DKellis

You didn't miss very much.

This would not be a change that affects me, but since it appears to make things easier for others, I have no objections to it.

The manga is currently just going on and on and on, although we've gotten a good feel for the love dodecahedrons by now. The anime has a lot of pop culture references, so I wouldn't actually recommend it for a newbie to anime, but it's quite fun for someone who gets the injokes.

A lot of people seem to like Hinagiku, although I'm personally partial to Maria.

This may or may not also be found under the name Kachou Oji, or Section Chief Oji, depending on who's doing the localizations.

I said it soloed worse than most other characters I've played except for Kheldians. Certainly they solo worse than other MMs I have.

Then again, I'm not happy with knockback in general, since I have terrible luck with enemies getting stuck in map geometry. Happens a lot in caves. My Ninja/Storm hit 38 and I just kind of... left her there.

I remember thinking the lower-level VEAT arcs were more interesting than the higher-level ones.

Especially the last mission at 50, which is basically "you're a true Destined One now, you have nothing better to do, go troll Statesman".

Most of my experience with VirtualDubMod (I forget exactly what the differences are with vanilla VirtualDub) are with AviSynth. When you mentioned splicing the video, what I thought you meant was taking two different video files A and B (of similar formats and frame sizes), and then sticking A and B together into AB, like using glue, rather than mixing them together into a new product C.

That's what I remember doing: creating a... one-line? Two-line? Whatever... Avisynth file, and running that into VirtualDubMod, and saving the output as the final product. (This was because my old actual video editing software horked up errors when asked to produce files more than 2GB in size. It was pretty sad.) There's probably an easier way, but I was relying on AviSynth anyway. (I probably shouldn't; there's a lot more out there now.)

Other things I remember doing were muxing and demuxing, messing with codecs and sizes, and that's about the limit of my experience.

It's used for a lot of things, including but not limited to dubbing. One of the things I do use it for is to splice videos together, although it's been a very long time (ie several versions ago, probably) since I tried that and I used AVISynth anyway.

One of the things I remember about VirtualDub was that the creator made it mostly due to Sailor Moon.

Ha, yes. Weirdly, I've seen variations: my Bots/Dark, Thugs/Poison, and currently Demons/Thermal are massive overperformers as usual (well, at least compared to my Blasters), but my Ninja/Storm has some of the most shameful performance I've ever seen on a non-Kheldian. I suspect it's the Ninja aspect, since every time I try to suggest it could be Storm, or perhaps a combination of Ninja and Storm, I get so many retorts to the contrary I am forced to retract my guess.

(I know why my Kheldians suck: it's because I don't team.)

May be a consequence of this:

I know I've heard a lot of talk among people I've tried to get to try CoH that it has "dated graphics". To be fair, they don't then turn around and say that "graphics are killing games", possibly because they're not so... fire-and-brimstone passionate, I suppose.

Text adventure games (presumably Zork needs no introduction) prove that it is possible for games to tell a story without good graphics, but it doesn't prove that such a game can tell a good story, and still be considered a game. Besides, adventure games have their own problems.

My comparison with Blaster damage has been my Dark Melee Scrappers. It could be due to my very weird luck with crits (quite streaky), but against a single target, my Dark Melee Scrappers felt like they could consistently dish out at least as much damage as all my Blasters over a period of time.

Now, I know the retort: my DM Scrapper does poorly in damaging large groups. (Survival-wise, obviously the Scrapper can stand up easier than the Blaster, but that's a false comparison anyway.) But I don't fight large groups. This is basically along the lines of "I don't team"; it's just not something I find enjoyable.

So I am assuming that the advantage of Blasters, which they give up for survivability, are their AoE capabilities. And perhaps that "thrill of being on the edge" which is obviously a draw for some, just as "thrill of being in control" is a draw for me.

EDIT: And the last time I brought Masterminds into this discussion I got a lot of "but MMs don't count" due to some reason or other.

I scrapped a Archery/EM back in I5 because of the redraw. I don't know whether it got any better. (And I wasn't sure about Trick Arrow at the time, so I didn't try a TA/A Defender.)

I think it's not so much the redraw time as much as the redraw style for me. I like Dual Pistols because the character doesn't reach behind them to draw the weapon with that weird creaking sound.

Speaking of sounds, another thing that was almost killed by sounds: Mind Control. After incessantly hearing the WEEEEOOOOOOO and SCRREEEEUUUUOOO of the early powers, I just set my sound to mute. If I had to listen to that all the time, no way I'd have played that powerset.

Even more, if I got a game for US$50 and I only get 10 hours' worth of actual game, then I'd feel ripped off. A book (paperback) might last me that long for a tenth of the price.

Of course, a book only requires the reader to be literate, have a decent vocabulary, and have enough recall abilities to remember what happened prior in the story. (Also the usual mechanical actions of being able to hold the book and turn the pages and whatnot.)

A lot of what happens in games is busywork. Travel is a major one. In progression-based games (with experience points and such), fighting enough enemies to level up to take on the boss at a comfortable risk level is another; in this case, bosses are level-gates.

What can be done could be to integrate the story within this busywork; while you're travelling, make it meaningful, rather than going from point A to point B and only that.

This is probably the reason why I don't like to play Blasters. I like to be in control, not panicking.

Then again, I played a character I hated (EM/DA Brute, before IOs) to 50, so I'm just stubborn. I really want to try having one of each AT at 50, eventually, even if I'll never play that AT again.

Part of this is because while you can give me the Numbers and I can calculate everything myself, I can't actually decide whether I'd like the power until I take it, slot it, and use it.

Basically, I don't know what I want. I can look at Drain Psyche, and see that it has a certain PBAoE range, and decide that since it doesn't immediately heal me (but does give +regen), it has a duration significantly longer than its recharge even slotted, and its values don't seem to be useful for the small spawns I fight, I shouldn't even bother with it until I have everything else I want. But according to others, it's an amazing power even solo, and even if I don't like blapping. I asked specifically about this.

I still can't use it without feeling that I made a power pick mistake, since either I die anyway when I use it, or it does nothing for me.

And by all rights numbers-wise, my Fire/Elec attempt should be amazing and awesome, but I'm having more fun with my Dual Pistols/Mental Blaster. What bothers me is that all my Blaster attempts (Fire/Elec, Fire/Ice, Ice/Ice, Ice/EM, DP/Mental) still feel like I'm missing something important, since I fare much better with my Corruptors and Defenders and Controllers solo. (Haven't tried Dominators to a significant level, mostly because I am truly getting sick of redside contacts.)

Generic EndMod recipes have been strangely expensive on the Market for a long time, and I don't really know why. Other recipes might or might not share the same oddity, but EndMods are consistently so.

Filia Ul Copt, who appears only in the third season Slayers TRY, which is kind of... odd, regarding its place in canon. Filia doesn't usually have any signs of being a dragon other than her full transformation, and the occasional popping out of her tail, usually for comedic getting-stepped-on.

I've bolded the part I was trying to say.

It's actually more to do with how anime gets produced... or rather, how anime gets approved for production. There's a lower barrier for approval, especially if there's a pre-existing work that has proven to be popular enough (and I don't mean so popular that everyone knows about it, although it helps, but merely popular enough to be considered). This is why we hear a lot about some anime having a source manga or light novel or whatnot.

And from what I can tell, anime seasons are usually decided by quarters (cours), rather than needing to go on and on and on until cancelled. This lets them try (however successfully) to tell the story within the space of 13 episodes, or 26, or some other multiple of 13 (or 12 or 14). Exceptions are the really short one-offs, or the long-runners.

Anime does follow its own trends and hype. Some of them have been labelled as "genre conventions", some of them as "tropes", some of them as "cliches"... certain trends dominate over a period of time, a little like how reality TV dominated for a time or National Idol-type shows or game shows or such. In anime, it used to be mecha, and then lots of mecha shows appeared until Evangelion, upon which deconstructions and reconstructions abounded. Or under-one-roof harem comedies, possibly stemming from Maison Ikkoku. Or random slice-of-life, made popular in the West by Azumanga Daioh. Or the moe style, which is an interesting spinoff from certain shoujo styles... it goes on.

In each anime, though, there may be some strange detail that seems out of place, which helps differentiate it from everything else: Kimagure Orange Road would have been a love triangle story, except that the male lead has, for some reason, ESPer powers. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya would have been a standard school days iyashi-kei (one of the spinoff manga was even going in this direction until recently), except that the titular character warps reality (and the main male lead narrates in first-person in the light novels).

This is probably why there seems to be greater variety: there are a lot more anime due to production methods, and US companies have been aggressively marketing many of them for some time, possibly because they're different. (Or more likely, fans have been aggressively promoting them.)

I assume if you take away their punishment beast then they'll deal with you without rancor.

How does the latter follow the former? Is this only in the case of Blasters? Of all Blasters, or of some? Does it also apply to all Dominators?

Please elaborate.