MoiraMom

I'll try to be there. Probably bring my emp def, Rosy Dawn, but other options are psi/psi blaster Red Madder or dark/dark dom Ginger Dusk.

I expect I'll continue to drop in on Freedom mostly in the evenings as usual, until I can't find my friends online any more. And I'll keep an eye on that cityofheroesveterans.com website.

I honestly have NO idea what game I'm going to migrate to. And I need a "mental health" break -- CoX has been fantastic, with the super flexibility to do pretty much whatever I feel like that day. Roll a new character? Play with costumes for hours on end? Solo? Team? Massive incarnate trial or other big league-y thing? Heck, it even had a bit (a bit!) of PvP, and I generally don't like PvP at all.

But what I liked, most of all, was the camaraderie with strangers and friends alike. Someone find an MMO with that same sense of teamwork that isn't full of idiot kids or crickets, and let us know.

My global is @MoiraMom. My Steam profile is "jds | Moira". I am a mediocre shot in L4D2. Rosy Dawn is the best empathy defender on Freedom.

Long-Range Teleport is the final teleportation pool travel power. It's...not nearly as useful as it could be.

I am ignoring travel to any alternate-dimension zone (Firebase Zulu, Praetorian zones, etc), the PVP zones, or any zone that has no "extra" way to get to it (sewer network, abandoned sewer network, troll tunnels, monster island, etc).

Redside, LRTP can get to any zone the ferry&helicopter already go to (but there aren't that many zones redside, particularly hazard zones.)

Blueside, LRTP can get to any zone the monorail already goes to, PLUS The Hollows (hazard), Faultline (hazard), and Peregrine Island. But NOT to Perez Park, Boomtown, Striga Isle, or Crey's Folly (all hazard zones). It only makes sense to add the other hazard zones; otherwise, why be able to teleport to some but not the others?

LRTP also cannot get to Dark Astoria or the Rikti War Zone, although both of those would be fantastic to add.

Anyone with an Ouro portal hopping to, say, Talos to make use of the monorail and TUNNEL right there can beat it in terms of destinations, with the exception of two hazard zones (Hollows and Faultline); on the other hand, Ouro+T/TUNNEL means you can get to Dark Astoria as well.

Base teleporters can get to ALL of these locations (plus Terra Volta, Eden, and Rikti War Zone), which leads me to wonder why that is a superior power to the inate LRTP? Why not just add all of the base beacon locations to LRTP? Problem Solved!

Still having the occasional problem of the Flow Lightning columns not showing up properly. This makes it more difficult to avoid them when trying to get back into range and whatnot. Notice: Flow Lightning-caused death, NO LIGHTNING ON THE SCREEN AT ALL:

Dangit, where's the "like" button...

I was misremembering M1 as Hero 1. My bad! Named statues that I can find in the game:

Atlas (duh)
Galaxy Girl
Talos
M1
Mustang (aka Corsair snif)
Avatar (broken, under a tree in Perez)
Nebula
Wavelength (!! does "Assist the security chief in IP" still say Wavelength fell in the Rikti War? She looks awfully spry at the moment.)
Cassiopeia
Breakneck/Cyrus Thompson
Dauntless
Nimbus/Georgia Reynolds
Crimson Fist/John Knox
Orion
Night Hammer (badge implies she was quite alive when it was made)
Red Tiger/Jake Montoya (definitely still alive)

And Lord Recluse, of course. HE's quite alive. Such an ego. And all the Praetorian statues, but we know they have ego issues.

So, it's an odd list. But... we *do* have the memorial of Hero 1 (although I wish it were outside somewhere), and I think it would be fitting in-game to have a couple of memorial statues somewhere for Statesman and perhaps Sister Psyche (she's been "dead" before, but this time for sure?)

So we have all of these GIANT statues all over Paragon City, most of some specific now-dead hero or heroine. Many of these dead supers have a statue because they did something Particularly Important, which is nice and cool and all.

Statesman is dead.

Why doesn't HE get a giant statue?

Thank you, Arbiter Hawk, for posting all this info (and acknowledging the level shift bug!) I do feel once that's been fixed, that the trial will be fun to run, while still difficult. But the fun will be back, which is very very important.

The only other mechanic which I'm just very unclear on, is what, exactly, the "Favor of the Well" is doing. Simply saying the lower his health goes the more the Well favors him is -- well, what does that *mean*? Favor numbers go up and go down in proportion to the damage he takes and the amount he heals back, but does his regen %age change as he gets lower on health? If so, does it drop back down at any point?

So here's my data on the Light of the Well level shifts from a run tonight. I took a bunch of screencaps (basically one a second), and looked at them later.

One complete cycle of Light of the Well, I never got any sort of a level shift at all.

I had an odd theory that perhaps you only got the level shifts if you took all 6 lights down within 10 seconds of their spawning. Several rounds where we didn't make that arbitrary 10 second window, and I got no shifts. But then:

18:38 to go in the trial: 6 lights spawn
14sec later, at 18:24, we're down to 1 light left. No level shift (showing 3)
19sec later, at 18:05, we still have 1 light left, and my level suddenly pops from 3 to 8
4sec later, at 18:01, we finally get that last light down (0:02 sec to next cycle). level shift still 8
17:57, we have 6 lights (new cycle), and level shift goes up to 9
17:55 (or possibly 17:56), level shift drops to 3


IF the level shifts are happening to only 16 lucky targets within some range, then it makes NO SENSE AT ALL that I would suddenly jump from a level shift of 3 to a level shift of 8 after nearly *20* seconds, unless everyone is similarly delayed, OR the shifts are being applied very very randomly.

I think it more likely that they're supposed to apply league-wide, but for some reason are occasionally delayed randomly or not applied at all.

It seems obvious to me that the level shift mechanism is broken in some fashion.

Edited to add: I forgot, I dropped my lore pets once when I was +8 or +9. Clicking on them later showed them changing level between 49+3 and 49+8/9 (I forget which). I couldn't tell what was making them flip back and forth; they were both in melee range of Tyrant (Cimerorans), and died shortly thereafter.

Yeah, the giant blinding white-everywhere thing does get a bit old. It's hard to tell Light of the Well apart from bad lightning juju apart from....everything else. Most of my characters have flight, and I've taken to just going UP and then back or to the side, to avoid getting stuck on invisible girders, rocks, debris...

So... load a league up with high-defense twitchy types, and avoid squishies who can't move quickly out of the AoE Lightning or (actually worse) Hammer attack?

That might be more successful. And also more irritating to the squishies.

I do like the trial, overall. My main complaints are in the severe LACK of CLUES, where other trials have explained even briefly the general things you're supposed to be doing to succeed, and the potentially-bugged level shift mechanic.

Difficulty through obscurity is not good design. When you have a trial that most people prefer to farm instead of actual run full-out? That's a fail.

The lack of useful information about the trial mechanics is really what is dragging this one down, I think. I've not been on a successful run yet (keep timing out in that last fight), but I was thinking about the other incarnate trials and what info you're given, vs the info given in the Mag trial.

One of the strategy tricks to TPN is realizing that you have to sync clicking at least the last two terminals at once, because as soon as three terminals are clicked you're all teleported out of the building. This info is NOT in the trial instructions, BUT the trial instructions DO tell you to use the terminals to increase PO.

One of the strategy tricks to DD is knowing which heroes/villains to rescue, and which to leave, to change which buffs/debuffs the Sentinal gets. The trial info DOES tell you which heroes/villains grant what, but not what to do with that info.

Other trials generally give you stronger hints or outright instructions, in order to help you figure out the basic mechanics. Once you know the basic mechanics, you can formulate a strategy to counter them.

In the Mag trials, however, the instructions/hints fall down badly when it gets to the Tyrant fight phase. Use the Quills on the Lights, got it. But what do the Lights do, specifically? Are they just funny-looking lichen? Okay then. But I've also seen things about "don't go to the hospital when Tyrant is below 50%, because THAT affects his regen". So does the regen-Tyrant mechanic CHANGE in the trial, from Lights to hospitaling? What exactly affects the other bar (I forget the text on it), below his health? Number of player deaths overall, or amount of hospitaling, or time the Lights are up, or damage dealt to Tyrant (just like that final MoM fight) or what?

It is entirely unclear, at least to me so far, what we're supposed to be doing aside from killing the Lights (lichen) and attempting to kill Tyrant while avoiding the giant lightning storm (green stuff) and keeping the adds down. All that alone isn't doing it. We couldn't get him lower than the low 30s in a decent league the other night (three emp defenders, few deaths, lots of barrier and rez). Do we just need to load up like crazy on regen debuffers?

Somewhere along the line, they added [Captions] as a channel you can stick in a tab. I have a tab now just for [NPC] and [Captions], so I can be sure and not miss *most* of the text that flies by in the newer missions and trials. It's also usually easier to read, as it's better contrast than that awful red-on-black text they seem to favor...

Same here. <frowny>

First time doing TPN, too. Sigh...

I have the same issue on a new shiny Apple slim keyboard on my Win7 PC. I can use Sharpkeys to remap some keys (notably I remapped left alt to be left windows and left command to be left alt), which works everywhere.... except in City of Heroes.

If I hit my remapped alt key (really the Apple command key), CoH doesn't recognize it at all. So fauxAlt+1 equals 1 as far as CoH is concerned. Very very suboptimal, as you might imagine.

The two ways I can think of to fix this in CoH would be to either add a way to specify the key's hex code in keybinds.txt (and then have it work with an additional, so E0_5B+1 or whatever), OR to fix CoH itself to stop using DirectInput for keyboard and actually trust the OS to give it the right info.