Pauper
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Posts
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Joined
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Hey, all. Came back to CoH after a long hiatus to try out the free-play options (though I'm currently VIPing on a game card), and I'm finding that the game seems much harder than I remember. Best example I can give -- the toon I rolled to try out Praetoria:
Manicheus Uno
Thermal Rad/Dual Pistols Defender (just hit 17)
Warmth - 16+ DO End Red, 15+ DO Heal+, empty
Power of the Phoenix - 10 IO Rech Red
Pistols - 16+ DO Dmg+, 20 Trn Dmg+, 14+ DO Acc+, 16+ Trn Acc+, 14 Trn Range+
Dual-Wield - 10 IO Dmg+, 17+ Trn Dmg+, 19 Trn Acc+, 16+ Trn Rech Red, 15+ DO Range+
Empty Clips - 16+ Trn Dmg+, 15 DO Acc+, 11 DO Range+, 14 IO Explosive Strike (Chance for Smashing)
Bullet Rain - 19 Trn Acc+
Health - 14 DO Heal+, 15 DO Heal+, empty
Stamina - 15 IO End Mod
Stealth - 10 IO Def+
Invisibility - 15 IO Def+
He's also got Teleport as a travel power, but not sure how relevant that is. I'll also say that nearly all the enhancements slotted are drops or built from drops, though I'm low on 'Information' due to some teething issues related to the Praetoria vendors being 'all-origin' vendors (and thus accidentally buying DOs that didn't include my own origin).
As an example of my frustration, I'm currently doing the Bobcat arc in Pretoria. In the 'kidnap a psychic' mission, I'm encountering Syndicate, mostly Sword Adepts and Pistol Adepts. If I run into a group of 3 yellows (minions one level above me), I generally either try to arrange so that only one has me in LOS or hit Stealth; generally this will allow me to pull one at a time and handle the group, albeit slowly. But if something goes wrong and I aggro the full 3-enemy group, I generally get hammered, even with maneuvering to try to keep as many as possible in the arc of Empty Clips. I have noticed a slight animation delay when going back to the guns after using Warmth to heal up mid-combat, but I've also found that if I hit a Dual Pistols power that's recharging, the animation will play even if the power isn't recharged, which often covers the remaining recharge time. Then, at the conclusion of the mission, I finally encounter the psychic I'm supposed to kidnap (and her surprise companion), and I just get hammered. Currently I'm doing what I typically do when I discover that I can't finish a scenario -- wait three days, then hit the 'complete mission from this contact' menu item to get past it and keep on with the story.
This is the best example, but I'm having similar troubles with most of my toons, save one -- a Martial Arts/Super Reflexes scrapper I rolled way back when and am running through First Ward with now. Most of my toons, except this guy and the scrapper, have been dialed back to -1/-1 difficulty just so I can experience the missions without having to make multiple trips from the hospital back to the mission map.
Has the game gotten tougher, or do I just suck?
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Pauper -
Quote:Thanks for the advice. Rather than hijack the OP's thread, I'll start a new thread with a build and an example bad experience.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I'd say that triple-slotting Health is part of it. Health is a nice power and it does grant a good bit of regeneration, but for one, that third slot is barely helping you and, for another, those slots are better spent elsewhere altogether. I wouldn't mess with Health until your 40s when you had slots to spare and not much of importance to put them on.
Forbin has a point - posting your build will help, as would just outlining AT and powersets. That's really not not the whole story, though. Most builds can do well if you play your cards right, so what I want to know is exactly what you're doing to have such difficulty. I'd suggest recording video if you want to mess with Fraps and YouTube, but a basic text description will do, as well.
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Pauper -
Quote:Thank you! This was driving me nuts.Originally Posted by A Musing Mage
What I think you may have encountered is this bug. Occasionally when zoning into a map, pets get stuck. They appear by the entrance but won't move or attack or go away when dismissed. If this happens, use the chat command "/release_pets" to force dismiss them all. When you resummon them they should behave normally.
To refer to another of the OPs points, I too am a returning player (though I've gone VIP for the moment), and I too am having major problems dealing with difficulty level. It's gotten to the point where I've just bit the bullet and downshifted my difficulty level to -1/-1 because none of my toons can handle 3 yellow minions at once (except my blaster, if my initial sniper shot hits, because that weakens one to the point where I can drop it before it reaches me and beats the psychic snot out of me with his buddies).
I've done my respec and triple-slotted Health and Stamina, so I'm not sure what the problem is, unless I, like the OP, just suck at this game.
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Pauper -
Quote:You don't really even have to go to 'big infinities' to see these weird results.Originally Posted by Hopeling
This really isn't an isolated result - there are quite a lot of things that behave a certain way at every finite point, and act completely different in the limit at infinity.
Example: Draw two lines, one three times longer than the other using whatever unit you wish, in such a way that you can draw a third line to make a right triangle with the longer of your original lines as the hypotenuse. Make sense?
OK, now draw a line parallel to the third line that passes through any point on the hypotenuse that you wish. That line will pass through a specific point on the shorter of your two original lines.
Draw another line, parallel to the line you just drew, passing through a different point on the hypotenuse. That line will pass through a different specific point on the shorter of your two original lines.
If you've had middle-school level geometry, you might see where this is leading: by the Euclidian definition of parallel lines, no two lines you are drawing through a point on the hypotenuse will ever pass through the same point on the shorter of your original two lines. But this means that, for every point on the hypotenuse, there is a corresponding point on the shorter line.
And this, of course, proves that there are exactly the same number of points on both of your original lines, despite one of them being three times longer in 'absolute' terms.
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Pauper -
Quote:A lot of the weirdness of physics comes from the weirdness of math.Originally Posted by Captain-Electric
And you're probably discounting quantum particles, which may outnumber themselves many times over (no, that's not a typo, it's weird science).
For instance, you might be asked which is larger -- the set of all positive integers {1,2,3,4,5,...} or the set of all perfect squares {1,4,9,16,25,...}? Just looking at the first few members of each set and seeing, for instance, that 3 is a member of the first set but not a member of the second set, you'd probably assume that the set of all positive integers is larger than the set of all perfect squares.
You might notice, however, that each positive integer has exactly one perfect square: 1 squared is 1, 2 squared is 4, 3 squared is 9, etc. So every member of the set of positive integers has a corresponding member in the set of perfect squares that represents the perfect square of that integer. And since the definition of a perfect square is that it's the number that results from taking an integer and multiplying it by itself, there won't be any member of the set of perfect squares that doesn't have a corresponding member in the set of positive integers.
In other words, despite the fact that there are positive integers that aren't perfect squares, the set of all positive integers is exactly the same size as the set of all perfect squares.
Now *that's* weird.
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Pauper -
"But think of the money I'll save!"
"No, but I got him with the door!"
He stumbled back into the saloon, bloodied and bruised, and asked, "Okay, where's that old lady who needs her teeth cleaned?"
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Pauper -
Old Gumbo Bailey
Which I am tweaking to:
Ol' Gumbo Bailey
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Pauper -
As a returning player, I'll say I very much enjoyed the 'Shining Stars' arc blueside. When I found the Dr. Graves arc redside, my first thought was that it was largely a mirror of the Shining Stars arc and discounted it for that reason.
Playing through it again, though, I think my initial reaction was a mistake -- most of the characters in the redside arc seem better defined than their corresponding blueside NPCs and their dialogue, while being maybe a bit cliche'd in points, was more interesting on replay. Zephyr particularly had me in stitches with:
I'M
THE
FREAKIN'
WIND
DUDE
I'll nominate Dr. Graves for 'best quest-giver dialog' in all of CoX, not just redside. I feel as though I can hear his rattling, sarcasm-laced voice in my head when I play the arc. It's quite cool.
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Pauper -
If money were no object, and I was looking for a new Mac that would replace my current Mac and still be a good CoX machine, I'd do the following:
Head to apple.com and start with the 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.4 Ghz i7 processor ($2199):
- Bump the default installed RAM from 4Gb to 8 Gb (add $200)
- Swap the 750Gb SATA drive for a 512 Gb SSD (add $1100)
This configuration comes with an AMD (?) Radeon HD 6770M with 1Gb of VRAM (this is about as good as you're going to get, short of getting a MacPro tower and swapping out the video card for your own pick), so there should be few bottlenecks anywhere in the system. Of course, it's also $3500 for a laptop, and I'm sure some of the hobbyists here can find similar components on the DIY side for significantly less cash.
That said, from a practical perspective I'd probably just go with the default lesser-expensive build for the current 15" MacBook Pro -- I'm running CoX fairly nicely on my current 4-year old MacBook Pro, so I'd feel pretty comfortable going with the current MacBook Pro. -
I've noticed this behavior, too, but with an odd twist -- it's usually the mob with a speech who runs.
Seriously, I'm running along the road from the tram to Wentworth's in Steel Canyon with my Scrapper and busting Outcasts and Council. The guy who yelled out 'Beat this guy and you'll be somebody' and took off was pretty funny, but it started to get surreal when mobs were saying things like 'You're looking for a fight? You found one" and "Now I have to hurt you" while they were booking for the hills.
Anybody else noticed that connection, or is it just coincidence?