Bill Z Bubba

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Have you tried it out yet? Since you are one of the most vocal oppenents to the tricorder that I can think of, you should know it still does the be-ba-beep noise despite the other emote, and it's still in your hand when you're doing the substitute pose--it's just much less noticable when it's not glowing and you're toon isn't tapping away at it. Maybe giant gloves will mask it completely?

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This was exactly what I found, adding on that the bind almost never worked at all anyway. So, I'll be sticking with tough.

Slapped together a MA/Regen to get a feel for it out there. I was shredded my a Ninja MM and a /kin corruputer. Had I had teleport, I could have gotten away. But, no, I had SS. I was slowed to a crawl, then had a bunch of caltrops thrown under me. That's all she wrote.

I was toast in seconds.

As I stated earlier, slows and end draining are the masters of pvp now. And the MM bodyguard power... very nice.

I'm REALLY enjoying the lack of inspirations in RV on test right now. I'd play in there on live often, on both sides, if they flat out banned inspiration use in PvP.

The entire zone feels balanced. Folks that are Eluding are almost impossible to hit. Got your 9th tier dam-res power up, you're NOT taking much damage and it WILL take several enemies to bring you down.

On the flip side, I ran a dom, 2 different builds.. was WAXED 6 times, and got one lucky kill on a hero squishie of some type. Maybe if villain squishies each have their own brute with taunt 6 slotted they'll be ok, but trying to play a squishie solo in PvP is a freaking suicide mission.

Bill Z Bubba's System Performance Guide (Rev 3)

Hello again, everyone. Since I consolidated my ATI Settings Guide, I decided to make sure everything was still as correct as I could get it for this guide. I removed from this guide a section on video optimizations, as the above guide should have most of the info. Instead, section four of this guide will have some general information that you may or may not find useful.

This guide is broken up into four sections:

Section One will cover MY computing philosophy when it comes to gaming, and will lay out the groundwork for WHY you should follow the other sections within this guide.

Section Two will cover Basic system cleanup and security. This section should improve performance and take minimal effort on your part.

Section Three will cover Advanced system cleanup. This section is not for little wussies that are a-scareded of learning too much.

Section Four consists of some tidbits and other items that have come up from time to time.


Let's begin!


SECTION ONE (Casual computing equates to a sub-par gaming experience)

A little history to get the ball rolling seems to be in order. I am a gamer. I am also addicted to the eye candy that has been rolling off the shelves in the past few years. The advances made in the 3D graphics community have been nothing short of phenomenal over the last decade. The technological dance between the hardware vendors and the software writers has taken us from Pong to the gloriousness of City of Heroes/Villains, F.E.A.R., and Far Cry.

Even early on, I found that my knowledge was inadequate to the task of keeping up with the accelerating evolution of the gaming industry. What could I possibly do to alleviate this problem? I became a tech. Not only has this kept me mostly up to date with the goings on of PC architecture, but it allowed me to fund my addiction.

The two now play hand in hand with my most favorite of hobbies, but there has been a price. I now REFUSE to game unless I've properly optimized every facet of the device which allows me to game. In order to have the performance, the eye candy and the lack of issues I have, sacrifices were made. Knowledge was gathered. And Bill's PC tweak guide is the product. Well, the real product is my game system. The guide is only to help others enjoy their gaming more.

My system:
The motherboard: ASUS P4C800-E
The video card: Xtacy Radeon X800XT AGP 256MB
The ram: 2GB of DDR400 PC3200 4X512MB
The sound: Creative Audigy 2 with 5.1 speaker setup
The monitor: 24" widescreen LCD running at 1920X1200
The hard drive: 7200 RPM 60GB running on SATA
The case: CasEdge Diabolic Minotaur

I game on this system. I also use it to store my mp3s, with which I play my bass guitar whilst listening to them with WinAmp. NOTHING else occurs on my game system.

No anti-virus solutions, no software firewalls, no MS Office, nada, zip, nothing. If you wish to have one system that you do everything on, that's your choice, or your financial situation, but doing so is against my philosophy. I have a separate desktop for all my other computing needs. I advise, if at all possible, that you do the same.

The philosophy: If I'm going to game, I deserve the best that I can get out of the hardware that I can afford. We all deserve this, but ONLY YOU can make it happen.

Microsoft sure as hell won't help you, the vid card manufacturers want you to drop $500 every 4 months, 3rd party software vendors don't give a damn about your performance, so it's YOUR job to make things right.

If you are not prepared to learn a few things, and work hard for your gaming experience, quit reading now, go away and cease asking for help. You don't deserve it. I said, GOOD DAY, SIR!

Still here? Good, let's get busy.


SECTION TWO (Items every gamer should know

So your gaming PC drags, locks up, or isn't performing as it once did?

Well it's YOUR fault! At least partially.

Some notes about Windows XP. It sucks! But it's also the best Operating System (OS) Microsoft has come out with since DOS 6.2, so let's do what we can to make it a streamlined, properly functioning OS.

Basic Maintenance: (The following information is based on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. If you are not running this, or Vista, by now, you should really put some thought into upgrading.)

Update your freaking OS already. Windows Update exists for a reason. That reason being that Microsoft opens holes as often as they close them. However, do NOT enable Windows Update to run automatically as this is a performance drain. Every Friday night, before the happy weekend of gaming, bring up Windows Update from your programs list and download ALL Critical Updates. View the Optional and Driver Updates but only install the Optionals if you know they are relevant to you, and only install the Driver Updates if they have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with your video or sound cards.

Spyware and viruses are NOT your friends. Get rid of them. Matter of fact, stop doing stupid things to get them. Quit hitting the porn sites, quit clicking yes when a webpage asks you to install something, quit being so trusting. There are evil folks running amok on this planet, and a great many of them have computers and company logos.

Download and install the following programs:

Ad-Aware from here.

Spybot from here.

These programs do NOT stop incoming garbage from getting on your system unless you purchase the full versions. I do NOT advise this, as allowing anything to run in the background degrades your system's performance. Run them both weekly at the minimum. A great time is Friday night right after you've installed all of MS's Critical Updates.

Keeping your system free of adware, spyware and bloatware will aid you greatly in the fight against viruses and security holes.

If you can't promise yourself to manually run a free virus check monthly, such as Trend Micro's Housecall or Panda Software's Scan, then install an anti-virus solution. AGAIN, I personally do NOT advise this, as the majority of AV solutions out there are bloated crapware that degrade performance as much as they keep you safe. If you DO install one, disable it while gaming.

A little interjection here:

Norton and McAfee's Internet Security bundles are the most intrusive, system clogging, problem causing sacks of excrement on the face of the earth. Do NOT use these products. If you are TRULY worried about your internet security, you should buy a router with an internal firewall to place in between your cable/dsl modem and your systems. Windows Firewall is somewhat useless and problem causing as well, but if you refuse to get a router, enable it. If you have a router and have enabled its firewall, make sure that Windows Firewall is Off by going to Start/Control Panel/Windows Firewall. Please see note at end of guide about connection issues.

Yes, there's too much junk running in the background of your OS and you need to get rid of it.

Back to the Start button, right click it and choose Open, then Programs, then Startup. If anything is in here, it's garbage. Delete it and close the window. Right click Start again and choose Open All Users, then Programs, then Startup. If anything is in here, it's garbage. Delete it and close the window. (These are just shortcuts to various executable files. Deleting them WILL not delete the programs that they are associated with.)

"But Bill! I use those programs!" Tough noogies. Start them manually WHEN YOU NEED THEM. Allowing them to start up with Windows does nothing but waste valuable system resources.

Reboot your system. Now run Disk Defragmenter. It can be found under Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter. This may take 15 minutes. This may take 3 hours. Run it, let it finish. How often you run this is a personal choice. I run it every time I add or remove a game. Beyond that, I attempt to run it once a month.

XP is bloatware on a huge level. Lots of useless bells and whistles that anyone trying to tweak out a little more performance should nuke. So here we go:

Right click the My Computer icon and choose properties. Go to the Advanced tab and click on the Settings button under Performance. Set this for Adjust for Best Performance. Hit Apply and then Ok twice.
Right click your desktop where it is touching no icons, choose Properties, go to the Appearance tab and click on Effects. Uncheck everything. Hit Ok, Apply and then Ok.

Things look somewhat different? Good. Move on.

"SOOO much work, Bill! Why do I have to do all of this?" Because Microsoft builds their OSs for people that don't want to do any work. You're a gamer that wants the best for yourself, right? Then get busy! If your hands aren't bleeding yet, you aren't working hard enough!

Update your Video Card and Sound Drivers!

Step one is to download Driver Cleaner from here.

"But why do I need that, Bill?" Probably because you keep installing drivers on top of drivers and haven't properly cleaned up anything ever.

Step two is to get the latest version of your video driver.

Head back into Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and Uninstall every listing you find of your video driver. (ATI now makes this simple by adding the ATI Software Uninstaller. This yanks everything and prompts a reboot.) Reboot your system. As it comes back up, it may tell you that it is reinstalling your display adapter. Cancel out of this, twice if need be.
Now run Driver Cleaner and clean every instance of your video components that you see listed. If you are uncomfortable choosing, read the help files within the application to get comfortable. Important! If you do run a persistent antivirus solution, DISABLE IT NOW. Install the latest version of your video driver.

OEM vendors don't want you laptop users to have a good gaming experience, so they force the video card manufacturers into not letting you get updated video drivers. Then the OEM vendors stop updating their drivers about 2 months after the release of your systems. To get around this: If you are unable to use video drivers from ATI or Nvidia, go to omegadrivers.net and use his drivers, as they have been tweaked to install properly on ATI Mobility and Nvidia Go cards.

Check the manufacturer's website for your sound card and see if they have anything new. If they do, grab them and get them installed the same way, unless all you are downloading is a patch to your existing driver. (Driver Cleaner can also be used to strip out Creative drivers.)

At this point, you should already notice improvements in the quality and performance of your system. Enjoy.

Optional: Because my system has 2GB of RAM, I have no need of a swap file. In my testing with CoH when I only had 1GB of RAM, I saw no errors without a swap file, but the general attitude is that killing off Virtual Memory should ONLY be done if you have MORE than 1GB RAM. To disable Virtual Memory/Swap File, go to Control Panel/System/the Advanced tab/the Settings button under Performance/the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory, click Change. For all drives, select No Paging File, and click the Set button. You will have to restart when finished. Further testing has shown that the best performance seems to come from leaving a swap file enabled, but on a DIFFERENT partition, preferably a different physical driver, than your operating system. Even with this information, my swap file remains disabled on all drives. Please note, some programs will fail to even start if virtual memory is disabled. CoH/V is not one of them.

An item that I neglected in prior versions of this guide, but an important one: Clean out the dust bunnies! Dust is evil. It gets into our slots, it builds up on our copper connectors, it clogs our fans, breaking them, leading to overheating, bad connections, systems locking up, randomly rebooting, artifacting while gaming, you name it, dust can cause it. Once a month, you should open up your case, remove all the components that are slotted, blow out all the slots, fans, cards, reseat everything properly, and reconnect all power cables. Another reason for reseating cards is due to the physics of metal that is heated and let to cool down. It expands and contracts which can cause a card to actually wiggle itself out of its slot.

If you REALLY want to see your system happy, let's move on to advanced tweaking.

SECTION THREE (You want me to do WHAT?!?!?)

In this section, I will be sharing with you some great resources to study with, research issues with, and to simply bone up your knowledge with. I will also be taking you through a few items in the system registry to nuke, as well as a few services that can be done away with without issue.

The Windows XP Registry: This is not a place to be if you don't know what you're looking for, and it most CERTAINLY isn't a place to be mucking about if you don't know what to do with the items you have found.

That said, Let's Go Delete Some Garbage!

Click on Start, then Run. In the run box, type in regedit and hit Ok. Welcome to the registry editor. Do not fear, young readers! As long as you tough NOTHING but what I'm telling you to touch, all will be well. If you feel fear at this time, close the editor and download HiJackThis instead. Using this program, one can see and then remove items from the registry that shouldn't be there. Also, the output from this program can be posted in the game forums to allow other people a glance at what may be causing you issues.

If you ARE comfortable with following these directions and ONLY doing what is stated:
Let's get to the two sections you want to look at.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion

Within these two paths, there are three items we are seeking. Run, RunOnce and RunOnceEx. When you click on the Run folder, items should pop up on the right side.

The only item that MUST remain on the right side is "(Default) REG_SZ (value not set)."

Everything else on the right side is something YOU will have to determine whether should be kept or deleted. In a nutshell, if you find that it is related to your anti-virus solution, your sound card or your video card, leave it alone. If it's NOT related to those items, you can right click the NAME of the key, and choose delete.

DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE IN THE REGISTRY BESIDES THE CONTENTS OF THESE 5 KEYS!
Do NOT delete ANYTHING from the left window.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\RunOnceEx
The CONTENTS will appear in the RIGHT window when you have Run, RunOnce or RunOnceEx HIGHLIGHTED on the right.

WINDOWS SERVICES: Below is all I plan to tell you about disabling unnecessary windows services. The Services MMC can be found in Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services.

Here's one services guide.

Here's another.

Services that I would completely disable:
Automatic Updates
Error Reporting Service
Indexing Service
Messenger
Themes

YOUR SYSTEM'S BIOS:
I thought about a lot of ways to cover the BIOS, but I'm going to take the easy way out:
Tom's Hardware Guide has a great article on BIOS tweaking.

A quick mention on overclocking. Don't do it. Ever.

Unless of course you need to because your performance is too low, AND you know for a fact that the bottlenecks occurring to CAUSE your low performance are DIRECTLY related to the speeds at which your processor, RAM and GPU are running.

If that is the case, OVERCLOCK THIS PUPPY!!! The apps are out there, there are ways to monitor your temperatures, ways to tell when you've gone to far without frying your system, ways to make a once slow system a screaming banshee again. But I'm not here to teach you that. If you want it badly enough, you'll figure it out.


SECTION FOUR (Other stuff)

Gaming on an LCD: If your LCD has a DVI port, use it. Don't use adapters, get a straight DVI-DVI cable to connect the dvi port on your video card to the DVI port on your LCD. Odd point here about the cables. A single link DVI is able to transfer 1920 x 1080 resolution vs dual link's 2048 x 1536. For those of us that bought the Dell 2405FPW, which runs at 1920X1200, we're kind of scratching our heads as to why Dell shipped us a Single Link DVI cable. Just a "what the?" that I thought I'd share. I did purchase a Dual Link cable, and have noticed a increase in overall rendering smoothness, so it's something to consider if you run high res LCDs. I can only assume Dell did it to save a few bucks. If you do run high resolutions, you might occasionally notice tearing as you move quickly through a scene or when turning around. At item that can help this is to enable the "Wait for Vertical Refresh" or "Sync Vertical Refresh" or "V-Sync" option within your video driver. For OpenGL games, when enabling Vert Refresh, also enable Triple Buffering, as this helps out overall smoothness and performance.

Gaming on a CRT: Windows XP sucks, as mentioned earlier. One of the BIGGEST suckatudes that MS added was a lockdown on refresh rate while gaming in full screen mode. I have never understood why they did this, never found any statement from them as to why they did it, and quite frankly, don't care why they did it. It was stupid. Anyway, get around it by making sure Refresh Rate Overide is enabled within your video driver. I usually set it for Same As Desktop, then set my refresh rate at 75Hz. Why 75? Because anything below that always bugged my eyeballs. If you don't enable the RRO setting, you will always be capped out at 60FPS in games. I advise attempting to game at the same resolution and refresh rate as you run your desktop. This is so that if you do run full screen 3D, when you alt tab out of it, you aren't causing your CRT to bounce itself between different settings.

What's the difference between LCDs and CRTs? Lots of things, but the big one is that LCDs do not use refresh rate. On a CRT, the entire image is shot back onto the screen X # of times based on the refresh rate, which you CAN adjust. An LCD only redraws each pixel as needed, and to my knowledge, there is no way to change the redraw rate. My LCD has a 12ms redraw, which seems fast enough that I never get ghosting. Due to this, you never have to be concerned with refresh rate override on an LCD, because Windows will lock it down to 60FPS within the display properties.

For both Nvidia and ATI users, I advise having your video driver manage FSAA and AF. As noticed in my ATI guide at the top of the page, we now have proof that the FSAA management within the game is different, and seemingly not as good, as that when managed by the driver. Be sure to turn OFF FSAA and AF in game when you force them to your desired settings within the driver.

On connection issues:
Networking can be a pain in the tush. Frequent disconnects can be caused by:
Your network card and/or drivers
Your router
Your cable/dsl modem
Your ISP
The server you're connecting to
Backbone issues between you and the server
Sunspot activity
Coronal mass ejections
It's Tuesday

Basically, ANYTHING between your chair and the server can cause disconnects. It's one of the reasons I avoid posting in tech threads on this issue. There's simply too many variables for me to test over a forum.

If you are having these problems consistently, the first step is to make sure that your software firewalls aren't causing you problems. See note above about the nastiness of Norton and McAfee internet security bundles. Next is to update all drivers and firmware for your NIC, router, cable/dsl modem. Make sure that all of your cabling is in good working order. Still having problems? Get with your ISP's tech support and with NCSoft's tech support and open dual tickets.


CONCLUSION:
Game happy, or quit gaming. Also, one can consider a computer much like one should consider a child or a pet: Neglect any of these, and it will turn out badly in the end.

Hey again everyone. As the Catalyst 6.5s are about to come out, I decided to rewrite the settings guide based on the testing I did on the beta6.5s here.

For explanations of the settings within the Catalyst Control Center, please go here.

For the Nvidia users, tweakguides also has full explanations of nvidia driver settings here.

Mousing over the in game settings will give Cryptic's explanations of them as well as some tips on usage.

At the time of this writing, ATI has not corrected their drivers to allow FSAA functionality with Cryptic's HDR effects implementation. Below are the settings I currently use in game and within my Catalyst Control Center. After that, there will be info that I hope will aid you in tweaking your system to get the best balance between eye candy and performance.

My current settings:
(If not listed, they are at default values.)

In Game:

Resolution AND 3D Resolution Scaling: Same As Desktop 1920X1200
Refresh Rate: Same as Desktop
Advanced Graphic Settings: Enabled
Particle Physics: Enabled
World Texture Quality: Very High
Character Texture Quality: Very High
World Detail: 85%
Character Detail: 200%
Max Particle Count: 25050
Vertical Sync: Enabled
FSAA: Off
Shadows: Disabled
Use Geometry Buffers: Enabled
Anisotropic Filtering: Off
Texture Crispness: Smooth
Shader Quality: High
Water Effects: Low
Depth of Field Effects: Disabled
Bloom Effects: None


In Catalyst Control Center:

Under Display Options:
3d Refresh Rate Override: Same as Desktop

Under 3D settings:
Anti-Aliasing: 4X
Anisotropic Filtering: 4X
Catalyst A.I.: Disabled
Mipmap Detail Level: Full to Quality
Wait for Vertical Refresh: Always On
SmartShader: None
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: Disabled

API Specific:
Direct3D:
Enable geometry instancing: yes
Support DXT texture formats: yes
Alternate pixel center: no
OpenGL:
Triple Buffering: yes
Force 24-bit Z-buffer depth: no

VPU Recover: Disabled

An item that I was criticized for in my prior guides was that I ignored the possible ramifications of lower end hardware performance hits for people that blindly followed my settings. It was never my intention for anyone to do so, but rather I hoped that readers might instead use this as a "guide" to help them learn about their own systems and tweak them accordingly.

Let's start from the top:
Resolution, Resolution Scaling and Refresh Rate:
The res that I run at is the optimal resolution for my LCD monitor. Any deviation from that causes fuzziness in the overall image, so I have little choice here. One or two steps lower is tolerable, but tolerable is not something I shoot for. I leave the Res Scaling alone as the reduction in visual quality it produces is unacceptable for me. As I run an LCD, Refresh Rate is meaningless so it's left at 60Hz. I advise setting your in game Res and Refresh Rate to be the same as your desktop settings so that your monitor does not need to bounce itself around if you alt-tab out of full screen. (Which is problematic and a known issue with ATI's drivers anyway.)

Advanced Graphics Settings: This must be enabled so that you can manually change all the settings in game. Using the slider provided when this is disabled WILL cause you problems due to the incompatibilities with ATI's current drivers and Cryptic's choices of what to enable as you move the slider from Performance to Quality.

World and Character Texture Quality: I have these set to Very High because I have 256MB of video RAM. If your card has less, you will need to adjust these settings as described in the mouseover in game based on your card.

World Detail: This setting has a HUGE impact on your FramesPerSecond. On the hero side of the game, I can still run it at 100% without issue. On the villain side flying around zones, I had often put it at 50%. I currently run it at 85% as a happy medium as I've been hopping sides a lot recently. Play around with this to find your happy spot.

Character Detail: I leave this on 200% as I've noticed no increase in performance by lowering it. I HAVE noticed, however, that when I lower it, NPCs and Player characters look squished up, especially the shoulders, at a distance in a way I can't tolerate.

Max particle count: This is another "you choose it" setting. I leave mine at 50% on the slider.

Texture Crispness. This setting should be on Smooth unless you have Anisotropic Filtering completely disabled in game AND within your driver. If AF is enabled, you won't see much difference, if any, by changing it, but with AF off, changing this setting to Crisp will mimic what AF does anyway.

Use Geometry Buffers: If your card supports Geometry Instancing, enable the instancing in the driver, and enable this setting in game. You'll receive a nice performance boost if you do. There have been reports of graphical anomolies on some cards if this setting is enabled, a shearing of textures. I've never experienced this, so test it out.

Shader Quality: I leave mine on High. All the time. No questions asked. Lowering it WILL help your performance, but at a HIGH hit to your visual candy.
Don't let your browser resized the images.
Shader Low
Shader Medium
Shader High

Water Effects, Bloom and Depth of Field: I no longer notice a huge performance hit with water on low. So that's where it is now. Placing it on high breaks ATI's FSAA in the same way that Bloom and Depth of Field do. If you want High Water, Bloom and Depth of Field, Disable Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) in game and set it for Let Application Decide in the CCC.

FSAA and AF: We now know that the in game management of FSAA is handled in a completely different way than if handled by the driver. We also know that you will get better performance and quality by having the driver manage FSAA. Since I let the driver handle that, I go ahead and let it manage my AF as well. I currently run 4X on both, as 2X FSAA doesn't smooth my lines enough, and 4X AF sharpens up the image enough. Raising AF to 8X or 16X extends the distance in game that the AF sharpening improves.

The CCC Catalyst A.I.: I disable it because I've never noticed any performance increase by having it enabled.

MipMap: I leave this all the way to the right on Quality. Tet this one out for yourselves by dropping it all the way down, going into the game, letting your eyes absorb what they see, then drop out of game, crank it back up, and go back in. The difference is major when it comes to eye candy.

Vertical refresh: Vertical refresh locks the vertical reresh to the horizontal refreash so that they do not get out of sync. When this occurs you see tearing as you move quickly through zones or turn around quickly. Whether you enable this is up to you. If you run lower resolutions, say 1280X1024 or lower, you probably don't need this. If you DO enable it, you should also enable Triple Buffering, as it increases performance when Vertical Refresh is enabled in OpenGL games.

I don't foresee any other changes coming until ATI fixes the FSAA/HDR issue. Some folks are able to run FSAA in game at 2X with the HDR effect enabled and have a certain level of success. I can not. Using the in game management always black screens the world now. I assume this is due to my resolution being so high.

As for the alt-tabbing issue, if you are one that needs to run other applications while gaming, and bounce back and forth between them, it appears the only workaround for you is to allow the game to manage FSAA and to run in windowed mode instead of full screen. Your findings on your system may vary.

For AGP users, leave everything under the SmartGART section at the default settings. I once foudn a performance increase by disabling AGP Fast Writes, but this is no longer the case, AND disabling Fast Writes exacerbates the Contact/Info screen pause/lockup issue.

Hope this helps.

Glad you've gotten yours to look good for you. Had you read past the first post, you would have seen that I completely discounted allowing the game to manage FSAA and AF.

You're very welcome. I'm always glad to hear that I've helped someone get a better gaming experience.

A fine guide, geewot. We agree on Evasion being the power to drop if you're going to drop one.

Your Attack Chain of the Gods is interesting as well. It means that, when desired, it doesn't matter if you choose between Swipe and Strike.

However, I'll be going Swipe for the sexiness value and adding it on the the end of the same single target chain, so hasten won't be a factor for me. The Dark Lord of Pinnacle can't be havin no glowing hands, dontcha know.

On the tricorder of doom versus tough: I'll consider the emote addition to a bind. As I mentioned the last time someone told me about that trick, I have no issues with Bill casting a spell to heal himself, but there's no way I could tolerate him pulling out a Star Trek handout.

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This sounds like, "my mansion's too big to walk all the way to answer the front door!"

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Well, yeah! I want the damn door to come to me!

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I feel your pain, UberGuy. Running 1920X1200 on a 24" wide means that I have to actually turn my head to see from one corner to the other.

Hmm.. perhaps I shouldn't sit so closely.
With all the menus still at 100%.
Looks like
this. Don't let browser resize image.

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But yeah, I do check it consistantly.

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I have much too large a screen to constantly shift my eyes up to that corner. If it were undockable from my health/XP meter, that would make it more useful.

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Why not move the whole thing to an easier location? I agree with you, by the by, leave Night Widows ALONE. Love em.

Little clue for the clueless:
When an entire spawn suddenly disappears, and you're fighting Arachnos, pop a yellow. DING, everybody's back.

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You'll be thrown into the air so many times your butt will never touch the ground until you're dead.

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And PB is perma with 2SOs, so you're never thrown anywhere. Damaged, yes, but tossed around? Only if you don't have PB on auto.

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maybe for a scrapper they're better since you can get 3 of them, but for a stalker 2 isnt enough, esp. since our HP are a fair bit lower

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Good point.

I love the passives. Loved them from the moment they added the scaling dam-res. I happily let myself dip into orange level health just to have the dam-res kick on and laugh as I fly through whole missions bouncing between red and orange health.

No aid-self needed at all.

[ QUOTE ]
As others have mentioned - a group of VG members who know eachother's tactics well should have no problems taking out a few groups of scrubs.

[/ QUOTE ]

Phantom,
Have you ever found yourself on a PUG that worked out really well? Why did it work out? Group of oldie players that all had above mediocre skill and builds? A leader that actually lead, actually took and used tactics and ideas from the group?

Same thing can happen in a PvP zone. All it takes is one meeting inside the villain base to check out each other's powersets and determine who needs to cover who's backside.

But I do agree that I'd like to hear about more diverse groups of villains and how they do. Replace some of the corrupters with a brute or 3. Get a couple of MMs in there. Now how do you do?

I mean, we all know that a team of illusion/rad controllers can make a mockery of everything in this game, why wouldn't a team of corrupters be the same?

Oh well. At least Bill Z Bubba still has the claws changes and defense scaling to look forward to.

I like my solution the best. Solo in PvE and never have to be annoyed by anyone's BS in PvP... or in PUGS... or in broadcast... it's good to be an MMO hermit.

I'd be interested in the results of this same test, but against 12 white minions instead of 4 orange Lts. I'm betting claws stomps EM into the dirt.

My guess on the swipe/strike thing:

Swipe's animation is cooler than strike's. Strike does better damage.

You must choose. Coolness? Or DPS?

I choose coolness.

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Great guide, Bill!

I was wondering if you recommend any specific programs for running manual virus scans. My experience leads me to agree with your assertion that most virus solutions are bloated, but I am not familiar with what other options are out there.

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Yeah, this has been bothering me too ever since I foolishly upgraded my Norton AV from the 2002 version to the 2006 version. I'm horrified at how much has changed, and wish to dump it ASAP.

I gather both Microsoft and Avast make solutions that passively scan for the worst offenders, and Avast also make a free active scanner that many of my friends use. However, I'm sure there are others out there, and would love to hear about other solutions, and some pros and cons of them.

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I'm rather hoping someone else pipes in on this as I've used housecall.antivirus.com in the past, but was hoping to move to something else. Something Free and non-intrusive, of course.

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If I had a set of claws, I'd be driving them straight into people's chests and faces all day long.

EDIT: Hmmm.. probably a good thing I don't have claws.


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And. . .sig.

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Foot in mouth nothing. I'm up to the knee on this one.

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It may seem off topic, but bear with me. I think suppression is worse now with the new changes.

I love the changes to the claws attacks but the constant stream of attacking guarantees that I never go anywhere in PvP. Can we lose travel power suppression now? Its worse now than ever and sets based on more, faster attacks are penalized more heavily than those based on burst damage

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10 points for attempting to make this NOT a threadjack, -2billion points in that it still IS a threadjack. Slot up swift and quit trying to use your travel powers in combat.

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The heroes have more advantages than just slots and HO's:
Accolades, epic powers, and the 4 extra power slots make a huge difference. Also, just about all of the heroes are fully HO'd on test.

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My scrapper has ZERO HOs. He also doesn't have tactics, focused accuracy or conserve power. I see stalkers with nothing but Focused Senses.

I didn't even USE my dark mastery except against AVs in RV. The only villain that I couldn't rip through was an em/invul brute thanks to his high s/l dam-res.

Tal_N,

As a fencer and a swordsman, I enjoy slashing AND puncturing. A slash won't pierce the heart. A puncture will. If I had a set of claws, I'd be driving them straight into people's chests and faces all day long.


EDIT: Hmmm.. probably a good thing I don't have claws.

I decided to see RV from both sides.

I logged on as Bill Z Bubba, lvl 50 claws/sr scrapper. Build not designed for PvP. I kicked a bunch of tail. Somewhat effortlessly.

I logged on as Beel Z Bubba, lvl 40 em/ea brute. I had my tail TROUNCED repeatedly, quickly, painfully. Maybe getting fully slotted out by 50 will make a difference, but I rather doubt it. I felt like a defender in PvP playing my brute. Confused, taunted, feared, toggle dropped by phantasms(?) held, two shotted by a lone blapper... it was pathetic.

I see why villains aren't bothering much in there.

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question: due to the retorlled claws end costs, is there any reason for a claws/regen to grab stamina? Seems like QR is pretty sufficient now.
(besides- I need to make room for more attacks on my scrapper now )

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If you plan to run a lot of toggles, CJ, Tough, FA, etc, I'd vote yes. At least that's my plan for my new claws/regen if I decide to go that route. But if I was only going with claws attacks and regen only for damage mitigation.. I could see QR being enough.