Hints and Tips for new players

[Ty Tanium]

Good evening, Christmas Eve, and Seasons Greetings to all in DCUO,
I have played the game for a time now, probably not as long as a lot of others here, and one of the things that I have found is that there is no real guide to gameplay except for the in-game tips that show up as you go. Somebody mentioned, in another post, that the context of those tips was somewhat confusing.

What I would like to do is draw upon the DCUO player community to contribute hints and tips for new players who maybe struggle to get through the game at certain points and/or under certain circumstances.

I would like to hope that a number of longer term players will join us "newbies" here so that we don't have to watch, re-watch and endlessly watch short and sharp videos that are supposed to make us experts in under 15 minutes.

In another post that I made I asked, "What is the best new character build?"

It is a fact that there is no "best", a fact I have proven to myself by running two very different characters side by side through the game and both are now at level 24.

Character 1: Male, Hero, Mentor: Batman (Tech Origin) Powers: Fire Primary Weapon: Dual Pistol Movement: Flight

Character 2: Female, Hero, Mentor: Wonder Woman (Magic Origin) Powers: Sorcery Primary Weapon: Hand Blast Movement: Flight

With BOTH of these I have, in different ways, successfully negotiated the game to level 24. The differences are in the strategy - either brute strength (Tank role) or fight smarter not harder (Healer/Controller) role.

The first tip I would give any new player is -
Consider your enemy; your enemy will have strong members, sneaky members, power oriented members and weapons members. Plan your "Loadout" (press K) to cover all these events. Make sure you have close combat, ranged combat and, above all, don't forget the shift button can block close up attacks and ranged attacks with no "power cooldown"

(Cooldown is the time it takes for one of your loadout powers [at the bottom of the screen] to become available again after you use it.)

The second tip I would give is -
Listen to Oracle (If you are a hero) and take a good supply of Soder Cola into any fight :D

Please feel free to add hints and tips as you will and have a very Merry and safe Christmas and New Year.
Cheers,
T

(Ed. Note - Here goes nothing, 2 heroes, different styles and powers, about to embark on the same mission. For the record my female magic oriented skills hero has done better than super dude slam buster thus far.)

[Ty Tanium]

Evening, useful tip (in case ya don't know) :D

When you're whizzing around the place doing heroic/villainous deeds keep your eyes open in unlikely places for "easter eggs", (they can be anywhere behind things, on top of things, even on top of buildings) green exclamation marks in circles, blue exclamation marks in circles, yellow question marks in circles and small glowing multicoloured balls of lights. They have rewards, power ups and info in them for you or your mission.

After I've cleared a mission of opponents I'll go back over the area to make sure I've picked up all the goodies. It's worth it.

Cheers,
T

[Ty Tanium]

So, you've got a big mob of bad/good guys that need taking down and here you are with your meta powers and/or weapons all charged up. CHAAAAARGE.... and let them know your name is the vanquisher when you lay your vengeance on them...!!!!

Errrrrr no, not a good idea. For every one of them you target, then have to beat on until they go down, the rest of the crowd is gonna be beating on you.

Best advice I can offer, find the riot scene, check out the action and make a plan. Let's face it, your character might be tough as nails and faster than a speeding whatsit but against ten or twelve opponents at a time.... yeah, you don't got enough time to drink enough soder colas...!

Good luck out there.
T

[Ty Tanium]

Evenin' all,
Got a new tip for new players but this one depends on your character.

Both of my characters move by flight, one carries a staff, the other a bow. Both of these items combine good range abilities and serve well in a melee situation. Now I'm not saying this makes me a better player than anyone else, just saying that I have found these combinations to extremely effective.

The tip that I want to give is;
If you're going to fly into a trouble spot don't just hit the ground running at "ground zero" - you'll very likely end up dropping into a whole mess of opponents who will turn you into paste. Pull up above the battlefield, scope it out, look for any "Easter Eggs" (like reward or investigation points) and, above all, decide how to go about getting into the fight without getting ya noggin bashed in in the first minute.
Cheers,
T

[Frost]

Originally posted by Ty Tanium:

Both of my characters move by flight, one carries a staff, the other a bow. Both of these items combine good range abilities and serve well in a melee situation. Now I'm not saying this makes me a better player than anyone else, just saying that I have found these combinations to extremely effective.

It's worth noting that flight/skimming is the slowest movement mode (escpecially in combat) in the game and the weapon type can be easily changed on an existing character with ingame currency, unlike power or movement mode which will require marketplace purchase every time you'll want to change those.

[Ty Tanium]

Good evening and thanks Frost, a very good point there.

I would like to add that once you are in a story line you are committed to that story/line. It does no good to change your mind and ignore the voices in your game/ headphones (or head) during the game if you don't do what you are told the game just goes into a do while loop, you are stuck where you are unless you go back to your journal and select a different mission.

In short, do what the voices tell you... LOL
Cheers,
T

[Ty Tanium]

Hey y'allllll...
Thought you could use another one... as you get levels up you will run into tougher "boss" smackdowns (No s**t Sherlock...!!!) and often, with these the trick is make sure you check your on-screen goals.

With many of these "bosses" you can't just go charging in and try and beat them down, that'd be like throwing your smallest friend into the ring at a WWF Royal Rumble...!

Make sure you check HOW to go about clobbering the "bosses"
Cheers,
T

[Ty Tanium]

Hello everyone, how's all the heroes/villains today?
A while back I asked the question in discussions, "What's the best character build?" and not surprisingly the answer came back, generally from everywhere, the is no "Best".

I would like to share with you, after playing a good many characters to level 30, my idea of an "Optimum" character.

Mentor: Either Batman, Superman or Lex Luthor
Ability: Fire (For the up close and personal stuff)
Weapon: Dual wield pistols/ Bow (for good ranged attacks)
Movement: (long range) Flight

Just my 2 cents worth now I have actually got a bit of time/experience under my belt.
Cheers,
T

[Colonel Angus]

For folks that have never played a role based MMO before, some things you need to know, and how DCUO functions at its core to better understand the how/why of build setups.

First iand foremost, DCUO is a multiplayer action RPG that orients the tail end of content toward group play, with groups split up into roles to assist in group composition to tackle content.

While most MMORPGs tend to use 3 roles, DCUO goes with 4.

The roles:

Damage - the basic role that all players start with. All power types have access to the damage role/damage 'stance' and it's unlocked by default. Also knowns as 'dps role' in traditional MMO terms. DPS means 'damage per second', implying that the role is all about doing as much damage per second s they can squeeze out, at a consistent rate.

In this stance, your abilities are oriented toward attack. It is the most common role in the game, which also means the wait time for group content for the damage role. Your secondary abilities, like any healing/restorative abilities are significantly weakened while in the damage stance, so for example, a healer power type like sorcery may have access to the self healing 'rejuvenate' ability, but using it while in damage stance will be penalized and will heal back very little while still consuming the same amount of power, thus making it a waste of an ability to use while in damage stance. (TLDR - focus on damage)

The next important aspect of the damage role is damage is split up between weapon damage and power damage. Weapons inflict physical, precision based 'white number' damage on targets. They also draw the least amount of enemy attention.

Powers inflict 'yellow' number damage, from the might stat, and can sometimes suffer from the penalty of not being able to damage peripheral targets, like switches or destructible objects that weapon attacks can damage. Sometimes this is to prevent massive area attack powers from blowing up things you don't want them to blow up prematurely, like healing barels, but other times it's just an oddity and a balancing oversight and you'll have to use weapon attacks to destroy desired objects. (These are typically targets with a yellow lock on box around them, as opposed to the usual red color)

Not all powers are created equally. Powers have different power costs, different cooldown times, and different animation times. Some are AOEs that can damage varying area distances, while others are single target attacks.

Typically, single target attacks do more damage to single targets, and usually are more power cost efficient. Most, but not all power types have a very low cost, high damage power attack that has a very short cooldown - usually half a second to a full second, making them spammable. Some power types will have a single target variant, as well as a multitarget variant (think grenade AOE on impact). Some power types will only have one or the other. Some will have one or the other, but NEITHER of them actually do decent single target damage, so now all power types are created equal and some will learn more toward single target emphasis while others may be more AOE, and fewer still can excel at both.

For balancing purposes, it's important to note that some of the inherent drawbacks to a power type can be mitigated by borrowing from the powers of your movement type's unique power tree.

For example, acrobatics has several highly damaging single target abilities and a few AOEs. (AOE = area of effect, meaning splash damage, like a grenade going off). Flight has a mix of single target, but nicer AOEs. Speedster is an odd mix of mid range to short range/melee powers. (Melee range abilities usually do more damage than long range abilities to account for the risk/reward factor of having to get closer to danger/bosses - but not always. Be sure to test on sparring targets to compare results)



A rotation is something referred to when you use a systematic sequence of powers so that the cooldowns are refreshed right as you finish the first rotation, allowing the 2nd rotation to begin anew, and so on and so on. There are myriad 'rotations' you can put together. Some power types can do a full six power rotation, while mini rotations also exist of 3 to 4 powers. Every powerset has access to mini rotations, but only a few can pull off five power or six power 'full' rotations.

It comes down to how a power type's cooldowns are set up. Some just don't flow very well if you try to go big, while some also drop damage efficiency because the game lacks a solid balance between the factors of cooldown time, power cost and animation time. DCUO is very poorly balanced in that regard so will take a lot of trouble shooting when you are working on your rotations to figure out how to trim the fat and use the most efficient powers in your arsenal.

One example of the issue with this type of balancing is supercharge generator abilities. These were added in just a few years ago, and they offer a way to more quickly generate supercharge in combat, but do to improper math, they decided that these powers, despite having a staple 6 second cooldown, should absolutely suck ass and underperform in the damage department. So while you would use the power to try to get to the supercharge quickly, the potential dps you lose by using a supercharge generator power in a rotation actually just robs you of damage only to give it back in a supercharge attack - that may miss or just be overkill for a target, often resulting in wasted potential.

Thus the community has opted to ignore these abilities and they remain an eyesore for the damage role. (Support roles, that don't have to worry about squeezing damage out, can make better use of them, but even that is largely iffy due to only having six power slots). Similar balancing issues exist with several non supercharge generator abilities as well, so definitely need to test each power out to see how it performs.



The next important thing to understand for damage players is 'damage splitting'. Damage splitting refers to hitting multiple enemies with an AOE attack. You are only allowed to hit so many enemies with a single attack before it starts to be penalized in its damage output. This means there's a sweet spot, and it can vary from power to power. Some AOE abilities can do their maximum damage when they hit 3 targets. Other powers can hit up to 5 targets.

No power an hit more than 5 targets without losing damage output in the process, and by that point all you've done is pissed off a larger group of enemies that will take longer to kill as a result.

To test damage splitting, the sparring targets in the Hall of Legends (and League Halls) are grouped as single target, 3 targets, or five targets. The League Hall has an even larger group as well. This will help you in determining how to focus your build and what the pros/cons of your power type's abilities are.

(This also means that tanks that think they can run ahead and gather 10+ enemies all at once are doing it wrong, due to damage splitting nerfing damage output, and need to focus on 1-2 groups at a time to actually kill them faster. This isn't like other MMOs like FF14 that don't use damage splitting. Need to pace yourselves).



That should cover the brunt of the damage role. Next post will detail tanking.

[Colonel Angus]

Tanking 101


Tank role/stance is unlocked like all support roles - at level 10.

Tanks, in MMO terms, are heavily durable players that fulfill the role of group leader and enemy attracting punching bag. They aren't built for doing damage (except Earth, by way of spamming Jackhammer), but instead are built to survive longer than other roles.

Tanks play the role of leader/point man, and should be in the front of the group as they progress in a mission. Their job is to 'taunt' enemies and force enemies to target the tank, rather than their allies. That then opens up a window for damage players/DPS to unload on enemies while they are focused on the tank, and complete rotations without interruption.

Tanks 'taunt' enemies in two ways. The first one is by hitting an enemy with a power, which can include AOEs hitting multiple enemies. The second is a passive taunt. Any time a tank uses a power within a roughly 12ft radius of the tank, no matter what power is used (doesn't have to be an attack), enemies in that radius of the tank will be taunted. This means a tank can jump into a crowd of enemies, but then target the one straggler enemy that is still at range, and hit that straggler enemy with a ranged power. With the tank being surrounded by other enemies, they will be close enough to the tank that they all get taunted.


Not all enemies can be taunted. Normal fodder enemies can be taunted by the tank, but special enemy types may be scripted to ignore a tank, such as enemies performing some kind of unique action in a mission, like enemies trying to transport stolen goods or some vital item you're trying to protect.

Some bosses flat out cannot be taunted at all, and will randomly attack any and every player in the group. Otherwise, most bosses can be taunted, but nearly every boss will have some kind of attack, or attack sequence, where they intentionally ignore the tank and attack either a random party member, or specific party member (usually the healer), so non tanks need to be aware and ready to react by blocking, rolling, or just popping a cola if they ate severe damage.

Each tank power type has different survival mechanisms. Ice gets a bonus to defense stats while having several shield powers to keep them from taking damage. Fire has minimal defense boosting effects, and instead boosts their health, and heals back lost health. Rage is a mix of defense boosts and self healing, as is atomic. Earth is massive defense boosts, or lesser defense boosts while damage taken is split between the tank and their pet golem (so it changes if you prefer to aftershock tank, or pet tank).

Tanking can be difficult if you are playing content for the first time and don't know the mechanics of the mission. It can also be difficult because rookie players, usually bad DPS, don't let the tank lead and just rush ahead of them, screwing up the tank's taunt control and enemy setup attempts. As a F2P game, DCUO has a lot of said rookies, so just be prepared to deal with them. If they 'jump the tank' and get ahead of them, and die, that's entirely their own fault.

As such, tanks are the lowest amount of the active populace at any given time and are often in demand. Queue times as a tank are typically the fastest, as a result. That does not mean one should queue in as a tank, and then not play the tank role and play dps instead, because you'll be the first on the votekick when people start dying.


One final thing - as said before in the damage role breakdown, weapon attacks attract the least amount of enemy attention. Power attacks attract considerably more. Lastly, Healing attracts more than weapon attacks. A tank's taunt overpowers all of them - except another tank's taunt effects. Multiple tanks can result in wonky taunt control, with tanks fighting over enemy enmity control. Each tank power type has a singular power that has a stronger taunt that cannot be broken by another tank, and can be used to better coordinate taunt control.

All taunts last 12 seconds. They can be refreshed prior to the 12 second mark, though. In simple terms, this means a tank only has to use a power on a specific enemy/or taunt in range of said enemy once every 12 seconds, but to play it safe most will go with 8-10 seconds.

Unfortunately the game does not feature the kind of visual indicators that other MMORPGs utilize to inform you of your taunt status on enemies, so tanks will just have to be observant. Keep your heads on a swivel and keep scanning for new enemies showing up in a battle, or those that are at a distance and aren't attacking the tank.

Tanks have several 'pull' abilities, usually circular, very wide AOE, or conal long range pulls. These will literally pull enemies toward the tank. All tank power types except Ice have both a conal long range pull and a circular (radial) AOE pull. (Ice only has conal, and will have to pair with the flight tree to use the AOE pull from there to use both).

To make things simple, the basic tank approach to a group of mobs is to lunge toward an enemy closer to the center of the group, then cancel the lunge with the 360 AOE pull to gather up all the enemies near you, then scan for long range outliers and use the ranged pull to bring them to you. Once all enemies are point blank, then continue with your tank survival mechanics to stay alive while the DPS in the team bomb enemies to high hell.

That about covers the tank role. Next is healers, which is much simpler.

[Colonel Angus]

Healing 101


Healer role stance unlocks at level 10. Healers suffer a damage penalty and get a massive boost to their restoration stat. Their job is, primarily, to keep the tank alive. Secondary, is to keep the group alive (especially when there's no tank).

Healer powers used to perform much better in the past, and had higher healing output, but were nerfed several years ago. To compensate for the reduced healing output, you will have to combo healing abilities together, usually using your single target heal and your 3 person heal back to back (every healer power type has these).

Healing draws the attention of enemies from medium distance away. This also applies to healing over time ticks on any allies that may still be going off while the group gets closer to enemy targets. Thus it's up to the tank to be at the front of the group and to taunt those enemies before they detect the healer.


Healers will primarily be doing weapon attacks in combat, and are better suited to ranged weapons - pistols, bow, handblasters, rifle. Like said, healers do the least amount of damage, so using damage powers in healer stance that have no secondary healing effect is a total waste and the focus should be on utilizing healing abilities. Yeah, you can get 'experimental' with hybrid building, but a jack of all trades is a master of none, and your performance will be crippled one way or the other; being saved only by content that is particularly easy, or the presence of another dedicated healer doing the heavy lifting.


Healers are the second most observant in the group, after the tank. They constantly survey the battlefield and prepare to counter heavy boss attacks with a team heal, or to heal a tank after a 'tank buster' boss attack. They must also diligently monitor the health bars of allies in the group to be ready to heal back damage sooner than later - and also account for up to a second's worth of lag.

This also doesn't mean spam heal powers when nobody is taking damage. Those are panic healers that have a hard time handling that much information and spam heals when it isn't needed; prematurely draining themselves of power reserves in the process.



Not much more to say on healers, with the exception of nature, and lesser extent, celestial.

Nature's healing primarily from pheromone stacking. There are roughly 4 powers that can add a stack of pheromones, but the max stack is only 3, so you can figure out which 3 to use. When you have all 3 stacks of healing ticks going off on allies, then things get simple. You can combine the 3 stacks into one using a particular power, and can refresh all stacks from that point on using just the one power. (Poison, in the damage stance, works the same way - 3 stacks can be combined into 1 and refreshed with the same combiner power). You'll still have your single target and group heals on top of that, but so long as you have your 3 stacks constantly going off, should be good.

Celestial differs in that it's one of the power types that uses combo abilities. These are abilities that require additional button sequence inputs to trigger second and third abilities in a chain.

Celestial's abilities can range from 2 to 3 combos, and each combo sequence is vulnerable to interrupt, so need to be careful. That said, celestial does >not< need to use combo abilities to heal, and can just use one off powers from the tray. It performs a bit less but can be compensated for by using the 'oh ♥♥♥♥' team heal that most healer powers have (elec doesn't). It's an 18 second long cooldown ability that can be protected by the 'empowered channeling' tactical hand mod (from your lair's mainframe). It will rapidly heal the entire group when you need serious healing output in a pinch.

Next up is controller role.

[Colonel Angus]

Controllers 101


Controller role was meant to be a crowd controller focus, but fell apart in development. Instead of focusing on the control aspect, controllers instead became debuffers and power batteries for allies.

Thus, controller power types all have 3 debuffs they can place on enemies that last 12 seconds (same as a tank taunt). These are a defense debuff, indicated by actual HUD elements on the screen with a red shield icon under the enemy's name. Then there's the attack power debuff, which is indicated by a red crosshair/reticle. Lastly there's the self healing debuff, indicated by a red heart icon. This one is the least important as a tiny, tiny handful of enemies in the game actually heal.

Each debuff can be applied by 2 powers, so pick and choose which you prefer. Some may be melee range, some may be long range, etc.



The next big thing controllers do is supply power to allies. Now, in the past this used to be a pain in the ass, as you had both a power that initiated power-over-time replenishment to the team, and an individual power that restored a small burst of power to the 3 people with the least amount of power in the group (by percentage). It's much easier now for a few reasons:


* First, players can now regenerate their own power passively by selecting the 'super powered' trait from their traits selection (at level 10).

* Second, players can restore additional power to themselves with the orbital supply drop, sidekick, and allies like Oracle and Cyborg

* Third. The power-over-time powers for each controller power type was changed and made passive. Now a controller initiates PoT to allies by simply using any power while in range of allies, so it's more a passive effect. You still retain the burst power out ability, which restored power to the 3 players in group (other than yourself) that have the lowest percentage of power.


Lastly, controllers still have crowd control abilities, but due to how the game mechanics work, this is largely ignored and is seen as heavily ineffective. This is because enemies, when controlled, will eventually break out on their own, and once they do, they are totally immune to control effects for several seconds.

As many player attacks, including regular weapon combos, can create control effects on enemies, they are constantly breaking out and getting immunity, making the need for actual control effects/lockdowns very limited to a select few missions in the game where certain enemies should be controlled, and hidden off in a corner, while the team focuses on the boss or some other secondary objective.

How long an enemy stays controlled before they break out is where the dominance stat comes into play. The more dominance you have, the longer enemies will be stunned/asleep/knocked down/etc. Once the break out, though, they become immune. In most cases, attacking an enemy that is controlled will also break the control effect even sooner, so imagine a group of players just blasting everything in the room and how that effects attempts to lock down an enemy. :T Wasn't really thought out that well, and should have been an active power setup, like a green lantern using their ring to continuously hold an enemy within a construct by holding the button down, keeping the controller locked in that ability state as well as the enemy, but anywho...

The typical controller loadout would be:
2 or 3 debuffs (the healing one is rarely needed, so can be skipped)
The burst power out ability
An ability to pull an enemy (can help set up enemies by pulling them to the tank/etc)
A group power restoration supercharge
If you skipped the heal debuff power, you can insert an attack here or a self shield


That in mind, controller power types do generally play the same. Controllers have the 2nd highest damage stats after damage players, so having a spare attack ability can help contribute more damage to the equation.

Note: Some control abilities may lockdown an enemy, but it may also prevent that enemy from taking full damage. This was originally intended for PVP balancing purposes but adversley effected PVE and can be seen as detrimental. For example, if I remember right, the green lantern ability to trap an enemy in a baseball construct suffers from this issue, so it may be better suited to using an alternate control ability instead. Up to you.


That covers it for controllers. The rest will be general tips.

[Colonel Angus]

General tips:


Clipping.

Animation clipping is the function of bypassing an animation with another animation, resulting in the animation time for the first action being overwritten by the second action, bt without cancelling the output of the first action.

Originally a design flaw that was later labeled intentional, only to be exploited in several 'unintended' ways - some of which had to be walked back.


Animation clipping is useful for players for all roles. It can allow you to rapid combo several abilities to hit higher performance outputs than normal, but can also be abused to circumvent certain weapon combo animations without losing any of the damage.

It's also used by support abilities that don't have a damage aspect associated with them, allowing a heal power to clip into another heal power or tank power to clip a prior power's animation. It's also used by the precision player meta by way of the brawling weapon mastery shuriken combo.

Similarly, it's what allows flight users to aerial clip and gain additional mobility while pulling off their attack rotations while airborne, as jumping itself can factor into clipping.


In the original game, players would clip a weapon attack into a power attack. Before we had weapon mastery and crazy artifacts and power stats, squeezing out extra damage was more of a science, and you had people combining AOEs like the one from martial arts spinning punch ground slam > AOE power, for a double AOE.

You also still have several weapon combos that trigger multiple attacks that can be clipped with a power to combine the two attacks. IE: one handed weapon's flurry combo can be clipped with an attack power without losing any of the attack ticks.

This results in a rapid burst of damage output in a fraction of the time it would normally take. When PVP was popular, it was also an issue as players executing 'unseen' damage was treated more like the abuse it is, and it made certain weapons with combo potential significantly better than others, that are much slower, require many more inputs, and pale in comparison to the damage factor with clipping potential.

While weapon balancing was never addressed, power damage became the staple so it's less of an issue now, but can still be exploited, and in some particularly clever ways, especially with some artifacts.





Don't sleep on movement/iconic powers. Many of these were oriented toward the game's original PVP balancing, and have some unique perks associated with them, primarily being they outperform many powers from the natural power tree, but also tend to favor damage splitting after five targets - if at all. They are solid filler powers that can be used to overcome weaknesses in natural power trees - especially like gadgets, which has an overabundance of low performing, low cost powers and very few hard hitting, higher cost powers. This can be remedied with iconic/movement mix-ins.



The 3 power rotation.
It's possible to utilize a 3 power rotation of hard hitting abilities. These are typically 3 second long cooldown powers that cost roughly 300 base power (escalated as your stats grow). 3 powers at 3 second cooldown with 1 second animation times means you can loop them infinitely, but at a cost.

These higher damaging powers also have the higher base cost than normal, so they will drain your power bar faster and faster as your stats increase. (Your power costs escalate based on your CR 'tier'). You can mitigate the drain with allies like Oracle, Cyborg, the super powered trait, and artifacts like The Omegahedron, which specialize in power regeneration perks, as wel as some mainframe tactical mods that can restore power when certain associated abilities are used.

The more power you have, the more power you passively regenerate with the super powered trait, or in combat with the hybrid trait.




Escalating power costs factor in your mainframe mods.

As your CR tier increases, your power costs begin to sky rocket. This is a result of power creep and the addition of the lair mainframe generator mods. If you are finding yourself out of power, chances are you hit either Tier 3 or Tier 4 and your power costs increased.

If you have been ignoring your lair's mainframe, which many due because of the absurd source mark costs to unlock things - let alone if you play alts (it's a nightmare and should have been made account bound years ago) - you'll see 3 white, 3 red, 3 yellow and 3 blue sockets on your generator. These are for mods that, by design, the developers assume you have been keeping up with. Many just don't.

Generator mods drop in content that released from the point generators were added to the game; dropping from bosses at random. The drop rates, however, are absolutely abysmal. The alternative occurs at.. I think it's CR322 or so, with the Flashpoint Paradox DLC. Head to the episode vendor in the HoL, or the Flashpoint vendor in you faction headquarters (HoD/Watchtower), and you can buy the level 40 generator mods straight up for source marks (a single mark each).


At CR 322, your power costs are going to be very high, so having 4 power geneator mods (blues) installed in your generator will boost your total power significantly and allow your power regeneration to compensate for the increased power costs.The reserve tank chest tactical mod can also give you a small percentage bump in maximum power as well, but typically won't be needed.


From content after this, generator mods drop from bosses, and again, scarcity means you may be stuck with level 40s for a while before seeing anything up to the latest content mods, with I think are level 48s. (The power creep is real when you look at the escalating stat gains from a mod from 40 to 41, to 42, etc. It's sheer nonsense)

Similarly you'll want to obtain adaptive augment mods from the relevant CR episodes you're at scale with, as they also provide a bump in your stats to help offset increased costs.



It's one of those, 'because it exists, it has to be factored into balancing' type deals. Because generator mods exist, content is created with the expectation that you already have them, or are going to get them.

Going forward, you at least want to have the Flashpoint level 40 mods installed.

Later on you can buy plans to craft mods, but even then it's a royal pain in the ass due to the source mark cost on plans.








Tip for rapidly raising CR to push through tiers.

The process:

Play raids. Of which, there are two specifically that are cakewalk easy, and give you the maximum amount of marks for raids. (Raids with less than 3 bosses give less rewards)

Gates of Tartarus, and Necropolis of the Oogabooga. :P

These are hallway simulators with simple bosses and aren't mechanics heavy. Can just turn your brain off and coast.

They are also short raids, taking an average 8-12 minutes.

Then, use those marks at Tempestuous Fugitive (lol) to buy specific equipment.

2 Rings, face mask, utility belt, neck. That's it.

Those are the cheapest items you can buy for marks.

Then spam the Shady Nightclub duo, or more raids, to get gear drops for your other slots. Shady Nightclub is the only duo with five gear drops. Others typically have 2-3 at best, and it's a short duo as well (if you play it strategically, don't split up, and focus fire, leaving the puzzle portion for the end when all mobs are dead).

Do that and you'll keep bumping up your CR at a rapid rate. Within 3-5 days, depending on play time, you can get to the latest content CR.


The difficult aspect is actually deciding when to obtain your lair mainframe power ups, as both the gearing process requires tons of marks, and the mainframe requires marks. You'll want the tactical mods before anything, so i'd suggest go with that first, and then wait on the orbital/supply drop/sidekick or henchmen (not both) till you hit latest content and are using unique marks for gearing instead.


Artifacts are also a heavy mark grind, but those can wait. The amount of investment needed for those is a painstakingly long process that just isn't going to get done fast. That in mind, I suggest your first artifact for any player/character/role is The Transformation Card.

TTC is an artifact that works for any role. For tanks, it boosts your healing and damage crits. For controllers it boost your power heal and damage crits. For healers it boosts your healing crits (and meagerly boosts your damage, since healer damage is trash regardless). You'll need to obtain the related critical skill points in your traits tree, but when combined, can give you something like a whopping 45% crit chance. It's as ridiculous as it sounds.

It also boosts ANY form of self healing/power replenishment, allowing colas, supply drops, allies, artifacts and pets (sidekick) to benefit from the increases crit range on your intake AND any output to allies (so Clarion artifact users can team heal more effectively, etc)

If you could only have one artifact on a character, it should be TCC. The other two are more build dependent. The strategist card pairs nicely with it, but only when it's been buffed to level 120 or so. It's output is too miniscule before that to be worthy of note, suffering from low proc chance and low damage output.




Lastly,- skill points.
There are style vendors in the HoL that sell multiple style sets. When you finally hit the latest content tier, and have source marks stockpiling that the new content doesn't use, and you don't need the marks for the mainframe or artifacts, then use them to buy these styles. There's a significant amount of SP gains locked behind unlocking style sets, and the amount you can obtain by collecting all these styles will be enough to comfortably get all the crits you'd need for your roles (plural).