Zloth

I just checked Unchain Essence on live last night against an even level sky raider minion. At level 26 it did 55.44 damage. My brawl is doing 9.59 damage. That's an index of 5.78. Brawl has one very-expired training enhancement in it and Unchain is empty.

CoH Hero Builder lists the index as 5.1111, though. I don't see any posts for Warshade BI's in this topic. Has anyone here checked them out?

EH!? I'm a hero, I don't need a net!!! <smirk>

Also the Cascade side of the molepoint has walls again! (Smart move doing that one first, it's the side where you first have to touch the portal. Not an easy thing when there's no visible portal!)

Nonononono, geysers PUSH! If they sucked instead, they wouldn't be geysers now would they?? <grin>


Oh, I finally did the last Shadow Shard TF. It's a pretty good one! It had some great surprises in a few of the missions and the story was a good one. The final AV was a bit on the easy side. (Maybe that was on purpose? You're a LONG way from the nearest hospital and awakens might well be in short supply.)

1. Kheldians are strange in playback. I have one where my warshade goes between all three forms but, in playback, he never shows up as human. You might have better luck in the demo if you start recording when both are in human form.

2. Uncheck the Disable2D option and chat will appear. It only shows up as chat bubbles, though, so chat from characters speaking outside of camera range won't show up.

Thanks for the compliments!

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So, for me at least, visual range was just under 300'. I didn't think to test targeting range.

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I was checking this on live and got about the same range with one of my contacts. An unenhanced teleport is about 300' and, at level 50, a superjump is under half that.

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I still dont like the idea of having to deal some kind of damage and stay alive.

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That isn't what's happening. If you're within 300 feet then you'll get credit regardless of the damage you did.

Suggestion: If we are out of range when the xp gets handed out, can we get a message to that effect? We had a ton of confusion about not getting mission xp when we weren't in the mission long enough until we started getting a message.

1. Just move your mouse - that's your real live mouse pointer, not anything saved in the demo.

2. This is getting asked a lot, I think I'm going to have to add it to the guide. There's an easy way and a hard way.

A) The easy way is to go get FRAPS. Start it running then play your demo back and have it record. The free version is pretty limited but it works.

B) The hard way is to do a demodump at a fixed fps and convert your demo file into a TON of screenshots. You can then use VirtualDub (or Microsoft's Movie Maker) to pull them in to a video of whatever resolution you like. Sound is lost completely but that doesn't matter if you put in your own music anyway.

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You can be standing at the apex of a corner and see both halls. Once the group is Wormholed down one hall, CF them during the 5 to 10 seconds they are disoriented.

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And 5 seconds later? You end up with a group of rooted mobs that want to tear you to shreds. 5 seconds later The only thing accomplished was being able to aoe root the mobs without taking the alpha strike.

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Sure they want to, but they can't because there's a corner in the way and they aren't able to move around it. By the time the immobilize wears off, pets will have agro (or better yet a tank).

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Actually, you'll still take the alpha strike because of the delay between activating Wormhole (which is when the villians become aware of you) and when it goes off.

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Two ways around that. The easiest is to hide behind a corner. The better-but-more-expensive way is to put a couple of slots into range. Heck, one will do it pretty well but two SO's should give comfortable range.


All right, I took a crack at Infernal again. No way. Not with my Grav/Storm, anyway. Steamy Mist protected great against his fire attacks but eventually he would get ticked at a Singularity and chop it in two with two or three swings. After a long fight he only lost maybe a sixth of his hit points. He finally got agro'd at me when my hibernate hadn't recharged and that ended the battle real quick.

I was worried the increased damage resist for our Singularities might have made us too strong. They can still die fast against an AV's firepower, though. All is as it should be on that front.

Ummm.... yeah... I just did a Kora mission on Unyielding without breaking a sweat. If I can brush off scads of +1 and +2 Rularuu like that then maybe we don't need love, maybe some other powersets need <ahem> downward corrections.

But anyway, did some solo'ing with more 'volunteers' this time. GDF radius is definitely bigger - I was able to do a GDF then wormhole and had enemies that were not moved and did not miss. It's hard to measure but I'm thinking 15' radius.

I'm not seeing this scatter effect. The only time I've had scatter is when some enemies were stopped by a wall (or a hold) and others weren't. I tend to send enemies up against walls almost all the time, though. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Got burned by the AoE once, too. Just for the heck of it, I went after Infernal solo. I tried to pull him away from his alter and I think I got it in the AoE. (And no, the portal did not move.)

I wonder - can you stuff DE emminators into ceilings? I've seen lab equipment get stuck like that.

I've updated the Demo Launcher with a demo fixer. Since Issue 3, players have not been saving correctly. This little extra will pull in your demo, fix the bad players, and save it back to another file (the demo name plus " Fixed").

Link in my signature

I did some solo'ing using a lot of wormhole power. The longer recharge is definitely a pain but, if I can pull in a couple of bad guys at once, it takes longer for my storm cloud and singularities to chew them up. The radius does NOT appear to be as big as GDF at all. More like a ten or fifteen foot radius.

Regarding use of Wormhole against the DE emminators, it should still be fine. I haven't tried it to be sure but I would think any DE that went along with a little pet would simply run back to the battle as soon as they could.

I'm quite worried about agro, though. It seems like we get a chance to agro the whole group for each enemy we hit. Now we are hitting more enemies per use. Won't that increse the chances of bringing the whole group down on us? Hard to test this solo, unfortunately.

Now about these Singularities.... they resist MORE damage now? Jeeesh, the things are already hard to kill. I could literally plop one in the path of a big Rularuu patrol and expect it to survive a full minute.

Propel: anything is good!

Well, I have all those numbers down now except the 5th one. It doesn't seen to change anything! Each character I've made has had a 0 value but I haven't seen any other characters with a 0 value yet.

Here's an excerpt from my soon-to-be-redone FAQ....

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>0 394 COSTUME 0 89a0ea 77 1 0 .77 .66 .20 .12 -0.1 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0</pre><hr />
<ul type="square"> [*]The first number on the Costume line is the basic model. 0 is basic male, 1 basic female, and 4 huge male. (I’m guessing 2 and 3 are big male and big female but setting this makes most of the character invisible and gives lots of move animation errors.) Note that many costume options do not exist for all models so switching gender will often result in no texture at all.[*]The second number is the skin color. Colors are done in hexadecimal as BBGGRR so 00ff00 is pure green and white is ffffff. While character creation limits your skin colors quite a bit, I think you can use any color you like in a demo.[*]The third is height. 0 is average height and values can range pretty far. –99 makes the character no more than a dot and at +1000 you’ll have to zoom back to see higher than the kneecap. Graphics don’t scale up too well so don’t expect a lot from characters larger than 25.[*]The fourth is the overall physique scale. –1 is as skinny as possible and 1 is as muscular. Going above 1 has no affect I can see but, when I put a huge male’s physique at –40, his head shrunk totally into his chest![*]The next number doesn’t seem to have any effect. I suspect it is something that the following numbers override.[*]Shoulders are next (.77 above). Normally between -1 and 1, you can go outside those bounds and make some real strange folk. Going negative very far will make the right shoulder come out the left side and vise versa.[*]Chest next (.66 above). Going outside the -1 to 1 range has no effect.[*]Waist (.20) work just like chest.[*]Hips (.12) work more like shoulders. If you go over 1 you start getting a very bow-legged hero. Going much under –1, though, just makes the hips vanish completely.[*]Legs (-0.1 above) are different. The max/min value the game lets you make seems to depend on other factors (probably including height). The end results are almost always pretty near 0. You can change this a lot in a demo, though. A 1 makes your legs twice as big as the rest of your body. By –0.9 you’ll have no legs at all. Below that and you start sinking into the pavement, and the game starts to act odd.[*]The last 21 numbers are all used to describe the head. The seven parts are head, brow, cheek, chin, cranium, jaw, and nose (the same order they appear in the costume creator). Each part gets three numbers reflecting the width, the height, and the depth. In the example, all seven parts are given max width, minimum height, and average depth. The range goes from –1 to 1. If you go outside that range there is no effect, it just uses the max or min. (So a nose of 9 9 –9 will look just like a 1 1 –1 nose.) The exception to this is the head. A head of –9, -9, -9 makes for a pretty tiny head, while heads over +9 start to really bury into the chest.[/list]
Maybe I can figure out new costume options tomorrow. If the Arena doesn't come up too soon, that is....

Yep, you've got it right. It does the body sliders in some order then it does the face variables in some order. I'll work out which is which after I get some changes into my demo player so people can fix these.

There's a tricky bit, too - we've got one extra number! There's a height slider, six body sliders, and 7x3 head sliders. That's 28 sliders but there are 29 numbers after the skin color. Hmmm...... And people are getting different numbers in there.

Max/Min values look to be 1.00 and -1.00 for normal characters. I haven't played to see what playback will allow. (We could have some serious fun if it lets us go outside the boundaries!)

AAARRRGGH!!!!

OK, what we got here is a bug. All those numbers between the COSTUME line and the PARTSNAME line should be in the COSTUME line as parameters. So, in issue 4, you get a big honking line like:

0 394 COSTUME 0 89a0ea 99 1 0 .777 .661 .202 .126 -0.1 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0

So why so glum? I found the bug, I can work around it easy enough. Well, this same bug is in issue 3 and can be fixed the same way. The Demo Edit didn't do that, so it isn't saving back as well as it could. More to the point, though, it means WE COULD HAVE BEEN PLAYING WITH (some of) THE SLIDERS BEFORE CHRISTMAS!!

&lt;voice emmulation="Dr. Smith"&gt;
Oh the pain.... the pain....
&lt;/voice&gt;

And I just figured out the problem and how to fix it. Gonna go post it at the end of my demo faq topic. About time to update my FAQ now, but I really really need to update my demo programs as well. And test the Arena. And see how this new Wormhole thing works. So much to do!!!

To the last question.... your height is actually in there. After the Costume line there is another line that's just a number. That's your height. Copy it up after the two numbers that are already there. So a line like:

COSTUME 1 0f263d

Becomes:

COSTUME 1 0f263d 16.140654

You'll still look wrong, though. Keep copying the numbers to the end of the Costume line until you get down to PartsName and you'll look right. So, in the end, it would look a little like this (minus any line breaks the forum might put in):

0 394 COSTUME 0 89a0ea 99 1 0 .777 .661 .202 .126 -0.1 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 -1 0

This also works in issue 3!

;uses self-kick travel power to get back to my FAQ topic....

Looks like big changes to the character definition, as you would expect with all those sliders. Characters now look like the following:

0 2133 NEW CuppaJo
0 2133 COSTUME 1 9bb2ff
0 2133 8.228567
0 2133 -0.873016
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.555556
0 2133 -0.809524
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 -0.015873
0 2133 PARTSNAME Tight Metallic None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME Tight Metallic None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME Standard skin_head_06 Streak 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME Smooth skin_bare None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME Flat Metallic Fade_Line 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME Retro_01 Retro_01a Retro_01b 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME Medium_04 Long_01a Long_01b 0000aa 000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME Metal Studded_01a Studded_01b 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 0000aa 1f0b00
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000
0 2133 PARTSNAME None None None 00000000 00000000

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Well, I'm not sure if the Pally's pals despawn after a while or what.

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Possible. Or they may just get seperated over time. This was a couple of weeks after Issue 3 had come out so it's possible nobody had been in King's Row at all for several hours. Or maybe somebody had been on and finished them off but couldn't finish the Paladin. Heck, maybe some police bots picked them off. &lt;shrug&gt;

Just a note.... A few months ago, right around when Issue 3 went live, I bumped into the Paladin on test. I logged in and he was jumping over a fence into an alley. Since I was over double his level, I went after him solo. It was a long fight but I managed to win. You get NO badge for defeating a completed Paladin. Those of you wondering if there could be a second badge in this, there ain't.

Yet.

(Oh, and the Paladin was pretty much alone. There was no parade of clockwork following him, just a normal clockwork spawn that happened to be near when I layed into him.)

Actually, I have a demo, let me get some shots....

The Paladin

He had the standard clockwork electric blasts. My elec/elec blaster had Thunderous Blast. I win.

(And I'll leave out the bit where some -25 Tesla Knight stuck me in a cage right as I was trying to gloat over the dead Paladin. &lt;grumble grumble&gt

Something important that wasn't covered..... how the forms work!

When you pick your nova form at 6th level you don't just get one power, you get five powers! Dark Nova will pop up in your primary power list and four blast powers will appear on your inherent list. This also means a lot more slots to fill and a lot harder choices to make when you get more slots.

You can only use those 4 new inherent powers when you activate nova form, which takes two or three seconds. When you are in nova form, no human power will work for you. And by that I mean NO HUMAN FORM POWER - including auto powers like stamina. Even most temp powers will not work in nova form. (Vahz disease still works fine, though. Arg!)

While slotting up your nova powers is important, do not neglect slotting the nova form power itself. While you can't use Stamina in nova form, you've actually got something like it already built in and endurance recovery enhancers can boost that effect. You also get a to-hit bonus which can be enhanced.

Travelling as a Warshade is a dream once you get to 6th. Teleport most of the way then, when your endurance runs low (or you get near a place where you know there will be nasty lag, like Talos tram station), switch to nova form and fly. You can switch back to teleporting, too, but you fall quite a ways before the first teleport fires off.

Oh, another thing on travel.... dwarf form has a teleport much like the human form. However, dwarf form has a little stamina recovery so it's actually a little better to teleport around in dwarf form. (Plus you have free resists if you teleport into something nasty!) If you want to slot the teleport travel power, I would suggest slotting the dwarf form's port instead of the human version.

It's downright vital to set up a keybind for switching forms. Put your nova form powers on tray three then set up a hotkey to do "goto_tray 3$$powexec_toggleon Dark Nova" and another to do "goto_tray 1$$powexec_toggleoff Dark Nova$$powexec_toggleoff Dark Dwarf". Make that last one a real easy key to hit, you'll need it when you get stunned out of a form and want your main power tray back.

Ah, so they are kinda like opening credits covering for folks who are late to the movie. Clever! I liked having Ms Liberty hiding behind the camera with a boombox, too!

OMG! That was great!!!

I've always been a slightly slow reader so I couldn't quite keep up with that initial dialog. Luckily, it's a demo so I just popped in and added a few seconds!

If you make a demo in a Hammidon raid, I think you'll find that you can see a lot more of what happened on playback than you could when you were actually there! Just set the playback to use a fixed framerate.

Sorry, I'm not following that at all. Demo files are text files. Just change the extension.

That happens when CoH can't find the demo file. The demo must be in the client_demos in your City of Heroes directory.

That's VERY interesting, RedNile!

Couldn't you then confuse a boss, then have a grav controller wormhole the boss to your party with no risk of annoying the entire spawn? It would be a slow tactic but it should work. It sounds like a good thing to use if you need to clear some bosses out from around an AV.

Teleport Foe could be used, too, though only against minions and maybe LTs. If you have a Kheldian heavy group, it might be a good tactic to pull on Quantums.