Retrogression

That Obso-1337 robot is funny! Great pic/bio.

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Who could possibly be trusted to have such permissions for BOTH sides?

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Malaise?

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Oh please! Even if not a trainer... put Malaise in Pocket D?

I miss Malaise...

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Story in a nutshell:
Trick Arrow used to have 4 Targeted AoE powers. That made using the set incredibly difficult (although, it was pretty cool.) During the test period, we decided to change 2 powers to standard AoE attacks. Poison Gas Arrow was one of them.

Originally, Poison Gas Arrow would leave a large pool of gas that lasted almost a minute. Any critter entering the gas cloud would be debuffed and a small chance of being put to sleep every quarter of a second. When we changed it to a normal AoE, though, the chance to sleep was left at it's original level. While that was fine for a power activating 4 times a second, for a one shot chance, it was patheticly (sp?) low.

So, I increased the sleep chance to a 'better' value. It's still not 100% of the time, but you should get between 50% and 66% of minions when it lands.

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Can you start making the debuffs better and not the holds? Defenders need improvement in this power set more than controllers. At least consider it!

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hehehe... Romin' Hands... cute.

I changed mine to an animated one.. my FIRST animated Avatar that I made myself! YAY ME!

>.>

Now how long until I get modded for it...

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yay! did you use my guide ?

Step 1: install GIMP

First, download and install the GIMP.

http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

The first two "download" links on that page are what you need. Download each. Open the zip files and click the installers within till they launch. Follow directions.

You now have a free graphics program. It is easier to use than Photoshop for a beginner but it is still not what one would call easy. But not really difficult either.

If it keeps saying "no disk in drive" that's a bug. Just hit "continue" whenever it shows up. Annoying, but it's a free program and it's really meant to be run in Linux. If you already have Linux, you don't need my help to install GIMP


Step 2: make the heart jpgs

Use this site and save the jpg files to your hard drive.

http://www.acme.com/heartmaker/

right click on the heart graphic and choose save. Save each one with a different name that you will recognize.

Step three: make the graphic with layers

Open your GIMP program and you will see various windows open up. One of them says "The GIMP" at the top with menus under it (File, Xtns, Help). Choose the file menu and the Open command and open all the heart files you want to animate together.

Pick one of them to be your animated image. For each of the others in order, choose it, on its window go to the Select menu, choose Select All. Then from the Edit menu choose Copy. Then go to your animated image and choose Paste. Open the Layers window (from The GIMP, File, Dialogs, Layers). You will see the pasted image, probably at the top. Right click on it and choose "new layer" and it will become a separate layer.

Repeat above steps as needed.


Step four: make the animation

Go to the Script-Fu menu on your picture with all the layers in it. you will see ScriptFu as one of the menus, I promise. Under it choose Animators/blend.

Now go to the File menu ON the picture. Choose "save as" and type in a file name ending with .gif (be sure to delete the .jpg on the existing name). You will be given options: choose "save as animation" and "save as indexed" as your options. Then click the Export button.

You are done.

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How I made my animated logo:

- Installed the latest GIMP for windows
- put the different hearts to animate in different layers
- under ScriptFu/Animation picked "blend"
- saved result as animated indexed gif

too simple

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Ermm... yeah, could you make a guide about how to do that, or maybe PM it to me... Just... talk to me as if I had no idea what a GIMP was, or what this "gif" thing is you're talking about. Because, odds are.. I don't >.<

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Oh thank goodness, I thought it was just me. What is 'scriptfu'? Almost sounds bannable, doesn't it...

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OK, making a guide. I'm not an experienced graphics anything so my guide will be very simplistic. But it is up, over in Guides section.

How I made my animated logo:

- Installed the latest GIMP for windows
- put the different hearts to animate in different layers
- under ScriptFu/Animation picked "blend"
- saved result as animated indexed gif

too simple

I'm getting on the bandwagon temporarily with my sonic bubble avatar. Cover your eyes if you're prone to headaches. I'll nerf it soon

The bosses in the PvP missions in warburg are particularly tough, I agree. There's a Crab spider guy in the rescue mission and a Fortunata type (is that the blood widow)? in the clickie type I've done... I did quite a few of these with Pantha (nearly half of level 36) on Rugged, which is the setting she's always on.

The Fortunata bosses are the tougher of the two for her to take on. Their damage is undefendable to her except by use of the Wedding Ring and inspirations (though she can do it with those). The Crab bosses are easier for her but still difficult (often takes as many as 6-8 inspirations).

I never buy inspirations so the ones I use are ones I got from fighting the minions in the mission, whatever they happened to be. Damage, accuracy, defense, resist, and heal insps (red, yellow, purple, orange, and green pills) all help. Pantha has no need for breakfrees (lavender) and very little for catch a breaths (blue) -- I never respec'd her for ED so she has stamina 5 slotted Pantha is now level 37 and is my 2nd highest character in the game.

The wedding ring is VERY helpful vs both Crab and Fortunata bosses, and if I use it I might get by without any inspiration use (or just one).

how about this solution:

make all attacks do a random attack / damage type in pvp.

might be smash, might be lethal, might be cold, whatever.

Current Heroes on Champion:
Retrogression, 44 kinetic/rad-blast defender
Gamma Radiant, 35 radiation/psych-blast defender
Kung Fooey, 32 dark/regen scrapper
20somethings:
Crystal Siren, storm/dark-blast defender
Cruarch, fire/fire tank
Photon Phreak, illusion/forcefield controller
Under20s:
Katt A Ract, ice/empathy controller
Moraine, stone/ice-melee tank

Current Villains on Champion:
Retrograde, 27 sonic-blast/kinetic corrupter
Mercurial, 14 energy-melee/inv brute
Countess de Winter, 4 ice-blast/cold corrupter

Is Radiation Aim still only 6 seconds? or is it 10 like all the other aims finally?

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I mean really, a %7.5 chance to hit for an AV?????? Thats a joke.

Am I completely missing something here?

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You're missing that debuffs are serious business in CoH. That's the reason people keep saying "you don't need much healing if you have enough debuffs." The AV doesn't have a 7.5 % chance to hit you, but it can be reduced to that with enough debuffs. Course, if it lands a hold on one of the debuffers, that springs right back up again.

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why dont they limit the amount of one buff someone can have on them at one time? i think it is truely sad when im teaming with 3 friends where 2 of them are empaths and they can stack so much CM on my other friend (around 24 clear minds at one time)

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Most buffs are limited to one per caster. Clear mind is one of the very few that stack from the same caster. 12 though -- that means 2 casters are basically doing nothing but standing there giving one guy clear mind -- not the usual scenario. But they might end up limiting clear mind to not stack from the same caster anymore, like most buffs. (EG fortitude... increase density... o2 boost... forcefield single target buffs... fire shields.. ice shields.. sonic shields... accelerate metabolism -- there are almost NO other stackable single target or personal aoe pure buffs from the same caster. Pure buffs = buff powers with no debuff component)

I recently found my Quality Control Statistics textbook from a class I taught once, and I'm thinking I can try applying the techniques it contains to see if the hit/miss is appropriately random.

But I don't have HeroStats. Any recommendations as to how to get appropriate input for this process?

It'd be nice if I could get the game to log the calculated expected percentage to hit for each attack. I wonder if that's in the logs Cryptic keeps? it'd be meaningless to most players but they could put in an option for something like "verbose logging" hmm...

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I see absolutely no reason to have this fixed for one set of NPCs and not the other.

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One would assume it's because different code sets control "citizen" NPC AI as opposed to mob NPC AI.

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It actually makes perfect sense to me even without the technical reasons explanation.

1) the ones who are supposed to fight alongside you, you have to be able to fight alongside. You can't fight without Hide as a stalker, and the enemies are balanced assuming you have the assistance, so they had to fix them to see you and help even when you're Hidden. Not to mention the ones who give you stealth themselves with Shadowfall or Steamy Mist.

2) the hostages don't help you and don't need to fight alongside you. You are meant to clear to them and then lead them out. Sure you might get ambushed, but you can hide, kill the ambush, then uncloak and finish leading the hostage out. Much more reasonable.

It does not really make sense that you could keep hold of the hostage during a fight if your fighting style involves striking from shadows anyway. They'd give you away with a muffled warning or something to your enemies. Better to let them go then find them again after you clean up the ambush

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Why is WoW or Lineage doing so much better?

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Just what you said.. except for one more thing. Mass apeal. The generic fantasy play is something alot of people will go for.

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I think superheroes actually have a larger mass appeal than generic fantasy. At least good superhero movies generally do just as well as good fantasy movies and bad superhero movies do better than bad fantasy movies.

But it's true that Blizzard has a large fan following. I even like Blizzard games other than WoW. I think though that it's something else, and the whole "hasn't launched in Asia yet" thing -- well why not? NCSoft's Asia marketing doesn't know how to market CoH yet I guess?

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Why would you want anything other than level 50's in your SG then?

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So you could have heroes who were out heroing in your SG, instead of fancy nametags, the players of which are busy leveling up a few villains?

I mean, level 30somethings or 40somethings are likelier to be online playing and contributing. Even if a level 50 made double the prestige, the fact that they aren't making experience for any useful thing is going to make them less likely to be playing and more likely to be on an alt.

I don't think it makes sense for level 50s to get double the prestige though.

How about double the salvage instead? then they can work on crafting or how about letting level 50s get some Influence as well as Prestige, since they get no xp?

Caliban seems to be from Regenerator badge (troll achievement badge).

Cog seems to be from Gearsmasher.

Omega Wolf seems to be from the Silver Bullet badge. (or possibly atlas medallion)

Behemoth Overlord is probably from Baphomet slaying.

Boulder I will guess is from the Eden trial.

I can't be sure about the Abomination... maybe from Adamastor?

Nemesis is another questionable one - it's a Lancer though. Not a "Nemesis soldier" or an Automaton. Maybe from a mission badge?

what about making sure Villains who own both games get the hero only items (pointy ears, shoulder kitties, certain patterns, certain faces)? Or is the absence of those from villains a bug in beta?

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-Maiden Justice is Monica Richter. Her daughter is Miss Liberty who was born in the late 40's. (Statesman and Maiden Justice waited until later in their careers to have children.) Her granddaughter is Ms. Liberty who was born in the early 80's.

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So uh... this means that Tyrant is Dominatrix's grandfather too, right?

Ew.

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No - Dominatrix's mother was a hero - according to her bio named "Miss Liberty" - so it is unlikely that her mother's father was the Tyrant. Probably Miss Liberty-of-Praetorian-Earth's father was some other hero who is a villain in the regular CoH world... my first guess was Lord Recluse but he can't be as he is probably Miss Liberty's mom's brother in that world too? Or maybe it's in Praetorian Earth that Maria Jenkins got the name Maiden Justice first, accounting for the bio error. Whereas in real Earth Monica Richter got it first so Maria had to settle for her 2nd choice.

Could the Jenkins from CoV tutorial be Maria's descendant? hmm...

The thing I don't get about Defense buffs is that sometimes you consider them equivalent to double their value in Resistance -- you give a 10% defense buff and consider it equal to a 20% Damage Resist buff; and other times you consider Resist buffs to be four times as powerful as defense -- you give a 5% Damage Resist insp and consider it equivalent to a 20% Defense inspiration.

To players, though, they're about equivalent - though situationally variable. 20% resist and 20% defense feel about equal. Resist helps you more when you're fighting purples who discount your defense by a lot; defense counts more when fighting whites with a lot of status effects that could turn off your toggle buffs.

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Good move Statesman!

Could we at least get your view on Steamy mist, Shadowfall and the other defender powers left in the cold?

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I would also really like to see the steamy mist and shadowfall powers addressed, as powers that grant defense.

I think the winning costume is great, very suitable to the origin. And the origin is also really interesting.

Congrats to the winner and good job Manticore on spotting an opportunity for a hint

I play X hours a week for over a year, and I don't have a level 50.

And it's for the reasons outlined above.

Though, 40-50 isn't just Peregrine Island. There's also Shadow Shard. And Rikti Crash Site. And all the other dimensions you go to.

But the distance between getting new powers gets MUCH longer. I have to space out my playing my higher level heroes with a lot of playing low levels. And my value of X is around... 15-20? I'd estimate my graph of characters/level is something like:

level 1-10: 20? no idea.
level 10-20: 7 (current) + 3 (deleted) = 10
level 20-30: 5
level 30-40: 3
level 40-50: 1