Happy_KillMore

Hi folx. I made this arc a while back. It was my sophomore effort, and I quite enjoy it, though it hasn't had any exposure, so I've only received 5 ratings. I'm hoping that a few more people will try it. I'll post the relevant details below.

Arc Name: Rise of the Equalizers
Arc ID: 76453
Faction: Custom (the aforementioned Equalizers)
Creator Global/Forum Name: @Happy KillMore
Difficulty Level: challenging
Synopsis: A heretofore unknown group who believes in the dominance of technology is bent on wiping out all sources of extra-normal mutation and all magic use. (NOTE: This is meant to be a challenge. The group has some tough members and the last mission has 7 EBs in one outdoor area.) --Taken straight from the in-game descriptor.
Estimated Time to Play: 1+ hours

If I were to self-critique, I'd say that there's one outdoor mission with 3 hostage rescues, and not everyone enjoys those (so I picked a smallish outdoor map). Also, I stuck 2 ambushes on one boss as he gets damaged; they're hard and can be overwhelming if the team blows through those two ambush points. Finally, the last mission can be tedious with having to hunt down 7 EBs; did I mention that some of them fly?

Hopefully, I'm being overly harsh. We shall see though, once a few reviews crop up here, which is my hope. Please tell me the truth, but be kind in doing so. I expect that people who play it without a large (5+) team will find it difficult or annoying, but it shouldn't be too bad with a big enough (coordinated) team.

P.S. Don't pay too much attention to the Knockoff Ninjas arc that I have published; it wasn't a serious attempt and only remains because I got some good ratings on it.

Are you running a skinning program like Window Blinds? That's typical behavior for that problem. If so, then just tell the program to ignore City of Heroes and you should be golden.

I give a hesitant round of applause to this new option. Why hesitant? Because of fear.

I have this fear that if respecs can be purchased, then the freespecs that NC so often hands out after a new issue will simply disappear. That would be the capitalist thing to do, after all: stop giving away things that you can charge money for.

It's probably a completely baseless fear, I know, but there it is.

Wow, I've never actually played a Controller or Dominator with Mine Control before, Zombie. That must be sweet!

So when are you gonna make a new one, Devil Man?

Disabling WindowBlinds is unnecessary. There's a menu option for per-application settings. Go in there and tell WindowBlinds to not skin the game and updater executables. Then everything will work fine.

I think current wisdom is to not go past the 7.10 drivers.

[ QUOTE ]
Special Thanks to Our Players...

Full Access to City of Heroes and City of Villains®
All players with City of Heroes retail* accounts will now have access to City of Villains, and all City of Villains retail* accounts will now have access to City of Heroes. Players that didn't previously have access to "the other side" will find that they do now.

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OK, I expect to get flamed for what I'm about to say, and before anyone does so, know this: I don't care.

Now then, to the issue at hand.

Around the time of I6, I decided that I wanted to try out the Villain content. So my wife and I each bought a copy of City of Villains and upgraded our City of Heroes accounts. That was, what, $30 each I believe? Something like that. Now I find out that all these other people will get the same thing without having to pay for it.

I don't know who decided that fit the definiton of "thanks," since that's a slap in the face.

That now means that I had to pay for something that other people are now getting for free.

Sure, there's the argument of buying GvE and getting access to both sides for one price. But anyone who bought GvE paid for both at the time; what I'm miffed about is the people who bought the original CoH 2 years or more ago, never paid for the additional side, and now get to do something that I had to pay to do. Besides, anyone who bought GvE isn't going to get anything new from this "thanks" than they were already getting.

This is sort of like the time that I got hired into a factory job, got my first grade increase a few months later, then watched the company decide that everyone hiring into factory jobs would start at the grade I'd just had to earn, and at a higher base pay (I got a slight bump in pay to match what the new people were going to get).

NC, you want to give me some special thanks? Then refund the $60 that we had to pay in order to access both sides, now that the second side comes for free.

I ran last night on my usual Tuesday team of 7. My in-mission frame rates were roughly 60% what I've come to expect on that team, which is to say that they fell from 50-ish to about 30-ish. That's standing still, no combat, no enemies on the screen, in Council caves.

On that team, my wife plays a Sonic Defender. Coincidence?

I should note that I'm posting this extremely prematurely, as I also moved from the 93.71 nVidia drivers to the 94.24 before playing. I don't recall having heard others complain about the performance of the 94s though, so I don't think it's the drivers. The only reason I did the drivers at the same time is because the game complained about my "outdated" 93s, and I thought that maybe the 94s would help with the new graphic detail.

You know what I find funny? Considering the trivial case of mobs that are too low for you to even get experience.

In that case, the value of X becomes 0. Then if you apply that to the break-even point, you find that S = 3DF becomes undefined; which I suppose is another way of saying that there is no break-even point under those conditions.

And that agrees with my original assertion in the trivial case!

In raids, I have also picked up a Kinetic Shield (30 mins of use) and Stun Grenades. Well, I think they're called Stun Grenades. Instead of doing a flash, like the ones from the low level KR mission to take out some Skulls, these do an area disorient-- pretty sweet! I think there were 6 grenades.

So when I "find" a key and a new nav point doesn't show up on my map, that means I got a jail break side mission? That's good to know. Of course I've often broken the prisoner out anyway, but I've NEVER gotten a time bonus for doing so.

I've got to put my 2 influence in. I personally love the debt system as-is. There's a penalty for biting off more than you can chew and then not retreating. It's not even a severe penalty; what do we do to alleviate the debt? Simply play the game, which we'd be doing anyway. It's an elegant system and I think it's actually the best individual idea that someone had in the entire game.

No, I'm not kidding, I'm 100% serious. It's completely brilliant.

So just keep it in place. Pay no attention to people who complain that it's too harsh.

I know not everyone agrees with my opinion, but I had to put my opinion out there in case someone official is tallying responses in favor or against this change.

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Dont know about any word, but if I can noun it, I can always verb it.

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Did you just turn the word "noun" into a verb?

I'm not going to read through hundreds of responses to see if my suggestions have already been suggested, so here goes:

I'd like to see the ranking system be a lot more customizable. There should be more than a top, middle, and bottom rank. It'd be nice to see 6 or more ranks, with customizable options for each rank. You could decide independently for each rank who has invite permission, kick permission, promote permission, demote permission, etc. Demotes and kicks should only be applicable to those below your rank. The customizable names for each rank option needs to stay too.

With this in mind, the group's founder should be a special, unique rank, with all permissions, including kick and demote for those at the top.

All these customizations should be available only to the founder, and should be available on the fly, rather than set in stone at the beginning.

As for the 75 toon limit, I'd like to see that changed to a 75 account limit. It doesn't matter if I put 5 toons in the same SG-- I can only play one of them at a time. I should still just count as 1/75 of the capacity in that case instead of 1/15.

Finally, you know how heroes on your screen show up with blue names and highlight boxes, while heroes on your team show up with green? I think it'd be nice if heroes who are in your SG but not on your team would be highlighted with color as well. Something purple might be appropriate. I'd still want the teammate color to take precedence, but it'd be nice to look around a crowd of names and immediately pick out an SG mate at a glance.

I like the idea of a third tray. Not sure how often I'd specifically need it, but if it was an option, I'd probably spread out anyway. And I think using ctrl to access it is a superb idea. I wouldn't mind if if was shift either (I just click on the names with my Empath) but since so many people already use that, I'd suggest leaving shift alone.

Biggest downside I see at the moment is that it'll occlude yet more of the playing area. Because of that, it'd be nice to be able to hide the second and third trays separately.

As for shape shifters, I've just started one this week. I put all my Dark Nova powers into tray 9 and set up a bind to change form and tray simultaneously, plus a bind to change back.

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A solo player (unless the mission calls specifically for a boss in a spawn override) will create spawns with minions and lts. ONLY. My concern at the mid and higher levels is that a solo Archetype isn’t all that powerful.

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That may be your intention, but that's not what's happening. Last night my wife was clearing out some older story arc missions by herself. One of the missions she went into, which didn't say "Defeat SomeGuy and his minions," spawned 4 Warhulks. If she'd been doing this mission at the intended level, she would have been unable to defeat those Warhulks.

This is an excellent guide. I've got to comment though that a couple of weeks ago, I saw behavior that doesn't fit in with this guide, and I thought I'd share it.

I was playing an Emp Defender and had just reached lvl 13. I had Heal Other with 3 TO Heal enhancements in it. At the time, I had two 12++ and one 15. In my inventory was a lvl 16 Heal, and I bought a lvl 15 from a store. I tried the Heal Other and saw how much it did (I want to say something like 60.67, but I don't remember the value now for sure). Then I combined one of the 12++ into the 15, dropped the 16 into that now-open slot, then failed to combine the new 15 with the other 12++. Basically, I went from 14, 14, 15 to 16, 15, 16. When I tried the Heal Other again, the amount of healing I did was actually 0.3 points less! (I do recall that number clearly!) Following the formulas/values you've posted here, I went from having a 26.57% bonus to a 28.21% bonus, but the amount of healing dropped.

This behavior didn't make sense to me before I read your guide, and it doesn't make sense to me now. Does this make sense to anyone out there? I don't play the numbers game in CoH, but I was just puzzled by this behavior.