Aggelakis

You guys are making me wish I had bought an SSD instead of a power supply to support my new (to me anyway) videocard. Of course, an SSD would have been at least twice the price of my power supply, so I guess that SSD will just have to wait the four months until my car payments are done.

PS; it's not so much that it's against the TOS (which technically it is), it's also just mostly not possible. WoW is built specifically to allow addon designers access to various innards of the game through mystical development voodoo. City just does not have the innards-access that WoW does. If it can be scraped from the data passing between your client and the server, we can poke around at it (this is how HeroStats/Glycerine read the chat text). If it is a texture file, it can be changed to look like something else. (You can, in theory, turn every street into a plaid pattern by dropping an appropriately-named file in a specific branch of the data folder.)

But you can't do things like HealBot to make squares to click on for auto healing. You can't do BossMods to tell you what a boss is going to do next (epic bosses (Archvillains and Heroes, here) choose what powers they do pretty randomly, out of all powers they have available, just like minions and lieutenants and bosses; there are only a few instances where a boss will do something at a specific time.) You can't install Altoholic and know in two clicks what all of your alts are carrying, if you need a specific piece of salvage for your recipe. (Keep track of that manually...*sadface*)

Incidentally, most epic boss fights last maybe 2-3 minutes. A few last longer, a few take less than 30 seconds.

Yep, nothing like unitframes. The UI is what you get. You can only change the textures of things. An example is the map. You can change the image of the zone underneath the icons (this is what the Vidiotmaps Pack does). You can change what the icons look like (this is somewhat more involved and sometimes requires doing things that are in the gray area of the TOS/EULA). You can't change the shape of the map (other than dragging the edges of the map bigger/smaller). You can't add icons to the map that aren't available in the dropdown selector (e.g. gather nodes, even though we don't have those here).

Cooldowns, however, you can do with HeroStats. It reads your chat text, which includes power activation lines, which then HeroStats turns into cooldown (we call it recharge) timers. HeroStats runs OUTSIDE the game, though...it's not an in-game modification.

There aren't any actual addons for City. Nothing will change the functionality of the base game. You can only tweak the visuals, and then only by changing texture files.

There are applications to assist information-gathering (HeroStats for data; Badge-Hunter (badge-hunter.com) and City Info Terminal (cit.cohtitan.com) for badge collecting stats, both of which can be verified by HeroStats, CIT also can be verified through a separate, low-resources program called Glycerine).

There's the Vidiotmaps Pack, which changes the base image of the map to include helpful information.

There's the various icon fixes, which changes the power icons to more standardized versions (using a pet icon for a pet, instead of a knockback icon, which is something the pet does...that kind of thing).

As for your other question, as a sometimes WoW player myself, I find this game is actually kind of freeing to not have to powergame in order to be the very best, because you can play the game without any enhancements (our version of gear) and still do OK. However, you'll find an EJ mentality down in each archetype's subforum. People tend to stick with the official forums for most of their poking at builds, that way they get the most exposure and the easiest channel of feedback. Even better, you can only post on the forums if you have an active account, so you'll always get responses from someone who is playing *right now* instead of possibly operating with old information. Mids (cohplanner.com) can help you plan your build.

Keep in mind that City is EXTREMELY casual friendly, so there's no actual 'wrong' way to do it. If you're having fun with it, you're doing it right.

Always ask wiki first!
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mail_System

The support site and the master account use two different user/pw combinations.

The first time you use the support site you will have to sign up for an account.

I would like to make a third suggestion to the OP: Please use paragraphs instead of a huge block of text. I didn't even read your post because there are no line breaks.

Compared to your 8 year old Sony VAIO, it will be like playing a different game entirely.

The only character I exemplar with in any major way is slotted with HOs and generics, so I don't have to worry about exemplar effects on my enhancements for almost all of my higher-level characters.

Therefore, I slot my final set pieces of levels between 41 and 49 (because 50s cost exorbitantly more inf to craft than 49s, and have infinitesimally small benefit increase). During leveling, after level 35, I'll typically get lower level ones and then replace with higher ones when the character reaches 45 or so. Prior to 35, I generally don't use set pieces, instead just slotting level 30 generics and leaving them. I gather and craft usable set pieces via lowball market bids prior to being able to use them.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mail_System

I have a duo with my boyfriend who are both mutant gravity/fire dominators. One has Mikey and one has Drea. This would support the 'random' speculation.

I use Avira AntiVir for antivirus.

I use MalwareBytes and Spybot S&D for malware.

I use CrapCleaner (aka CCleaner) and Defraggler for general cleanup utilities.

I have Firefox with NoScript. Basically, if I don't specifically allow a site to run javascript/flash/movies/etc, it won't. I also add most of the crapsites I come across to NoScripts auto-block list (so it doesn't even do the little "do you wanna?" symbol in the corner of my browser). I also have Adblocker, and use it to block whole entire sites sometimes.