Zloth

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ok wow, so now you can hit aim+buildup/drop out of the sky filling your defiance when you hit the ground AoE a spawn/group of players while popping green inspirations and watch as your exp bar fills...


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You can already do that. Unless your AoE is Rain of Somethingorothers? In that case, the rain will get the boost but, given how little damage it does, your xp bar will most likely be filling with the debt bar.

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does that mean that in pvp it'll take the full damage and not just base damage for the -dmg part of the debuff?

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No change was made to PvP.

In regards to what is affected and what isn't, from the looks of it all your powers are going to be buffed in I7. Right now, if you take a red inspire, all your blasts and punches get the damage buff. However, if you call a rain of fire or throw out some caltrops, those are currently treated as pets by the game and they get no benifit from your red inspire. That's a nasty 'gotchya' as most players don't realize those things are pseudo-pets and are treated differently. I7 will make pseudo-pets get buffed just like other powers - you'll no longer have to worry about this whole pseudo-pet thing.

REAL pets will not get the benifit. I'm guessing that a real pet is a pet that you can actually click on and select. (Does that happen with traps?) No benefit for controller/dominator pets, dark servants, warshade pets, or MM henchmen. I forget whether Voltaic Sentinal can be targetted but Tornado can not so it will likely get the buffs.

Ah well, we'll find out when I7 hits.

Alas, for poor Sonburst the nerfs have come too late. Far, far too late.

*covers himself in glowy material, protecting him from any stealthy supers sneaking around*

Oh man, how did I miss this guide??

Headed out to make a new Defender named "Screwtape"....

Might want to check Grav out again. Animation times got reduced (either in I5 or I6, I forget which) and Wormhole's stun got better in I6 as well.

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Storm is really close range, but I do like the ability to grab mobs with Wormhole, and throw them all in a corner so that I can use Hurricane to pin them there.

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Hurricane plus lightning storm! That storm has considerable knockback, though it's one target at a time and you can't predict who it will hit. If you really want to get mean, re-summon the Singularity near the corner as well to do repel and throw in some holds/immobilizes. Oh, and don't forget the slow/knockdown of freezing rain!

Storm is a wicked corner power and Grav's Wormhole makes using corners fun and easy.

Ya just use the card builder Cuppa linked to. You can tell it to send you the picture as a JPG. Save that away and upload to ImageShack (or wherever). Is the web page giving an error message?

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SOON

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Oh man, the devs are going to be saving that link!

ImageShack seems to be having issues but.....

Flame War

P.S. GAK! OK, who played the typo card!?

The only way I've been able to get it so a demo doesn't record at all is to mess up the comand or forget to put the name of the file in. They even record in bases, they just play back crazy. Are you getting an error message when you try to play a demo back or is it just not there?

There's no real limit to the recording time but the demo will stop automatically when you zone or log out (well, it's supposed to stop when you log out, anyway - see Circ's post above). However, while it is recording nothing is saved to disk. That doesn't happen until the demo is stopped and then the whole thing is saved at once. If you crash before you save, all is lost. Also, huge demos get a little unwieldy. I try to keep my demos under 20 minutes each.

Eh?? They fixed demos months ago so that console didn't work any more.... and now it works again? Nice!

An HOUR to get to your mission/dungeon/whatever!?!? You're exaggerating, right? Jeez, I thought it was horrible in Anarchy Online to take 20 minutes to get to a mission. (Of course, there would also be 15 minutes paging through the random mission computer trying to find one that was even that close and had a sane reward.)


So far I've only made two characters with Stamina and only one of those (the tank) got it at 20. Actually, my controller just respec'ed it out. My blaster and defender both drain endurance. My dominator doesn't seem to need it at all. My corruptor probably will need it. Really though, this power isn't the must-have so many think it is. Especially now with reduced endurance cost and ED.

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I can't be satisfied and enjoy the game indefinitely if all it is is a fighting game. If all I have to look forward to is doing the same thing with different powers, fighting villains that only differ in look and powers, then I may as well leave the game to kids who like seeing pretty images flashing by over and over.

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I don't know about you, but I can. I still play my level 50 at times not for content (heck, I mostly do that Kora Fruit mission with her) but purely for the battles. Heck, I just did a mission with my level 14 corrupter that, except for a single spawn, was all 3 minions and most of those were even level. Every single battle played out very differently. Sometimes I would use cover, sometimes I would hover above with that jet pack thing, sometimes my snipe would miss, sometimes my snowstorm anchor would start to run off and I would have to drop the power or risk agro'ing who knows who. And that's just solo with a few powers. Groups tend to play very differently as well....

IF they are challenged, that is. I keep my Warshade at Heroic and his battles are mostly pretty dull, playing out mostly the same way. (However, the battles with a Void or Q-Gun are seriously intense. Nothing like the sound of a nictus gun to wake me up!) Playing my Mastermind at the normal difficulty level was pretty dull, too. If things are easy then you don't need to think about cover to hind behind or other clever strategies. Just go in, blast, and move on.... zzzzz. Tolerances differ per person but I like my difficulty such that I at least get into red health every two or three hours. If I'm not dying every 10 to 15 hours then I'm probably not having much fun.


By the way - to the Original Poster.... My MMO history is a bit different. I played a lot of Asheron's Call, which had no end game content at the time. Then I moved on to Anarchy Online, again no end game content at least when I was there (heck, it was lucky to run at all). Then to Dark Age of Camelot where the min level to be usefull in Realm vs Realm was always five levels above me. DAoC was a BIG shock to me. That was (and likely still is) a game where the lower levels are just there to train you for the 'real' content in the end game. It's good to be back in a game where advancement is there just to add more variety to your battles.


I really important concept here in CoH/V is the sidekick. YOUR LEVEL DOES NOT MATTER ALL THAT MUCH!! A level 5 that's sidekicked up to level 49 won't be nearly as effective as a real level 49. However, in most MMO's just taking a two week vacation can be harsh. If you go away for a month or two then you can forget ever playing with your old friends again unless you all make new characters! Not here. The character that has gotten behind by two months can just be sidekicked in and will still be able to contribute to the group! In fact, thanks to levels taking more time the higher you go, they should slowly catch up to the higher level characters.


P.S. Yes, "my level 50." After probably 4000 hours of play I have just one level 50! However, I think the total 'grinding' time I've done in this game is less than 40 hours. I'll take 3960 hours of fun over any stack of level 50's, thanks.

A quick update for CoV.....

1. You can NOT record demos that show your supergroup base. If you take a demo in a base you'll see the characters moving around but no walls or objects.

2. Slag Golems (found in Sharkhead Isle) are a bit random. If you record a demo they will still have random parts attached but probably not the same ones you really saw in game. In fact, the next time the demo plays through they will have different random parts!

3. No ragdoll physics.


By the way, demo dumping is working well again! We had a few months there where demodump didn't record a lot of textures.

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This topic was raised on the scrapper/stalker forums a week or so ago, about being able to put automated TRIGGERS on various powers, including HEALS.

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Uhhh, no. That does sound fun to me but it's going to be way too much work for way too many people to have to go programming powers in. PvP will start to become more a war of triggers and programming skill.

The problem isn't really one shots at all. It's attacks for which there's no viable defense. If somebody sets up shop with multiple trip mines in front of a nice, friendly boss turret then teleports, what are you supposed to do about it? Defense-oriented classes might have a chance. Keeping a purple inspire going the entire time would probably work. This really doesn't strike me as reasonable, though. Not far off but not quite there.

I would suggest changing the animation for teleport a little bit. Give us an effect before we get teleported so we have roughly one second before it hits. That will let us hit an inspire or a power if we're quick. The tactic would still get a lot of folks but death would no longer be inevidable.

With stalker one shots, Idunno. I've got a stalker with Assassin Strike but I haven't used it enough to know the details of how it works.

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Great, so that means Super Reflexes has a further achilles heal (not mentioned before) in that every fourth attack from NPCs will effectively 'auto-hit'.

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No, they have to miss four times in a row. And, for the streak-breaker to actually make a difference, they would have to have missed the fifth time, too. If you can get the to hit chance under 40% then they have to miss seven times for it to make a difference, and I think Elude is very capable of bringing to-hit chances down that far.

Thank you SO much for saving those!!

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Any Prestige they EARN while fighting in SG Mode stays. The -only- thing lost is 20,000 when your group loses a member that drops them below 15, or are already below 15.

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Hmmm, so if somebody is going to quit then it's a good idea to buy a boatload of furniture and bring your group down to just a little prestige. Then, when the person quits, you sell back the furniture and aren't out your 20k?

Did anyone save the suggstion-turned-RP thread from early CoV beta with Jenkins quitting various villain groups?? It's time to show the world!

Heck, any Rularuu would be good.

The most obvious one - sappers. It would be even better if we could get fake sappers for cheap - maybe 150pts. Looks like a sapper, fires off powers that use the same effects, but there's never endurance drain. One real sapper with two fakes around him should get real interesting.

Sorcerers really need to be in there. Heck, maybe they are. I logged in last night and got like 20 gladiator badges.

How about D.E. swarms? Not the run-of-the-mill kind, mind you, but the nasty kind down in the Eden trial that take away fly powers. That should bring Longbow Wardens down to earth.

Hammidon - no go, he won't fit on some of the maps. Sorry.

Rikti Monkies - cost only 50 each and you can get up to 20 of them. <grin>

`Tis a good thing! A pity I always save as TGA graphics and those don't have neat-o-keen headers to play with. (I pretty much always crop the pictures before I save them away. If I started with a JPG that means it would be compressed twice. Not good.)

By the way, Irfanview not only lets you edit these tags, it lets you batch edit them. So, for instance, you could stick "CoH" as a keyword on all your jpegs in your CoH screenshot folder.

Yeah, the Results thing seems to have vanished. It went away a few issues ago. There could be some option you can throw to it that will turn the results log back on but I don't know it.


Bostic, not sure why you would use FRAPS (or any other 3rd party app) for that. Assuming you save to TGA files you are getting an EXACT save in whatever resolution you want. No compression of any kind at all. What's more, demo playback can set the frames per second so, if you really think you need 20 screenshots per second, you can do it. The game will slow down to accomidate. And the ability to edit out certain powers or even change the time of day makes for screenshot heaven!

You can now check PC's and NPC's max health in demos. There are theoretically a lot of stats you can get from demos but you have to be carefull with it. While you can see the numbers flying around for damage and healing you can't tell what's causing them so big battles become a hopeless swarm of numbers. You can get numbers, though, it's just that you have to use one power at a time. Also, damage numbers are rounded off so you can't tell if the damage tick is doing 2.2 or 2.3 damage. (You can sure count the number of ticks, though.)

You can't pan it in the game. You would have to record a demo then mess with the camera position in the resulting text file.

I've never tried adjusting the mousewheel. There MIGHT be a difference if you go to your mouse properties in Windows and change how many lines you scroll at a time but I wouldn't bet on it.

I run at pretty insane resolution (1920x1440) and my screenshots save very fast. The first one can sometimes take a bit but all the following ones don't even take a second. Still, you can't beat Demodump for screenshots! Why take one when you can take a dozen per second?? Plus, with a little editing, you can remove some of the less sighly powers.

(I've been having real bad problems with Demodump dropping textures lately, though. Hopefully you won't get this.)

New Demo Edit program up. No big changes except it handles the HP and HPMAX commands in demos.

Drat, foiled again!

I don't suppose a distributed computing deal could be cooked up? Break up the data into one-hour intervals and have desktops and/or non-production game servers chew on them after hours? (The datamine could get done REAL fast if it was sent out to customers' computers but that would open up hacking possibilities.)

P.S. Ummm, Dev response thread? Are those rules still in effect?

It's like taking a screenshot of the character selection screen - the screenshot is not saved to disk but it is saved in your Windows clipboard. Take the shot, start MS Paint or IrfanView or Word or whatever, and paste the picture in. Then you can save it away. If you're playing in full screen mode then you might have to quit out of CoH in order to start another program.