Samuel_Tow

I don't believe going for polar opposite name is a good idea, generally speaking. As was said before, the Praetorians have the same powers as the Freedom Phalanx of Primal Earth for the most part, they just do evil with them. The reason I'm saying this is that one of the VERY few non-name names I actually have would make no sense if I mirrored it.

The Steel Rook derives his name from the mechanical suit of power armour, which allows him to function a lot like a Rook - straight-line offence with superior firepower. Mirroring this wouldn't make much sense, as "Steel" is something that would have to be retained in an alternate version. I suppose I could go with "The Plastic <something>" but that would be kind of like trying to make IronMan's evil counterpart and making it into "Plastic Woman." I mean seriously!

Generally speaking, the Praetorian counterparts of Primal Earth people aren't really "evil twins" or "other halves," they're the SAME people, but different. As such, their Praetorian names wouldn't and shouldn't be the simple-function opposites of their Primal Earth names, they should be evil or more aggressive versions of the same name.

So if losing his wife caused the Steel Rook to develop his armour to ensure the same didn't happen to anyone else, then his Praetorian counterpart would have gone through the same, but decided he had to do to villains what they did to him, transforming, essentially, into the Punisher in power armour. I would then call him The Steel Vengeance or some such.

All one really needs to do to avoid the chat bug is have a look at his or her chat line before typing. If there is garbage text in it, hit escape and retry. You'll write over the garbage text at next chat activation. Not to say it's not a bug or not annoying, but it's hardly ridiculous. I've gotten hit by it dozens of times, but I don't believe I've ever actually sent it to chat more than once.

I can't speak about anyone's particular problem, but I had a mouse that would move on its own, even at rest. It was a cheap optical mouse that had the tendency to wobble when moving, and also tended to start drifting to top left or bottom left when left at rest some of the time, even without me touching it.

I also recently had problems with supposedly good Microsoft laser mice, where they would absolutely not work directly on desk surfaces. The cursor would still move, but it would be hideously inaccurate, would jump around and would generally make it incredibly difficult to click something with. My solution was to put a white sheet of printer paper on the desk and use that as a make-shift pad (no-one at work seems to have one O_o), and other people I've suggested this to just duct-taped white sheets of paper to their desks. It fixed all mouse problems that I had.

Mice acting sentient sounds like something that would be hardware-related, but if it's only in City of Heroes, I don't know. There were Vista-related cursor problems that I remember, but heavens knows if it's connected in any way.

A better effect is a good call, indeed. Dimension Shift makes foes slightly transparent and has a stronger, thicker visual effect than other powers. However, it's also from the same theme as other Gravity powers, so it blends in at times, and picking out the enemies you can fight, while possible, takes time and effort. I suspect changing the colour of the effect in some way, just so it's not "Like Gravity Distortion, only brighter."

I think I can finally speak at least about the low levels. I have a Gravity/Energy Dominator who's about to hit 21, and things haven't been a piece of cake. Largely, though, this is due to my absurdly small amount of hit points. Damage is sufficient, and I hope to get some more survivability out of Gravity Distortion or Wormhole.

This character has been levelled up almost entirely solo, and has in fact had an EASIER time solo than on a team. Increased spawn sizes don't mesh well with single-target damage. Endurance has been a serious concern, but between fast-filling Domination and Rest, it hasn't left me actually waiting on it more than a dozen times in 20 levels. As Dominators are now prone to massive overkill, some degree of care must be taken in regards to who you shoot with what. A Power Blast on a target that could be taken out by a Power Bolt, for instance, isn't very smart, and it wastes endurance, to boot.

Overall, though, I'm impressed with Dominators' killing power now. Between Energy Blast and Propel, it's been pretty cool. I had serious problems with Luddite Crusaders, thanks to their confounded crossbows dealing silly amounts of damage, but I've found that saving Domination for when bosses are around helps a lot. A floating Crusader is significantly safer than a rooted Crusader.

I doubt any kind of Dominator would find huge spawns NOT a greater issue than single, tough enemies as even with good AoE potential, low hit points restrict how much you can do. I guess, again, AoE control powers could help, but none of mine have been available quite yet, or if they have, I haven't been able to take them. I'm looking to, now. Still, plenty of tricks can divide spawns or pull from spawns, which helps. Teleport Foe has been a godsend, more so than on any other character I've played. I wish it recharged faster and cost less

So far, it's been an uphill struggle, more so than most other lowbies I've brought up, and I blame hit points more than anything else. It seems to be picking up at 20, though, so we'll see.

I'm firmly against this for two reasons.

One reason is the what I like to call "the creeping suck." The game starts out, everything is easy, your character rocks, you're mopping the floor with everyone. Then things start getting harder and harder and harder until you start wondering when you're character is going to stop getting WORSE and actually get BETTER as you level up. This creeping suck starts to creep in on Blasters around level 30 and outright ambushes them at level 40, as the game suddenly becomes a LOT harder while they haven't improved all that much.

I like to gain levels and become stronger. Having my powers cost more and more and more is not conducive to that. It creates a funny sense of lull, which always leads to an unpleasant crash when the training wheels come off and the game punches you in the face. I'd rather have as few instances of "sudden suck" as humanly possible.

The other reason is more religious. I'm sick and tired of people holding Stamina to be the holy grail of endurance management, so I will not support any idea to make endurance management easier until Stamina can be taken. Endurance is manageable in a lot of ways other than boosted recovery, and I'd rather people were forced to come up with them before they found an "out" so that they have a better solution even AFTER they take Stamina.

What is a "Nade?"

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"Nerf this" threads are against the rules.

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And that goes double for "Herf this" threads.

The worst thing about the Malta change is that it makes them even LESS interesting to fight. They have lots of holds and lots of damage. Ooh! Smart! Or rather, not smart, but cheating. Smart is what they were before, and smart is what someone without much protection needed to be to fight them. Here's how it went:

Gunslingers would not use their ice hold and their fire bullet, and boss Gunslingers would not use their sleep dart, if they were closer than about 40 feet. However, at 40 feet or less, Tactical Operatives would use their stun grenades, which they wouldn't do if you were around 50 feet or more away from them, at which point they would resort to just firing their rifles for fairly low damage. Titans had stupid-powerful attacks, but wouldn't really resort to using them unless you tried to run away, making Titan battles especially in open space such that once you engaged, you HAD to finish it or you would die running away.

They are no longer interesting to fight. They just fire all their powers all the time. It's no longer possible for a relatively weak but smart player to outsmart them and beat them at their own game. Now fighting them requires the same bull-rush approach as fighting every other faction. Kill the Sapper, hold the Tac Ops, cross your fingers. Boring. Every fight in this game always comes down to this. All that ever really matters at all is who to kill first. They call it "tactics," but the only tactical thing about it is an order of attack. Malta used to require ACTUAL tactics, requiring people to think where they were and decide what they would rather be exposed to and what they could trick the Malta units into not using. Now it's full broadside and hope for the best.

It's an immense disservice to this game that all tough enemies need to be defeated by out-toughing them. The Cimeroran Traitors are sort of a step in the right direction, as killing their healers (again, "kill first" pseudo-tactics) and separating them would work to your advantage, but even they are only marginally so. The Vahzilok are a good example, though. Hugely powerful, larger-than-normal spawns of zombies reduce even the strongest of characters to pulp, but that's because they're not made to be fought head on. In fact, they're meant to KILL people who fight them head on. Instead, the proper way to fight them is to abuse the zombies' stupidity once they are robbed of their Reapers and pick them off one-by-one. Getting a Reaper out of a spawn of Zombies, then, becomes interesting, and a friend of mine suggested aggroing them and running far away, as Reapers would run ahead of the zombies because they're faster, thus allowing you to kill them before the rest of the undead caught up. The rest of them would be easy to pick off. Being that they give greater than normal experience, this slowdown was compensated for.

Scripted enemies with learnable behaviour which can be used to the player's advantage is the PROPER way to make the AI "smarter." Smarter doesn't mean better able to kill us, it means plain more interesting to fight. Your typical arcade boss is a thousand times smarter than your typical CoH boss. They'll try a variety of attacks, each of which has to be defended against in a different way, occasionally become vulnerable, and even start using more powers as they lose health. But just requiring something more than standing face-to-face with the boss and trading punches, or semi-permanently incapacitating the boss and beating on him is "smarter."

There's a difference between smart AI and cheap AI. The original Diablo had very cheap AI. Rangers of all sorts would back away from you in a diametrically opposite direction each time you approached, run as fast as you did, and stop to fire at you the second you stopped chasing them. That's smart as a direct translation of the term, but it's also horribly cheap, as the only way to catch them was to cause them to jam themselves in a corner. Each and every one, one by one, while melee enemies beat on you.

I don't want the AI to be better at killing me. I want the AI to be more interesting to kill.

I have to agree with Zombsmann - don't roll back changes to higher resolution textures. Update the old low-res amorphous blobs to higher resolution, shadered textures so they match the new stuff. Shiny metal would be really cool, as none of the old metallic textures are any more shiny than the non-metallic tights.

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* You would lose all your inf.
* It would have other costs associated with it. {Note: speculation included loosing all of your enhancements.}


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Honestly, these two things would be really stupid.

Nobody would be dumb enough to let it take their influence. They could just transfer to an alt before doing it. It would just result in complaints when people did it by accident.

Losing enhancements would be even worse. In fact it would punish people for actually investing time in their characters. The best candidates for side-switchers would be people who have no enhancements? Imagine if you had rare IOs or even purples, and the game tried to take them from you if you wanted to switch. That would be even more complaints from accidental switches.

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Keep in mind that this was discussed in I6 at CoV Launch and during CoV beta, back before there were expensive enhancements or any use for money beyond collecting large numbers. Losing influence and enhancements mean losing SOs, which, even at level 50, weren't much more than a three-four million for a full set

That said, it's coming to a point where they may as well merge the markets. After spending some time on the Hero side of things and enjoying my many millions made from selling things cheap and snagging huge bids, the harsh truth of the Villain market is starting to depress me. Few items seem to sell at all, and when they do, they sell for very low prices. Most salvage that even has anyone bidding sells for below vendor price, and most doesn't have a single soul looking to have it. Whether that's due to population differences or the fact that people are off grinding the AP Architect, I cannot say, but I'd enjoy a unified market. We might as well.

Also, I don't believe there was ever a confirmation done about being able to start as a "morally grey" character. I'm pretty sure you'll have to choose whether you'll be a heroic vigilante or an evil conformist in Praetoria, with the option to earn points towards the other side and switch at some point. Even the signature characters being introduced are very much clear - one is a hero, the other a villain. You could probably get very close to neutral, but you're always going to be on one side or the other, never straddling the line as such.

Beyond that, all we really have is speculation that I couldn't guess one way or the other on.

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Backflip CC
Salute CC
Evil Laugh CC

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Sorry for crimping the post at the links, but I LOVE those. Can we please please get emotes to put us in those stances without having to go through other emotes? I tried BABs' /em idle1 and /em idle2, and /em idle2 puts me in a stance that I absolutely LOVE and was never able to get by itself. Please, can we have some more flying stances that are already in the game? The old stance that Soul Storm would leave you in would also be very welcome.

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Footsteps are cool. Sand and loose soil now actually sound like sand and loose soil (and a little like snow) and the sound of footsteps on metal is no longer borrowed from Ufo: Enemy Unknown.

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I KNEW IT! I knew those footsteps sounded familiar!
Now I really wish I hadn't deleted my old AR/Trap Blaster: Elerium-115 Suit
I even have the full X-Com series on Steam. ^_^

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A lot of the sounds in City of Heroes can be traced back to older games. Here's an interesting factoid: Proton Volley sounds like a Plasma Cannon in Auto Fire

Wait, so the single-target intangible cages can't be slotted for magnitude? That doesn't make sense. Those are pretty much the only things that would be worth slotting for magnitude as you'd want to cage single, big things with them.

Why is there even a magnitude enhancement in the first place, when these powers catch everything short of an EB anyway? Why not duration, like every other status effect? Or, the flip the question around, why is Intangibility the only effect with an enhancement-boostable magnitude?

Still, even with all of the above, Dimension Shift has proven useful to me plenty of times. It has saved my life, it has divided spawns for me and it has served to let me withdraw from a fight safely. Which is really cool

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Got a quick question for you, S_T. Do *laptop* screens have a native resolution, and if they do, how do you determine what it is?
My work laptop is driving me nuts--I've tried several resolutions, and none of them seem quite right.
Thanks!

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I'm not S_T, but I stayed in Holiday Inn Express last night...
All LCD type monitors are fixed resolution, aka native. To determine what that's supposed to be, the hit or miss method works ok, but you can always... well, ok, mostly... go to the manufacturer website and search up your laptop's model number. Or google it, it's amazing what google will show up with.
For example, just pulling one out of my head (after looking at hp.com first), an HP dv6z laptop's resolution is 1366x768. And if you google 'hp dv6z resolution' you get this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...p;oq=&aqi=
And the 4th one down has it right there (as of this posting)
So... maybe I helped?

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Beaten to the punch... Man, I knew I shouldn't have stayed off the forums over the Weekend

But yes, pretty much that exactly. I'd advise people with LCDs to stick to their native resolution if at all possible, as that's the only resolution that actually looks good. While LCDs cane display lower resolutions than their native, they do so via some kind of nasty interpolation or whatever that's called, resulting in ugly, jagged pixels even on high-but-not-native resolutions.

That's actually one of the reasons I've avoided large LCDs - their native resolutions are quite high, which makes games slow down more if I want to play them right.

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I've always heard 70 is the danger zone If you overclock your stuff. If you don't overclock anything then it can go a little higher. Dust and such can cause temperatures to rise so if you do have high temps you might be able to help by blowing the dust out so long as you know what your doing. there are some decent tutorials on how to do that on the net if you feel you need to do that.

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Hmm... 70 it is, then. Mine's running at 61-62 when I step on the graphics, but it doesn't seem to go above that even when the loud fan turns on. Maybe I should try Mirror's Edge again and see if that will lock up. Too bad the game sucks...

Good to know! I always thought it was duration and always wondered what it was good for. On the other hand, though - if Intangibility enhancements enhance Intangibility magnitude and Dimension Shift already affects bosses (it doesn't play its effect on bosses, but it most certainly affects them), what's the point in slotting those in it?

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Wait... Are you sure that's 1060x1050? That's almost square. NO monitor has that kind of proportion.

[/ QUOTE ]I'm sorry, I should have mentioned that I cropped the images. I was focused on the character/citizens themselves and not the surrounding landscape.
Consensus seems to be that I'm just not used to seeing the game the "right" way. I'll need a couple visits to the cstume shop since some of my characters were made with the old view meaning that I used "thin" heads to make it look correct and now they're really thin looking heads

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Before you go out and remake your costumes, make sure that you're using the correct resolution. You don't want to "fix" them into something else that's not quite right. And believe me, I went through this - it's better to make your characters the "right" way because that's what they look like on other people's screens. You want to know what other people see, after all

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Or he can just go with the native resolution for his new monitor which is probably printed right on the box in nice bold print.

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I didn't see him mention a new screen, just a new video card, which is what had me concerned. Some LCDs Windows can detect and determine the maximum resolution for, but some it just registers as "Plug-n-Play monitor" and gives them allowed resolutions all the way up to 2500xSomething, which they obviously don't support. If it's an old(ish) monitor with a box filed away somewhere and no resolution written on the sticker at the back (mine doesn't have it listed), it could be bit of a pain figuring it out. The manufacturer's site should have it listed, but wading through the tangled mess that is most manufacturers' websites has been hell and high water for me in the past.

And, yes, use some anti-alising Years ago I discovered that, counter-intuitively, increasing anti-alising to x2 or even x4 had very little effect on framerate in this game. I don't know why that is, but it remains true. I guess it's because this works only on the 3D geometry and not on the textures - street markings remain jagged with any setting of anti-alise that the game supports. It still makes the game a lot more pleasing, though.

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This could be far off in left field, but do you have any mez duration set bonuses? Is it possible one of them is affecting the phase of DS? Yes I know they shouldn't..but it may be a bug.

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No, no set bonuses. Nothing but DOs. The only thing I slotted between 14 and 16 was two DO endurance reducers and an accuracy enhancement in Teleport Foe. None of that should have affected the intangibility duration of a power I didn't touch.

Had I not timed the effect, I could swear I just have poor perception of time, but I timed it on the same stop watch, and it was 18 seconds at level 14 and 30 seconds at level 16. Is there some kind of intangibility duration AT modifier that's coming into play as I near level 20? That would make sense, as AT modifiers start out as all roughly the same between all ATs and don't settle into their final values until level 20, but even then, shouldn't the duration real nubers have reflected what the modifier dictated? The value said 30 seconds, but it was NOT 30 seconds. It wasn't, and now it is...

This is incredibly odd. Something caught my eye about Dimension Shift a while ago - it seemed to be lasting a LOT longer - so I retested it. Same character, only now it was level 16. Against two white con minions, my stop watch measured the power's duration to 32.11 seconds. I'd call that 30 seconds plus server lag and my own reaction time.

I have no idea what changed between level 14 and level 16, but my Dimension Shift is still unenhanced for duration, and I'm positive of the results I posted earlier today. This time, however, it really FEELS like 30 seconds, and it feels like A LOT, which is what it should be.

And I can't figure out why.

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Or he can use Windowed mode instead of Fullscreen and the aspect ratio should be fine no matter what size he changes the screen to (providing his desktop is at the correct aspect ratio as well).

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That's not always a given, though. Pretty much half the time I go to help with someone's computer, their Desktop is at the wrong resolution for the monitor. I've seen my fair share of 5:4 LCDs and 8:5 widescreens at 1024x768 just because people don't know what to put there. If the OP was using the wrong resolution before, I'd like to figure out what the right resolution for his screen would be even if he does end up playing in windowed mode.

Could the Dominator changes have messed with that? Did you try that before or after I15?

But it doesn't reduce the actual lost packets, right? Meaning I shouldn't be looking for a kinder netgraph? I'll give it a shot. See if it helps. Before I go boot my provider on the...

If it were against something I expected would resist the effect, I wouldn't be as surprised, but this is true for everything I've used this on the Luddites, the PPD, Arachnos, the Goldbrickers, the Vahzilok and probably something else besides. All of them seem to end early. What's more, minions, lieutenants and bosses come out of the Intangible period at the same time. It seems like the period is short for everyone, and by the same amount.

Also, the power says "+3 Intangible, Unknown for 30s PvE only" (in City of Data), which led me to believe it wouldn't "shift" bosses. And indeed, using the power leaves bosses without the glowing Dimension Shift effect, yet shooting at them produces the "Unaffected" message and nothing I do to them has any effect, just as nothing they do to me has any effect. They are, in practice, Intangible, only they don't have the effect. And how does a mag 3 status effect affect a boss who should have mag 4 protection to these things?

City of Data also lists "+3 Immobilize for 30s PvE only." Which would be great, if it actually worked, but I've not seen it be the case. It's usually mayhem and pandemonium when I resort to Dimension shift, and maybe what I'm seeing are immobilize-resistant enemies, such as bosses or the Vahzilok zombies, but enemies I "shift" are most decidedly still running around willy-nilly.

And then there's "ThreatLevel -1 for 8s If target is a player," which displays in-game as "-100.00% threat level for 30.00s on target." Wouldn't that imply that enemies would stop shooting at me and start shooting at someone else, despite their shots being ineffective? Because this isn't the case. Not only are shifted enemies shooting at me the entire time they're out of phase (and doing nothing), but as soon as they return to normal space, I'm facing full-spawn aggro and an a deadly alpha strike. And that's on a team with two other people who aren't standing by idle.

Can someone please explain what I'm missing? I mean, I like the power, but at this point, the numbers I'm seeing for it don't appear to have anything to do with the real world.

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Proof positive. Just to make sure I'm not guessing, I timed my intangibility duration. I hit a single even con Goldbrickers Rocket Man (level 14, if it matters) and timed it on a stopwatch. I was a little slow on the stop and probably reacted a second too late to stop it, but it still stopped at 18.51 seconds. Give or take half a second to account for my reaction time, I'd call that 18 seconds. That's 18 seconds in practice out of 30 seconds on paper. Why? A single even con minion shouldn't be resisting anything inherently, and I don't believe the Goldbrickers resist intangibility effects specifically.

For what it's worth, the Goldbricker DID appear to be immobilized, but he kept shooting at me ALL the way through. Granted, this being a -threat effect, rather than a placate effect, and me being alone for this test, it could simply be a function of having no-one else to shoot at.