Antimatter_NA

It's simple math. By level 20 you have about 10 powers, five of which are probably devoted just to basic functionality like stamina and travel.
It's not until level 30 that you start to feel combat complete, and it's not until 40ish that you've probably got all the powers you need to have the most fun with your character.
Given the limited number of actual powers, and the way you only get one every two or three levels, CoH is a game that has very little sense of reward for leveling compared with every other MMO, where abilities are plentiful, characters start to be solid and interesting around 10, or 20 in higher cap systems, and there is alternative advancement as you go along.

Regardless of whatever your opinion may be on that, the fact is that most people don't enjoy the leveling process and just want to realize their character concept or start having fun with their character's full range of powers as soon as possible. Thus, the farm.

You're also losing sight of the whole reason this was even brought up: Which is that AE is not to blame for farming, the game design itself is responsible for pushing people to farm as fast as possible to the top without much regard for the content. That much is undeniable, as farming and power leveling has been a huge part of CoH since day one, in various forms.

Given that, there is ultimately no harm in allowing greater control over mission scripting, even if it does make for better farms, because farming is something that has been and always will be with us regardless of how effective it is - The best thing you can do for the game is to simply make it fun by providing players with the tools to script interesting missions that are worth experiencing for the sake of it (although you could cap exp per minute or something if you really wanted to).

My vampire is more ethereal, Dark Melee and Dark Armor.
He has a costume change where he is a slick suited vampire, and then transforms into a brute beast, wings, with torn clothing.

His mode of travel is super jump, and during combat he jumps all over the place with great speed using combat jumping and hurdle. (seems the most vampire way to engage in combat).

It was made before willpower came out, but willpower is probaly the best choice because it's more about making you strong, difficult to kill, and most importantly it doesn't cover up your look.

Except that... Mindlessly dismissing whatever lessons their system has to offer only on the basis that they are different games, without doing any research on the subject for yourself to determine whether or not that is the case, is counterproductive to a discussion on this topic.

Your problem is that you make the assumption that just because it's a different MMO that there is nothing to be learned from it. You're wrong.

There's no special synergy between the two. It's not like the KB allows you to do anything you couldn't otherwise do with fire/, especially since it's only single target.

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I'll give an honorable mention to Grav. It ain't half bad in PvP (its single targetness hurts it in PvE, but not in PvP). Beware its long animations, though. Its looseness gives plenty of room to take things like Tough and Phase Shift. In I12 PvP you could really stack up the slows, but in PvP 2.0 I think slows are broken.


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The slow hold animation will kill you.

What you call "looseness" is simply a lack of good powers to take. You can achieve the same effect with another powerset by simply skipping some of the good powers that aren't needed for PvP.

The slows won't stop most people from going anywhere with the high unsuppressed movement and jumpheight of dedicated PvPers. You've only got two slows to stack and neither is very powerful.
Ice is the only set that can truly slow someone down because you have one power which will floor the speed of anyone.

The biggest reason to choose Elec is for buildup. Critical for PvP as the dominator suffers from a lack of tohit buffs.
A lot of PvP doms go /thorn just for aim.

You don't know what you're talking about. Mission farming was every bit as effective as AE farming, it's just that it was limited to certain builds and certain conditions - So a handful of people skewed the market and no one else could compete.

AE missions have leveled the playing field by allowing any random group of eight to effectively farm - This reality is reflected the lowering of prices on the market and the evening out of prices from one rare to another. Increased availability combined with the ability for everyone to farm at the a competitive capacity. No longer do we have 5% of the players farming for 90% of the loot and then using thier own concentration of wealth to skew the market prices out of reach of everyone else.

Now everyone can be a part of the economic process, with any character, but simplying joining an AE farm team - A far more simple and inclusive process than the prior system consisting of lone farmers, sometimes with bots, but always restricted to a handful of useful archetypes doing all the farming to pay for those who can't do it.

No, it's only you. Come back when you get past level 10.

So don't buy a cheap laptop expecting to game with it. Laptops are always more expensive than the equivalent PC, and get more expensive the more power you try to put into it.

So either accept that limitation or build a desktop to save money and still get power.

AE farms are a symptom, not the problem.
Mission farming was a symptom of the same problem - The only reason it was more limited was because not everyone could do it. All AE has done is put everyone on an even playing field.

It's a sandbox MMO that was built from the beginning to support player scripted content. That's right, actual control over scripting, environment layout, everything that the actual devs use to create stuff save for uploading new assets.

Do they care if people use them to farm? Why would they? It's not the kind of game that was designed to string people along with grinds and endless pursuit of special loot, and neither has CoH been that kind of game. You don't need to artificially string people along with grinds when there's actual content to experience.

You might be at the point of writing off CoH's custom content as a failure because 90% of it involves farming, but you must recognize why it has come to farming, and the reasons are not a strike against the expansion of custom content or against the idea itself.

1. We don't have enough freedom to craft a unique experience. Since really the only thing we can do is get creative with text and enemy costumes, our ability to tell an interesting interactive story is almost nill. Without event scripting, mob placement, object placement, etc, there is not much we can do to make out custom content competitive with simple grind maps.

2. The problem of CoH's level system. The level system was flawed in it's original design because player's don't start to have interesting characters until halfway through, and don't really feel complete until they get near 50. THe gameplay might be fun, but the actual leveling is a lot more painful than it justifies. Which leads people to find any way they can to farm (and there was plenty of farming prior to CC).

3. After hitting 50, we now have to farm for cash to IO out. So this prevents us from just enjoying the content once we hit 50.

Personally I wouldn't mind if everyone had a short farming journey to 50, but then spent all their time playing through well crafted custom content while building their character up with IOs, eventually using it in PvP.
But supergroup based PvP still hasn't be done right, and unless we get better custom content scripting it's going to be difficult for it to be appealing enough to the point where people say "I think I'd rather sacrifice some XP/Inf per hour in order to do something interesting".

Stalkers are good even on farm missions. Because unlike the AOE of everyone else, they start bringing down threats immediately, increasing survivability and reducing the chance that the corruptors will be aggroed and killed.

It's just not a very visible role so they don't get credit for it.

It's also a role that masterminds can fill to some degree with their ability to mitigate aggro, but it goes underappreciated.

Wait, they are banning missions that they deem farms? That's stupidly subjective. Plenty of one mission farms get under this radar by having some silly simply story attached.

They use to do powerleveling back when it required specialized builds to farm PI portal missions. Back then all they needed was filler, you were getting in the way.

Now that anyone can form a team and farm for equal benefits thanks to tickets, so anyone who is capable of contributing is no longer a drag on profits.

I want to form groups for story arc AE missions, but I it complicates things if I don't pick one that auto levels because most teams that form in the AE have levels arranged all over the place.

That just gives me an error message.

I'm not sure of the math, but I assume the energy is gaining a net increase in damage output after all this?
I'm curious as to how much fo a percentage they actually get buffed and how the numbers will run out compared with the other sets, because everyone is getting buffed out of domination.

I found the old 7.11.13 drivers and installed them. The game now recognizes the card BUT whenever I set it enabled in settings and apply, it just reverts back to being disabled. Kind of like the problem I have with my resolution changes not sticking unless I use tweakCOH, but that has no setting in it for Physx.

I found the thread where they list all the changes. I see they also upped the endurance and recharge hugely. But at least energy should now be a proper burst oriented set.

I don't understand the whirling hands change. It's not an animation that should have more range, and since it's the only AOE you get it would make more sense to give it more more damage but with the same range.

Hell, what they should really do is give whirling hands knockdown. That would give energy some breathing room while waiting for everything to recharge, and would fit with the animation more IMO.

I've got the actual card. I guess I need to know version of drivers works and where I can find them.

Vista 32
8800 GTX
PhysX card

Nvidia PhysX drivers version 9.09.

Looking over the test forums I only find reference to /Psi getting a buff to it's AoE (as if it needed it), but no reference to any changes to /Energy.

I want to have enemies that can teleport like malta gunslingers.

Maybe I want to give some enemies combat jumping or super jump.

Maybe I want to give one superspeed.

I'd also like the ability to combine two of them, like superspeed and superjump, or fly and teleport.

http://www.YTMND.com should be looked at for the similar problems they have with what they call downvoting, and how it differs from the CoH system which leads to it functioning.

It's a five star based system and often great content gets downvoted by people who don't take the time to appreciate it, or in many cases people are just griefing (Some people are motivated to downvote in order to make their own stuff rise higher too).

So why don't the downvoters drag down good stuff into obscurity? Because total average score is not the primary filter by which people discover new content.
There are many filters for content that appear on the front page:
1. "up and coming". Once levels reach a certain threshold of votes or views, and a threshold of average votes, they rest on this area for a while and are immune to immediate downvoting, allowing good voters to outweigh a few downvoters if the content is worthwhile.
2. Top view today/top viewed this week. This could be top played in CoH, and would be a standard that is independant of downvoting.
3. A running roster of the newest created content, for people who are willing to try out new stuff looking for new gems.
4. "Worthwhile". This is a random listing that draws off a pool of all the content that has reached a certain threshold of views/votes/rating (basically everything that reaches the level of up and coming, and then stays at that level, as a chance of getting "re-run" randomly in this window). The great thing about this filter is that you're always guaranteed to get good content, but it's stuff you otherwise never would have come across because it had dropped off the daily trackings.
5. Preferred user listings. People who are singled out for having consistant and regular content get their own section of up and coming. This stuff tends to be of much better quality than the random up and coming everything else posts.

The site also offers a myriad of other ways to filter and sort the mainpage according to your preferences.

Notice they do allow you to sort stuff based on flat out average rating, and total all time views, but these lists rarely ever move. That's why they are not the best to base the CoH rating display on.
But it does make a good kind of "all star" list where newer players can go back to look at all the best of the best.