Chad Gulzow-Man

I still think the way to "fix" Stalkers is to buff their single-target damage to higher than a Scrapper's, while leaving AoE damage at its current state (or even nerfing it by a very small amount to compensate for the ST buffs). They're supposed to be single-target specialists, and yet Scrappers' ST attacks outperform those of a Stalker right out of the gate, and Brutes outperform them after just a few seconds in combat.

Of course, the last time I suggested this, I was all but called an idiot and told I didn't understand how the game worked. Mileages and variations and what-not.

I've just been making sure I have X number of slots left at the end of the build (where X is the number of extra slots I need between Health and Stamina, 2-5 depending on whether the character needs the Numi and Miracle uniques or not), but at this point I'm not setting anything in stone.

We don't know what else is coming in Issue 19 that might affect our builds. Actually, we do know one thing that is definitely coming that will wildly change some people's builds--the Alpha Incarnate Slot! (Global End Redux enhancement on top of Inherent Fitness, yes please!)

You can work around it. Try starting off with /e tarzan (which is the same animation shared by several powers) and then doing whatever emote you really wanted to be doing. There are a few other emotes that work as starter emotes as well.

My shield brute was air guitaring with his shield out a few nights ago. \m/_

(Note that if you move your character's position, you'll have to do a starter emote again to get to the emotes you'd really prefer to be doing.)

Ooh, they have Nehi Peach...

... for $25 a 12 pack. It's not THAT tasty.

Yeah, it sounds like the motherboard. You might want to test your memory anyway (I've been seeing a lot of weird things happen at work this month due to bad RAM), but it sounds like the mobo.

www.memtest.org

I agree with Awesome here. Now that you've mentioned you're planning to buy a new PC soon anyway, do the cheapest upgrades you can (an extra 1GB of RAM is a great suggestion) and just save the rest of your money for your sweet new rig.

And remember, painting flames on the side of your case won't actually make you go faster, but it will make you more attractive to sexy nerds!

Hi Beach. You are right, your system is a little dated, but you'll be happy to know that it's not completely obsolete.

First off, the bad news: Your graphics card, the GeForce 6600, will not run any of the advanced Ultra Mode features. It might be able to handle reflections on the low to medium levels, but it will choke if you try to do things like realistic shadows or ambient occlusion. I used to have a 6600, and I know from experience that it did not work well with Bloom and... er, whatever the setting is that makes things get "fuzzy" at a distance.

You'll also need to look into significantly increasing your memory.

The good news is, you've got room to upgrade your system. It would really help if you knew the manufacturer and model of your motherboard, as I could recommend cost-effective replacement parts with product links, but as it stands I can give you some idea of what you'll be spending.

First off, memory. RAM is super-cheap these days. You have 1GB now, and you want to go to at least 3GB (Windows XP 32bit won't read beyond 3.25GB, but you're welcome to slot all the way up to 4GB). 4GB of RAM for that system will likely cost you $100 or less (provided you can reuse the 1GB that's already in there, of course).

Second, you're going to need a new video card if you want to use Ultra Mode. Your motherboard may or may not support the current generation of video cards (it might only use AGP, when motherboards now use PCIexpress), but either way you do have room to move up. Unfortunately, the outdated AGP cards tend to cost more money... if that's what your system uses, you may want to think about building/buying a whole new computer anyway; you may as well get your money's worth out of the upgrade, however you want to slice it. Your best option for upgrades here will reside in the GeForce 9000 series, and you're looking to spend likely over $200 for the AGP models.

If your motherboard does support PCIe cards, then you're almost certainly going to need to upgrade your power supply as well. A decent graphics card requires a PSU that works with about 400W at a minimum these days, and the really good graphics cards sometimes require upwards of 600W. A good PCIe card that works with most (if not all) Ultra Mode features will probably cost around $180 and go up from there.

Another option which can increase your speed on the cheap might be to add another hard drive to your system that you only install your games on, and keep it defragmented regularly. Having games, which tend to require a lot of reading and writing actions on your hard drive, on a physically separate drive than your operating system will cut down your load times noticably.

That should be a good start, to give you some things to think about. Let me/us know if you have any other questions.

If your girlfriend (or boyfriend, or whatever you call your significant other) told you that you had to choose between her (him/it/them/whatever) and City of Heroes, which would you pick?

...

I picked you guys.

Okay, that's a bit of an over-simplification of things, and it didn't help her accusations that I'm addicted to vidjagames... but I still think I chose the right answer.

A respec changes whichever build you have currently active.

There is no way to specifically say "respec build 1" or "respec build 2;" just show up at the respec officer with the build you want to change.

The flyer has been in that mission at least since Issue 7, if not the release of CoV in Issue 6.

Actually, no, I take it back, it was definitely in Issue 6. There was a point in the CoV beta where that flyer would bug out and attack players.

I'm just highly unimaginitive.

Actually, it dates back to high school. My bus used to drop us off at about 6:50, and class didn't start until 8:00, so my friends and I would hang out in the cafeteria and draw. One day we decided we'd all draw the most useless superhero we could think of. I drew myself in the clothes I happened to be wearing that day (a grey teeshirt and jeans) and added "-Man" to the end of my name. My friends, for some unknown reason, actually thought it was kind of cool.

A short while later, during another pre-class drawing session, we invented our own pretend clothing line for characters to wear known as "Stuff, Inc." Ever seen Chad in game? Wondered what the S on his shirt stood for? Now you know.

The Chad is in, hip, down, and jiggy wit' it.

Edit:
FYI, I've linked this on the LoV forums as well, as several of our members don't regularly frequent the official boards. Looking forward to it 3D!

Have you hit level 49 yet, when you gain your final power?

First of all, I'm pretty sure Posi said they're looking at going beyond 10 Incarnate levels--it's something they're going to continue expanding for as long as they keep updating the game.

As far as the Alpha Slot goes, I don't know how much is allowed to be said since it was tested and pulled while still under the Going Rogue closed beta NDA, but it's effectively a global enhancement slot that works on every power you own, and that a small percentage (~20%) of that enhancement would ignore the limitation of Enhancement Diversification. It does not work with regular enhancements or IOs, but uses its own specialized craftable enhancements.

The different Incarnate levels all had craftable powers associated with them, and to my knowledge, Alpha was the only one that worked as an enhancement. Other levels will supposedly include things like pet summons and damage powers and the like.

But keep in mind that all of that is information based off of things that were removed from the beta and speculation from the crafting menus, and that it might all be completely different in Issue 19.

EDIT:

That sounds like an issue with the video card.

Have you run any other games on the machine? Have you tried updating the graphics drivers from ATI/AMD's website (rather than Toshiba's)?

If your drivers are up to date and other games don't experience the same issue, then I have no idea what could be going on...

You're asking a lot of questions today.

I set up my wired Xbox 360 controller to work with the game when I was bored one day last summer. It wasn't particularly fluid... I don't think I was able to get the camera look to work with my right analog stick. It was also a huge pain in the butt to get all my attacks bound to all the buttons, and pretty much ended up not being much fun at all once the novelty wore off.

Anyway, if your controller works with your PC (ie, you have all the necessary drivers installed), you can set joystick commands in the Options menu. Once you've experimented enough to learn what the game calls each button, you can even set your own binds using the /bind command...

Of course, when you realize you've got 10 powers in your primary tray plus however many others you commonly use in your alt trays, plus jump, plus a button to activate/deactivate your travel power... Well, you're going to quickly realize that you don't have enough buttons to do anything.

You can use it as such, Vitality. You just have to rebind the keys to do so.

/bind numpad1 "powexec_slot 1"
...
/bind numpad0 "powexec_slot 10"

A lot of people prefer to use their numpad for situational binds instead of attacks, though. For instance, it's a great way to control a Mastermind's pets while still keeping access to their personal powers on the top row of number keys.

Edit:
For the Ctrl and Alt versions, you'd want to bind the following:

/bind ALT+numpad1 "powexec_altslot 1"
...
/bind ALT+numpad0 "powexec_altslot 10"

and

/bind CTRL+numpad1 "powexec_alt2slot 1"
...
/bind CTRL+numpad1 "powexec_alt2slot 10"

If this is something you think you'll want to do on EVERY CHARACTER, you can set a default "keybinds.txt" file in your CoH program folder, and any new characters created will automatically absorb those binds.

Stormy, it's probably easiest just to check the Dev Digest and the Community Digest every day to find those things mentioned in parts 2 and 3. They aren't restricted to any one forum, as power adjusting usually affects multiple ATs at this point in the game. Discussions on individual IO sets will pop up on random AT forums as well.

As for patch notes, the patches on test will show up under The Training Room subforum, and those on the live serves will show up under the News, Events and Announcements subforum. (You'll see patch notes listed in the Community Digest as well, as they're posted by the forum reps.)

Send an email to cohforums@ncsoft.com with "FORUM HANDLE CHANGE REQUEST" in the subject line.

(Caps used for emphasis, and are not actually necessary in the email.)