Captain Fabulous

Well as of this morning I was getting the never-ending Connecting... message for live, but test was working fine.

I deleted cohupdater.exe in my live folder and copied over the file from the test folder and it started right up.

I noticed the updater for test updated itself today. No problems so far for me.

When will we see the new updater?

Tossing in my 2 cents. I have the same problem after I've spent time crafting in the base. I suspect it's from repeatedly opening and closing the various storage containers. Memory usage climbs to 1.5-1.8 GBs and the game eventually crashes. Using Win7 x64.

Wait, did he mention lag spikes?? So I'm not the only one suffering thru impossible-to-play lag?

And I've seen this jumping around thing too, where critters will be in one place and then for a moment be in another, like across the room, only to return to their original location a moment later.

Nice to know I'm not the only one. But seriously, the lag is brutal. Pretty much can't play at all anymore.

Luminara, I think we're on completely different pages, and that's why we're not seeing eye to eye.

Let me explain a bit more on how I see my version working.

Let's use Conserve Power as a reference. It's a 50% endurance discount. And you'd be hard pressed to run out of endurance while that power is up. So 50% is, IMO, too much of a buff.

Now for Vigilance to be useful most of time it needs to be fairly consistent, meaning the buff amount shouldn't vary wildly. So in practice the amount of buff you get isn't going to vary much between base and max.

My thinking is this: 15% endurance discount for 1 critter and +1% for each additional critter up to 16, for a maximum buff of 30%. Since we know that a persistent 50% buff is too much, 30% is probably the sweet spot. And you'd never get less than 15%.

Of course these can be tweaked here and there as necessary -- maybe 12.5% base and a 32.5% cap, 10% base and 25% cap -- whatever -- but that's the range I think would work the best.

And this is why I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of "exploiting" it -- because there simply would be no need to. You just wouldn't gain that much. Even maxed out at 30%, it's not going to be an unlimited well of endurance, and it's certainly not going to make a Defender uber. And in "normal" solo gameplay you're going to get a buff of 15-18% without even trying. OK, sure, you can stun, blind, mez, choke, blah blah blah, but for what? An extra 8%? 12%? Why? Is it really going to make that much of a difference, so much so that you're going to go out of your way to maximize it? I don't think so. *YOU* might, but I don't think most people will bother.

I think people have to pull back a bit and realize AT inherents aren't supposed to make anyone uber. Supremecy, Containment, Critical Hit, Assassination, Gauntlet, Scourge, etc etc etc, look at them. They add a little somethin' somethin', but nothing that's game breaking. You could argue that Domination was a bit overpowered, but it's not so much anymore. Fury perhaps, but you generally have to work pretty hard to get and keep really high levels of Fury; you can't just stand around doing nothing.

I envision Vigilance being much more like new Defiance, where now it's like the old one. The buff should be big enough to be meaningful, but not large enough to trivialize endurance management.

So while you might find it easy with an overpowered Dark Defender to game the inherent, you're just not going to gain much by doing so. But really, is this any different than a Brute using Brawl (level 1 inherent power) to maximize Fury generation? Or a Corruptor on a team only attacking foes under 50% health in order to maximize the chance of triggering Scourge (don't laugh, I know a LOT of Corrs that play this way)? Or a Controller opening with an immobilize, hold, sleep, or stun to trigger Containment? Are any of those "exploits"? I don't think so.

Back to range, I understand your point but disagree with it. I don't see the problem having Vigilance at a 40' range when you have 80' attacks. I don't think people will get confused. Inherents are bonuses. There is no "penalty" if you aren't getting it. A large number of AT inherents have conditions, and no one gets confused about them.

One could use your argument and apply it to ranged/melee modifiers. Why should I get "penalized" for using a ranged attack instead of a melee attack? Because being closer to your foes is more dangerous, and the game "rewards" you by giving you a buff to short range powers. The concept is the same. Sure, you can stay right at 80', firing away in relative safety. But then your risk is low, you can't use your most powerful attacks, and you don't deserve a buff. Get closer to the action and your risk goes up. When your risk goes up, you're entitled to a buff. So many facets of the game work this way. This is nothing different. Having to be within 40' away from critters in order to trigger the inherent is no different than requiring your pets to be within 60 feet of you, having to be hidden before you attack, your foes having less than 50% health, or critters needing to be stunned, held, immobilized, or slept.

I've suggested this before and I still think it would be an improvement over the current Vigilance.

I don't have a problem with the -endurance buff. I think it's completely appropriate for a Defender. The Defender running out of end usually spells doom, especially if they're a healer.

But instead of basing the buff on the aggregate health of the team, base it upon the number of foes nearby. The more foes you're fighting, the greater the discount. It could be setup just like Invincibility (but with a much wider range, say 25'?); gives a greater buff for the 1st foe and smaller buffs for subsequent foes up to a cap.

Doing it this way makes it fair across all Defender powersets, whereas current Vigilance is very biased and encourages poor defending. And it also would give the solo Defender a decent buff, whereas the current Vigilance gives squat. It also would be a much more consistent buff, as spawn sizes are relatively constant, based upon the team size and mission difficulty. The current Vigilance buff can vary widely from mission to mission, based upon team composition and critters fought. This makes it very difficult to rely upon it, further reducing its effectiveness.

Just my 2 cents.

I dunno if it's just me, but the new Drink Potion costume change animation seems out of sync. The sound of the bottle smashing doesn't quite match the visual.

It affects all teleportation powers that use that same animation. And it wasn't reported here because it was reported on test.

It's too bad the search-by-name function doesn't allow you to use conditional operators. That would be too easy

Sorry if this was mentioned in the thread, but I noticed this setting only applies to effects that are activated AFTER the setting is applied.

So if you turn the suppression on you will still see effects that were activated or applied before you turned it on. Once on, any effects turned on or applied will be suppressed. It won't suppress any currently active effects, only new ones.

I don't know if this is still the case, but this is how it used to work. I also know that the setting still doesn't stick. You can set it to enabled but it will reset it back to disabled when you quit the game.

It's been happening to me too on all 3 machines I have, but just yesterday. All different OSs (Win7, Vista, and XP), and all different video cards (two Nvidia, one ATI). I must have crashed at least a dozen times yesterday.

And I *never* crash. Ever. I was on Freedom, so hopefully today's maintenance will have fix things up.

I have a slightly more elegant solution. You can add all the devs as contacts. Then just click on UserCP, Contacts & Friends, and they are all listed there.

Then you can click each name, go to Statistics, and see all their posts.

If you go to the Contacts & Friends page you can add new contacts by simply typing their names into the "Add a member to your list" box. The system will auto-match names as you type, making it really easy to add all the devs. Just resist the temptation of adding them as "friends".

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Yep would of loved therm and fire but instead we get Traps and AR??? whats up with that.

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to me it's a toss up...

Emp/Fire is a combo i've wanted ever since I became the self-proclaimed Emeril Lagasse of Empathy...

TA/AR is a combo I've wanted since I realized how brokenly powerful the combination will be.

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Empathy/Fire? What would your character name be? "Feel the Burn"?

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One of the very first characters I wanted to make was a cleric/priest type named Father Marcus (based on an old D&D character), who I wanted to be Empathy/Fire. This was 5 years ago. Much to my dismay /Fire was not available for Defenders, and I instead used Dark (with the concept modified to be a fallen priest). It just didn't have the right feel and I deleted him shortly thereafter.

I saw the fire attacks as holy fire

In the game's options there is one setting called Max Particle Count, which goes from 100 to 50,000. This controls the amount of particle effects on the screen. And yeah, with big teams and lots of effects I have to slide this way down myself (note to devs: can we please get a chat-line command for this???).

Max Particle Fill isn't in the game's options, but it's in the registry settings and can be changed with Tweak CoH. It ranges from 100% to 1000% (1.0 to 10.0 in the registry), with the default being 1000%. I have no idea what this setting does.

I've seen this setting in the registry and in Tweak CoH, but not in the game's options, and I'm not exactly sure what it does.

Does anyone know?

Yeah, most of what's in SP3 for 32-bit XP is in SP2 for Windows Server and 64-bit XP. The remainder are available as separate downloads from Windows Update. You're not missing out on anything.

I only mentioned it to note that, theoretically, XP32 and XP64 aren't really the same OS.