And the mask comes off.

[Ankhammon]

Dominators were kind of tricky. If you played one before the Dominator buffs that came later certainly it could lead to frustration. If you were a person that utilized IO's then you could achive Perma-Dom. Once you got there... Dominators become a very strong class because of their ability to control, their resistance to Mezzing and the damage they can put out..

But yes it can be rough going..but once you get there.. you can steam roll...

My Fire/Psi regularly farmed the wall in Cimerora for drops and influence.. I had an Ice/Thorn that would make scrappers ask me.. what the heck is that ??

In all honesty I think ANY toon can be played well in this game.. Some combos will work better than others in circumstances but anything can be effective..

Did you finish the Ice/Thorn? I started one of those and got into my 30s with it, but never got it completed. Were you ever able to solve the alpha issue with it? For me, it was either I died on the first volley or I was fine. Never anything in between.

[Pyromantic]

My first character was a blaster and my last alt was a blaster. I loved the blaster playstyle and so I designed one specifically based on using range as my best defense. I chose Sonic/Ice/Ice as the best ranged choice.

When I got the game the first character I made was a Sonic/Ice blaster.  I still feel an attachment to that character of course, though I never got it to 50.  The funny thing is that the character was on the control-heavy side, and I found myself paying more attention in a fight to using Sirens Song, Screech, Ice Patch and Shiver than to getting the most damage in.  So it occurred that perhaps I really wanted to play a controller instead.

I made a Fire/Kin, though perhaps not for the reasons people would expect.  In the mid-30s on my blaster, I teamed with a Fire/Storm and was impressed by the imps.  I decided that I wanted a more buff-oriented secondary to buff those imps, and /Kin looked like a good choice.  I had no concept of farming or powerlevelling at the time, and in fact that character never took Hot Feet.  That character was my first 50 (and is the source of my handle).  I was completely hooked on 'trollers and my first 4 50s came from that AT.

One of my favourites by the end was Plant/Rad.  I put a lot of time into that build and it was a monstrous soloer.  It has the advantage of doing well early too, with the high damage of the AoE immobilize, the potent Seeds of Confusion coming at level 8, and the excellent early /Rad powers in AM and RI.  I think if the game does come back that might be the first character I get going.

[Arcana]

Dominators were kind of tricky. If you played one before the Dominator buffs that came later certainly it could lead to frustration. If you were a person that utilized IO's then you could achive Perma-Dom. Once you got there... Dominators become a very strong class because of their ability to control, their resistance to Mezzing and the damage they can put out..

From my experience, one of the indirect sources of frustration for Dominators was that their powerset design strongly encouraged a hybrid melee-ranged combat style that many players were not used to.  If you played and excelled with an Controller, or a non-Bot Mastermind, or a Blapper, you were more likely to transition smoothly to a Dominator.  If you tended to focus on ranged blasters, non-ranged scrappers, or defenders, you might have had a harder time.

Some players were also frustrated by the relative lack of AoEs, but what Dominators lacked in quantity they made up for in execution potential, because you could use control to better leverage your AoEs, particularly PBAoEs.

And of course there's Domination.  If you could leverage Domination well, that also made a huge difference.  And you didn't need to perma Domination to get more mileage out of it than other players.  Because Domination also refreshed endurance, if you could afford to use more endurance than was otherwise sustainable and pace yourself so that Domination tended to refresh endurance when you were very low, in effect that meant you were able to do more per minute than a player that didn't pace themselves that way.  That tended to translate indirectly into more damage, faster kill rate, and faster overall play.

[LaughingAlex]

Put simply, City of Heroes allowed players to have so much more power compared to most MMOs that players could afford to do weird things that were just fun, without having to worry about being killed by the game if they did not play absolutely perfectly.  A bad day in City of Heroes was often better than a good day in other MMOs that emphasized much more difficult combat with much more restrictions on the abilities of the players.

I would also say though that, the combat other mmorpgs emphasized is laced to an extreme with the artificial kind of difficulty.  They only allowed for perhaps the most extremely narrow, restrictive strategy, and only that.  If you did anything else in them, you lost automatically.  If you did that one strategy, you won easily all the time.  But the strategy didn't allow for any kind of backup plan nore allowed the team to defend itself in a changing situation.  The holy trinity is useless in pvp, because of the same reasons mmorpgs become hard when things don't go perfectly to plan.

[LaughingAlex]

I had a teammate who loved to speed boost the team, once in a mission. Normally, I had no problem with this, except in a cave map. For whatever reason, I always got "snagged" on terrain features, which annoyed the hell out of me. He never would allow me the chance to get out of range, if I asked, so I would always either delay entering or rush ahead to avoid the boost.

(I know. It's my problem, rather than a general problem with the game, but I felt it bore pointing out.)

I didn't think that was so much the player but bad map design.  You had a lot of static meshing that wasn't solid enough to prevent people from being stuck.  Some caves such as the counsel caves for instance should have had invisible walls placed in front of the piping to prevent people from getting jammed into them.  I'd have also smoothed the floors some, but I'd totally have made the walls much flatter for gameplay sake and to prevent static mesh disasters.

[JanessaVR]

I didn't think that was so much the player but bad map design.  You had a lot of static meshing that wasn't solid enough to prevent people from being stuck.  Some caves such as the counsel caves for instance should have had invisible walls placed in front of the piping to prevent people from getting jammed into them.  I'd have also smoothed the floors some, but I'd totally have made the walls much flatter for gameplay sake and to prevent static mesh disasters.

I had always assumed that this was deliberate for the Oranbega cave designs, which is why I would train myself in speed-running them without getting snagged on the torches.  I always thought that was a situation where I appreciated being one of the (apparently) few people who played CoH with a game controller - flight especially was smooth and sure for me.

[dwturducken]

Believe it or not, I actually used to train for that situation, and have started using Titan Icon to train for it again.  When a large Oranbega cavern was cleared out, I would practice full speed runs of Flight (which I always have slotted as fast as it will reasonably go), down twisty-turny hallways lined with torches with the objective to make it to the end without snagging myself on any obstacles along the way.

That sounds like work! I just wanna play the game!

Seriously, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. I'll have to get going on that, since we're almost there.

[brothermutant]

I liked my Grav/Time, and I agree that it fit thematically too (master of time and space). The dmg was always meh, but the SLOWS from both powersets were enough to make all the baddies to crawl. And I found that Time had a lot of both soft and hard controls in its set as well. Very nice toon, called mine Too Much AwesomeSauce and he looked like Dr. Manhattan. I think I really got to like grav despite its problems because it had such a clean look to it.

I had a Mind/Elec dom (Jed I Am) and she was fun too but real slow on the killing. I did ok solo, and I slept a lot of baddies, and confused a bunch too. But on a team, most complained about the confuse taking away from XP and sleep being almost completely useless as most targets were hit with AoE dmg, waking them immediately. I think Psi was my tertiary set (nice status protection in that) and it fit with the theme. no travel except ninja run (just because I bought jet packs by this point) and I really got used to ninja run, you can do some impressive stuff with that one power.

As for the Invuln tank vs scrapper argument earlier, I always felt the same as you friend. My Scrapper seemed tougher than my Tank for some reason. It could be the speed at which I killed or maybe just the different attack powers (claws on Scrapper, SS on Tank). Not sure but I KNOW my scrapper was more fun to play at least, that could be it too.

[Acanous]

any update on the timeline? I just got a new PC. Old one fragged itself. Lost all my builds save two (Which I still have in Email format)
I...have no idea how to rebuild Acanous :<

[HEATSTROKE]

Did you finish the Ice/Thorn? I started one of those and got into my 30s with it, but never got it completed. Were you ever able to solve the alpha issue with it? For me, it was either I died on the first volley or I was fine. Never anything in between.

Early on yes the Alpha was tricky.. in the end my build had enough S/L defense that I would just wade in and go to town..

[JanessaVR]

any update on the timeline? I just got a new PC. Old one fragged itself. Lost all my builds save two (Which I still have in Email format)
I...have no idea how to rebuild Acanous :<

My best advice is to start playing around in Mids again.  I've had to re-familiarize myself with it, but I swear I'm actually making improvements in my new builds that didn't occur to me last time around.

[Mistress Urd]

It is amazing to me that so many others had great luck with Dominators, all of mine frustrated me to no end. I usually played solo and honestly, I never learned all the tricks for each AT, but some of them worked so much better for me than others. Maybe is was just the RNG playing with my head.

I had many issues with Dominators was early on, the "Happy Fun Button" you were happy when Domination was up and sad when it wasn't. Controllers: When I compared my Dominator to any of my controllers, I would rather play a controller. After the buffs to Dominators, they were much better. I had two, a fire/fire and a mind/psi. If only they had an illusion one. Strangely I consider Dominators as a Blaster replacement rather than an alternate Controller.

[HEATSTROKE]

From my experience, one of the indirect sources of frustration for Dominators was that their powerset design strongly encouraged a hybrid melee-ranged combat style that many players were not used to.  If you played and excelled with an Controller, or a non-Bot Mastermind, or a Blapper, you were more likely to transition smoothly to a Dominator.  If you tended to focus on ranged blasters, non-ranged scrappers, or defenders, you might have had a harder time.

Some players were also frustrated by the relative lack of AoEs, but what Dominators lacked in quantity they made up for in execution potential, because you could use control to better leverage your AoEs, particularly PBAoEs.

And of course there's Domination.  If you could leverage Domination well, that also made a huge difference.  And you didn't need to perma Domination to get more mileage out of it than other players.  Because Domination also refreshed endurance, if you could afford to use more endurance than was otherwise sustainable and pace yourself so that Domination tended to refresh endurance when you were very low, in effect that meant you were able to do more per minute than a player that didn't pace themselves that way.  That tended to translate indirectly into more damage, faster kill rate, and faster overall play.

make sense my firsts two blasters were Nrg/Nrg and  Elec/Elec which I played as Blappers and I was pretty decent with Controllers as well

[JanessaVR]

Melee characters in general just weren't for me.  My philosophy is: "If you're close enough to touch the enemy, then they're close enough to touch you - and that's too close!"  I tried to ensure range 100 (at least) for all my powers and keep my distance, hovering with Fly, ready to escape if things went badly.

[Waffles]

It is amazing to me that so many others had great luck with Dominators, all of mine frustrated me to no end. I usually played solo and honestly, I never learned all the tricks for each AT, but some of them worked so much better for me than others. Maybe is was just the RNG playing with my head.

Plant/fire dom was actually one of the best builds in the game, min/maxingwise.

Melee characters in general just weren't for me.  My philosophy is: "If you're close enough to touch the enemy, then they're close enough to touch you - and that's too close!"  I tried to ensure range 100 (at least) for all my powers and keep my distance, hovering with Fly, ready to escape if things went badly.

Had a dark/shield scrap, a Widow, a claw/dark scrapper, a ninja/ninja stalker, a titan/elec, SS/fire, and a STJ/regen scrapper for melee characters, i'm probably forgetting a few.

Titan/elec couldn't really die because everything it fought got sapped, it had infinite energy, and defensive sweep really made it hard to hit.

Dark/shield murdered entire packs (Including bosses) in about two seconds.

Claws/dark could not die when I got cardiac alpha (Before that...*Shiver*)

Nin/nin was softcapped, and could handle itself fairly well, since bosses died really quick.

Widow was sort of like playing a more badass claws character with psychic powers and a laughably easy softcap...Kickass.

SS/fire/fire- Remember how I said dark/shield cleared entire packs in 2 seconds? This guy cleared entire maps in mere minutes.

STJ/regen: Liked STJ, but I didn't feel like it meshed with regen at all. My worst melee character, not fun, (Subjective, I know) and lacked some damage on the AOE front.

[Power Gamer]

Edgar/Bug: Y'know, I've noticed an infestation here. Everywhere I look, in fact. Nothing but undeveloped, unevolved, barely conscious pond scum, totally convinced of their own superiority as they scurry about their short, pointless lives.

Zap-Em Man: Well, yeah. Uh... don't you want to get rid of 'em?

Edgar/Bug: Ah... in the worst way.

[pinballdave]

Melee characters in general just weren't for me.  My philosophy is: "If you're close enough to touch the enemy, then they're close enough to touch you - and that's too close!"  I tried to ensure range 100 (at least) for all my powers and keep my distance, hovering with Fly, ready to escape if things went badly.

In my own quaint and defenderish way of thinking, there were multiple ranges.

1. There was melee aka fluffy aka disruption anchor aka hurricane range, and trapper range. Get in close, get cozy and debuff

2. There was near range. This range was intended not to be close enough to land a punch, but a good place for radiant aura, heal aura, the time auras, the dispersion bubbles (cover all the melee folks) and KINETIC range. (Can you hear the Bzzzzzzooooorrrrrrrtttccccccch! and see the monitor flicker?)

3. Who am I leaving out? Well dark defenders could go pretty much anywhere even without his posse of defender cousins, but for more maximum healing with twilight grasp it was preferable to be in with his peeps, outside melee range. The other fellow I forget so often is trick arrow. Generally, he would best stay at the far outside range of the heal auras, try to stay inside dispersion buffs; mezz protection is golden.

The safest place is right beside your bubbler.. or fluffy xD

[JanessaVR]

The safest place is right beside your bubbler.. or fluffy xD

Actually, I found the safest place was a good 200'+ out, sniping from very long range.  Extra fun - you hit one, but you're so far way that halfway to you he gets bored, turns around and goes back.  Then you hit him again and finish him off. 

[pinballdave]

...

Widow was sort of like playing a more badass claws character with psychic powers and a laughably easy softcap...Kickass.

...

I know some of you might NOT be surprised but I thought of widows, especially night widows, as being a defender with really awesome secondary melee attacks. Mind link was way too powerful for ordinary melee characters :p

[Pherdnut]

any update on the timeline? I just got a new PC. Old one fragged itself. Lost all my builds save two (Which I still have in Email format)
I...have no idea how to rebuild Acanous :<

If you have a picture, I'm sure somebody can figure it out.