Canine

Warning, wall of text approaching. Scroll down for pretty pictures if you're impatient.

I work in a school, so I get this dirty great lump of holiday from late July to the end of August.

I tend to pick something I feel like giving a try during this holiday, rather than just playing CoH. I've knitted chainmail, modded Xboxes, whatever catches my fancy.

This year, I decided to give brass etching a shot. Why? Not a clue. It just looked interesting enough to keep me entertained. Well, that and I wanted to make a late wedding present for a friend who got married in Las Vegas, of all places... (the present will not appear in this post)

While I was doing research and thinking on designs, I decided to try some smaller pieces than the oversized lump of brass that was being made as a present (a desk nameplate, the recipient's a doctor}

Bear with me, this does eventually have some relation to CoH.

So, I decided to make a couple of keyrings.

This led to trying to figure out designs. Which led to CoH AT symbols. Which leads to a headache. To do etching on brass the way I did it requires a monochrome Black/White design.

I eventually got my sweaty little mitts on some AT symbols, by drawing them in Inkscape. And yes, it took a while. I started with Scrapper, Defender and Stalker, as they were pretty straightforward.

While I was on, I drew up a Crane and Lion Clan Mon from L5R, the Crane mon initially as part of the aforementioned present, since the recipient is a Crane fan, and the Lion mon because I could use the same paint I was planning on using on the Scrapper keyring. And for good measure because I'm a manga nut, I drew up the glyph from Kurosaki Ichigo's Temporary Soul Reaper badge in Bleach. (don't worry if that sentence made no sense, just let it wash over you)

Once I had the designs, I just had to transfer them to the brass to use as a mask. This process hurts your brain. You have to remember that black on the design will be left as raised brass, and White will eventually be etched into the metal and filled with whatever colour paint you use. You also need to mirror the designs horizontally.

The horizontal mirror is because to get the designs onto the brass as a mask, you print them out then iron them onto the metal. (look up etching brass on Instructables for more details)

OK, this is getting long enough as it is. In fact I just chopped out about another 15 paragraphs of 'how to do it'. If you want to know more, then look it up. Instructables and Google should tell you anything you need to know.

This is NOT a quick process, merely filing the keyrings to shape took me an hour for EACH keyring. The paint needs to dry at least overnight, if not longer. The Lacquer again needs to dry fully etc. etc.

So the keyrings got filed to shape, painted, lapped, drilled, clearcoated and I fitted some soldered copper split rings. (that one sentence took about a week and a half to actually do...)

Oh, and please bear in mind that the keyrings may look bloody huge in the pics, but they're about 27mm across in reality. Also, almost all work was done with hand tools - Hacksaw, 8" second cut metal file, Needle files, Wet/Dry paper. A drill press was used to pierce the holes.

The pitting due to the problems with the mask is most noticeable on the Defender, Scrapper and Stalker closeups, but I quite like the effect on the Bleach Glyphs. I'm REALLY pleased with how the Crane and Lion Mons came out though, especially since I basically had to hand draw the mask for those due to difficulties getting the design to transfer properly.

Time for the pretty pictures! (but apologies for relatively crappy photography)

All 8 Keyrings:



Scrapper:



Defender:



Stalker:



Crane mon:



Lion mon:



Bleach Glyph:

Two points.

1) Under Dark Melee, you list Soul Drain as Soul Transfer.

2) Under Dark Armour, you list Soul Transfer as a Mag 11 stun. It's not. It's a Mag 30 stun for 11 seconds. Oh, and so far as I can tell in my limited use of the power so far, it's autohit (in PvE, at least) too

I take Travel Powers when I can fit them in.

Nowadays, this varies between level 26 and level 49 (my personal record, and not one I'm going to be beating).

Sprint, The GvE Jump Pack and the Safeguard/Mayhem temps will get you anywhere you need to be in the game - when combined with knowing your way around.

It all depends on how much patience you've got for getting around. Myself, I like travelling - whether it's trying to bounce off implausibly small stepping stones when getting from train station to mission without touching the 'ground', slaloming in and out of support columns on fliers or just legging it round the city implausibly fast with Superspeed.

Then again, I've got friends who WILL get a travel power at 14, come hell or high water. But I find that Travel power at 14, combined with Stamina prerequisites by 20 means you have a very dull 1-20 game with no new shiny powers to play with. Maybe this is why people keep trying to blitz through the 1-20 game as fast as they can.

Frankly, all the issues raised in this thread are entirely secondary to me, since the damn boards ask me 3-8 (my record so far) times in a row to log in, and each time I enter my details (involving two excess mouse clicks for 'europe' and 'remember me'), I get 'welcome, Canine', then bounced back to the same page I left, where I'm not logged in <seethe, fume, naughty words etc.>

So the OP's a step ahead of me on that count, at least.

And since the board seems unable to understand that 'remember me' might actually mean it should remember that I'm logged in, my desire to post and/or actually use these boards has been more than a little curtailed.

And yes, I've been through all the faff on clearing cookies, deleting cookies.sqlite and associated files in my profile directory etc.

<shrug>

One thing that nobody seems to have touched on yet, is that high defence values do more than just stop your health dropping.

A lot of those red numbers come with a special added bonus, free of charge - debuffs and mezzes.

High defence values can, at a pinch almost substitute for mez protection, or make existing mez protection far more potent.

For example, my Stone/Fire scranker, who uses Granite purely as a panic button, has all bar softcapped Psi defence. He laughs at Master Illusionists - they summon their 4 Illusionary Illusionists, all 5 pop flash and Blind and he's still stood there, almost completely untouched, and absolutely not held. Add in the fact that the Carnie end drain [Psychic Visage] is AoE/Psi typed, and Rooted gives end drain resist, and he's almost immune to that irritation, too.

Hmm, I'm waffling. I'll return to the point, High defence levels are valuable for more than just mitigating damage, they can help mitigate other things too.

I do, however appreciate the running of the numbers, and fully endorse the conclusion that the last 5% defence approaching the softcap gives as much mitigation as the rest.

Nice mini-guide-ette

Yes it's an irritation, but frankly, a minor one compared the the blood boiling fury that is generated by these blasted boards requiring me to log in 2-5 times before it actually accepts it, and then logging me out at a random point thereafter, and refusing to actually remember me, no matter how often I tick the box...

<deep breaths, counts to 10>

As far as the Digests go, I'd assume that someone somewhere is working on them, but it's quite likely a more complex task than pressing the big red button labelled 'Enable Dev Digest'. but I know nothing of board configuration/management, so I'll wait.