_Zep_

How is your arrest time / mob?

My fire/fire is 39ish and She can deal out tons of AOE, however it takes 10 sec or so for the dots to add up which gives them time to get in a few hits. Of course I dont have the dam res and def I bet you do.

I like having two 1..2 punches, fire ball + fire breath and fire sword circle + the smaller pbaoe the name of which I am forgetting right now. Rain of fire does good damage too and also is great for control since you can make mobs run away with it.

I kinda agree with inferno, I dont like end crashes in a big way, solo there is no point, on teams though with it up every few spawns its pretty nice. Kills everything except bosses.

Along with significantly enhanced space for the character bio, it would be enjoyable to find a web page, with-in the COH umbrella, on which characters could be reviewed.

Like how some other online games provide characters to be viewed on the web. Adding password protection and an editor (perhaps make it a part of the forums?) would allow for much more efficient entry of the hopefully much more intense bios and origins to follow.

((lvl 40 stalker, infinity. Always happy to team))

"Shocking New Menace Robs Bank. Again."

The headline was attention getting, but lost a little power with the bad pun. In smaller type the story noted that 'Electron Volts' had robbed another bank and was still at large. The Rogue Island police was warning that the villain appeared to be armed with electrified fists and should be considered extremely dangerous.

Within one of the many scattered caves of the isles a small, unimposing male Asian tossed down the newspaper with a lopsided grin. As he looked out over the surf he spent a moment thinking about where to spend some of his newly acquired wealth. Dreaming about fast cars and beautiful women on his arm helped keep away the dark dream of the night before.

The bad dreams were always hovering on the edge of his consciousness. He has tried many medications (legal and not-so-much), meditation techniques and even black magic to drive them from his mind. All his attempts had been to no avail. Sleep remained his true enemy.

The dreams always started the same. A mysterious figure in a plain white lab coat, his face covered with a mask, looking uninterestedly on as Ramsmei twitched and shrieked in pain. A powerful hum fills the room as giant capacitors and transformers store up and discharge unimaginable voltages into his always hurting body. The only words spoken are "More electron volts" as dials are turned up and the pain increases.

Ramsmei had been born a happy child into a large family. His family were citizens of beautiful Cambodia. A county with lush vegetation and time honed Buddhist traditions. His family was moderately prosperous and included many siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins by the score.

It wasn't until decades later Raksmei Loun even knew the name, "Khmer Rouge," and the reason his parents sold everything; all that they owned.His wise father and loving mother had gathered the family. All of it. Brother, sister, cousin, aunt and uncle. Bribes were placed and finally the captain of a tramp cargo ship was found who was willing, for a very steep price, to take them all to America. The family planed to seek political asylum.

The captain was a small time hustler with a different plan. He was one of those petty souls who believed the world owed him prosperity and hadn't paid up yet. The kind of soulless person who really would sell his mother for the right price.

The Loun family would not learn until it was far too late that the man they trusted for their salvation had already sold them all into slavery the day they boarded his ship.

In the Rogue Isles many things the rest of the world finds disgusting and abhorrent are legal and even flourish. Slavery is almost mild compared to what is allowed to take place under the rule of Arachnos and Lord Recluse.

Drugged just before arrival in the States, the Loun family woke up in one of Aracnos' secret labs. A brilliant but twisted mind ran the lab. The term "sadistic mad scientist" isn't really adequate.

With the sole exception of Raksmei, the Loun family was condemned to a painful existence as one of the 'infected': those poor individuals who have been experimented on and dumped in a shanty town to fend for themselves with their genetic damage and mutations.

Raksmei has no clue what the twisted chemicals and viral vectors with genetic payload were supposed to accomplish. The sadist in charge may have only been testing their toxicity to humans, or how much pain they could inflict. Whatever the goal might have been, in Raksmei's personal genome something evolved. He developed unprecedented abilities to generate, control and discharge electricity.

At first it was only a spark or two, like petting a cat on a dry winter day. That was enough to get him noticed for further experimentation. He was kept in an insulated cell by night, but at least for the first time in years he was getting almost decent food. They wanted to keep test subject echo-echo-four-one-niner alive. Day time was a decent into the red haze of pain. Strapped to a table, hooked up to generators and transformers designed to power a small factory, always hearing "More Electron Volts.'

The generators powering Ramsmei's pain and suffering had a finite limit. Day after day, body wracked in pain, he slowly learned to channel and even hold energy within himself. After months of intense torture and pain Ramsmei had learned to smell the voltage and see the amps. A new Synesthesiac perception had developed and electricity had become his life's blood. Reversing the direction of the current and forcing megawatts of energy into equipment designed to give punishment rather than take it, Ramsmei overloaded the test machinery then took his revenge on the staff at the laboratory.

Upon the discarded newspaper a back page story was now showing. The Rogue Island Police were seeking any witnesses to a bizarre accident. A Captain John Smith, retired from running a small cargo ship around the orient, had been a resident of Cap Au Diablo these past five years. His body had been found on the docs last night with massive electrical burns on a bench that was far from any active power lines or equipment.

thank you, that did the trick.

For your resolution (I run 1980 * 1200) I'd say you want an nvidia GTX 280 or better.

The Nvidia GTX 200 and 400 Series will both do well, and can run DX 10 (a consideration for other games). If you go with an Nvidia GTX 500 type card you can run DX 11 and will be able to run at that resolution with most things turned up.

ATI makes decent cards as well, however Nvidia has much better drivers and open gl support (COH runs in open gl).

What is your budget for the vid card?

Any quad core CPU on the market right now will run COH just fine. (Dual core likely as well)

I'd watch it over a few hours and see what it does, and/or try restarting it.

Comcast or some other entity may be working on equipment or have an outage somewhere, they don't always report or admit to such events.

Comcast has been caught throttling customers before.

My new mouse is nice and spiffy and doesnt have issues with the left button, unlike my last, it has however brought a new problem to me.

I do have the logitech mouse software installed. Hoping it doesn't have to be removed.

When I click the scroll wheel (middle mouse button) I get in icon on my screen, even in game, that looks like a magnifying glass with a plus in it.

Looking at the mouse control panel and the "set point settings" for the logitech software I dont see a way to configure or turn this off. I did see a 'detect game mode' and turned this on, to no help.

Any suggestions or ideas to fix this? It looks like the logitech driver is intercepting the mouse click and I dont want it to do that in game.

Thanks

A lot depends on how you want to or will use bonfire.

As has been suggested above it can be used to make a safe zone to stand in, or fling mobs in a specific direction.

You can block off doors or hallways, or the really fun one is with corners or dead end corridors. With those you can arrange for mobs to get flung into the wall and bounce back into the bonfire. Quite amusing to lock down a spawn that way. It also can do some considerable damage even un-slotted.

On my fire/storm controller I have a single end redux in it. I keep planning to change that to a recharge. I mostly use it for area denial.

On my fire/kin (I forget how many slots) I use it more as a damage power. With the -kb in fire cages it can do some considerable chewing on a spawn.

For a blaster I would likely use it mostly to make a safe zone to stand in and the occasional nasty lock down on spawns as the geography permits. If your build has slots to spare it would a be a good place to put them, as mentioned above Kinetic Crash is a very good set.

If you are tight on slots it can be effective with one slot.

I know its been some time, I cant sleep so I am checking threads I have posts on:

That said:

Right now the only decent video cards / graphics chips are by Nvidia or AMD/ATI.

For COH I suggest an Nvidia card if you can manage it. ATI makes good cards as well, however Nvidia is superior with open gl.

Avoid, if you can, any kind of integrated graphics options. Shared memory slows things down. Intel graphics are great for low end systems and doing word, excel, etc, not for gaming.

If you have time look at reviews or go to a site like hardocp.com and ask in their forums to get some excellent advise for a new card or what built in video is better for your laptop choice.

I dont have the armor from leviathan mastery.

So many choices so few powers you can take

I may drop bonfire though, we'll see. I already want to move some slots around from my i19 spec. Working on buffing end still.

I have a gtx 580.

The newer driver packages from Nvidia come with a 'clean' option in the installer.

I just noticed it had set the option back to multi-display performance mode. I just put it back to single display performance mode. That may be the difference right there.

I am from the perspective of a fire/storm controller (50) and Storm/Electric Defender (40).

The only power in storm that underwhelms me is Gale. Though same swear by it.

Read the guides in the controller and defender forums. They may not be spot on, the information however will still be relevant.

My Use of storm is very different (though with some overlap) on the two characters.

The controller lays in with flash fire/fire cage to lock down then follows with 'rain walks up to pbaoe range (hot feet) and while spamming fire cage for lock down each time its up lets loose with lightning storm and tornado and water spout (patron pool). With everything rooted and -KB things melt fast. I have thunder clap and cinders as back up holds, thunder clap has a wonderfully fast recharge so it is up often. With team play or when things don't go as planned the extra control I get from freezing rain, thunder clap and cinders do wonders and the stealth/defenses from steamy mist are very nice. I also have all four leadership powers. I can solo quite effectively with or with out imps out (imps do speed things up though). There are nice proc IO's for all those powers.

The defender plays very differently.

I need to make much larger changes with the defender between solo and team play. I also think the defender would play much more like the Corrupter.

With steam mist always on and hurricane mostly on, I will drop freezing rain which besides all the nifty debuffing also has a fair level of control, and then get lightning storm, voltaic sentinel, and tornado out as fast as possible. They do the bulk of my damage. I then use hurricane to frequently debuffs every mob in sight and when the topography (office, where house, etc) permits stick things in corners. I then use the blasts to plink at things as needed. I can sit at point blank range with a spawn and use Zap over and aver because nothing can hit me to interrupt it.

For team play I don't use tornado often and focus on debuffing and healing more then damaging. Lightning Storm/sentinel being fire and forget. I also hang out at the back of the party, mostly out of melee range so as to not piss off the hand-to-hand members of the group. If it comes up I will let range people and everyone know if they are on trouble to run into the hurricane for safety. On some maps like the where house ones I will as needed push spawns into the corner and keep them all nice and bunched up while pulling their teeth.

These play styles work for me, they are not the only viable ones for the ATs.

Both characters are very end heavy. I have the Alpha cardiac on the controller and some procs/io sets to help with end and he can still run out. The defender I need to be careful how much I use my blasts or I will drop my toggles though both recharge fast and putting two back up isnt to awful.

I dont use snow storm much because of end issues with my builds, though I plan to pick it up on the defender at some point. It is very good at debuffing and slowing down spawns.

Things to consider: Storm is very endurance heavy. You will need to use lots of end-redux SO/IO's. At 50 you can fix the bulk of the end issues.

Knock back can be used for effective control. Solo, or on range based teams, this can be very good. With a hand to hand based team the chaos a stormy can very easily create is usually not welcome and can generate a fair level of hostility from the other players.

Some people, who perhaps have rigid ideas on how to play the game, wont play with storm and will not invite you to groups and/or be hostile while in a group.

I have successfully tanked and been sole healer on the defender, though not ideal you _can_ do it.

Has anyone else taken a hit to game performance with this driver?

I am goign to try a clean install and see what happens. With everything maxed out (literally) at 1920*1200 2x aa 2x af I was able to get playable frame rates (for me in this game 15-20 fps)

After the driver install I am getting 5 fps in some out door zones.

Just me or has anyone else dropped performance with this driver?

I am deciding between cardiac radial and core boost.

My build is very End heavy. I may make a second spec to use musculature or spiritual later.

Anyhow, to specifics,

Controller Fire/Storm.

All four Leadership powers, Steam Mist and Hot Feet to power. Plus wanting to toss lightning storm, tornado and water spout. All this on top of spamming my control powers including fire cage.

With the +resist it wont really do much except what I get out of steam mist.
With the +range, that would be nice to be able to control with a greater safety margin, my PBAOE nature does make me go up to the spawn after they are somewhat shut down though.

With + range does that also increase the area or radius of effects as well? Would firge cages be bigger I know the 16 max targets would stay the same. Would flash fire have a bigger rad?

More important what about the range for lightning storm? Not casting it, the part about how far I can travel from the storm and still have it work part, would that go up?

Thanks for any input

Thank you all.

Task Forces?

I know ITF. Isnt there also the States and Recluse? I have heard of tin man and apex. What else is there?

I am thinking both in terms of lvl 50 content and those runs for which incarnate shard will drop.

Thank you.