EarthWyrm

Where's the love for Absorb Pain?

This wins the, "I read it out loud to my wife, but couldn't make it all the way through because I was laughing so hard by the time I got to the last line" award.

There were elements that reminded me of Smurphy.

As such, I would recommend that leaders running multiple BAFs in a row rotate which team is on ambush duty, to keep the distribution relatively equitable. The fact that drops aren't automatically shared across the whole league is not something I've found to be intuitive to players thus far.

At the rate provided, I didn't even notice the cost. I think I bought open the last half of Lore and a good chunk of Interface. The non-inf costs, in terms of components needed, are high enough that even if I wanted to "buy" my way through the tiers I wouldn't be able to.

Past a certain point, if you don't got the threads it just don't matter how wealthy you are.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to leave work early to go home and do some iTrials...

Agreed. The first night I20 was live, I did one of each trial. Failed both.

Thursday night, did one of each trial. BAF succeeded. Lambda failed due to misunderstanding leader communication.

Saturday, did 7 Lambda's and 5 BAF's. On the third BAF, due to popular request, we did the badge where you keep the 2 AV's separated and I got the "Master of" badge. Moreover, all 12 runs were successes. All recruited through global channels by people who, as it turns out, knew what they were doing.

The learning curve on this is WAY faster than I anticipated. As long as people listen, the iTrials are really not that hard - and they get easier as more and more people get iShifted.

Avoiding random queueing also helps, I think.

From what's been said, it sounds like they get more useful, not less, as the new system progresses. That is, there will be other things you can spend them on in the future.

You get them for completing the Incarnate trials (one per trial per 18 hours, I think). There may be a second way, which isn't coming to me at the moment. Successfully obtaining a "Master of" badge for one of the iTrials?

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

For reals, yo. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Cut-scenes are immersion-breaking, repetitive, and to me are one of the ultimate forms of poor story-telling. I realize they have a foundation within the genre - but that's not an excuse. It's a problem with the genre.

On the bright side, my current computer loads so slowly that I get to miss most of that cut scene.

Given that all servers, including NA and EU, use the same market server, I'm not sure why that would happen.

This. It really was a lot of fun. =)

And my wife, who ended up with her stalker on the other league, gets to gloat about having a badge I don't have for at least a day or two!

That's fair. As one of the folks on the team, I really appreciated your leadership and willingness to provide specific direction throughout the trial. I hope to end up on one of your teams again in the future.

/em nods

Yup. Pretty much my point.

That being said...

I did have fun in my one failure of each of the two new trials last night, other than the ridiculously fast deaths at the end of the BAF that made me feel like my uber-IO'd Ultra-rare alpha'd brute was made of tissue paper, and I learned a lot. I suspect things might have gone better for me in the BAF if I'd remembered to add League chat to my tabs. (I apologize to anybody who was on that team with me... the brute who was spazzing around the map like he couldn't hear anything being said actually COULDN'T hear anything that was being said!)

I predicted to my wife over lunch today that Lambda will be fully PUG-friendly in under a week, but the BAF will take at least 2.

I think this is good content. I just hope there is some mechanic to be used to deal with the set bonus problem that doesn't completely neuter defense-based primaries and secondaries.

Note that I didn't say it's not WAI. WAI, in this case, just happens to be a heavy-handed kludge that's un-fun. I know this issue was mentioned in beta and would like to see the design team work on other ways out of this corner that previous (player-friendly) decisions have painted them into, wrt high defense builds on characters that were never intended to have that type of survivability.

I don't expect fighting scads of level 54 bosses and their AV overlord to be like face-stomping Council Empire, but I also don't particularly like learning over and over what it's like to be "Council Empire Rifle".

For truth. My +softcapped brute (yes, /EA, but still... those looked like energy attacks and his energy defense is in the +55% range) routinely died in seconds to the groups summoned to reinforce Siege in the BAF. Turning on Overload didn't matter.

Having pretty much my entire secondary negated was fairly demoralizing. This is WAY overcompensating for the ability set bonuses provide to increase defense for squishies.

I spent 25 minutes the other night switching characters until I could find one who was far enough from the cap to claim the 450,000,000 I mailed myself so that I could continue my ebil marketeering activities.

Thankfully, I have unused spots on other servers, or my avarice might have to actually know bounds.

This has not been my experience at all. Of course, most of my characters are housed on Virtue, which has a fairly large population, including people still leveling alts. I see plenty of non-WST task forces and strike forces being put together on the global channels of which I'm a member, including slogfests like Citadel and, at least 3 times in the last week, Dr. Q.

I mention "still leveling alts" as if it's something that doesn't occur on some servers. Clearly, it does. It's just the case that, the more people who are working on leveling, the more sub-50 TFs and SFs you'll see run. (More TFs than SFs because, as ever, devs hate villains. But that's a side issue.) I see plenty of Posi I and II and Synapse runs as well. They're still excellent ways to blow through the 10-20 band without touching AE. =)
I did nothing but the Winter event for shard hunting, as long as it was active. The Lady Winter map was a freakin' goldmine.

I had no difficulty finding teams when I wanted them, and I'm not what I'd classify as a "social beast." The opportunities were there.

The spring fling is a different issue. It didn't change at all this year, and forced teaming missions to get to a map full of Red Cap ambushes is not all that entertaining after the first umpteen times you run it. I did help a few people out who asked for help in globals by grabbing a villain, but I basically ignored the whole thing. If they update it next year, maybe add a new badge or something, I'll stop ignoring it. It wasn't about shards or whatever - it was because the event is the same old same old, and not all that enticing as something to grind through yet again.

Again, not my experience on Virtue. I've actually missed out on TFs that weren't the WST because I was too slow to respond to something in a global channel. Something else inevitably came along, though.

I'm sorry your experience has been less than fulfilling for the past few weeks, but as I noted up-top I suspect that it's either a function of the server population, or not having managed to find the optimal global channels to be part of in order to locate non-WST things to do on a given server.

Thanks, Hyper. I'm pasting the questions from your Q&A link below, along with my answers.


1) What will you primarily be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc

Standard general purpose machine able to support playing CoX with Ultramode enabled. I don't want to be bothered with upgrading for quite a while. Like I said, I've had my current desktop for 8 years, and all that I've had to do to keep it running is replace the PSU once.


2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

I'd prefer not to spend more than $750-800 per machine, but my wife is excited enough about a new machine that she was willing to go for the $900 unit that wouldn't have done the job. With tax/shipping, I really don't want to go over $1900 for two machines. Whether that's reasonable is one of the things I want to figure out. From looking at Father Christmas's $725 rig it seems do-able if I want to build.


3) Where do you live? This is important as it affects what vendors you may buy from and how much shipping costs might be.
Ohio.


4) Are you planning to buy or build?
Prefer to buy. If building makes more sense, is significantly cheaper, and is less scary than I imagine it being (I'm mainly concerned about the CPU/mobo installation, based on what I'm sure are unrealistic images of a modern arcanist hunched over the gaping maw of an ancient HP case working a soldering iron by candlelight) I could be convinced. I've swapped out PSU's in the past and installed RAM, just have never mucked around with a CPU/mobo. I'm certain it's not as scary as my brain makes it out to be, I've just never done it.


5) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need. If you're unsure what exactly you need, say so.
CPU, RAM, mobo, case, video card, PSU, hard drive, CD/DVD burner.


6) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Just the externals. Mouse/keyboard/monitors. The guts of the existing machines are, as noted, Old. I may end up putting my current HD in the new box as a second HD just to keep from having to transfer everything, though, which may affect PSU recommendations.


7) Will you be overclocking?
Not on purpose.


8) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?
Mine's a 20 inch, wife's is a 23. I don't, unfortunately, have exact resolution for mine handy (probably 1600x900). I think hers is a 1920x1080. I have monitor envy.


9) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
The sooner the better. I'm trying to hold off until the tax refund comes in, but that should be any day.


10) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? etc.
I do not know the answer to this. CoX tends to be the most resource-intensive app I run. If they made CoH2, that'd probably be the new leader in that category. If I can provide other information relevant to this decision I'd be happy to do so.


11) Any specific must-have features? Must be able to max out Ultra-Mode? Must have 6+GB of RAM? Must have an SSD? etc.
Must be able to run Ultra-mode with most features enabled, if not maxed out. Should be able to simultaneously run CoX, Skype (or TS), Firefox, and Mids, with any other standard background stuff (Avira, etc.). Being able to run 2 monitors a plus, but won't be relevant until I get another monitor, and is more of a luxury than a "must-have".


12) Are there any vendors/brands you'd specifically prefer to use?
No.


13) Are there any vendors/brands you'd specifically prefer to avoid?
Other than HP? No.


14) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit? (Note: If your current OS came with your computer, odds are that it is NOT transferable.)
I may be able to get licensed copies of Win7 through my employer (a university) for cheap. I'm not positive whether this is the case or not, and whether it would be 32 or 64 bit. I know that last fall they said they would be having copies available in the spring, but haven't had reason to check back.

I'm clearly doing something wrong, then. I've run Manti on 2 non-50s with max rested xp. Both of them got about a half-level of xp over the course of the missions, and a half-level bonus at the end. To be fair, they were both "bigger" than the tf (one level 42 to start, the other 46), but even when I was running ITFs with my non-50s I never got more than 2 levels out of a single WST, and that was on a "shard run" where the 50s wanted to kill everything in front of them and had it set to +1 because so many of them were level shifted.

It's good xp for non-50s, but 3-4 levels per WST is perhaps overstating things a bit. At the very least, it doesn't mesh well with my experience.