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Katie V

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  1. Katie V

    Jet Packs FTW!

    POST-ACTION

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bronze Knight View Post
    Asking for thrust vectoring is a bit too much Sam. At this rate we'll be lucky to see them as static costume parts.
    I like the Jingle Jet solution: there are two auxilary jets that activate or deactivate depending on what the character is doing.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
    Yeah, I remember you mentioning that in the All Things Art thread, though you never explained what the hurdle was.
    As I recall, the problem is the lack of a good attachment point. If you attach the backpack to the shoulders (the same place as wings attach), the bottom lifts off the character's back during any forward-bend animation, and sticks into or through the pelvis during back-bend animations. If you attach it at the center of mass, you get the float/embed problems the jetpacks have. If you attach it at the pelvis (the same place as belts attach), you get the straps detaching from the shoulders during forward bends, and sticking into the back during backward bends. The correct solution is to attach the pack at all three points and flex/stretch with the character's motion, but it's very difficult to get that to look good, and I don't think the CoH animation system can deal with three-point attachment.

    (I had exactly these problems when trying to create a good-looking backpack in Second Life, so it's not just CoH that has difficulties.)
  2. Katie V
    I think Repel as a secondary effect would go nicely with an enhanced (say, 10-foot) range on spears. You'd have the ability to keep your target out at the limits of your range -- which would put them just outside their melee range.
  3. Katie V

    Hami Raid Time

    POST-ACTION

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by GATE-keeper View Post
    To do the raid, about an hour. To set it up, about two
    Collecting enough people to start the first raid takes a bit, but after that, Virtue's back-to-back-to-back-to... raids blueside seem to take about 35 minutes each. The biggest variable is the monster hunt to draw Hamidon out of hiding: a short hunt might take less than five minutes (and leave everyone short of EoEs), while a long hunt might take 15 minutes or more.
  4. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Kron View Post
    I learnt to hate email as I sent canes to my lower lvl toons to try and get the lowest lvl possible recipes.
    Hey devs, stack salvage in emails? Sometimes I'd like to just play the game :P
    Don't send canes, send cash. It's a lot faster to send ten million inf than it is to send a hundred candy canes.
  5. Katie V
    My evaluation of the Apex TF, based on running it repeatedly:

    First phase: Praetorian Clockwork hotspots. These guys pump out ranged energy damage and don't like to move. If your survival depends on clustering enemies around you (Willpower, Invulnerability), you're in trouble without team support. Granite does well; Electric Armor may also.

    Second phase: The sewers. Just about everything here pumps out massive amounts of toxic damage. Granite can go toe-to-toe with these guys without team support; I've also seen a Willpower tank survive by out-regening the damage. Fire might be able to survive by stacking Healing Flames.

    Third phase: War Walkers at the police station. A tank is of limited use here, as the War Walkers are so large you can't group more than three or so around you, and the rest of the battle tends to be very spread out.

    Fourth phase: Swords on the rooftop. Pure melee lethal damage, so almost anything will do well.

    Fifth phase: the Battle Maiden fight. The keys to this fight are mobility, lethal defense/resistance, and the ability to attack at range. Battle Maiden is resistant to pulling: if you taunt her from range, she tends to pull out her crossbow instead of charging. Tanks that depend on clustering enemies (Invulnerability, Willpower) will have trouble, as a cluster of enemies can keep you from moving out of a blue patch. A Granite tank can work in this fight, but needs to either have speed buffs, or be *very* on top of things. Granite + Rooted without Teleport is a recipe for death; fortunately, there isn't enough damage flying around to need Rooted's regen or defense debuff resistance.

    The best "tank" I've seen for the fifth phase was a team of support types with Leadership buffs. Everyone was softcapped, players could move around as needed to stay out of blue patches while still attacking, and the aggro was fairly well spread-out over the entire team.
  6. Katie V
    The magnitude of the stuns isn't too bad, but if the raid group isn't keeping on top of the Magus spawns, you might be facing a *lot* of them. In a typical raid, the mag 6.9 protection from my Mastermind's FFG is enough to keep people going, so the mag 8.6 from Sonic Dispersion should be sufficient as well.
  7. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TheHawkes View Post
    The processing power required would be mainly for maintaining the state table, and caching the processes into and out of active memory as needed.
    If you insist on using one process per port/address pair, perhaps, although modern operating systems are surprisingly good at reducing the resource cost of running multiple copies of a program. Any sensible person is going to do something like run a SOCKS wrapper around CoX, then tunnel that through a single SSH channel to a SOCKS proxy at home.
  8. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TheHawkes View Post
    But do you have oodles of processing power?
    Why do you need oodles of processing power? The only CPU-intensive part of the operation is encrypting and decrypting data, and I've got an old Pentium MMX that's more than capable of doing so at CoX data rates.
  9. Katie V
    What operating system and SSH software will you be using on the work computer? Setting up SSH tunnels is trivial on Linux/OpenSSH and reasonably easy on MacOS/OpenSSH, but I don't know an easy way to set them up on Windows.
  10. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Signpost View Post
    Since it is melee (or melee pbaoe, doesn't matter which)
    Does matter. Many PBAoEs (eg. Foot Stomp and clones) are coded as AoE, not Melee.
  11. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Scooby_Dont View Post
    Am I the only one with this problem? When I first log on to any character, I can click on something on the far right of any bar, such as insps or powers and it just doesn't take.
    The invisible pophelp window is sitting on top of your trays. Clicking on a window away from the right edge will bring it above the pophelp window; alternatively, you can drag the pophelp window to a less offensive location.

    I leave pophelp on with a bunch of unread messages so I know where the window is.
  12. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
    I want to make a point of saying this: I refuse to play the Market game. Ever, for any reason. The less time I have to spend on the Market, the happier I'll be and the less likely I am to rant about something unrelated. As I said before, my patience for Marketeering does not exist. It's just about enough to snag a full set of commons even if I have to pay 40 million for them (which I had to, last time), though I could see myself staggering Set Inventions slotting over the 50-to-Incarnate process. But not by too much.

    Point is, I want to kill stuff, not play broker. In fact, this is one of the VERY few things that's likely to make me ragequit out of the game in very short order.
    Basic marketeering is very simple: whenever you've got a full inventory of salvage or recipes, head down to Wentworth's and dump it all on the market for 10 inf. It will tend to sell almost as fast as vendoring, at better-than-vendor prices.
  13. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Prof_Backfire View Post
    The devs should just forget about PvP, really. The tiny minority that's actually interested in it has been ungrateful and uncooperative, the game was never balanced around it, and it's just not fun.
    No, what they should do about PvP is eliminate zone PvP, eliminate the PvP-specific combat mechanics, and announce that arena PvP will never be balanced.

    That's the superhero way, after all: Batman vs. Superman is never going to be a fair fight.
  14. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Syntax42 View Post
    Aren't those critters usually seen in missions lower than you get Granite Armor? Even if I'm wrong about that, 30% psionic defense in Granite is plenty. Pop a small purple inspiration and you're at 42.5%. That's one set bonus away from soft capping. Also, the build is not designed for exemplaring below Granite Armor. I suggested in a previous post that a second build be made for exemplaring.
    Psychic clockwork are found in a variety of Tina Macintyre/Unai Kemen arcs, plus the first mission of the Lady Gray task force. Crazed show up in some Tina Macintyre arcs. There are also some psychic archvillains you face, such as the Psychic Clockwork King (the LGTF plus a Tina Mac mission), Malaise (the Faathim TF plus two Maria Jenkins missions), and Mother Mayhem (the Faathim TF plus two Maria Jenkins missions). All of this is level 40+ content.
  15. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Derangedpolygot View Post
    There's also the awful, awful Devouring Earth eminators. Specifically, the Quartz give a huge To Hit buff to DE, and suddenly your 45% defense is worth squat.
    The Quartz emanator bonus is +100%. You don't start seeing any benefit from Defense until you hit 55%, and the softcap against one is 145%. You can get there through powers (a Katana/SR scrapper running Elude can hit the softcap for melee), but there's no way you can get there from IO sets.
  16. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by NewScrapper View Post
    I keep hearing about this falloff. What's the general rate of performance falloff? Am I going to need a new SSD every 2 years?
    Because of the way a solid-state drive works, you can write "1"s in units as small as a single bit, but you can only write "0"s in blocks of 128 kilobytes at a time. In effect, this means that updating a data block requires reading 128KB of data, setting the block to all "0"s, then re-writing that 128KB block. To keep the impact of this to a minimum, the computer will try to put no more than one file in a given block.

    Eventually, as the drive fills up, it runs out of unused blocks, and the computer is forced to pack multiple files in a single block, or spread a file out across multiple blocks. In a worst-case scenario, a large file (say, the 600MB "sounds.pigg") could be spread across 150,000 blocks, and updating it would require reading 20 gigabytes of data, erasing the blocks, and writing 20 gigabytes of data.

    The rate of performance falloff depends entirely on your usage patterns. If you're only ever using the drive to store large files, the files it holds are rarely changed, or you never get near full capacity, you might never see a performance change. If you copy the data off the disk, erase it, and copy the data back, you should regain lost performance (this is why digital camera memory doesn't have performance falloff). If you're using it to hold tens of thousands of small, frequently-changing files, performance will be abysmal.
  17. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Heraclea View Post
    I finally got through a Tin Mage yesterday. Director 11's AI was decidedly odd. He kept running away despite being taunted, and I was told that I could not follow him if we wanted to get the badge for avoiding the mines, which it turned out we did not get anyways. If a condition for full success is not chasing him through the building, he should come when called and stay put.
    There's a lot of misinformation going around about the Midnight Dodger badge.

    The one and only requirement for the badge is that no team member take damage from a trip mine.

    You can detonate all the mines you want (in fact, since they're ordinary trip mines, they'll detonate after four minutes even if nobody's around), the mines will appear in the corners, the mines will appear in the rafters, the mines will appear on the storage racks, the mines will appear even if Director 11 is held, and so on. Mine damage to pets is irrelevant, which is why the currently-popular strategy involves massive numbers of pets, Warburg nukes, and a quick defeat.
  18. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Minotaur View Post
    Most of the time where you meet occasional psi, just stay in granite, for heavy psi, minerals, tough, weave, rock armor, rooted.
    The only exception is an impending wipe during a mothership raid. There'll be heavy psi flying around, but also heavy energy, smashing, and lethal damage, with mild fire damage. The best thing I've found for that situation is Granite armor + 2 purple inspirations a minute.
  19. Katie V
    Based on my very limited testing, my best guess is that which reward table you get is non-deterministic.

    Test run 1: Syndicate takedown.

    To establish a baseline, I soloed a Syndicate takedown on my level 50 bots/traps mastermind using no powers other than Summon Battle Drones (twice), Summon Protector Bots (once), Summon Assault Bot (once), Upgrade Robot (once) and Equip Robot (once). I ran no toggles, activated no other powers, and never targeted an enemy. I issued no commands to my bots, leaving them in "defensive follow" the entire time and using the natural aggression of Syndicate members to direct their attacks.

    I got the full rewards table.

    Test run 2: Syndicate takedown.

    I soloed this as if I were doing a mission at x8: all toggles active, lavish use of traps, taunting whenever it was active, and so on. I used every power except Teleport at least once (including a totally gratuitous use of Repair, just so I could say I used it). Rather a waste of powers, as half the time whatever I was toe-bombing would be defeated before I could get the trap down, and I don't think there was ever a cluster of targets big enough for Electrifying Fences to hit more than two opponents. The event went a little bit faster than before, but not much.

    I got the full rewards table.

    Test run 3: Syndicate takedown.

    I soloed this using a single un-upgraded Protector Bot (to put me at the softcap), plus extensive use of my personal attack and secondary powers (for future reference, Trip Mine is a lousy single-target attack). I had most of my toggles running. This took about twice as long as previous runs.

    I got the full rewards table.
  20. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper View Post
    No. Critters don't get tohit bonuses until they're +6.
    In this case, this is an over-simplification.

    In general, critters have a 50% base chance to hit you, with level and rank modifiers to accuracy. Historically, the only exceptions have been critters with massive to-hit bonuses from powers, designed to shred any defense-based character (Rularuu eyeballs, Devouring Earth Quartz emanators). Because of the size of the bonuses, it's not possible to build meaningful amounts of defense against them, and so 45% defense was the target to go for.

    However, some of the new critters are an exception to this rule. Praetorian Devouring Earth have a base 64% chance to hit, high-level Resistance have a power (Targeting Drone) that gives a similar effect, and Battle Maiden is reported to have a slightly elevated base to-hit as well. If you're creating a character for end-game play, it may be worth going for 60% defense, which will softcap you against these new threats.
  21. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ironblade View Post
    Putting CoH on a solid state drive will not make a huge difference. The reason is simple. If you look in the pigg directory, you'll see just 67 files comprising nearly 4GB. These are *BIG* files. The main factor in loading them is the data transfer rate. SSD transfer rates are not shockingly superior to regular HDs.
    This isn't true. The pigg files are big, but they're not monolithic. Game accesses to those files tend to be random-access rather than linear, so seek times matter more than sustained-transfer rates.

    That said, the whole issue is rather academic. If Windows does as good a job of caching as Linux does, the game will be operating out of disk cache most of the time -- and RAM is far faster than either a solid-state drive or a spinning disk.
  22. Katie V

    Woot First GM

    POST-ACTION

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Pyro_Master_NA View Post
    The only problem I had with WL on my fire/rad was taht his minions kept killing my imps. It was in PI though, so will the minions be below 50 if I find one somewhere other than PI?
    No. The minions will be the level of whoever the GM is aggroed at when he summons them. If you're soloing the GM, that means the minions will be your level.
  23. Katie V
    Keep in mind that if you're slotting at level 50, ED will take a large chunk out of your enhancement numbers: the "3.125 enhancements" in Executioner's Contract results in a 99.9% enhancement, while the "2.5 enhancements" in Exploit Weakness results in a 95% enhancement.
  24. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sailboat View Post
    You don't want people replying in broadcast because you will be hopping channels to spam this invitation (and perhaps hopping zones and broadcasting it in the clear) and you'll miss people who broadcast a reply, especially if it takes them a minute to decide.
    There's another reason not to have people reply in broadcast: by giving them a very simple instruction to follow (send me a /tell), you filter out the people who can't follow even the simplest of instructions. This tends to lead to a superior team composition.
  25. Katie V
    Sounds like one of his minelayers is crawling along the rafters.