Mister Rik

Is there a general consensus on the best way to deal with Vahzilok mobs? I took a Vahzilok mission on my Grav/Earth dominator, Venus Lass, last night and was quickly reminded of why I try my best to avoid Vahzilok missions: they appear to be effectively immune to everything except straight damage.

I'm generally successful against these guys with Blasters, provided I can keep away from them long enough to burn them down at a distance. But Brutes, Scrappers, and Stalkers ... I have lots of trouble dealing with more than 1 or 2 at a time —once they start puking on me (or exploding) I'm dead in about 5 seconds. And my Dominator has holds, immobilizes, and KB/KD out the wazoo, all of which had no apparent effect. So as I was trying to escape the sewers with the NPC I'd just rescued (it was a Steel Canyon radio mission), the new spawns (the ones yelling "Stop Venus Lass!") that appeared after I rescued the NPC overwhelmed me because none of my crowd control would work, and more kept spawning behind them. Ultimately, I gave up trying to defeat them and just ran like hell for the exit, hoping the NPC was keeping up.

I don't know if this bugs anybody else, but ... one of the "rules" of roleplaying (and this is a roleplaying game) is that you should never mandate what other characters are thinking or feeling or how they react to something. For example:

Wrong:

"I punch you in the face, and you scream in pain and crumple to the ground."

Right:

Character 1: "I punch you in the face."
Character 2: "I scream in pain and crumple to the ground."

Now, I'll make allowances for game mechanics necessitating letting the game describe how my character physically reacts to things, like if my character gets hit with a knockback and fails to resist it, she falls down, or if she takes enough damage she's "defeated".

But this can and should be avoided in ordinary dialog with NPCs. IMO there is absolutely no justification for an NPC telling me anything about my character beyond what can be physically observed and verified (and if they do know other things about my character, there should be an explanation for how they have this information — "According to the Vanguard files on you..."). Specifically, I find it extremely annoying when Twinshot (and later, Maelstrom) keeps calling my characters "kiddo". Sure, when my characters first meet Twinshot, they are "novice" heroes and she's a more experienced hero. But "novice" =/= "young". Yeah, most of my characters are young. But some of my characters aren't. I have a few human characters who are clearly older than Twinshot. I have some characters who are aliens, whose ages Twinshot cannot possibly guess. I have some Magic-origin characters who are members of "fantasy" races, whose ages Twinshot couldn't know. My petite, fairy/elf-looking brute with the cherub wings could be an immortal who is thousands of years old, and only looks seventeen because she doesn't age normally. And while I don't have any robot characters, I could make one, and that robot would certainly not be a "kiddo" (or an "old man", either, for that matter). Just the simple fact that the character creator has "Older Faces" options should make it obvious that not every character is going to be young, and therefore NPCs making age-specific comments about player characters is inappropriate.

Ooh, good idea. I have a second PC sitting in my ministorage. It's too underpowered to play the game on, but it would work fine for this. I'd need to buy a new flatscreen monitor for it, though - there's no way I want its existing 19", 50-pound CRT monitor taking up half of my desk space (and I would also want its screen resolution to be the same as my main computer's screen - 1280x1024 screenshots aren't going to do me much good when I'm making wallpapers for a 1680x1050 monitor).

EDIT:
Then again, I suppose it would be possible, since I'm on an iMac with an Intel processor, to set my machine up to run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously, with CoH running under both OS's - then I could just switch between them. I don't think I have enough RAM or processor power to do that and still get any kind of actual playable performance, though.
END EDIT

The downside to using this method for screenshots, though, is that so many of the shots I get are "shots of opportunity", i.e. inside missions, or roaming around the city, when I find just the right lighting conditions combined with an interesting backdrop. And most of the time, at least outdoors, those lighting conditions don't last long enough to log in the other account and get the "photographer" character to the original character's location in time to take advantage of the light. So I'd need to have the "photographer" logged in all the time and set to auto-follow the other character everywhere, which might be tough on the photographer's survival (dangit, those snipers in Founders Falls just shot down my sidekick again!) Also, aren't free accounts limited to two characters total? I have characters on 5 or 6 different servers, so most of my characters wouldn't benefit. Unless I want to open 3 or 4 free accounts.

I'll tell you what outrages me:

I have no idea what the Play NC site is! The official "down time" announcement didn't provide a link, and neither did the OP in this thread! And www.plaync.com leads me to a Korean-language site (for this company, but I can't read it)!

Seriously, though, where is this site? I get the vague impression from some of the early posts in this thread that it might be a way to use the Paragon Market outside of the game. Which would be good for me, because the Paragon Market in-game is crashing my client every time.

I play roughly "character-based" (in the roleplaying sense) and "story-based" in roughly equal parts.

When I say "roleplaying", I don't mean actual acting out my character with other players; rather, I mean I approach my characters as characters in a larger story/world. I don't do any kind of preplanning of characters, as in "here's where I want to be at level 50". I look at it the same way your "typical" comic book superhero/supervillain would go about it: "Whoa, I have superpowers! Let's see what I can do!" And then as I level the character I try to make it feel like a natural progression, with my character learning and improving as he/she goes along and gains experience. This sort of goes along with something I brought up recently in another thread: are the different powers within a power set all different powers, or are they all basically the same power being used in different ways? For example, the Fire Blast power set. Most of the powers all boil down to the same thing: flinging a ball of fire. You start out with one way to toss the fire around, and then as you gain more experience you figure out different ways to use that ball of fire. Throw a bunch of small balls. Combine those small balls into one bigger ball. Save up and charge that bigger ball into an even bigger ball that explodes when it hits, or simply hits harder. Focus that ball into a beam. And, assuming I haven't played with a particular power set before, I don't "look ahead" to see what's coming and think about how I'll use future powers. I try to approach it the same way my character would: "discovering" new ways to use his/her abilities.

Granted, this approach makes the most sense for Mutation origin characters (who spontaneously manifest their powers at some point) or Science/Magic origin characters who gain their powers via some kind of scientific or magical accident and suddenly find themselves with strange powers. Pre-planned Natural or Technology characters make more sense to me. A Natural origin character learns through training, and can plausibly know ahead of time what skills he'll learn in the future ("Once I've mastered this attack, I'll be ready to learn this other attack"). A Technology character can plan improvements to his devices/gadgets/power armor in advance. But even a Tech character can be "accidental", like the guy who finds an abandoned power suit and has to figure out how it works.

Storywise, I try to approach every mission as being "brand new" to the character I'm playing, even if I've already done it several times before on other characters. I try to look at it as each character playing out their own, personal storyline. To do that, I attempt to select different contacts whenever possible when a current contact wants to introduce me to somebody, so that every character follows a unique path.

Of course, I can get away with a lot of this because I play entirely solo (at least for now - I've only been playing since September 2011), so I'm not worried about being a liability in a group situation.

Some individual wallpapers (still working on the others):

Mental Miyuki:

Full Size

Raisa Razor:

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Tabitha Target:

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Full-size (1680x1050) version here.

One of my "theme concept" creations:

The Extracurriculars were students at a school for superpowered girls in Galaxy City, when the meteors hit ... and their teacher went bad!

Center: Dahlia Danger (Dual Pistols/Devices, Technology Blaster)

Top Left, in sneakers: Energy Ellie (Energy Blast/Mental Manipulation, Magic Blaster) from USA
Top Left, in blue beret: Flavie Faker (Illusion Control/Force Field, Magic Controller) from France
Bottom Left, in blue and gold: Raisa Razor (Claws/Willpower, Science Brute) from Ukraine
Bottom Left, with bow: Tabitha Target (Archery/Darkness Manipulation, Magic Blaster) from Scotland

Top Right, with knives: Dorotea Dagger (Dual Blades/Super Reflexes, Natural Stalker) from Mexico
Center Right, with tail: Mental Miyuki (Psychic Blast/Kinetics, Mutation Corruptor) from Japan
Center Right, in blue: Kinetic Keisha (Kinetic Melee/Regeneration, Science Scrapper) from USA
Bottom Right, with bat: Betty Beatdown (War Mace/Invulnerability, Mutation Brute) from UK

Know what else I'd like to see? A "thong" option for female characters. In the interest of "decency", I'd say to not have it as an option in "Bottoms with Skin", or the "Bottom" for under skirts, but rather make it available as a "pattern" for overlaying on top of tights, the same way you can overlay "Bikini 1, 2, and 3" over tights (or other lower-body leggings). I hunted all over trying, unsuccessfully, to find an image that illustrates the look I'm thinking of. So think of "1980s workout leotards", where it looked sort of like a 1-piece swimsuit with a "thong" bottom worn over tights. I know I've seen female superheroes dressed like that in comic books (mostly from Image Comics in the late '80s and early '90s).

As somebody who enjoys creating desktop wallpapers featuring my game characters (bunch of them here at my DeviantArt gallery), I would kill for an in-game camera mode that would let me take true, full-screen-sized screenshots of my characters. By "full-screen-sized" I mean that, with my character's entire model visible from head to foot, their head would be just below the top of the screen and their feet would be at the bottom.

As it is right now, if my character is standing on a surface and their whole body is visible, their head never gets higher than the center of the screen. The only ways I've found to "trick" the camera to make my character model larger on screen is to either use an "upskirt" angle (which is occasionally amusing, but rather limited in artistic application, and in any case only works from behind the character), or else snap the screenshot while the character is flying/hovering or jumping (hence the number of those wallpapers showing a flying or jumping character). Either method is extremely limiting when it comes to trying to compose a shot with a particular pose.

So if I want to depict them being as tall as my screen, I have to crop the screenshot and then enlarge it. And no matter how high the graphics settings are, it's a sad fact that enlarging a bitmapped image results in some level of degradation, i.e. blurry edges and loss of detail. That essentially forces me to modify the image with artistic filters, as you can see in most of the wallpapers at my link. And while that's fine sometimes, there are other times I'd really like to use a nice, sharp, "un-retouched" image.

Basically, I'm asking for the ability to get costume-creation-screen-level zoom within the actual game world so that I can zoom in on my character without half (or more) of the model disappearing off the bottom of the screen. Along with the ability to pose the character any way I want (not custom poses, but poses using the emotes/animations normally available to me in-game).

It seems to me that this should be as "simple" (ha ha) as a toggle that would allow me to manually set the focal point of the camera. I base this on the fact that I can stand near another character (player or NPC) and zoom in to view them "full screen", but I can't do it to my own character because the camera is apparently tethered to my character's head. "Toggle On" = "Allow me to focus/aim/zoom the camera freely"; "Toggle Off" = "Resets the camera back to normal gameplay mode".

We need more shirts in general, at least for female characters. And a Mexican costume bundle (for Cinco de Mayo!)