only usually 1 or 2 slotted purps if  at all and that was for a damage or recovery boost.  My Invl/Fire tank didn't have any purps on him.  But then again Invul was already super freaking good.

[RabidWeevil]

Ya purple didn't mean good.  I only usually 1 or 2 slotted purps if  at all and that was for a damage or recovery boost.  My Invl/Fire tank didn't have any purps on him.  But then again Invul was already super freaking good.

Haha, good old Flaming Duffelbag.  But yeah, tankers in general didn't need purps to get great.  I don't think I had any on my Willpower/Martial Arts tank either.

CoH had the perfect middle ground where you could still do the "gear grind" kind of stuff to earn new and interesting little buffs, but it wasn't just farming up a new piece of gear that was slightly better than the last, with the gear parsed into tiers where you had to get enough of one tier to do the content that let you get the next tier and so on.

Basically, in CoH, gear was INTERESTING rather than just a continuation of stat-based progression.

[silvers1]

Heh.  Try Overwhelming Force's -KB proc in Tornado on a Stormie.  Auto-hit Tornado.  It made the 'Nado stay in place (mostly) instead of jumping around to new targets; it would just sit on someone and repeatedly hammer them to the floor while stacking disorient and buzz-sawing their hit points away.  It was easily permed.  It could not be killed or targeted.

I tried to make a Stormie in a couple of pen'n'paper roleplaying games and each time the GM was aghast at the idea that any system might let a player have a self-targeting, auto-hit, big-damage, AoE, unkillable, permanent, control pet. 

Too overpowered, I was told.  I wasn't allowed to have it as my ONLY power.  And Storm had plenty of OTHER powers.

Awww .... dangit.  I never thought of doing that with my stormie. 

[Thunder Glove]

Awww .... dangit.  I never thought of doing that with my stormie. 

I did it with my Robotics/SS Mastermind.  It was great.

The proc was quickly nerfed when used in Tornado or Bonfire (reducing the KB to KD, but also reducing the chance of KD from 100% to 40%), but it was still extremely effective.

I got a second one later on; it went into a Staff/Dark Brute's damage field.  It was beautiful, with everyone around him getting damaged, taunted, feared, stunned, and knocked down, and that's before I hit any attacks at all.

My god I miss this game.  No other game lets you make such crazy-awesome characters.