Dementor_NA

Was making a joke and thought better of it. Never mind

So, I hadn't played CoH for over a year: I had played the hell out of it since launch, but sometime around the Freedom announcement I decided to take a break. In spite of this, I've still always loved this game, and hearing the game was ending gave me a fierce urge to play again.

For some reason, the Atlas Park music hits me like a punch in the gut. You know, the music that plays when you first get near City Hall? Ugg, nothing else in the game makes me feel like that: that's the music I'll always associate with my first few hours of CoH, and the game that kept me going longer than any other.

RIP CoH, I'll miss you.

I made one of the other threads about this: yeah, looks like it's down. Shutting down the Beta server seems like one of the most logical first steps towards getting it all shut down. It's too bad: being able to play through much of what I had missed (for free!) was a great way to finish out the game, and with free boosters (2X exp boosters + perma patrol exp, as many free dual insps as I want, whatever set enhancers I want, infinite free reward merits, etc) it meant I could level quickly enough to try out a good chunk of it. I got into the thirties with a water/dark blaster and with a staff/willpower scrapper, and several others into teens and 20s.

I'd love to play on the "free stuff" server more, but if it's gone it's gone, and I'll have to move on. RIP City of Heroes.

I've been playing on the Beta Server for the last week or so, a way to test out content I hadn't played yet (since everything is free on the beta server), but tonight I can't log onto it. Is it down? If so, is it down for good?

Even if I wanted to, I can't buy anything else on the live store, so that's my only way to play anything new ATM. Anyone else able to get on?

Well it's doomsday, gents.

It was all bad and wrong talking about abusing exploits and whatnot when we were worried about the long-term health of the game (level 50 in one play session does not make for a game you can play for years.) Now, obviously, that point is moot. Further, many people might like to get characters to 50 at a more accelerated rate, now that they have a strict deadline in which to do so. Thus, I'll ask: can we talk about exploits now? I've got a farm map on the AE that I kept secret for a long time (it's various exploits were never fixed) but now that maybe nobody cares somebody else might be able to benefit from it. And hey, if somebody official sees this post and still feels a need to delete exploits? Well, who cares, the servers go down in a few weeks anyway.

So here goes: Arc #444905, The Forbidden Plant Cave
Warning: The writing is intentionally bad. This was to keep people from playing it, and thus discovering it's a farm.

1. Who: The farm is designed for a Plant/Thorns Dominator: invest heavily in AoE attacks preferably ones with -DEF. I use Roots, Fling Thorns, Thorntrops, and Carrion Creepers. I also use Ice Storm and Sleet from my Ancillary Power Pool. Most of the damage is dealt by the enemies to themselves due to Seeds of Confusion. However, anybody with flight (jetpacks should work) and AoE ranged attacks can effectively farm this mission.

2. Set your effective players# to 8. If you have an AoE confuse, crank your difficulty up to max. Otherwise set it to whatever you think you can kill quickly with your AoEs.

3. Begin the arc, speak with the contact, and enter the mission. The map is extremely small: head all the way to the back, flying past the enemies (they cannot attack you unless you are on the ground or in melee range of them). Invisibility can be helpful.

4. Towards the end of the map, there are three "rescuable" NPCs with no guards. They will fly after you and speed boost you, and will help keep the enemies near you by adding to your effective aggro cap. They won't attack, and so never "steal" exp. Gather them up and move to the last room.

5. There are four glowies in this room, and no enemies (yet). Quickly click three of them leaving whichever is closest to the middle of the room for last, guide your flying NPC speed-boosters towards the ceiling, then click the last glowy without getting any closer to the ground than you have to. Once the last glowy is clicked, the room FILLS with mobs.

6. Begin to kill the mobs, staying in the center of the room. Toss in your AoEs to make sure you've dealt a little bit of damage to each of them, then toss in your confuse (preferably while Domination is active) and allow them to kill each other. You'll receive exp/inf FAR in excess of what you actually "earned" because of the way confuse effects exp/inf distribution.

7. Around the room there will likely be a spawn or two that has not aggroed you when they spawned; quickly and toss an AoE their way to get their attention. They may not immediately run towards you if you're at your aggro cap, but as soon as enemies start dying they'll remember that attack and come to die.

8. Eat inspirations as they drop, eat them all. Don't ever stop eating them. You'll get a freaking ton of them, eat them to make room. You really want the reds, yellows, and blues, but eat the others too, since they're taking up room.

9. You'll notice some the enemies have a red glow, and say stupid things as you damage them ("Oh no, I'm a 3/4 life!" or "You killed me!") These enemies will spawn ambushes as they get damaged, to add the already massive pile of enemies at your feet.

10. When you only have a few enemies left, they stop being able to kill each other very quickly, and you're better off starting a new mission. (This is because their one ranged attack deals very little damage, and is an immobilize so it keeps them from getting close to each other) There should be a new glowy in the room at this point: click it and the mission will complete. Or you can just go into the AE controls and quit the arc.

Yield: For the level 50 Dominator I designed for the farm, I can make ~20 million inf in 10 minutes, and tons of tickets. That's 4 runs in rapid succession, quitting the SECOND I see that none of the enemies are in melee range of each other.

How is this an exploit?
Two main reasons: one, I've stacked mission objectives in the final room in a way I don't think you're supposed to be able to, creating a huge spawn. Second, it takes advantage of the fact that "Entangle" counts as a ranged attack (making the enemies worth full exp) but can't target you while you're in the air.

Not sure if this thing is still open for questions or not, but a question that's always bugged me:

Early in the development of CoV, we were told villains could join one of two villain factions, one existing faction and one new one. We got the new faction (Arachnos which was at one point SPIDER or SPYDER or something) but no existing villain faction was made joinable. I've always assumed the other playable faction was the 5th Column, and that the faction's impending playability was part of the reason its thematics were tuned away from WWII mass murdering racial supremacists, replaced by the Council. Was I correct on either point?

I stopped playing before they switched over to using the new launcher, but now every link I find to download it leads me to the closing announcement. Did they take it down? How can I download it?

Funny, I don't have much desire to play for years, but now that I hear it's going away I suddenly miss it like crazy!

Confession: I made an insanely exploitable farm in the Mission Architect that outperformed any others I was aware of with zero risk, and survived every MA farming nerf. I haven't played in over a year now, but as far as I know it still works. It was kept private, just between me and some of my friends and SG mates, but every once in a while I'd invite somebody random for a few runs, hoping the secret would get out, and cause a big ruckus. It never did.

If anyone wants to check and see if it's still functional, it was called "The Forbidden Plant Cave". (EDIT: Just logged on, and yeah, it still works. ~5 million inf per run when you solo it on maximum difficulty spawned for 8. A run takes about 2-3 minutes with my build.) It's disguised as a really bad mission (cheesy dialogue, stupid plot, etc), and I think there's a random high-level supervillain right at the front to dissuade people from going in further (EDIT: in some versions there was, Tyrant, but he's not in it anymore. There are still references to him in some of the text). To farm it:

Arc#: 444905
1. Get a hero that can fly or hover, one with good AoE attacks. The best at this are plant dominators, because they can confuse the mobs to help kill each other for MUCH more efficient gains. With mass confusion, you can crank the difficulty up to the top and rely almost entirely on the mobs to deal the damage. Auto-Hit damage sources are also important if doing this.
2. Stealth to the back of the cave. Some versions had friendly "buffbots" along the way, which would hover next to you and buff you, but not attack. I don't remember if those were in the final version. (EDIT: They are, but they only do speed boost and the kinetics thing where they steal damage. Old versions would have multiple types of buffs, not sure why that changed)
3. Activate the glowing pedestals: I think there are four. (EDIT: there are) Upon activating the last one, a HUGE wave of enemies appear, and even more will rush into the room. Slower computers WILL crash.
4. Kill them all. Some of their deaths will trigger even more waves of enemies to show up. I think those mobs glow red or something. (EDIT: Yes, they have a red glow to them. More enemies spawn when these glowing mobs reach 3/4, 1/2, 1/4 hp, and when they die)

The enemies can't attack you while you fly: their ranged attack (which they have to have to yield full exp) is one of the immobilizes from the plant control set: it can't target you while you're in the air. Their melee attacks reduce DEF, which is very useful if you're using the confusion method. (EDIT: Opening up the mission showed that the bosses are only yielding 91% of their exp. This may have always been the case, but if so, I don't remember. At any rate a loss of <9% doesn't worry me much.)

Godspeed Positron. I drifted away from this game and this community a while ago, but I'll always be a huge fan. I credit this community with helping me win my spot on WWTBASH ~6 years ago, and Positron's support in particular was a big part of what made that possible. That's not a debt I know how to repay; whatever it is you do next, rest assured I'll be there, not because I owe you, but because you helped make CoH the best game on the market.

-Omnicron/Mindset

I recognize some of these guys from the WWTBASH forums pre and post season 2.

I've always felt the biggest problem with being a superhero is actually finding some crime to fight. Do these guys just wander around downtown hoping to run into a mugger?

It'll teach FOX to make a multi-picture deal with a company, no matter how low their bid is. Even after they saw the work they were doing they weren't able to go to anyone else. Check out Gulliver's Travels with Jack Black, they also did the FX on that, and they're supposed to be TERRIBLE.

I know some people in the industry, and there's an... interesting story behind this movie.

Apparently, the studio behind this movie is also am FX house, and they had been contracted to do several FOX films, which they half-*****. (Wolverine is one of these films, for a point of reference). The last one they worked on was an alien invasion film that was originally due out this month, called "Invasion LA" or something like that, but the project was held up by the FX house... yes, the production studio for Skyline.

So instead of working on the project they were contractually obligated to work on, they put the money they were supposed to spend on these projects into their own picture, and swiped assets from Invasion LA for it as well, bumping that picture back so it would look like a ripoff of Skyline. Then they get to brag that the only spent ~10 million to make Skyline, but the only reason that's true is because of the "extra" money from their other projects and stolen assets from the film they sabotaged.

Then it apparently sucks anyway.

I HATED Nemesis. My reasons at the time were many, but the scene that stands out in my mind is the one where Riker and Worf come across the big bad alien anglerfish-looking enforcer guy, proven badass and whatnot. Klingon warrior versus alien badass, right? Surely the aging paunchy officer wouldn't be the one to throw down in melee combat with this mo-fo, right?

Right?

No, Riker's all like "Hold my stuff" and Worf is like "k".

Terrible movie.

There are too many catgirls, G0KUs, and Girl Zeldas running for me to be worried about the flavor of my immersion while outside my circle of friends. Stupid-big swords are not worse than these things, so thumbs up from me.

I will note though, that BaB's is correct; War looks awesome because he is animated to use a sword the size of a bus. If it were my game, I wouldn't introduce a ZOMGSword without the proper animations to back it up, because it would drive me MAD.

So that said, I'd actually get behind this (as opposed to being ambivalent about it) if it meant the development of a "Huge Weapon Melee" powerset, with great sweeping animations appropriate for WTF weapons of many flavors, from fullblades to massive axes, to Jurrassic's car-hammer or Jack-in-Irons' People-Basher (unlockable, of course) and things like traffic signals or Telephone Poles. The set could perhaps be somewhat slower than other sets, but in turn generate more rage (for brutes) better punch-voke and bruising (tankers) and crit more often (scrappers). Just some thoughts.