Pauper

This is exactly what they are trying to accomplish.

The fail is not on their part, but on ours for assuming that what they want to do is give away costume pieces, when what they want to do is get people to follow them on Twitter, and the costume pieces are just the carrot to get people who wouldn't normally join Twitter or follow a 'corporate' account to do that.

Right now, we sound like the people in the grocery store ******** at the free sample lady that we can't get a whole pizza for free. Please stop.

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Pauper

I agree with your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

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Pauper

Thanks for the heads-up. I'm planning to make the retina MBP my next computer purchase, and it's good to know in advance what to expect.

That would be my guess, too, based on running the game on the same machine both using the Mac client vs using the PC client via Boot Camp on a Windows Vista partition. It seems as though the Cider client is emulating Windows hardware -- the good news is that this means that the Cider client is less vulnerable to breaking when the underlying hardware is upgraded since it doesn't directly make use of the underlying hardware. The bad news is...CPU gets thrashed because the Cider client isn't using the video card, etc.

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Pauper

Except that means that you're wearing knee pads with no shoes, and no ability to add shoes.

Less of a problem with gloves, but still a problem for some costume concepts.

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Pauper

Yes, though the tier 4 freemium benefit is lifetime access to the auction house. 8 reward tokens seems like a pretty minimal hurdle for a player to get access to common IOs, especially given that spending the $5 needed to buy an auction house license for 2 months gives you the 2nd of 8 reward tokens you need to permanently unlock the auction house.

Also, if free players can join a supergroup (which I think they can do post-i23), then they could also conceivably get IOs from supergroup storage, if common IOs didn't need to be unlocked. I'd think it would be more frustrating than beneficial though if the only way to get 'free IOs' was to join a supergroup unless you spent $90 or so to get to tier 4.

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Pauper

Another potentially interesting wrinkle: say the minion is a Carnival of Shadows Attendant, and after you complete your first attack chain, the Attendent hits you with her Energy Rings, disorienting you.

The corruptor now either pops a Break Free and continues his attack chain, or waits until the effect wears off. The blaster simply fires off Power Bolt via Defiance 2.0, defeating the enemy. She can now pop off her own Break Free to fight other enemies, or simply wait for the effect to wear off if there's nobody else around.

This specific example focuses on one of the blaster's strengths -- in this attack chain, the blaster has effectively 100% mez protection thanks to Defiance. The corruptor can't say that, and will be slowed in DPS and kill rate. However, as other posters have already pointed out, this is a somewhat artificial example, and Defiance doesn't do anything to prevent mez from stopping higher-tier powers, which would effectively slow a blaster's DPS in a more realistic scenario, just not as much as an un-Break Free'd corruptor (for which DPS is zero while mezzed).

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Pauper

That's certainly possible -- I've never played an EAT, so can't comment on access to those, and I don't think there's an EAT 'unlock' at premium anyway.

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Pauper

No problem -- I liberally cribbed the first three steps from CuppaManga's Mac Edition Guide. If anyone is using the provided Mac client and hasn't read that guide yet, do so.

Thank you for the work on this new help info!

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Pauper

Thanks for the info -- this tells me that the existing data and texture_library folders were put there when I installed VidiotMaps. I'll go back and revise my directions.

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Pauper

As far as I can tell, this is exactly what happens.

- If you have tier 5 Paragon Rewards, masterminds and controllers are unlocked as a premium player anyway.
- If you don't have tier 5, but you created a controller or mastermind when you had access to it (as pre-Freedom subscriber or VIP), you retain access to that character when going premium if that's one of the slots you have unlocked at premium.

If you're not tier 5, all that happens when you go back to premium is that you lose the ability to create new controllers or masterminds until you re-up VIP or reach tier 5. I guess I don't see this as a huge problem.

And as an aside, I seem to see this other misconception all the time -- the 'game is balanced for SOs' is interpreted as 'I can play this game at whatever difficulty setting I want'. That's simply not true. Sure, a kitted-out toon can probably play at seriously bumped difficulty from a fairly early level, but if you're going with just SOs, assume that your default difficulty should be +0/x0.

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Pauper

It takes a bit of effort, but not a lot. Download the Mac zipped package referenced above. Once it downloads and is unzipped, you'll see a data folder with two folders inside -- a Texts folder and a texture_library folder. To get these into your Mac City of Heroes install, follow the below steps:

If you've already made an alias to the City of Heroes program directory inside the Mac package (what I call the 'working directory'), skip down to step 4.

1. Command-click (or right-click with a multi-button mouse) the City of Heroes Mac application. When the contextual menu appears, select "Show Package Contents".

2. In the Finder window that appears, open the Contents folder, then the Resources folder, then the transgaming folder, then the c_drive folder.

3. If your installation is like mine, you'll see two folders -- a coh folder, and a windows folder. Everything you'll need to do is inside the coh folder. (If you don't see a coh folder, you may instead see a Program Files folder; there should be a City of Heroes folder in that.) Call this the 'working directory'.

At this point, you can make an alias to the working directory so that you can skip the above steps if you ever want to uninstall this, or try to install other goodies put together by CoH fans.

4. Open your working directory from step 3, then open the data folder. Note: you may not see a data folder, in which case you should create one.

5. Take the entire Texts folder from your download and put it inside this data folder.

6. Open the texture_library folder from your download. Take the Badge Reporter folder and put it into the texture_library folder in the data folder. If there is no existing texture_library folder in your data folder (for example, because you just created it in step 4 above), then you can just put the texture_library folder from the download into the data folder.

That's it! The process worked fine for me and the new help menu is amazing!

If something goes wrong with your system, or you just want to uninstall this, simply go back to the data folder in your working directory, delete the Texts folder, then delete the Badge Reporter folder from the texture_library folder. (Don't touch anything else in that folder unless you know how it got there.)

Hope that helps!

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Pauper

The only way in which I care whether or not the proc is removed/power is modified/etc., is the degree to which it is perceived that the outcry over 'OMG, this is the brokenest thing EVAR, nerf plz!!!' is to some degree responsible for the ensuing nerf. Because that emboldens a certain portion of the population to scream at anything they think is overpowered/'too good', WHICH IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

Also, because it's refreshing to argue with smart people on the Internet for a change.

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Pauper

Fair enough, but there are a lot of things that have changed like that over the years:

- Receiving 'full' travel powers at level 4 instead of level 14.
- Access to remote auctionhouse and vault as vet rewards.
- Reducing requirements to access Epic archetypes.

Heck, you could even argue that, by this definition, Enhancement Diversification is game-breaking. Except that, since these things were done with seeming deliberation, while the OF proc is presumed to be a bug, that the former don't count in this calculation.

That's really my main point -- the idea that this was 'unintended' despite having ostensibly been tested. Looking at the actual effects instead of just being overwhelmed with the visual of eight mobs flopping helplessly on the floor leads me to feel like this is just 'meh' in the cosmic scheme.

On a scale of 'game-breaking', I'd say perma-Phantom Army is still better than this -- permanent aggro-avoidance, plus enough damage to actually defeat the mobs that aren't attacking you. Plus you can start it earlier than Bonfire/OF. And nobody's calling for that to be nerfed.

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Pauper

Again, let's not get hyperbolic in your response -- if you don't actually have another power that can do significant damage to a +20, then using perma-KB to 'neutralize' it doesn't really help that much, since you don't get XP for just knocking down an enemy.

The 'uber-farmer' folks have a slightly better point, except:

1) There are already ATs and builds that can run arbitrary level shift/x8, so the fact that an AT with access to Bonfire+OF can now do so as well doesn't really hold a lot of water with me, and

2) Only two specific builds -- Fire/x Controllers and Fire/x Dominators -- have the ability to attempt to start this 'farm' at level 26. Every other AT needs to wait until level 35. Somehow I doubt the Kin/Fire Brute who's been running at +?/x8 since level 16 will be very impressed.

The effect certainly *looks* impressive, but given that the devs have always said that they don't balance the game for IOs, I don't see where this has such a huge material effect on core gameplay that it's really needed to 'nerf' this combo.

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Pauper