Cowthulhu

Thanks for the input, gang. I tried out Mesmerize on Test and may go with that. What a great power. Long sleep duration, decent damage for me at this point, and you can pretty much use psi dart, levitate, and Mesmerize as an attack chain while taking no damage. I may actually slot this one up for damage.

On the subject of Drain Psyche, I understand the duration is 30 seconds, but I'm not clear on the recharge.

I'm not sure if I'm going to invest heavily in hasten to get the recharge down or whether I'll just use it situationally (it isn't permable these days, correct?)

Thanks for the guide. I've been away from the isles for some time now but recently returned and am enjoying my mind/psi. I agree with Argentae that psi dart, much like thorny dart in the thorny assault set, is excellent for building domination.

The build I'm currently working toward, like many of mine, is a bit unusual. There are so many mind powers I wish to try and I prefer to stay at range, hopping in when need be, then back out. Note that I'll be teaming exclusively.

Here's what I have so far

1 Levitate
1 Psionic Dart
2 Dominate
4 TK Thrust
6 Confuse
8 Mass Hypnosis

And I am currently planning:

10 Combat Jumping
12 TK
14 Super Jump
16 Psychic Shriek
18 Hasten
20 Drain Psyche
22
24
26 Terrify
28 Subdue
30
32 Mass Confusion
35 Psi Lance
38 Psychic Shockwave

Obviously, at this point (just hit 10) my offense is very weak.
I'd like to fit in Mesmerize but I'm not sure where.
I use TK thrust to get mobs out of my face, and while I wish it did a bit more damage, I do like it.

I may get on test and try out Mind Probe, but I don't really want another melee range power right now. I don't see why a mind/psi cant be very effective at range. While Mind Probe sounds nice, there's nothing all that special about it by the description, so there are only two key powers that require close range. But does that really mean you have to live in melee all the time? My guess is that the answer is no.

On the other hand, I've been known to play some wacky concept builds, so YMMV.

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Personally, I'm a fan of shadows.

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"What do you want?"

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I wonder if our first contact will be Mr. Morden...

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With apologies to Jack Sheldon, JMS, and the producers of Schoolhouse Rock:

The (abbreviated) Ballad of Mister Morden

Mister Morden walks out the door.
Mister Morden walks.
Mister Morden talks to Londo.
Mister Morden talks.
Mister Morden was an evil man.
Mister Morden was…
Mister Morden is the subject of the Shadows.
What his Associates say he does.

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and the high level characters can't contribute to prestige.

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They can still sell enhancements for prestige.

One thing I think would help, though, would be able to bank enhancements we can't use at the SG so others could find what they need without having to buy them.

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The Desperation idea sounds okay in theory, but I'd hate to be a defender teaming with the kind of blaster that yells at them for healing them when they want to do "mad phat damage" and then yells at them for letting them die when the blaster takes too much heat.

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What I find curious is that this same concept was originally supposed to be implemented for tankers awhile back.

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The new comic is night and day better over the previous version. The story actually interested me and the writing was very good. Congrats on the rebirth of the CoH comic.

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*shrug* I like it too.
It seems far more "professional" for lack of a better word.
I like the sense of humor contrasted with the darker bits.
I like the artwork as well.
I will say this second issue seemed really rushed and would have been better had it comprised two issues (one leading up to States' rescue and one for the Prometheus thing...I could have seen Issue 2 ending with States calling them idiots).

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[If you're really into the whole idea of "simpler is better" I suggest checking out Trollbabe.

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Oh no! An Edwardsian in our midst!

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I do hope it's Mutants and Masterminds compatable, or has a conversion table.

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Unisystem is a totally different animal from d20 (well, technically M&M is OGL, but let's not split hairs).

I wish the old posts were here. I've had a hunch they would use Unisystem for a long time. Aside from the obvious connection Jack has to Eden, I think Unisystem is a good choice for CoH. It has plenty of substance to it, but it isn't a game with real heavy mechanics like d20 or Hero.

Just my opinion, but a real heavy system would be the pits for CoH. The RPG needs to come as close as possible to recreating the kind of action the MMORPG is so well known for. Combat needs to be fast and dynamic. I'm hoping we'll see a system akin to TORG where we have mechanics for grunts and then for the "real" bad guys. While that wouldn't be exactly like the MMORPG version, I think it is a reasonable compromise.

Kind of curious that one of the other systems that comes to mind that would have been interesting to use for this is Savage Worlds...considering that Shane is a CoH dev these days *waves at Shane*

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any clues on what might happen to regen?

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Why? Regen was just toned down some with I3.

LOL. That's priceless. Makes me think of an old B&W hygiene film they would have spoofed on MST3K or something.

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Curses! Damn my reliance on the tray!

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Bill, what is it you are trying to do?
I don't see why you couldn't use a power tray activate command with this then put the macro you want in a tray slot.

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You know what I think would be really neat? If ST had a fixed facing when you placed it and it emitted a fairly wide cone that would reliably force stuff away from the controller. While situational, I could envision it being a decent panic power to wall off additional groups of mobs.

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Y'know, I like that idea. Fix the cone away from the caster at the time of casting, to allow for better aggro shaping (disperse a few, cower a few).

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Heh, if I had my druthers. ST would be kind of like TK. You'd target a spot in the distance, and it would appear next to you and move toward the target, pushing stuff away from you as it went.

Personally, while I think the immobilize version of ST, given the acc debuff and the fact you can easily get several out at one time, may well be too powerful.

You know what I think would be really neat? If ST had a fixed facing when you placed it and it emitted a fairly wide cone that would reliably force stuff away from the controller. While situational, I could envision it being a decent panic power to wall off additional groups of mobs.

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I feel that as a level 26 power it should be better than level 18 Phantom Army.

There is something obviously wrong with illision because I could easily group for the whole night and never run into the situational use of both spectral terror and phantasm.

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Not every power is "better" than the ones that come before it. The game isn't designed that way.

There is nothing wrong with illusion. Phantasm is not any more or less situational than the burn patches your buddy was dropping. If it doesn't fit your playstyle, then I suggest trying a different powerset.

**This message has been brought to you by the Committee for the Preservation of Phantasm Knockback

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What I do know, however, is in the case where the mob has to use a power to blow themselves up (as opposed to Skiffs, for example, who just sort of explode), you can stop the power entirely with EF. The power that Mages/Embalmed/whatever use to blow themselves up is interruptable, and EF will continuously interrupt everything that's inside it, so they can't blow up at all.

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Wow...45 levels on my rad controller and 30 on a rad defender and I never noticed this. Thanks for the tip!

Thanks Geko.

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Is that PDF not showing up for anyone else? All I'm getting is a white screen.

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Had no trouble with it whatsoever.

No, this isn't a nerf, it is a bug fix.

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now according to this some one running fire shield and that is being hit by a fire melee attack that does smashing and fire damage will be able to resist the smashing damage but the fire damage will not be resisted? im confused as to how this works and also confused about the usefulness of these kinds of defense powers now.


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This is about defense, not resistance. Your best defense that is applicable to a particular attack will be used to determine if that attack hits. Damage will be determined as it always was.

Some questions:
Has the friends list max size been increased?
Can you invite players to a channel while they are offline?
I've just created a channel. Is that character the operator of the channel, or is my global handle the operator? My GC handle is what shows in the list, implying I could then log in on a different server and still be the operator.
I invite my SG to a channel. Am I inviting the individual characters or their global handles?

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It does nothing. What makes it useful is that it does that nothing for a specific length of time (the number after sleep is the number of seconds to do that nothing). This way you aren't constantly rewriting your target.txt file, just once every second.

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Ding! light bulb just went on.
The batch file rewrites the keybind file every second with the next line from the phrases file.

So there isn't a randomizer at all, but takes advantage of the fact that you will make calls to it in a random fashion, yes? I thought sleep was some sort of randomization function. Now I think I get it. Sorry, I just like to understand how stuff works.

This would have been fantastic for my rad defender. I'll have to think about how to use it on my newer heroes.

Thanks for the explanation!
I'm assuming the resource overhead for this is negligible?

First off, thank you so much for posting this.
I've used a rotating series of binds before but allways wanted to be able to do this.

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Target.bat contents (the "for" line is all one line):

@echo off

:TOP

for /f "delims=zzz" %%i in (phrases.txt) do (echo space "local %%i$$unselect$$toggle_enemy$$bind_load_file C:\kb\target.txt">target.txt)&&sleep 1&&echo %%i

GOTO TOP


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Ok...
What does for /f "delims=zzz" mean?


If I want to use a different key than space could I, for instance:
echo F10 "local %%i$$unselect$$toggle_enemy$$bind_load_file C:\kb\target.txt"

Could the lines in phrases.txt make use of CoH's $target macro (don't see why not, it's just a text macro, right?) Are there characters that aren't allowed in that file?

What does sleep actually do?

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This technically isn't possible with our engine. It would have to be a huge animated texture refreshing at 20+ frames per second.

We did think of it, but the engineers' eyeballs popped out of their sockets when we suggested it.

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Hey, Positron, what about a sort of "giant hologram" rather than a flat image? You'd see a really large version of one of the fights taking place inside, only it would be transparent, have some scan lines in it, etc.

Dagnibbity, Inkblaster beat me to it.

Hmmmm...well I do sometimes use the ctrl+num keys to change the tray after it has inadvertantly been changed to something else in the middle of a fight, but I'm thinking that generally happens because the ctrl key was hit by accident in the first place.

When global chat comes in, I'd like to be able to see the global name for SG members in the SG window.

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Argh. Well, I hope there's some measure of choice involved in the nature of the attack. I wouldn't want to be stuck Mental Blasting someone when I could be Will Dominating them.

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I suspect that what they mean is that your target is switched to the taunter and you can't switch to a different target. If that's the case, you'd still get to choose if, when, and how to attack but not your target.

One issue with this is going to be for support characters. Taunt the opposing empath and now they can't switch targets to heal their friends.

Wonder if this means they'll add taunt resistance to some of the inspirations and powers. Let's hope so.