Call Me Awesome

I wouldn't suggest reducing your framerate... what that does is put a cap on the maximum fps you can get. Personally it bothers me to play much below 30fps as the motion looks choppy... I can easily see the difference between 30 & 40fps and 40 & 60fps, an occupational hazard of working in video production

Also, if you have adequate cooling then there's no excuse for the game to run hot. Yes, a graphically intensive application like COH does force your video card to work harder, but a well designed card in a halfway decent airflow case shouldn't have any issue. If you're still running that FX5500 then it's verging on rock bottom minimum specs for the game today; it was a low to mid range card from something like 5-6 years ago.

Is your case really small and cramped? That could be an issue; computer components like some elbow room around them to allow for airflow.

If the rest of your machine is of comparable vintage to your video card it may be time to consider retiring it for a newer machine. Not what you really want to hear I know. Of course evicting the dust bunnies will never hurt anything.

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Ah, I see your picture now; your case is big enough to allow for airflow. From that angle I can't tell about the CPU and the rest of the components but judging from the look of the exhaust fan you certainly have a dust bunny infestation.

If your video card is getting hot you could buy a slot cooler (a fan that fits into the slot below the card and sucks air from around the card and spits it out the back). I don't think the card itself has a fan... many video cards of that generation got by with just passive cooling since they didn't eat anything like the power a modern one does.

Oops, yes that's frequently A Bad Thing... particularly if the computer was just turned off and things are still warm! Thermal shock can equal broken solder joints and a sudden malfunction. That fluid will coat things with ice on contact. It's a great way to cool down a warm can of beer though.

If you haven't used canned air before as you spray the can will get cold and the pressure will drop. When this happens you can shake the can to get pressure back... when it gets really cold just put it down for a couple of minutes to let the ice melt off the can (no joke this).

You're safe as long as you hold the can within 45 degrees of level... and I've never gotten fluid unless I turn it upside down. I suppose turning the can on it's side may get the squirt gun but if it's somewhat upright there shouldn't be a problem.

You should be able to, it takes ~5 seconds to kill you. Depending on your team composition this may be a non-issue too... an emp, storm or similar character with a heal should be able to keep you alive through the hold. I've seen a stormie spam O2 boost and keep a tanker alive through the hold.

GPU - your video card. The fan on your card and the heat sink it blows air through can build up enough dust bunnies to drastically reduce it's cooling ability. A can of compressed air ($4 at most office supply houses) can be used to blow the crud out of the fan/heat sink. Turn off the machine and DON'T let the fan spin freely while you blow it out... you should see a pretty dust cloud come out the back of the machine.

CPU - the processor of your machine, it'll be on the motherboard not far from your video card; it also has a heat sink with a fan... your chipset (also on the motherboard) may well have a small heatsink and fan as well. Following the same advise (don't let the fan spin while you're blowing it out) clean the gunk out of both heat sinks with your can of air.

After you've cleaned the heat sinks look around and blow out dust bunnies lurking elsewhere in your machine.

A good layout for airflow will have an intake fan at the front of your case (this also will attract dust!) and an exhaust fan in the back. Air goes from the front of the case to the back... the video card should suck in (relatively) cool air from the lower part of the case while the CPU gets the air above the video card and the exhaust fan should be located behind the CPU to pull hot air away. The video card has it's own exhaust (assuming it's a modern card that takes two slots) and it's fan will suck air in and blow it out the back of the computer.

It's always a good idea to periodically evict the dust bunnies before they start to reproduce... I typically do it annually with my machine. Of course I usually end up making SOME hardware change about annually so the cleaning happens when I have the machine open anyway... I tend to forget between upgrades. If you have a dust problem you may have to do it more often... foam filters for your intake fan may not be a bad investment either.

This isn't exact, but it's close to what I'm playing now. I'm pondering some changes; I really want to fit in Fireball and Grant Cover (for the DDR). Of course it's significantly over the soft cap so I already have debuff cushion... must ponder.

Indeed, it's very rare, at least on Guardian and Pinnacle, to find specific AT requests. Far more often it's bring whatever you like.

Occasionally for the harder, higher end content a team may be looking for damage, or support, or a tank. One thing about this game? "Damage" can mean virtually any AT and powerset combination; and "Support" DOESN'T mean "healer", in fact healer is a curse word around here... our buffs and debuffs are massively more effective than simple healing.

Also, as was touched upon earlier no particular AT is needed for any particular challenge. A team of 8 support characters (Defenders/Controllers) is not only viable, but can easily crush anything in it's wake thanks to stacking buffs and debuffs.

There's two ways to handle GW, first if you have a kinetic, emp or sonic you can have them stack 6+ mez shields on you (increase density, clear mind or clarity) and sneer at her feeble MAG 100 hold. Yes, the mez shield does stack from one caster and as long as that teammate is reliable you're golden.

Lacking that you can pop a purple or two and raise your defense to 45%+ (actually 1 small purple puts you juuuust shy of the soft cap) and hope the random number gods don't hate you... all her attacks are negative energy. Remember you can never push a +4 AV's chance to hit you below ~12% thanks to their accuracy modifier and the purple patch.

I've never run an RSF so I can't comment... I'm mostly blueside and my only 50 villain, a Fire/WP brute, doesn't see much play.

This is possibly the best advise yet; when I first started playing I rolled a Fire/Energy Blaster and leveled him to 20, found I really hated faceplanting all the time and switched to an Invulnerability/Stone tank. Well, that Inv/Stone tanker clicked with me and became my first level 50 three months later. After 5 years of playing I decided to try the Fire/Energy blaster combo again (my original having long since been deleted) and found that I understood things better now and had a (pardon the pun) blast leveling that character; he was my most recent 50 hitting the mark a couple of months ago.

So a character I absolutely hated as a newbie I rerolled years later and really enjoyed. Don't be afraid to try something out... if it sounds interesting it may well be worth trying. Likewise don't be afraid to abandon a character if it doesn't work for you. I've had fun playing every AT heroside, and I've played all of them to 50 at least once with the exception of a Warshade... my 'Shade is currently 45 and a lot of fun to play.

I've a bunch of very different characters scattered around the levels from 10-45 in addition to all the 50's; depending on my mood or what my friends decide to do on a given day I may play any of them. Some of them will eventually get to 50, some of them will probably stagnate in the mid levels until I get the urge to play them again and some may face the axe and get deleted. They also have to compete for time with my various level 50's... I probably play the 50 characters more than the lowbies.

I agree, I was able to handle everything I ran across without Tough... I just had to be really careful on occasion. Adding Tough/Weave, even before I soft capped, changed the "be really careful" part to worrying about the team instead of my own durability. It made things MUCH easier when I could concentrate more on the team than on popping inspirations or relying on team buffs to stay upright against really tough foes.

So, is Tough required for an Invuln? No, but it does make life easier. My old build had Aid Self instead of Tough and I had to be on my game to get it off in combat and stay right side up in high end content. Naturally your typical radio mission or arc doesn't need anything like that high end performance.

Nope, the new version still shows the cap of 3,212.69. I guess that slipped by Ston3y.

It's quite easy to soft cap a shield tank to melee/range/aoe... it can be done with just a Steadfast 3% unique if you take the fighting pool for Weave. Just on SO's if you slot your shields, Combat Jumping and Weave to ED cap defense you're only about 3% short. Your resistance numbers aren't going to cap out without One with the Shield which is only up about 1/3 of the time.

Shield/Fire is a nice combo... I've been leveling one lately. From the mid-30's on the damage output is actually around the low end of Scrappers. At 45 it kills about as fast as my 50 BS/Regen scrapper although it's a good bit shy of my BS/Shield.

My SD/Fire tanker was also really cheap to IO; I don't need to worry about expensive set bonuses for durability. Gift of the Ancients in the shields solves my endurance woes, Multi Strike in my AOE's gets the extra defense I needed and that lone Steadfast 3% def IO gets a bit of cushion. I think I've about 40 million in the entire build. Yeah, I can make a more expensive build and go for recharge and other bonuses... I may end up doing that eventually. For now it's very effective and it didn't cost a fortune.

Personally I'd say that NO possible enhancement would be worth anything approaching that amount of effort. In that amount of time I could easily level up a couple of characters from 1-50.

Also, remember that procs in an aura have a chance to go off every 10 seconds... it isn't a guarantee that you'll get the debuff and in any case it'll only fire on some of the mobs in your hotfeet in a best case scenario. I'd say a straight damage proc would be considerably more useful, and even that's iffy.

Interesting... unfortunately I have nothing further to try. Maybe someone else has a clue?

Now why didn't I think of this? It's a fantastic solution to the lowbie's attack chain. I tend to dump all the temp power recipes into WW at 1 inf each... I look at it as a public service. It's either put them in dirt cheap or just delete them so if it's at all convenient I list them.

Get by? Sure, but moving from ~68% S/L resistance to the HARD cap of 90% S/L resistance makes a HUGE difference in facing tough mobs. It's the same idea as going from ~30% defense to the 45% soft cap; the last bit of defense is much more valuable than the first bunch. Of course with an Invuln it's best of all to do BOTH.

Here's an example, back in issue 10-11 CMA didn't have the fighting pool or a soft cap build (due to the state of set bonuses then and Invuln in general it was, if not impossible at least extremely difficult). There were a lot of high level missions that I had to be extremely cautious of or risk getting killed. The STF was particularly challenging then; many of the AV's hit hard enough to 3 shot me. Adding the Fighting pool and Tough suddenly made most of the AV's MUCH easier. Of course when issue 13 rolled around with it's changes and I soft capped him in addition to the 90% S/L resist a lot of things that 3 shotted be before I could nearly AFK on.

Hmm, that's NOT a good thing in my opinion. If I'm leading a team of my buddies I'm generally NOT looking for more members. If I AM looking for members... recruiting for a TF for example... I'll be asking in the global channels. Yeah, in that case I'd be receptive to someone asking to join.

I'd agree, this needs to be an optional flag.

On the whole subject of color codes though, why don't they have a *key* to what the colors mean on the search window? I didn't have a clue what the color coding meant beyond the old green/blue/gray colors.

Well so much for getting a Raptor Pack. Is there a vendor somewhere?