Honbrid

Look for missions involving enemies weak to the kinds of damage you deal and/or that deal damage you are strong against. Peregrine Island is the 40-50 zone for heroes, and Grandville is the one for Villains.

Also, adjust your difficulty setting with a Hero Corps Representative/Fortunata Fateweaver. You can increase enemy spawn sizes, raise/lower enemy level, and/or include/exclude Bosses and Archvillains.

Without specific powerset information, that's probably the best info I can come up with.

The other night, I purposely tried to die on my SR scrapper. Two even-con minions could not quite take him down, even after I shut off my toggles and only had the three passives. (Granted, I had Health with just a single 35 IO, but still...) I was monitoring my resistance and every time I got within about one attack of death, my resistance was up near 60%. After five minutes of standing there letting them beat on me, I said to hell with it and gave up. Current slotting on my passives is a single Defense IO (35ish) in each.

Not Radeon 1300, Radeon X1300, which according to the manufacturers website makes mention of Vista, so it must be reasonably recent.

Sounds like you are running against the base-wide cap for energy items. A non-secure (hidden) base plot can only have one Energy class item in the entire base, no matter how many energy rooms you have or what flavor items they are. Secure base plots can have a second Energy item. Auxilliary items can be placed 2 per Energy item.

If you are using a Power Crystal with two Crystal Focuses attached and still do not have enough power, then it is time to upgrade to a Ley Tap. The good news is, Ley Taps can be crafted by an advanced Forge without needing to be unlocked by a badge, and they make as much power as 5 Power Crystals. Bad news is, the cost goes up accordingly. It'll cost about 1 million prestige to PLACE the guy once he's made. Considering the Power Crystal only cost you around 200k, it's quite a significant jump.

If you are using a non-secure base plot, the ability to place two energy items in a room is going to waste. I would consider dropping to a lower cost room, unless you are using the space for other things. It will help start saving up that million prestige you need.

For quick prestige, you can convert influence/infamy to prestige. The rate is 1 million inf to buy 2000 prestige. Also, if your group is below 15 members, pad it with alts until you have 15 members to get 20,000 prestige for each body. Neither method will really work well if you have a long way to go, but they can help start. Finally, don't forget about the Monitor Duty day job - it grants increased prestige earnings on mission completion.

Something else to be aware of - the closer your hero is to the upper end of a contact's range, the faster the bar will fill. Thus, Colleen Nelson's bar will fill faster for a level 39 hero than for a level 35 hero.

I'm only going to touch on a few issues here - many of these have been brought up many times before. Also, I bet someone else responds before me (no one had when I started this), so forgive repeated comment/criticisms.

First off, there exist already official Custom Weapon request and Costume request threads (in Suggestions and Ideas, and Developer's Corner respectively).

Re: backpack/jetpack - Currently, there only exists one node on the player skeleton for placing back details, and designing back pieces that don't clip horribly has proven difficult to my understanding.

Re: powersets - Our devs are pretty great about getting us new sets. Archery/Trick Arrow, Sonic Resonance, and Dual Blades are just the sets that I can think of off the top of my head, and I know there have been more than that (if not what they were... must be getting old ). That doesn't even count the Epic Archetypes, or those sets introduced with City of Villains. Demon Summoning and Dual Pistols are coming with the Going Rogue expansion, and all the Powerset Proliferation that has occurred is more than simply porting over from one archetype to another.
Regarding your specific examples, the desire for a 'brawling' or 'street fighting' set is part of the reason for the alternate animations for Martial Arts that came with power customization. I don't believe the game engine is capable of a 'Counter-attack' type set. I think 'Staffs' were part of that marketing survey ages ago that eventually got us shields, so the Devs know we would like it and just haven't gotten there yet.

Re: Pool Customization - I'm pretty sure that this will be the next target for customization, per BABs.

Re: Adjustable Stances - unfortunately, I think that the player skeleton is not flexible enough to be morphed in such a way - it's part of why even Warwolves don't run that way, and why we only have humanoid critters to fight - everything I can think of to fight(save Hamidon) has two arms and two legs, not four legs.

I haven't been on to check for myself, and I don't know if the test patch made it live, but back in October, the Crey Hero Lab map was reworked and published to Test Server.

Link to Test server patch notes: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=195044

To post off topic on the subject of Lemur's avatar - the irritating thing about that animated avatar was that it made the scroll speed of my browser drop to a crawl while it was on screen. The avatar itself was cute.

Also, because no one else seems to have brought it up yet, there is both a floor and a ceiling on your chance to hit - you will ALWAYS hit at least 5% of the time, and ALWAYS miss 5% of the time. No amount of Accuracy or To-hit will change this.

I don't always trust my memory, so someone correct me if I get something wrong here.
I believe the 'Salvage Drops' tab first showed up when Salvage did - I9. See InfamousBrad's excellent guide to invention salvage here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=119078
(Warning: the guide predates the forum transition and wasn't re-formatted, so it's a little ugly now.)

When AE launched the 'salvage drops' tab disappeared for some reason, but has recently come back again.

First off, welcome to Paragon City/the Rogue Isles. To answer your questions:

1. I am not aware of any torrents available to download this, but as it is both a Double XP long weekend, and a Reactivation weekend, the download servers are undoubtedly getting hammered by everyone who has been gone for a year and needs to update their client before joining the fun. All I can recommend is bearing with it.

2/3. The Architect Edition is the same version of the game everyone plays, with a voucher for a free costume pack (Science or Magic packs). If it comes with any other perks, I don't remember what they are 'cause I don't have it myself.

4. By this question I am assuming you are referring to the layout of zones in-game. 'Arena style' I suppose comes closer - each zone is its own discrete instance, and moving between them has a loading time, whereas WoW is all one continent-wide instance with no observable load times between zones. One thing to be aware of about CoH - This game is HEAVILY instance-based. ALL missions (save street-hunts) take place in their own instance, so the majority of people tend to be in those instances and not out in the city zones. If you have trouble finding people when you (finally) get in-game, make use of our excellent search feature, or go down to the individual server forums and ask about Global Channels (assuming you are not on a trial, as trials can't use Global Channels... nor can they start their own teams or send tells/whispers for that matter.)

5. Leveling in this game is generally very easy, depending on ArcheType (class, generally shortened to AT) and playstyle. Scrappers are good for new players and soloist, Blasters are a bit trickier until you learn how much you can handle at once, then they chew things up. Defenders and Controllers really shine on team play IMO, but are trickier still to solo. Tanks can survive alot, but damage dealt is not as high as the more damage oriented ATs so it may take slightly longer solo. Villain ATs I'm not as well-versed in, but they are more balanced overall when compared to Heroes. All that said, the only penalty for death in this game is halved experience for a (very) limited time, and having any Patrol (rested) XP will negate even that.

6. The 'Fortress of Good and Evil' bit refers to SuperGroup (Guild) bases. There are no single player bases (unless you have a solo SG), though it is often requested by players.

7. Some unsolicited advice about choosing a server - when you log-in for the first time, the servers will be in order from least load to most. (Once you pick a server, that server will move to the top and will stay there until you pick a different one. Last server played is on top.) This usually (but not always) is a result of population. Freedom and Virtue are the two most populated at any given time, but as a result of Double XP/Reactivation, there may be a delay getting into them right now.

There will likely be more people along with more answers, advice, and welcomes. Good luck and I hope things clear up and you have fun.

To start: I don't flashback much and haven't tested this, so this is likely wrong. My guess would be that the old Flashback auto-exemplar code actually changed your security level temporarily in addition to your combat level, which would prevent entrance to Hazard zones and other Sec. Level restricted things. Again, I have absolutely no proof of this or even experience of it happening so I am probably wrong, but I thought I'd drop my 2 cents in before bed.

The way they put this patch note in really doesn't explain anything, does it?

As a bit of lore regarding Rikti Mothership Raids, basically what we are doing there is sabotaging the ship so that the Rikti don't get it flying again and attack the city with it. As such, planting bombs causes more damage for them to repair, and fighting the Rikti on the ship takes away resources they might otherwise use on repairs. So the way we 'win' a raid is by causing as much damage and defeating as many Rikti as superheroically possible.

Some people further up-thread have said that E-mails from 'empty' mean the account has been banned. This is not necessarily true. E-mails also show up from 'empty' if the character that sent the E-mail has been deleted. I spam mark even the 'empty's in case the account is still active.

Currently the Dev Digest is broken. There's another thread here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=183641

Re: number 2 - it takes lots of heroes, on the order of multiple full teams to take one down. Champion did a dropship killing run that weekend and had over 100 people in zone, most of whom were killing the dropships. We downed 18 of em. And although there is no badge for killing dropships, you do get minion level rewards - XP, infl, and inspirations at the very least. Not exactly a reward corresponding to the effort, but there IS a reward nowadays.

Link to video of Champion's ship killing

Overheard in Port Oakes:
Wolf Spider: You have the right to remain unconscious. Anything you say ain't gonna be much.

LoTG = Luck of The Gambler, a defense IO set that includes a Defense/7.5% Global Recharge IO.

Set bonuses include increased Regen, Max HP, Accuracy, Hold resist (cause there has to be something less good) and Psi Resistance.

The set runs levels 25-50, and it is a very high demand set. If you get pretty much ANY of these, I imagine it is good money on Wentworths/Black Market