Radiac

I never actually said mine, lolz. Here goes:

My newest toon, the undead gunslinger Tin Star Jonny Ozark wears the "Man of Vengeance" badge, which I alluded to.

My Peacebringer is the aforementioned "space guy". He's all human, and all of his costumes are very "space", (can't wait for the "spaceman" costume stuff to roll out...) he wears "Rocketman, as I said.

My fire blaster is a calliente south american gurl with red and yellow bird wings and a bikini, so for her I decided on "Dance Legend" which is the exploration badge at the door of the old dance club in Steel Canyon. I feel like she'd be popular in the dance floor pretty much any place.

My main, Radiac, is a rad/rad def and is still not really wearing a badge that I feel fits his backstory in any really significant way and I'm still looking. Is there a "Radioactive" badge? I don't even know, I'll have to look.

My stone tanker, Mud Marine, is a military dude with Stone/stone sets, a camo outfit, has a trademark cigar-and-mirrored-sunglasses combo, and wears "Battle-Hardened" as his moniker, but I still haven't found a dadge I like that fits as well as that title does. His backstory is somewhat Rikti related, so I generally use Vanguardy stuff, but I switch back and forth.

While playing last night someone asked me how I had gotten the badge I was "wearing" at the time, and I told them it was just a random Exploration badge I had picked up that sounded good for the toon I was playing. This made me think about badges again for the first time in a long time.

When they were first rolled out I thought they were to some extent pointless, then I heard about Accolades and the Accolade powers, which made more sense. Later it occurred to me that some badges that are harder to get do, in some way, identify you as more of a "pro" if you have them (like wearing the 5 year Veteran badge for instance). Some are so hard to get that they're somewhat rare anymore to the point that people wouldn't know what you had to go through to get them, like "Charmer", which sounds like something out of the Spring Fling event set, but is actually the successful completion badge for doing the Abandoned Sewer Trial. That trial is not easy to do, hard to get a team for, and most people have never heard of it because there's no really obvious in-game mechanic that points you to it, as far as I know. It's just one of those things that you either know about from 5 years ago when it was "hot" or you don't because you're new. Later on it occurred to me the it would make some of my toons more "flavory" if I just always wore a badge that seemed to fit them well.

I remember long ago waking up early on a Saturday morning once or twice just so I could solo rocket launches in Warburg to get the "Rocketman" badge for my one "space guy" toon. For the most part, I only did that because I felt at the time that "Rocketman" was like the PERFECT badge for that character to have. Then I later noticed that they made "Rocketman" a Goldbricker minion name or something (I don't play redside a lot). In reality, the one exploration badge I was wearing on my other toon last night might just be the perfect badge for him as well, and I basically got it by accident. He's a wild westy undead gunslinger with Pistols/dark sets and and the badge in question is "Man of Vengeance", which seems to fit him well, because why is he dead but still walking the Earth meting out justice? Because he's a Man of Vengeance, that's why.

So, I ask you, what's the perfect badge for your character, and why? Is it obvious by looking at the toon, or is it to do with details you'd only know from reading the info?

On this subject, I remember when I "went active again" in October, there was the Halloween event stuff going on, which included the one tip mission you could get only during Halloween (the one where you rescue the Malleus Mundi from Libris Vermis, then at the end you get a menu of what to do with it). Are there any more tips like that one that only drop at certain times of year? A winter one would have been cool, but I don't think such a thing exists.

Come on, it's obviously Flambeaux.

In all seriousness though, I was hoping for the Back Alley Brawler to get his own TF some day. He looks so lonely in that unused corner of Atlas Park, he was the level up contact in the "wrong" starting zone, etc. Of course, if there were a BAB TF, I would want/expect it to be more "War on Drugs/Regulators" centric anyway, in keeping with his backstory.

If I had to wager influence on it, though, I'd go with Hero 1. I mean, how you define "minor character" is somewhat vague, he has been the central figure in a lot of in-game stuff, but not as a hero. He's also an Incarnate, so "minor" I don't know about, but he's still my odds-on favorite. He fits the bill. Again, you'd hope if there were a Hero 1 TF that it would fit his backstory and be about the Rikti, but then there's already the Lady Gray TF for that, so what else you gunna do with him?

(checks paragon wiki...)

Ok, the Miracle +Recovery proc and friends don't work like I thought they did *facepalm*, sorry about that. At least the LotGs are still the way I thought they were. On the plus side, now I know what to do with my unslotters....

Some thoughts, and this is just my personal opinions, your mileage may vary:

1. I don't have the Fighting pool on my Stone/Stone tanker and as of yet I haven't really felt like I needed it. That said I don't PVP at all and don't play with my difficulty settings cranked up to the max either. When I solo it's generally to do Tip missions for Hero Merits, so I want to go fast and get them done quickly. When I do team up, I haven't noticed any real "squishyness" problems when tanking the AVs I have tanked.

2. I personally don't believe in 5 slotting Stamina just to put 5 Performance Shifter set pieces in it, but I'd definitely still put the "chance for +endo" proc in there. My slotting for Stamina is just 2 Perf Shifters, the pure endMod one and the proc, I also have that pair in Physical Perfection for the movement increases.

3. I took the Teleport pool instead of Super Jump because I feel like I can always buy a jetpack for getting around (I actually have the Rocket Board too...) and you can use TP during combat with Granite and Rooted on. That said, you can't slot a LotG +Recharge into TP or Recall Friend, but I still get my 5 out of Granite Armor, Maneuvers, Vengeance, Rock Armor, and Minerals. The TP and Recall powers can be slottted with Zephyr KB Protection pieces for when you're not Rooted (running around a mission map in stealth mode for instance).

4. I'd put the "big three" Heal set uniques in Physical Perfection. These are Miracle +Recovery, Numina's Convolescence +Recovery +Regen, and Regenerative Tissue +Regen. Putting these in Physical Perfection is better than putting them in Health. A generic Heal IO slotted in Health does more for you than the same Heal IO in Physical Perfection would do. The same is true of EndMod IOs in Stamina. Thus I put all the various uniques in Physical Perfection and then slot Heath and Stamina with some sets and some Generic IOs so that they can be slotted to do what they do best. I think the max for Stamina is two level 50 Generic EndMod IOs, the PerfSftr EndMod and the PerfShftr Chance for +Endo proc.

5. Personally I hate Mud Pots and don't even use it. Admittedly, it's not always easy for me to keep mobs of bad guys in melee combat all the time.

6. In my opinion, if you've got Combat Jumping, you want to leave it with 1 slot and put the LotG global in it and be done. I don't know if you can put a Zephyr +4 KB protection piece in this but if you can, maybe leave it 2 slotted for that then.

7. If you're sticking with Super Jump, and you have the infl, I'd put a Zephyr +4 KB protection piece in it. The Zephyrs are expensive, I know, and most people would assume they're really only needed in PVP, but I find that when trying to stealth a mission you sometimes get like Rikti Drones or Nemesis snipers who can see you and shoot you with KB guns that can make life miserable. Plus its good to have when soloing if you don't want to turn Rooted on.

8. You could switch Focused Accuracy to Tactics from the Leadership pool which would allow you to take Vengeance, if you can make room for it. I think Tactics is better than Focused Accuracy in that it helps your teammates (useful at the end of the Underground trial for one thing). Venge can take a LotG +Recharge.

9. Maneuvers: see above, Combat Jumping. I like it with 1 slot. Slotting this up only makes you want to toggle it on, which with the Granite and the Rooted and the self heal you have is probably not a worthwhile use of slots in a build or endo during combat.

10. I left a total of 2 slots in Taunt and put 2 Mocking Beratement set pieces in it for the +Max Endo effect. I don't know if this is seriously affecting my ability to hold aggro or not. Teammates haven't complained at all....

I'm taking a wait and see approach to the AMD drivers version 11.12/12.1 thing that just came out. My rig is brand spanking new, and I do mean spanking, it's got an I7 processor, Asus Sabertooth X58 mobo, 240G SSD (CoH on the SSD, along with Windows 7), Radeon 6990 dual GPU vid card (one card with two GPUs on it, not two cards bridged together). And with 11.9 it was fine, with 11.11 it crashed about once per hour. Running Norton 360. Running CoH in ultra mode. I only use one monitor, so I don't care about Hydravision or whatever it is, and I only have one vid card (albeit a total hotrod vid card, but just one of them) so I don't know what, if anything there is to be gained by updating to 11.12 or 12.1. I doubt any new drivers could make the game look any better than it does right now with 11.9, and it's pretty fluid too, I just need it to do that AND be stable, which it currently is. My thinking is, if it ain't broke, don't "fix" it.

When I was in grad school (Physics) we used to go to Denny's late to unwind sometimes, and of course we talked about what we all had in common (Physics). We got a lot of the same funny looks you were probably giving those guys. Let me ask you this: what SHOULD people talk about in restaurants? For that matter, how can there be anything that people "should" talk about at restaurants late at night? If they were discussing Survivor or Lost is that any better? Isn't it all arbirtary?