Carnifax

1) 6 isn't it, as of the last patch (yesterdays).

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...so burn the game client to a DvD then... it's only 3 gig

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I have, but that's not the point! I'd like a proper, up to date, installer!! Besides, not everyone HAS a DVD burner, you know. Even in this day and age...

[/ QUOTE ]So what's that .iso going to be good for?

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Installing from a disc image.

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That's an awfully convulted way to go about things.

Just zip the folder into a ZIP or RAR file so, far easier to re-extract rather than messing with ISOs and the software to do so is (sorta) free with WinRAR.

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Sounds like a fix to me - only the Corrupter version should Scourge.

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A fix without patch notes?

Sounds like a stealth nerf to me.

Poor wee Sparkie really is Castles [censored] over the last two or three weeks.

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How many novels have you read where the hero just happens upon the main villain in the corridor outside the toilets?

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I wouldn't know because most authors don't bother to tell us. It's not important.

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Actually this is just plain wrong, most novels when detailing the Final Battle take pains to tell you exactly what setting it is occuring in and what the Big Bad is doing. Especially in comic books.

Having the Big Bad battle in the right room really is important.

That said at the moment you can get it pretty much right (but not always so) using Front / Back etc and tweaking / fiddling about.

It would be nice it there was a way to travel onto the map and see the spawn points as some sort of targetted spot / placeable thingie and assign a particular Mission Event to occur at that spot. It should also avoid any potential exploits in giving full control of Spawn Point positions to players.

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On a rad? Surely all that -defence is just a fancy way of doing what Aim does anyway?

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AVs have debuff resistance, they dont have self buff resistance, Aim helps

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I suppose you could say the same for Darks other -regen power, Twilight Grasp. But that's so spammy it doesn't really matter if you miss occasionally.

I find Aim handy on Dark/Sonics for ensuring a full Sonics attack chain hits. Very useful vs Rikti Drones (and Nemmies, but you'd be best off avoiding Nemmies, they're just frustrating for Dark/Sonics, they nullify all your best tricks).

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That's why I love Necro/Dark, can still fear nems

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Or failing that just send a horde of zombies to eat their faces.

That was the main reason my Dark/Sonics is currently in limbo at level 35. I have a level 42 Necro/Dark MM and he simply doesn't have the same limitations against certain enemy types : If all else fails eat their brains (or CPUs or whatever).

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There will be a digital release for Europe in the near future.

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Given that the only difference between the US and EU client is a .eu. stuck into the EU Updater could people order the US version and just change the CoHUpdater.exe file themselves and hey presto a fully working EU i14 MA Edition box set?

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On a rad? Surely all that -defence is just a fancy way of doing what Aim does anyway?

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AVs have debuff resistance, they dont have self buff resistance, Aim helps

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I suppose you could say the same for Darks other -regen power, Twilight Grasp. But that's so spammy it doesn't really matter if you miss occasionally.

I find Aim handy on Dark/Sonics for ensuring a full Sonics attack chain hits. Very useful vs Rikti Drones (and Nemmies, but you'd be best off avoiding Nemmies, they're just frustrating for Dark/Sonics, they nullify all your best tricks).

What's really sad is that it's blindingly obvious how to do it. Just make a custom group with just Lieuts in it. For some reason the Devs in their infinite wisdom made it so that if there's no minions available it just populates with the next available tier without downgrading the total number of mobs in it.

Which is bizarre because there are some normal missions ingame populated with just Freakshow Tanks, but they do reduce the total number of mobs correctly (so you get just a few tanks when you're on a team rather than a full X man spawn made up of bosses).

Really they've no-one else but themselves to blame on that one.

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Ok, well I thought I'd get at least some mature responses from people on these forums, like the guys who welcomed me back to the game after 4 years.

Hold me down with a bat? Come on man, at least have a discussion. You talk about people spouting elitist and trash talk, whats that exactly?

Xemulas, why don't you explain to me what Villians are then?

Why don't you tell me what i'm not understanding? I mean god forbid I might need to get a 3rd Degree to understand a computer game. I think from 7 years of playing MMO's I understand them pretty well.
Perhaps its some sort of comic lore you are talking about which is why you have made this comment? I will admit I'm not an expert on comics, in fact far from it.

Praf68, i'm glad you agree that the NPC's are the Villians of the game, so why can't explain to me why you bring in another side to the game called Villians when they are actually not required?
When what you will do as a Villian is exactly the same job a Hero does?

Right now I hear a lot of people dismissing every comment I make with.. NO or 'Grabs bat', I don't see any decent arguements against my points. Isn't that what a community forum is for?

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If the world was open then it would have to be free-for-all PvP. Because if you see a villain wandering about Paragon City, one who is known for escaping the Zig, probably has robbed nearly every bank in the city and all the other Paragon City based things villains get up to you'd arrest them on site.So any sort of "opt in" system makes no sense ingame.

Any sort of free for all PvP in CoH wouldn't work. The areas are too open, unlike say WAR where the maps are basically two "paths" of good and evil which overlap at points. So Ganking etc would be common place. Also PvP in CoH is terrible, it just isn't much fun. Powers for PvP work differently to PvE, and this is worked out by (1) the Target hit by a Power (for attacks etc) and (2) The Type of Map you are on. So because of Point 2 free-for-all PvP (or open area PvP) cannot work in CoX.

In other words No

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I guess it's only me who sees it as odd that the buffs granted by Mystic Fortune are based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot when IIRC many Christian religious groups don't take much to the Tarot...

[/ QUOTE ]It's a videogame, thus, it's not real. People who can't make that distinction would be labeled as mentally unstable by most.

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The little ray of sunshine has returned!

Welcome back MaX!

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Here is a thread for mission architect suggestions. Hopefully someone might one day read it.

My first suggestion is to add
ambushes which must be completed to finish the mission.

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Erm, aren't these already in? On test I had a "click the glowie" leading to a boss ambush which also needed to be completed to end the mish.

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Blech! And there I was hoping to get a new box with up to date dvds so I don't have to download 12 issues when I do a reinstall. At least now I know I can go buy a magic booster...

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You could just burn your CoH folder onto a DVD as a back-up. You can just copy it back onto your hard disk and run the updater (the .eu. one) and pick the same folder and it'll be reinstalled.

That way you don't have to give NCSoft any money either (they obviously feel they don't want it anyway).

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Will we at some point in the not too distant future get a European version of the new Architect Edition box? Or do only the Americans get the actual box? I've been browsing my usual shopping sites and none even announce the box.

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Only the yanks get the boxed version.

We can get a 1 & 0s version via d'interweb but that doesn't sit on shelves as well as a box, the 0s get everywhere.

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Didn't get chance to go into CoH last night, so couldn't make adjustments to see what's what, but I accept what's been posted since.

However, just wanted to point out.. When I wrote and published the arc, the MA editor did NOT tell you how many spawn points were in each map section. Now that it does do that, it's a LOT easier to setup spawns.

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That was added in Open Beta. I assume to deal with exactly this sort of unpredicability in controlling spawns.

Added the same day they took the University Basement away from me *sobs*

I liked that map!!

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Well, I don't know what emote you are thinking of, but I was talking about the standing one where your character casually dips a teabag in a cuppa handheld by saucer.

desperately searches in the cupboard for MindBleach Extreme™

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Oh dear gods my brain. My poor little brain.

Waaaaay to early in the morning to be stumbling across that image.

(and On-Topic)
Their site looks rather basic. Oddly though I actually like it more than the CoH or NCSoft ones.

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The simple fact of being able to place more bosses than there are spawn points IS a bug. It either should give you an error, or it shouldn't allow you to place that many, yet it does.


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If you try to place more bosses than there are boss spawn points it does return a bug.

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Take my Return to Disco arc. I use that old Hellion "Rave" map, similar to the old PDP map. On it I have 1 ally, 3 bosses (including the AV), and 2 ambushes. According to the map definition, I should be well within the limits for that map, right?

So, I put my Ally at the front, and a boss at the front, middle and back (AV at the back). The first boss is meant to spawn on the Ally, and each boss has an ambush.

So why does my Ally spawn at the back, and my AV is regularly appearing in the middle? Why does the first boss, triggered to spawn on the Ally completion, appear at a random position on the map, and rarely actually comes to get you? I had to go looking for him!

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Because of this:

DANCE RAVE: 10 allowed ambush, boss, patrol or destroy object details. (1 Front, 5 Middle, 4 Back)


So once the single front spawn point is filled, your mob gets bumped to the next available spawn point.

It's WAI. F/M/B is a preference, not an order.

Just because it doesn't work the way you think it should doesn't mean it's bugged.

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Tested this last night and was able to get it to work as Dave described, setting the two bosses & their ambushes to Any made everything appear as designed. The Ally appeared near the start, the two bosses appeared in the corridors before the big open room, the AV appeared either in the "lobby" of the big room (the small room opening into the large one) or in the big room itself. Then I got distracted, wiped the bosses and filled the place with zombies instead to see what the difference between the Banished @ levels 20-30 and the Banished 40-50 was, seems the 40-50s have the bigger spawn sizes (Mmmm. Claws heaven).

So really it's up to a Mission Designer to see if the map is suitable to what they had planned and tweaking accordingly as part of the design process. Also since going live missions from Test will probably need a good retest and tweaking since some things seem to have changed.

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Am likely to take the +tohit power for using Howling Twilight on AVs, hate when that misses on my MMs, so will try and make it not happen on my defender

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iIsn't Howling auto-hit in PvE? I've always thought it was. Aim is nice before Fearsome Stare & Howl followed by your single target chain. Also very handy vs what will be your (ahem) Nemises's. Vengence is very annoying and Aim lets you hit through it. With no -Defense debuffs Aim comes in dead handy.

Rooting isn't a huge issue for a Dark/Sonic, most things are quivering in fear anyway or are getting debuffed by Darkest Night and/or Fluffy.

Ah right, that does seem bugged in that case. If I remember I might try it out myself and see if there's any work arounds (I think the order of objectives has some effect).

Any time I've tried to place too many bosses (I tried 5 boss spawns on the back of small CoT map) it did give me an error though, after the patch that provided details on the number of front/middle/back points in the maps description.

My issue stems from the fact that I had a Test arc using the University basement map with a glowie and a boss ambush which worked perfectly. But because the map didn't work for some other objective combos the map got pulled from the MA totally.

If it's a toss-up between a map not working for some objective combos or getting pulled entirely I'd be in the "leave it in but not working for some objectives" camp.

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Could you screen shot it please? I am using firefox 3.0.8 and it looks ok. IE buggers it up from time to time though. Not tried it in Opera, or chrome for that matter.

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Snapshot 1

and

Shot 2

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How many maps are there in total? Hundreds? And you think it'd only take a few days? Seriously?


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Easily only a couple of days. It's not every map we're talking about you know, it seems to only affect the unique ones, and there really aren't that many; but even with having to check every single map, it's unlikely to take more than 10 minutes each. They don't have to create missions and try them, you know. They just need to lookup the data for the map and see if the F/M/B has been defined.


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If a map / objective combo doesn't work properly it's down to the Mission Designer to spot and fix it (reorder the objectives, cut down objectives or switch to another map). Maps getting pulled because some objectives work oddly on them isn't the way to go (neither is the map "useless" because it fails to work with your combination of objectives).

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I disagree. If a map/objective combo isn't working, then that map/objective combo shouldn't be available. If it's available for me to use, then it should WORK. If it doesn't work, then it's bugged.

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The Custom Arc you designed is bugged in that case, not the underlying map you attempted to use.

You cannot assume every map will work with every combination of objectives. If I've a "Ruined City" map with 20 glowies on it I'd hardly expect to be able to do the same thing with "University Basement", they're two different maps.

Similarly if you've a map with 5 bosses and an AV you cannot say "That should work with every map available", it's impractical (I'd hate to see it on University Basement for example )

Just registered without any trouble at all .

One tiny, wee thing, on Opera and Firefox the Ratings box for a mission is a little small for the text within it and so the bottom border cuts through it.

Example here

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I wouldn't sniff at an extra 50% global recharge, even with Hasten...
I'm always happy to see another Kin on the team and there's always a slight chance they'll speed boost me too ;-D

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Re-reading that it does look like I was being down on Kin/ but I wasn't as I did love them, they just didn't make me squee like Cold/, I would still rather have one than quite a few other AT's/sets.

I just always missed out on the glory of Fulcrum Shift

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I was being "down" at them, but only because of particle effect / high speed / slow laptop issues. They outweigh the +recharge for me (also the main reason I stopped playing my Kin/Elec as well).

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...which would have pushed back issue 14 to 2010.


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I very much doubt it would take more than a couple of days, actually. It's just that it would be a really crappy job for whoever had to do it, so isn't going to be at the top of anyone's list to get done. I allocate [censored] jobs like this to my staff regularly, and they're ALWAYS put at the back of their work list. It just the way things like that happen.

Unfortunately, it makes the MA look broken, so should really have been given a high priority, IMO.

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How many maps are there in total? Hundreds? And you think it'd only take a few days? Seriously?

If a map / objective combo doesn't work properly it's down to the Mission Designer to spot and fix it (reorder the objectives, cut down objectives or switch to another map). Maps getting pulled because some objectives work oddly on them isn't the way to go (neither is the map "useless" because it fails to work with your combination of objectives).

I agree, no to giving Villains access to the City.

I would be happy with another co-op zone, say 20-35 though, so that there's more teaming opportunies for villains in that range (so very very sick of Sharkshead Isle). The "narrowness" of the story arcs for villains means it always starts dragging when I leave Cap for Sharkshead. Heroes have the option of Talos, IP, the second half of Faultline and Striga at level 20. Villains get Sharkshead Isle and nothing else.

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I'd like to give it a shot, so what secondary and epic would tie in well

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For Cold or Forcefield (personally I'd much prefer playing a Cold defender just because they've more tricks up their sleeves and can do horrible things to AVs)?

For Cold I'd say Ice (for theme, masses of -speed & -recharge and the Blaster versions of Ice Storm and Blizzard combined with Sleet), Dark Blast for -ToHit blending well with your shields, an Immob to keep things in Sleet and a self-heal or Sonics just because it works so well on a defender (and you'll do truely nasty things to an AV).