Call Me Awesome

You should be ok, just download the latest driver. From looking over Newegg's customer reviews of that card it sounds like the driver that ships with the card is crap. Of course every driver that ships with a card will be outdated by the time it's burned to CD, packaged with the card and shipped off to the store.

I imagine several of the "ATI Gurus" on the forums could give you the lowdown on the various drivers.

Frankly by the time my BS/SD hit 30 I found very little need for healing; when it's needed I just pop a green. On a typical mission or TF I'll generally use 1-2 greens every other mission... with that little need I can't see blowing two powers for Aid Self. The few times when extra healing might be useful I'm usually deep enough in trouble that Aid Self wouldn't help.

Your mileage may vary of course, but that's been my experience anyway.

As far as I know issue 18 broke every pet AI in this same way. Yes it's frustrating and hopefully it'll get fixed... someday

Sounds like the old bug that occasionally caused the game to "forget" that you'd unlocked an epic AT. The solution is to log in one of your level 20+ villains in order to reset the flag. Since you say you deleted all of them your alternative is to level a villain back up to 20.

And once you've matured the build a bit you can easily eliminate end issues with a bit of set IO slotting. My BS/Shield at 50 runs 8 toggles full time and has effectively unlimited endurance... unless a group of Carnies get lucky with their death drain or a Malta Sapper likewise gets lucky my blue never drops below 90%.

Gift of the Ancients 4 slotted in defenses does wonders for +end and +recovery.

I see you were using an Invuln scrapper to tank LR? The taunt aura from Invuln & Shield will interrupt LR's pet summon (unless that changed recently... haven't run an STF in the last month or so).

I've noticed when tanking him with either CMA or my Stone tanker that as long as I kept him in my aura he never spawned pets until the 20% pet nuke. It seems that his general summon is interruptable by anything that affects him... therefore he doesn't use it if people are pounding on him or he's getting hit by an aura.

Yep, each character has ALL the vet rewards available that you've received on your account. It can get to be a lengthy process for a long time vet creating a new character... there's a lot of rewards to claim.

Just a suggestion but I personally don't like claiming the sprint powers... there's a heck of a lot of them and they just clog up your power list. It's a real nuisance when you respec... you'll have all those extra sprint powers cluttering up your trays. I only did it on one character and I've regretted it at respec time. Unless you have some strange build idea it seems to me that one copy of Sprint is enough... the different animations aren't really worth it to me.

Malta Sappers and possibly killing off a group of Carnies all at once.

Frankly you're getting well into overkill there; my BS/Regen scrapper literally could not make his end bar move with QR & Stamina on straight SO's back in issue 8; adding Physical Perfection and possibly IO bonuses is moving into somewhat pointless territory.

Well, the guy who has issues has never hosted Skype, he just joins the call and it still has a pretty heavy performance hit. Now he's using an older machine, single core. Still, he reports no noticeable hit with Vent and a 20fps hit with Skype.

I've never noticed any problems myself, but both my desktop and laptop are fairly potent machines. I was just tossing that out as a potential problem since one of my buddies was having issues. Maybe it's something else in his machine but he says Skype killed his fps and Vent had no effect.

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Vent's pretty easy to control access as well, you'll need to give all the config info to everyone and if you run into a problem child you can just kick them and change the password.

I wouldn't buy a Galaxy card; they're really low end in quality. My personal "run far away from" list for any peripheral are anything from Galaxy or Diamond Multimedia.

Check out Newegg for cards; I've had good luck with Asus and Evga... you'll also be able to get more card for the money from Newegg than Best Buy.

I do know the 8400 was a budget card in it's day; the gaming cards were the 8800 series. Nvidia had an interesting model designation, a x200 or x400 series (7400, 8400, 9400) were low end while the x800 were the high end. From that point GS was lower than GT which was lower than GTX.

I had an Nvidia 8800GTX card that I replaced shortly before Ultra Mode hit that was perfectly capable of driving the game at 1920x1080 and around 40-60fps so an 8800 of any stripe should be adequate for your needs. Hmm, I just remembered your 300 watt PSU; that might not push a card like that.

Skype works well with the caveat that one person will have to run the call and get everyone else on each time you play. I don't know if it will be a factor for you but Skype's client is a bit hungrier on processor power than Vent... I've had a couple of buddies who are still on single core CPU's say that Skype knocks a bunch off of COH's framerates while Vent doesn't affect them. I don't notice ANY degradation myself, but I'm running on a quadcore CPU or a Core2Duo on my laptop.

Good questions here, but frankly if you're looking to maximize your durability then Weave can be very valuable indeed. I doubt you've soft capped your S/L/E/N defense without it... S/L is possible if you used Kinetic Combat sets but E/N is tough enough to do even with Weave.

On the endurance front if you 4 slot Tough Hide & Weave with Gift of the Ancients that nets you 3.6 points of endurance and 4% more recovery. It doesn't quite make Weave a net plus on end but it cuts it's deficit way down.

Hasten's nice to have, but from a durability standpoint Weave's a better choice. Hasten will also exacerbate any endurance issues you may have by simply increasing the speed you fire off your attacks. Right now I don't find room for Hasten on my Invuln tanker... I'd like to have it but I like the other powers I took more. Once issue 19 gives us 3 more powers to play with I'll certainly be reevaluating that decision but for now there's too many other things I need more.

Yep, I meant two resets that I could recall. As I remember both of them had something to do with bugs or server issues but it's been awhile and I could be mixing that with something else. There may have been another sometime that I've forgotten about but it's certainly a rare occurrence.

I've only used the rename once; that was back when CMA hit 50 to change the global from the default, my first character who at the time was long deleted, to my current global, @call me awesome.

Interestingly enough I've been running those with a couple of characters, one a 50 BS/Shield scrapper fully soft capped and one a 50 Ill/Rad controller with perma-PA. The Ill/Rad averages running 5 tip missions in 30 minutes, the BS/Shield takes closer to an hour to crank out 5 tips.

Now if your objective is simple mayhem and killing everything on the map then the Scrapper's the choice... the Controller is much faster at moving to the objectives and taking them out surgically. Superior Invisibility and all the control and distraction make going to the objectives, getting the glowie or freeing a hostage and moving on to the next a piece of cake. Typical time to finish a tip mission with the Ill/Rad is 5 minutes.

I'd hate to guess within 2 billion what that build would cost; the Glad Armor 3% def IO alone is WAY over 2 billion selling off-market. I can't imagine that you couldn't come up with a more effective build at a fraction of the cost.

Based on the OP's history I have to doubt that this is a serious build.

Be aware that you can only do this ONCE, so make sure you like what you change it to.

I can remember maybe twice since I started playing in issue 3 that we got a global rename reset... you may VERY occasionally get a second chance. Don't count on it though; as I said I remember it happening only twice in 6 years. Plan on your rename choice being permanent.

I'll agree with this, while I would welcome more slots I hardly think of it as a "NEED". On many of my builds I'd like to have a couple of additional slots but I can work around the limitation. On the other hand, TEN more slots??? That really sounds like massive overkill... the only characters who could put that many to any decent use would be tri-form Kelds.

This free Fitness coming practically out of the blue is enough of a buff that I don't have any desire to complain about a minor issue of slots.

If you build it right the end isn't a factor. Just as an example, my 50 BS/Shield runs the following at all times: Deflection, Battle Agility, Against All Odds, Grant Cover, Tough, Weave, Combat Jumping and Sprint. That's 8 toggles and I have no problem with endurance... I can't get my blue bar to move below 90% after over 5 minutes of combat unless I forget to toggle from Super Jump to Combat Jumping.

That's all done mostly with +endurance bonuses; between the bonuses, Atlas Medallion and Portal Jockey I have a total of 119.5 points of endurance. I did build for some recovery as well giving 182% recovery, or 3.62 eps.

I used the same basic design on my Shield/Fire tanker pulling in similar numbers. Again, endurance is a total non-issue on that tanker and really became a non-issue about the time I hit 30, from then on added powers and toggles were more than made up for with added bonuses.

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Sorry Finduilas, I think you've mixed Active Defense and Grant Cover... GC is the ally defense shield.

But it does add to your defense DEBUFF resistance as Gilia said.

I repeat, that's a strange definition of "screwed". You're getting, for free, four extra powers assuming you only took 3 from the Fitness pool to begin with. How exactly is that "screwing" your character?

I can't for the life of me see how this is anything other than an unmitigated buff to every character in the game. It's a clear case of something for nothing, three more powers available for you to pick up. It greatly opens up character builds and means you no longer have to "waste" three power picks in the 6-20 range in order to function allowing you to get interesting powers there instead. Let's take your Corrupter for example, aren't there powers you'd like to have taken in the low levels that you had to delay in order to fit in Stamina? Remember you're also getting an extra power pool to choose from since you won't have to use one of the four pools for Stamina. Why not snag Assault/Tactics from Leadership?

And to the people who like to whine about slots how exactly is this reducing your options any? Are you really worse off with three extra powers you never had room for before just because you can't slot them fully? Which is worse, not having the powers at all or simply having them at less potency due to slot crunch? Kind of seems like a no-brainer to me.