Kong_Fuu

It ran a little bit slower than I would have hoped, but we came out winners in the end. The only tough part was of course Hamidon, who is not kind to MMs.

It would have gone faster if we had sidekicked up the 45s and 46s that were more or less just leeching off of the team right from the start. Their first tier pets were -6 to -7 against the mobs, or basically worthless.

Your friend is a total dick. Why is he your friend?

IMHO, once you let your account lapse, you don't get to keep ownership of the SG. The best thing to do is hand it off to someone who is still playing the game and wants to maintain a SG. I would then have the person demote all of my characters to the bottom rank so they can be easily kicked if we need room (our SGs kick the most AFK person when we need to invite someone else and the list is full. Typically said person will have been AFK for at least a year or two when they're kicked. The only other reason we kick is if someone is actually an [censored] and we don't want to be associated anymore (has happened exactly once ever). I figure there's no point in missing out on any of those dev "all SGs gets 10k Prestige for every member!" days should they ever happen again.

The point is, the SG belongs to whomever is actively maintaining it, not to the guy who talked to the registrar way back in the day.

I remember the bad old days before auto-demote, where all of the leaders would eventually quit the game and move on and leave the SG in an unusable state for the people still playing. That's actually why my current SG exists. All of the current players had to quit the dead SG and start a new one because none of the leaders had bothered to promote anybody before deactivating their accounts. Much later one of the stragglers managed to get the SG restarted (when auto-demote was added to the game), and has turned it back into a pretty decent SG. None of the original leaders ever did come back AFAIK.

I'd say Damage, Accuracy, Heal, Recharge, and Endo Mod are probably the most requested.

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Mental and I had fun tonight trying to keep our team alive. Unfortunately, they were all about as good as the arsonist at getting aggro (and surviving it), so it was a challenge. With one encounter, I hit DC with Soothe, Share Pain, and then Soothe again... I think his health was still half full after all three of those. That's a lot of damage!

Anyway, I'm not sure what to do about the enhancement situation... Kong has the whole 30 bin full of enhancements already (yes, full- 100 enhancements full), so it almost feels pointless to keep making enhancements! Too much time/money on your hands, Kong (at least I thought it was yours character dropping all those in the bins)?

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The 25 bin was cleaned out last night. After the meeting there were literally only the dregs left.

I'm hoping for at least one new primary and secondary for each AT (except Kheldians and Veats of course). Preferably using new mechanics that can be built into the game thanks to the fact that it's a full on expansion. Time Control/Domination, Bo Staff scrappers/brutes. Maybe even a couple more power pools (a boy can dream can't he?).

MPLS? You're going to wish you were in Isos.

On the other hand, the market servers are bogged down enough with the current activity. The devs are probably going to have to figure out a way to distribute the load better if they combine them.

I have a Spines/DA and one thing that surprised me was just how not bad the endurance management was. Compared to my MA/SR scrapper it was a breeze. I didn't get CoF and only used CoD as a stealth power though. I did have Tough and Acrobatics though (was built before IOs). Once I IOed him up endurance was hardly a concern at all.

Having two PBAoE damage auras is really nice too, combined with OG I rarely even have to look at minions.

Dark Regen is borderline overpowered too. The only thing keeping it in check is the animation time. I've died to a lot of alpha strikes just because it has to go through the animation before it puts the points back on.

My guess is that this expansion will be available sometime in the 1Q of next year. Maybe 4Q this year if they bust their butts or it is particularly content light. "When it's ready" is code for "It's nowhere near release, any dates right now would just be a guess".

OTOH, I played Starcraft for hundreds of hours on the $45 + $40 expansion (IIRC).

In comparison, people with the 60 month vet badge will have dumped about $1000 into CoH (minus some for buying time in big chunks, but you get the idea).

Maybe I'm skewed a bit because CoH isn't the only thing I play, I mix it in with other games, but it's also by far the most I've ever spent on a computer game, even if you count entire franchises.

If that's the case, shouldn't boxed games be going up too? Is Bioshock 2 going to cost $75?

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With the new expansion, "Going Rouge", I believe a market merger is inevitable now.

Discuss.

[/ QUOTE ]Rogue.

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They don't call it redside for nothing.

Eh, $15/month is a lot of money over time. It's like buying a whole new game every 3 months. Servers don't cost that much to run (real games can run them for free!), and even the GM staff is pretty minimal from what I've been able to determine. CoH may be cheap my MMO standards, but it's still expensive compared to buying full on boxed games.

A bunch of people in General are reporting that they got it too. It seems too early for I15 announcements (plus, wasn't it supposed to be about the 5th?). I wonder what's up?

I didn't get anything about this.

Voodoo always hates redside Isos. He complains every time.

To be fair that arc did have a fair bit of suggestive content that was perhaps borderline for a T rated game. I didn't think it crossed the line, but I can see where the complainers are coming from.

In cases like this, it shouldn't be a surprise that the GMs prefer to err on the side of caution as well. I would say that it would be risky for you to republish the arc in its current form, since eventually enough people will play it and report it again for a GM to take a second look. If they have to remove it a second time, it sounds like you lose the slot for good.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense. The old standard EM bosses were pretty lame (like the first three Single Targets and the PBAoE), but if it's that plus build-up that might be reasonable.

The only Psi slingers are a couple of the minions too, which wasn't too bad on my warshade (note for people who have not played Warshades: despite them using copies of a lot of Dark Armor powers, they don't have any Psi DEF or RES at all), but that was solo. On a large team it might be harder to survive. I do need to rerun the test with the new patch.

A note for anybody else making MA arcs: Balancing custom mobs is not easy. There is a fine line between boringly easy and team wiping, and the devs made it a lot tougher by handing out a gazillion Build-up/Aim type powers. The difficulty system we have to work with has terrible granularity as well.

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I assume that the Chromatic Red was the only one, and he's hard energy melee. Since energy melee has total focus on standard for bosses now, I would turn him down to hard.

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*Scratches head*

Er, what?

I have only had a chance to re-playtest the maps with my scrapper since the change. Giving build-up to a lot of builds early sure does make it hard to balance. It's impossible to pull build-up off of an AV/Boss without pulling them all the way down to standard, which would gimp them pretty badly. I think the devs way overdid it with buildup/aim in this patch.

FWIW, only one of the mobs has any mezzing attacks, one of the minions has Grav Control on standard (lift, crush, maybe Grav dist now with the patch). I was hoping this would put it on par with stuff like Freakshow mezzes.

I like to think my my arc isn't short, it just feels that way when you're playing it.

Thanks for the review and comments. I really appreciate the feedback.

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The easier it is for a scrapper to solo, a team will easily mow through it. My blaster also did not have a problem with soloing it (with a lower diff). I will continue to do MA missions that offer a real challenege compared to the run-of-the-mill snooze-fest found in 99% of the rest of the game.

I will change the description to read "Created for team-play" and will take the Dev stance of "if you're having trouble, get help".


I'm honestly done trying to defend why I did what I did. The pros have vastly outweighed the cons, as well as the people who didn't have such dire problems compared to those that did. If anyone else would like to comment on this particular arc, do so in-game or PM or I'll just consider it noise.

Cheers

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Oddly, I've found the opposite to be true for tough MA mobs. A lot of times the mobs are tough because they happen to have a powerset or two that stack in nasty ways (like Dark Miasma), and when every group is stacking the debuffs 3 or 4 times it turns into team wipe city. It's like fighting the CoT in the teens and 20s when the Ghost LTs start showing up and flooring everybody's to-hit.

Well built teams (full of buffers/debuffers of their own) will manage, but PUGs will be slaughtered even harder than usual.

Solo on a scrapper/brute is, IMHO, the easiest way to play the game. It's not the best XP or anything, but it's the mode least likely to kill you. Even most AVs (downgraded to EBs) are manageable.

Voodoo, my 2 cents: If you set up an arc such that a high power solo scrapper is forced to chomp down insps more or less constantly, it means that other than tanks, brutes, and maybe Masterminds your arc could easily be unplayable. I've played through my arc on a Defender, Corruptor, Warshade, and Blaster just to make sure it's not too overpowered for anybody to solo (although each build does require different tactics, and some of them are still difficult).

Yeah, making enhancements is so easy if you're willing to run a few MA missions and convert the tickets into common salvage. I suspect that even with the bin full like that it will be mostly drained before half of the people even look at it. Enhancements go fast in Isos.

Oh man keeping the team alive tonight was tough but fun. I spent most of the night just resummoning the pets so they could keep dying to bodyguard damage and AoEs while I spammed heals on the rest of the team. It turns out that a Widow can sit in the middle of a huge spawn if she's being smothered in heals...usually. The blasted Mu and their endo drains were getting to be really annoying for my "not quite yet to stamina" team though. Fortunately, I think most of the team hit 20 so next week should go smoother. In fact I think the target level for next week is going to be 21.

I've gotta say that so far the Thugs are way less survivable than my old bots were at this level, but on the flipside gang war is about a million times better than repair.

Does it work in Soul Drain? Since Soul Drain is an AoE, it seems like it should have a much better chance to crit than it does in build-up, assuming you're normally hitting at least 3 or 4 mobs with each soul drain.

If you cap your targets with soul drain, it should have a halfway decent chance of going off, not that you'll probably need it at that point since your damage will be near capped anyway.

Team Discrete Fourier Transform Ratio?

Just FYI guys, each one of the bins is sorted by level. I thought I'd mentioned this earlier, but maybe I forgot.

Numbering from the left the bins are:
Level 15
Level 20
Level 25
Level 30
etc... up to level 50. There is no level 10 bin because level 10 IOs are a waste of time.