Lord Mayhem

I'm worried too - I'm in Guernsey (Channel Islands) and we connect to mainland Europe through a relatively new undersea fibre optic cable 30-40 miles long to France, but connect to the UK backbone via very old undersea copper cables 80-90 miles long - plus when I connect to US servers the route usually goes through busy London and has several hops and quite a bit of ping added there. So I usually get far far better connections to gaming servers based on continental Western Europe than anything in the UK and especially the US (it's the difference between 40-100+ ping and 250+ ping - it was especially noticeable when trialling US WoW compared to EU WoW) - that fact has stopped me from enjoying MMOs and other games without European-based servers in the past - so this will likely impact me negatively.

Admittedly I haven't played much CoH since ultra-mode was added so nothing changes for me short term - even with UM switched off and my graphics options set lower than they were pre-I17 I've been getting terrible graphics performance and framerate stuttering (dreadful in Praetoria, not as bad but still horrid everywhere else - honestly it's worse everywhere than it was for me in Grandville in I7) that it has made CoH unplayable for me, so I've had to take a break - but at least I had the hope of returning to CoH once I am able to buy a new PC in the new year.

But now it seems I'll also be waiting on my telecoms company to make an upgrade to their infrastructure as well, so my break from CoH looks like it just became indefinite I'll give it a try before I cancel my sub, but piling internet latency on top of graphical lag isn't going to make for a very fun experience.

Grats to all the UK players who are happy about this, though - can't please all of the people all of the time, but pleasing the majority is a good thing.

Yeah it's not a particularly good video for showing the range of animations the set had, but when I searched for Friar vids on YouTube there were only a few and the others were worse - hence why I said to look past the graphics

I just don't want us getting a staff set where it looks more like you're twirling a band-leader's baton, rather than jamming a rod of wood/metal/whatever into someone's guts and laying down some real hurt

Well, I certainly didn't think Staves would be BEFORE GR

Personally I haven't heard the actual quote first hand about staves from the PAX East Q&A (it wasn't in the Q&A vids I saw), but I read somewhere they said it was pencilled in for the next expansion - not sure if that's true and/or whether they meant another paid expansion or just an issue.

I've never played Aion, as you probably guessed, but I found this vid. Honestly I find that staff-fighting style a bit too fast and flashy - it's so fast it might as well be entirely particle effects. If you can look past the ancient graphics on this DAoC vid of a Friar, I'd rather the stave fighting was more that style (watch the fight about 20secs into the vid), with animations closer to that speed (just without those pauses between attacks so that it flows better, like Dual Blades does here) - to give that feeling of real weight to each move, so that when you spin around and jab the staff in your target's guts (that was always my favourite move) you really get the impression you're clobbering them. I think that would work well for a natural fighting style, then the Devs could add lots of staff weapons with particle effects for more tech/magical staves, and maybe give us some alternate animations for more of a 2-handed spear/polearm-fighting style.

Yeah I was wincing at the length of the animations when I saw the video too, but I do think it looks like an interesting powerset.

But staves... I'm more excited about staves than I am about any of the 4 powersets in GR The only MMO I've played where they had proper stave fighting was Dark Age of Camelot, on my Friar, and I really enjoyed it - then my friends convinced me to delete all my Albion characters so that we could all play in Hib together /sigh (sadly we only had 2 EU servers then, we all had higher level Mid characters we wanted to keep, and none of my friends liked Alb) - and I didn't even like Hib much

Oh I'd missed that it's Praetoria only. So the endgame high-end content will be happening in the four zones covering L1-20? I hope these new zone events will either be very common or that there will be something else in those zones for L50s to do while waiting for them.

Btw, Well of the Furries? The well has catgirls in it? Or was that just a Freudian slip on your part? Maybe Tyrant does still have access to the Well of the Furies in his world - question is, does he really want others having access to it?

Oh same here - I like my ridiculously purpled-up builds as much as the next man (or woman, or alien, or cyborg, etc.).

Though I'm probably not as anti-teaming/pro-soloing as you are, as my preferred/usual playstyle is duoing, I'll obviously be happy if every L50 can participate in the Incarnates system solo if they want because it will mean that duos can fully participate too, rather than always needing a team of 8 players (something that's not always possible on the low-pop EU servers).

I don't think the Devs will let us down - too many people get driven out of other MMOs at top level because the playstyle completely changes from what they've enjoyed while levelling (whether to PvP or large scale PvE raiding) - but I think our Devs are more mindful of player retention and replayability than most.

I don't think it likely - this is still a very casual MMO at heart. I think (good) teams will probably be able to advance faster in Incarnate levels than soloers though - that wouldn't be any different to how things are with normal levels - and it still wouldn't change the fact I still prefer playing this game in duos (admittedly I do team for TFs/GMs/raids when I feel like it).

And I suspect Incarnate levels will still be totally optional, just like the invention system and the mission architect are pretty much optional - if you don't like the system, just keep playing the game the way you always have. In fact I wouldn't be shocked if the rewards from the Incarnate system were really only helpful/needed for the content that you do to gain Incarnate rewards.

But why call them Incarnate levels if they're just earned in exactly the same way as normal levels? Might as well just announce an increase in the level cap.

And I like those ideas GG - I've always wanted more dynamic content outdoors, so that player-characters can be more like the heroes/villains in comics, responding to dynamic events, rather than just pre-planning which static content you're going to churn through each evening.

You know, Matt Miller's comments about I19 and the Incarnate system at the PAX East panel (per the video at this link) really do make me think that zone events will be the way to earn the Incarnate levels. Watch the vid and Matt says, and I quote, "brand new zone events which is the content that you play through in order to earn all this cool new stuff that we've got coming for you".

Of course the question is what kinds of zone events does Matt mean? New fixed location raids like the Hamidon/Mothership raids? New dynamic zone-wide raids like the Halloween Zombie and Rikti Dropship raids? New Giant Monsters? Maybe even new dynamic zone events like the Steel Canyon fires & Talos/IP Ghost Ship that soloers would be able to do to earn Incarnate rewards instead of always having to group for GMs/raids? Or maybe all of the above?

Will lots more dynamic content be added to existing outdoor zones? Will the Incarnate "rewards" be retroactively applied to existing zone events? Maybe if you do events like those as a sub-50 you earn normal xp, but if you do them as a level 50 you earn Incarnate xp /shrug.

It would certainly satisfy my desire for more dynamic outdoor content.

Er, maybe that's why I used phrases like "personally I like to think" and "though I have no evidence for it". It's all in the reading.

/agree. Honestly unless new zones will be radically different from existing zones (e.g. moonbase, space station, underwater city, arctic supervillain base, Rikti homeworld, etc.) then instead of completely new zones I'd rather have a zone revamp or just some new missions/contacts/enemies being added to existing zones. Cimerora was a nice change of scenery, but it's woefully underutilised considering all the work that must have gone into making that and the Midnight Club.

Going Rogue is all well and good - and I'm very much looking forward to it - but no matter how new and polished the Praetoria city zones are going to be they're still urban zones being added to a game where 90+% of the existing outdoor zones are urban - that's not exactly a recipe for variety.

Yeah that is odd - they should at least have some kind of official presence in one of the central areas of Paragon City, seeing as Crey have at least 3 major buildings/facilities in the Rogue Isles (in Grandville by the Arachnos Tower, in the southeast corner of Nerva and in Aeon City in Cap au Diable).

The lore on the official website mentions that Countess Crey moved the headquarters of Crey Biotech & Crey Industries (the latter is the parent company, according to this page on Paragon Wiki) from Switzerland to Paragon City, but that would have been before the First Rikti Invasion/War - for all we know their HQ was in Crey's Folly near their factories (eastern map area) or wherever the Crey lab was that polluted the area (per official site) and has been abandoned/relocated now (personally I like to think their HQ was that huge twin-tower skyscraper in the southwest corner of Tangle Town, though I have no evidence for it). Crey "Security Chief" Tavish Bell mentions that Crey has multiple factories just "outside" Paragon City now, so their HQ may not even be within city limits anymore (i.e. the areas we get to visit in CoH).

In her contact text Kelly Uqua confirms that the huge Crey facility at the far east of Crimson Cove in Nerva Archipelago (with two skyscrapers plus lots of warehouses containing cages with Rikti/DE etc inside) is an office of Crey Industries, but she doesn't say it's the global HQ, though it's certainly big/impressive enough to be. With the malleable legal situation in Nerva (it being disputed territory between Recluse's "government" and the UN protectorate status that gives Longbow their mandate for being there) it would probably suit a "dodgy" corporation like Crey to have their HQ there for tax reasons - I can't imagine anyone is collecting corporate taxes in Crimson Cove - protection money perhaps, but not taxes ).

Some players may not think lore or the little details are worth bothering with, but for me it certainly makes the world a bit more interesting to explore. In fact I'd like to see every faction in the game having a headquarters or base somewhere in a persistent/outdoor/public zone.

This is how I feel. I adore my Archery/En Blaster (which has all 9 Archery powers), so to test Dual Pistols I mirrored his build and pistols just felt a lot more lacklustre by comparison for an "all-ranged" build - and with the long animations and redraw I know Dual Pistols won't be much good for blapping builds either - so I'm stuck wondering what it's specific advantage will be (even the berated Assault Rifle has its own niche - tons of area damage from cone attacks). It just seems like a jack-of-all-trades but master of none powerset - admittedly Dual Blades felt the same way, so maybe it's a conscious choice by the Devs.

I quite like the look of the Dual Pistols animations (except the bullet rain one - that looks stupid), even though some of them felt far too slow, but I disliked the different ranges and cone sizes - it just destroyed any in-set synergy - personally I would have preferred it if the entire set was range 60, instead of being a mix of 40, 60 and 80.

Personally I was playing EM/ on two characters that, at the time of the nerf, had fairly weak secondaries survivability-wise - an EM/Elec Brute and an EM/En Stalker - they depended on killing things fast, and the nerf to Energy Transfer in particular just meant another long animation time that sometimes they didn't survive through. I think most people who hate EM/ now were probably playing the set when it was nerfed and had the chance to play it both pre-nerf and post-nerf - it's the comparative difference that irks us. Though for certain archetypes, such as Tankers, I'm sure it's still a perfectly respectable powerset - but I won't be playing it again.

Those are both really good points/ideas and they are things I've wanted to see in the game for a long time - they would help to make the game feel more dynamic and less repetitive. I know the forthcoming DCUO has some dynamic content (arch-villains like Bizarro appear in the city and just start causing trouble, player-heroes can combat them alongside NPC superheroes like Superman, and player-villains can pitch in to fight alongside the AV), and is going to have interaction with the environment as well (they've showed player-heroes/villains throwing cars and throwing enemies that other players have frozen into a block of ice) - CoH needs to start adding stuff like this asap so that it will be able to compete.

Yeah that's pretty much how I feel. Though with Star Trek while I enjoyed the new Abrams movie, I can understand why Trekkies hated it because in tone it was very different to what had gone before (which is probably why I enjoyed it, because in the past I've always found Star Trek rather plodding and bland compared to sci-fi I like such as Farscape, new BSG, Firefly, etc.).

As a G1 Transformers fan (mainly because of the Marvel UK & IDW comics, but also because I had G1 toys as a kid) I was on the other side of the fence with Bayformers. But even though I felt the first movie's storyline was rather weak, hated the Transformer designs (too insect-like and "busy" with no charm/coolness) and Bay's manic fast-cutting was ruining the action for me even more than it usually does, I still enjoyed the movie just because it was great to see giant robots fighting like that. But the novelty wore off for the sequel and I couldn't get past what a terrible mess the movie was - dreadful story, lots of plotholes, insulting characterisation, no respect for source material, more of a comedy than an action movie, etc.

I guess what it comes down to is this: I can enjoy an unfaithful adaptation if it's a good movie, and I can enjoy a faithful adaptation even if it's a bad movie - what I can't stand is unfaithful adaptations that are bad movies. At those times I've often felt like a movie's director/studio has changed things from the source material without good reason, just to stamp their own (lack of) style on the IP, and it just seems inexcusable if you don't respect the source material and still deliver a terrible movie.

Wow, what a gross generalisation. I think you need to watch more British movies, Sam. A bad movie is a bad movie, but I'm not sure you can pin that on a specific cultural identity just because a movie was supposedly set in Britain and had several Brit actors in the cast. Besides, directors tend to be responsible for the tone/style of a movie and Reign of Fire had a US director at the helm. It certainly didn't feel like a British movie to me (shoehorning in the US characters, presumably to appeal to a US audience, made it feel distinctly un-British, imho), but then personally it didn't feel much like a Hollywood movie either style-wise. I don't think Reign of Fire knew what it was, and that was part of the problem.

Hollywood/American action movies are shallow, sex-obsessed, unfunny, CGI showreels full of explosions, plot holes, esoteric cultural references and product placement... is something I could say if I'd only watched a selective amount of Bay/Bruckheimer movies, and/or anything with Will Smith in it, and not much else - but even if that was true, and represented how I felt, I think saying it candidly would leave a sour taste in my mouth (in truth many of my favourite movies came out of Hollywood, and mostly makes up for all the shallow tripe I've waded through to find the good stuff).

If you don't like British culture (or slang) and gore then Dog Soldiers is probably not going to appeal to you, but imho it's a much better pure werewolf movie than Ginger Snaps and a better horror movie than An American Werewolf in London (as classic as that movie is). It has a good balance of action, horror and character interaction - with British black/grim humour, which suits the horror theme better than Hollywood style one-liners would. There's even a big explosion in there for the US audience (yes, I'm teasing any US posters reading this ). But if you need lots of explosions and CGI (i.e. a huge budget) to make a movie "cool" then no, you probably won't like it - it has gritty British style to it (which I prefer, for a horror movie anyway), not a glossy Hollywood one. Considering how relatively small the budget was (£20million I heard - that's fairly big budget for an almost wholly British movie) I think director Neil Marshall made it go a long way and the results are pretty impressive, imho - certainly better than, say, Van Helsing with its $160million budget (roughly 5 times as much as Dog Soldiers) and dodgy CGI. Dog Soldiers is my favourite werewolf movie and it's one of my favourite horror-themed movies of all time.

Underworld's werewolves are a mix of animatronic suits and CGI (the sequels used a lot more CGI) - they do look pretty good (though the hybrid looks horrible, imho). The movies are watchable enough despite some poor dialogue and wooden acting (mostly from British lead actresses Kate Beckinsale and Rhona Mitra, though Michael Sheen's charisma more than makes up for it and it's also fun to see Bill Nighy hamming it up and chewing scenery), but the story isn't that deep/complex even though it's obviously trying to be. In a lot of ways I preferred Rise of the Lycans (which is more of a prequel) over the first two movies, but they're all fairly close in quality/tone, so if you don't like one then there's not much point continuing to watch the sequels. I liked them enough to buy them on DVD and have watched them all several times. They're definitely Hollywood movies in style, though a lot of the cast are British, so I'm not sure if that makes them Brit movies for you, Sam

Shield/Elec Tanker (or Elec/Shield Brute) maybe? Nothing says defensive (both in gameplay and thematically) like holding a shield does, and if you want to explode out from a corner, unleashing all hell, then Shield Charge and/or Lightning Rod, followed by Thunder Strike, would be a fun way to do that.

Yeah Deathsurge can be pretty bad too.

This is pretty much how I do it too. I fit the concept to the build I want to make, so I've rarely run into a situation where concept clashed with playability. When that happens then I go with what I need/want for the build, then challenge my imagination to modify the concept/bio to fit, as the main reason I write bios is for the creative challenge and fun of writing them - and, like Adeon says, concept is mutable. Rarely the concept comes first, often because I've deleted a character but wanted to re-use their concept (or a major part of it) for something else.

This became the case with a Storm/Psychic Defender I originally had in I7-ish called "The Psyclone Ranger", a boy cloned by Crey from one of their rogue agents whose dominating psychic powers turned him into a megalomaniac (which is the concept of my L50 Mind/Psi Dom, Agent Godwin). The concept was that the boy was being "developed" as a more controllable pawn for Crey, but at this early stage he couldn't focus his psychic powers properly; this created unintended telekinetic disturbances around him, almost poltergeist-like, which he struggled to guide as storm-like effects.

I played him to L20, didn't really enjoy it, but I couldn't bring myself to delete him until I was able to remake him as a Psy/Mental Blaster when the archetype gained those powersets. I still kept the same name/bio/concept/costume, rationalising the "cyclone"/storm references as referring to Psionic Tornado. Sadly I didn't really like Psychic Blast either (partly because of the differences from the Defender version, partly because only having psi damage was rather limiting when so many enemies resist it heavily), so I remade him as an Energy/Mental Blaster which I was much happier with gameplay-wise (admittedly he's still been marooned at L20 for the past 2 years, as I don't play blueside much), but at first sight the new primary doesn't really fit the original concept.

The new concept makes the Energy/ part fit by just modifying a single line in the bio (bolded below) which also manages to explain why the character is wearing what looks like some kind of high-tech armour (which was always part of his costume design, but wasn't explained by the original concept) - so it all worked out ok in the end. This is the updated bio, which hasn't been changed much from the original except for the bolded part:

Crey’s illegal genetics program was an unsubstantiated myth until Back Alley Brawler discovered one of the cloning labs. In a locked test chamber he found a frightened young boy and a nearby computer revealed that the boy was a clone of ex-Airborne Ranger Steve Godwin, a Crey Agent recently arrested for misusing his psychic talents.

Rescued from that lab the young clone’s telekinetic ability was wild and dangerous, Crey having tampered with his genes to augment psionic potential. Sister Psyche taught the boy to better control his powers, but his raw emotions still caused unintended storms of telekinetic activity around him, until Positron built a containment suit that converted the excess TK emanations into kinetic energy which could be stored and subsequently released as focused power blasts.

Eager to emulate his saviours the clone has named himself The Psyclone Ranger and he is keen to investigate Crey’s operations, though Countess Crey still denies all knowledge of the program that created him.

What you don't know...

Poor bonnie Heather.

Ditto.

^This. Absolutely this. Blueside just feels so bland after playing redside.

Even though redside stories are no more interactive than blueside - they're just as linear - the writing is better and the gameplay feels more active and immersive (more scripted events, more mission types, less filler missions, less grindy feel as there are less defeat alls, etc.) - maybe because villains are about being proactive more than reactive, so at least your character is put at the centre of many stories instead of just being there as part of an investigation or to help out some hero more famous than you.

Seer Marino's arc is the most involving/immersive story in the entire game imho, but if you want an arc of similar quality that is also more epic than most Task/Strike Forces and features tons of cameos by well-known arch-villains then do Viridian's arc "The Conference of Evil" in Grandville - it's L45+ and has quite an extensive list of things needed to unlock it, but if you hit L50 I believe you can just pick it up at Ouroboros without needing to do the unlocking tasks. If the last two missions don't make you grin like an idiot (both lore-wise and gameplay-wise) then you're probably not going to find what you're looking for anywhere else.

In fact if you want to interact with most of the major heroes and villains in the game (although by interact, I mean beat them to a pulp ) then you can't do much better than just playing through all of the content in Grandville at L40-50 - most of the Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators pop up at various points (although you can run into most of them doing Mender Silos TF/SF in Ouro as well at L45-50), as well as many of the major archvillains from various factions throughout the game.

Otherwise your best bet is just to join a team doing the STF or the LRSF.