Rodion

Yes, I agree. The colors for someone viewing the casting of the power would only need to be loaded once.

However, the potential problem with depending on the costume definition is that when someone buffs a character with a recolored Fortitude, and then that character goes into another zone, someone observing that character would never have seen the caster and won't have the caster's costume definition loaded.

We already know that active buffs have the ID of the caster on them, so the devs could just load the costume definition of the caster. Which means they would potentially load a lot of data that you'd never use. Or they could optimize it and just send the power information for the active power. Or they could put the color information on the buff itself and never refer to the original character again.

Each of these ways of doing it increases the amount of data, and how they do it probably depends more on the way the rest of the software is written than any other consideration.

As with most software, their experience on live will tell them what, if anything, needs to be optimized. If most users have broadband this increase in data is a nit. But if they still want to support dialup they need to do some optimization. And always increasing the amount of data they're sending can eventually force them to upgrade their connection to the Internet (if we receive it they have to send it), so they'll want to keep the data transmission as lean as possible.

I would agree in general. But it really depends on the character you're playing.

Poirot may speak the way he does because he's only deigning to speak English. He may be pedantic and obnoxious, intentionally shoving his disdain for the English language into your face constantly.

In a text-only medium there are limited choices for conveying non-text cues such as an accent. You don't want the character to sound like an idiot (unless he is an idiot), so I would advocate using standard English most of the time, modifying usage on the edges to let people know where you're coming from.

As I said before: what matters more is what you say, not how you say it. Someone from another country and culture will have a particular viewpoint and historical perspective, and will have different reactions to the same situations. The best roleplaying will come out of that, and not phonying up some accent.

But, having played sports with non-native English speakers who are completely fluent in English, I've noticed that they will occasionally lapse into their native tongues when they are most frustrated.

So, while using Russian or French greetings might be a little over the top, saying the Hebrew equivalent of "Holy Crap!" when the team gets wiped is totally reasonable.

Obviously using other alphabets is solely for color. You don't want to say anything important if your team isn't going to understand it.

But transliterating into English doesn't increase the intelligibility of most foreign-language phrases. It will help for the very few Russian or Japanese phrases that people may know (Do svidaniya or Sayonara). But it doesn't even help English speakers pronounce them properly, because most transliterations apply a very specific set of rules that relate to the original language and not English.

For example, "Do svidaniya" (till we see each other) is the standard American transliteration of "До свидания." Most Americans would apply standard American pronunciation rules to the transliteration and come out with "Doe suh-vih-day-nee-yah." But the actual pronunciation is more like "duh svee-don-yuh."

Using other alphabets emphasizes the total unintelligibility of the utterance, and will often give a more true-to-form roleplaying experience. Just like comics that use Japanese with no translations and movies that have German soldiers speaking German with no subtitles. Or the extended sequences in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" where the only dialog is Arabic, Chinese or Martian. In those cases the point is that you don't understand them.

It's really the effect you're going after that matters. To me, transliteration is "wrong," like misspelling or using baby talk. If the other players aren't going to understand it anyway, it doesn't really matter what alphabet is used, as long as you use it sparingly and only for color.

I don't have any problems unless Death Shroud and Cloak of Darkness are on. Then I get bursts of graphics lag with each step I take. The wispy darkness powers cause the worst performance in the game on my display card.

The "suppressCloseFxDist 300" works great, by the way.

I find it hilarious when I'm at my last gasp and I use Consume, only to have all the mobs around me collapse from its meager damage.

To the OP: I noticed you six-slotted consume. If you're using IOs in your attacks you should be able to get away with only four slots (I favor Efficacy Adaptor because of its economy), though the +recharge bonus for six-slotting is rather nice. But I find it a more efficient use of slots to get the +recharge from Crushing Impact in my attacks. You'll need Consume a lot less if you use IO sets.

If you're having a hard time finding the influence to buy good recipes, run several MA arcs and spend the tickets on Bronze rolls. You'll likely get a few of the recipes you actually want, and you'll get others that will sell for a lot in the consignment house.

I meant resistance, because he can't really afford to be hit when resistance is debuffed. Since he has no defense, he's always going to be hit; he just has to make sure he can take the hits. You're right that -resistance attacks are relatively rare compared to defense debuffs, but when it happens you have to take quick action.

If you play MA arcs you'll run into more things that debuff resistance. Also, some villain groups (Howlers) can have extremely nasty -resist attacks.

Defense debuffs are so common that your defense is debuffed in practically every large mob that has a variety of attacks. Guns, swords, rad, Quicksand, etc., all can debuff defense. So a Fire tanker without any defense is going to be hit right away and is going to have debuffed defense a majority of the time after level 30 or so.

I've monitored defense on my fire tanker and it's often at -20 to -60 so much of the time that you just can't worry about it. You're not depending on defense to survive, so it doesn't matter what it is -- you're going to get hit, so you just have to soak it up.

On characters that are defense-based I monitor defense instead for the obvious reasons. I usually monitor last hit chance as well.

This is a completely reasonable thing to do. I've done the same thing on my Inv/SS tanker. Fly is just more convenient than SJ, and can be used in places (long low hallways) that SJ is just a pain to use.

Fly is sometimes more useful in combat. Sometimes a flier (Illusionist or drone) hovers out of your reach. Without something like Air Superiority or Hurl to knock the flier out of the air, Fly allows you to get at most anything without a lot of screwing around.

I did take SJ on my Fire/Fire tank, though; he hit 50 before I got the vet badge.

I have a Fire/Fire tank that isn't slotted for soft cap defense, doesn't have Weave or Hasten, and has numbers pretty close to what you have. I can solo 8x spawns of most (but not all) villain groups at +1 level. I do have 31% Hasten from IO set bonuses (from Crushing Impact, Doctored Wounds and Positron's Blast). I do use IOs, so I'll get better performance from my attacks, but you can slot relatively inexpensive sets that have great bonuses.

I have Greater Fire Sword instead of Burn at level 38 (took Burn at 50 and rarely use it), Incinerate at 35, and didn't bother with RotP because I rarely die. To be totally honest, Burn without some way to immobilize your targets is a waste of five slots.

Also, to be honest, you need to know what to do and when to do it when playing a fire tanker. If you're too slow to realize what's happening and take precautions, you can die very quickly.

You do have to use a lot of inspirations if you're soloing 8x spawns, but you get so many your supply is always replenished. You also need to be good at converting them to the ones you need (usually purples) on the fly. When you're level 40 you'll get another row of insps and it'll be a lot easier.

I recommend stacking your green insps above F1 and get used to quickly hitting F1 when you take a lot of damage (hit it multiple times if it's a whole lot). Do not use your mouse to click your heal insps; you'll be dead before you can even locate the cursor on the screen.

Monitor your smash resist stat. If it goes down you've been debuffed, and you should take a purple or two.

Teamed, you have to adopt a different strategy because you won't get as many insp drops. Lots of tanks are enamored of running around the map and herding several rooms. They apparently don't understand the aggro limit and are just wasting the team's time.

Rather than herd a huge area, I either rush each spawn with the team right behind me, or pull the spawn to a safe area if there's another spawn close by. As a person who plays a lot of non-tanks, I really appreciate the rush-in playstyle because waiting for the tank to herd a whole room is boring. I want non-stop action, not big bursts of activity interspersed with tedious waits for people to get rezzed and tanks to herd. The rush-in method lets you steamroll whole missions.

This also keeps you close to your team and lets you take advantage of their buffs, debuffs and heals. I've seen so many tanks (many non-fire tanks) die trying to herd an entire room it's not funny. You're on a team for a reason; let them help you.

Finally, because of the limits on AoE attacks, herding more than one or two spawns is mostly a waste of time. I think the maximum is 15 or so targets for an AoE, and many (such as cones) have a smaller limit (10 or so).

Yeah, I know it's matter of bravado for tanks to herd multiple spawns, but it's just bravado. It's safer for the team to take on one spawn at a time, because if you lose aggro for whatever reason, those five spawns are going to wipe your team.

Playing this way with a good team to back you up you can whip through eight-man missions at +2 or +3 difficulty as the lone tank and never break a sweat. I recently did this with my Fire/Ice tank and an eight-man team and had a great deal of fun. (Ice Patch and the Ice attacks slow down the mobs so that it's worth six-slotting Burn, by the way -- not perfect, but very decent damage.)

I'll join the chorus. Brutes need to be attacked a lot to build up Fury. A good duo partner for a brute is /Dark or /Rad because of the accuracy debuffs in those sets.

The acc debuffs allow the brute to be attacked constantly, but rarely get hit. Simply being attacked builds Fury; the attack doesn't have to connect to fill your Fury bar.

This points out one of the major problems in the design of the villain ATs. You have Brutes, whose damage output depends on rushing into everything and constantly getting attacked.

Then you have Dominators who stop the mobs from attacking the brutes. They, however, also need to keep attacking to build up domination. When a brute builds up a full steam of Fury and wants to go after the Big Boss, the dominator will often say, "Wait! I have to build up Domination first. Let me stand here and hold this minion a couple more times before you kill him so I can build enough Dom so I can hold the boss in one shot." Meanwhile the Brute's Fury is rapidly dwindling.

Then you have Stalkers who need to be Hidden to increase their damage, which means they often want to slow down, approach slowly, move in and attack from stealth.

Then you have Masterminds who have lots of aggro magnets in their pets, which can pull attacks away from the Brutes. They often have to stop and resummon killed pets, which often brings their end low, which means they want to wait.

Many of these problems can be ameliorated if players take the appropriate actions and build their character the right way. But on any random team you'll get a mix. Villains just don't play well together.

On the other hand, the hero ATs don't have these inherent tensions in the basic playstyles. There are some powersets that can interfere with other ATs (particularly AoEs with knockback and Tankers who need to maintain close contact with mobs for defense or debuffing reasons), or have a really slow pace that bogs everyone else down (/Devices blasters who insist on using Trip Mines all the time).

The only way this can be "fair" is if the identities of the authors are unknown to an impartial and knowledgeable jury that reviews the arcs. Fiction and poetry contests are usually judged by a panel of writers and editors who read manuscripts that do not have the names of the authors on them.

Public voting on these arcs would be anything but fair for exactly the same reasons: players are swayed just as much by prior associations as the devs are. It would actually be less fair because of the opportunity to buy votes with in-game influence and items. You don't have to buy many votes to force a win in something as small as this would probably be.

There are many kinds of poor performance that people call "lag." These include low frame rates from intense graphics, data transmission in excess of the capability of the computer's connection to the internet, poor performance due to transmission errors, high ping, etc., insufficient memory on the computer to run the game well, low CPU speed, etc.

When you say "lag" you should qualify the type of lag. You can quantify some of these numbers with the /netgraph and the /showfps commands, which show how much data is being transmitted and the ping time, and the number of frames per second.

You are quite correct in the assumption that more data is currently being transmitted -- it has to be because the color of powers is now changeable. And it's not just the powers as they're being cast, it's the powers as they affect other characters. Depending on how this was implemented, it could be very efficient -- sent once with the character definition -- or in the case of effects cast on other characters, it could be sent with each "pulse" of that power. Without seeing the data stream, I can't say how it's being done.

I can say, however, that I have noticed a definite increase in the amount of data being transmitted under certain circumstances. I have a friend who until recently used dialup. He was unable to use AE anymore. When I looked at this I found that after clicking PLAY for an MA arc my standing data rate went from 1K to 4-5K. Quitting the TF immediately restored the data rate to 1K.

I also noticed that simply inviting another player to the team raised the standing data rate from 1K to 2K. Disbanding the team lowers the rate to 1K.

Furthermore, I've also noticed a strange behavior that was introduced with I16 and may be related. When you click the arrow by the team window to see the buffs it displays the zone name for members who are in a different zone. This used to be a steady "Founders Falls" or "On Mission Map." Now it often switches rapidly back and forth between a zone like Founders Falls and "On Mission Map" when the team member is in fact just standing in Founders Falls.

My guess is that the increased data traffic I see when teamed is partly due to the transmission of this apparently erroneous data. I bugged this ten days ago, but I haven't seen anyone else mention this problem.

Unless you're using dialup or sharing your connection with another person, however, it seems unlikely that the performance hit you're seeing is due to this extra data. I would have never noticed it except that my friend's dialup connection become unusable with I16.

Rendering accents in a text-only medium is difficult without making the character (and the player) look like a fool. "Ahm jest an ole suthun gennelmun" may be completely incomprehensible to many players. An occasional bow to a characteristic pronunciation is fine, but what you say is more important than how you say it.

A better choice is to use standard orthography, but to employ usage patterns of the dialect. Vocabulary choices and sentence structure are the best way to show English dialects in text. Slang, regional idioms and characteristic exclamations add color and can immediately identify a person's origin: a single word or phrase like "Bollocks!", "bloody fool," "stupid git," "G'day, mates!", "Damn Yankee!", etc., can often tell you exactly where someone is from.

Then there are words that are just different for different regions: outside North American the trunk of a car is a boot, the hood is the bonnet, etc. Not that we have the opportunity to discuss cars in the game, but you get the general idea.

The easiest way to indicate non-English accents is to slip in an occasional foreign word, greeting or exclamation, or use a pattern of usage consistent with the character's native language. For example, Russian speakers often omit articles when speaking English because Russian doesn't use them. French uses different rules for articles, and French speakers may use them where English doesn't.

Your foreign character can say, "guten abend," "bon soir," or "dobry vecher" when you join a team and "tschüss!" (or "tschüß"), "adieu!" or "poka!" when you leave. Your Russian character can say, "bozhe moy!" in abject horror, or "molodets!" in congratulations.

If you're more industrious, you can actually enter Cyrillic text in /macro buttons and have your character speak Russian. "Боже мой!" looks so much more impressive than "bozhe moy!" I've got one character with a tray full of Russian exclamations for all occasions. The best way to do this is to type the text in another editor, then copy and paste into CoH. Feel free to PM me if you need some help.

Maybe someone else mentioned this, but perhaps +Defense buffs are given out so freely on IO set bonuses is that there are so many Defense debuffs in the game.

I regularly monitor important stats with the Real Numbers monitor, and started watching defense recently. I noticed that many enemy groups have at least one mob with some kind of Defense debuff attack: defense goes down when you fight Crey, CoT, Arachnos, Council, and so on.

Guns, swords, radiation, Quicksand, etc., all debuff defense. Several of the defense debuffs also require no to hit (Quicksand, Radiation Infection). There are damage resistance debuffs out there (sonics, tar patch, Enervating Field), but they are less frequent. They are also very nasty when used against characters with no damage resistance, so they tend to be less prevalent.

While it's true that someone with soft-capped defense is hard to hit in the first place, you just need one lucky hit (or Quicksand or RI) to start a terrible defense cascade failure. Characters that depend on defense alone can die very quickly.

I'm not saying that there isn't an imbalance between Defense and Damage Resistance as it stands now, but it's easy to see how the devs could justify giving out lots of Defense bonuses considering how many Defense debuffs there are.

A lot of the respondents are giving you advice that you won't be able to use for 16 more levels. I'll be a little more immediate and practical.

Because Shadow Maul and Sands of Mu are slow, they're best used when you can get more than one target at a time. I've found the best way to use any melee cone is to evaluate the placement of the mobs, then approach from a direction that maximizes the number you'll hit. Targeting a mob in the back and then interposing others (as another poster suggested) is a good way of doing this.

If you're solo, pulling mobs around a corner or into a narrow space is a very good way to get them to bunch up into a small area so that you can affect the maximum number of mobs with your cones. When I first started playing my DM/DA scrapper I would attack one opponent in a group, then run between a dumpster and a building. The rest would follow me behind the dumpster and would all line themselves up for the cone.

Most of the time you should be able to get at least two mobs at a time with melee cone powers. If not, you need to dance around a bit and get them to move so that you can target them. With experience you learn to do this efficiently and automatically, and you barely notice you're doing it. Most of the time you can take a single step left or right and accomplish this. Since a lot of power sets have melee cones, it's a skill that's applicable to other characters as well.

You should also make sure that you have enough accuracy on your melee cone powers so that they don't miss. At level 17 you should probably have two level 20 acc DOs, or a level 15 and a level 20 Acc IO. I always go with the IOs these days; they're not that much more expensive to make or buy (you can often get them for DO prices on the market, especially damage IOs because they use readily available salvage). And they never wear out, so they're cheaper in the medium run than DOs and SOs.

Among the secondaries, WP arguably has the best Tier 9 and self-rez powers.

However, the self-rez powers only work if you get yourself killed. Unless you care about getting the debt badge, you should be able to survive pretty much anything as a WP scrapper after level 30 if you're careful to judge the strength of your opposition and are very quick to use inspirations (especially greens and purples) when you sense the tide is turning against you.

I have a level 35 MA/WP scrapper and she's got a grand total of 4,320 debt. That's less than 10% of the 50,000 needed for the first Debt badge. According to Paragonwiki that's less than one defeat at level 26. Which means she's only been defeated only a very few times.

Given that sort of performance, having a power that you'll use only a few times on the trip from 35 to 50 seems like a total waste.

For reference, Mids lists Short Circuit as having base -35% end drain, Transference: -55%, Power Sink: -41%.

By itself Short Circuit is inadequate for draining a group of end enough to prevent them from attacking you. I had a Storm/Electric Blast and gave up on the drain aspect. Minions are usually dead before you can use Short Circuit a second time. Minions and LTs don't have enough attacks that use enough End to be be totally successul at mitigating damage with Short Circuit alone.

If you combine Short Circuit with Power Sink from the Electricity Mastery epic pool, you have a much more effective combo. But I didn't really enjoy much success with the two as an opening move solo, even with Steamy Mist and a +Stealth IO.

If you have a tank to coalesce the mobs and take the aggro for you, the combination of the two can pretty much keep a large group from doing anything, enough to be almost as good as a hold. But by itself Short Circuit just doesn't hack it.

Transference is a really good power, but it only drains a single target. With it alone Kin defenders can often keep bosses and EBs drained enough to mitigate a decent amount of damage. If you combine that with Short Circuit you can probably keep bosses and even EBs drained enough to prevent them from doing much of anything.

I like using the End Mod IO sets (Efficacy Adaptor) because they have some pretty decent bonuses and are fairly cheap. If you use Siphon Speed and/or Hasten you can get a huge amount of recharge and can use slots for other purposes.

Arthur is the sidekick of The Tick.

Hey, the devs explained exactly what happened in a public forum. They're not hiding anything. They can and did explain why it happened to some players and not others. It just depended on what happened to be in the uninitialized variable. They couldn't predict which players it would affect, which was why it was so hard to track down.

For example, in the following code:

the assignment in line 4 will cause most compilers to flag a warning to the effect that the variable "a" was used without being initialized. Similarly, the call in line 3 should also generate the same warning (this is basically the situation described by the devs).

My copy of the Microsoft C compiler correctly flags the error on line 4, but lets the call on line 3 go by without a warning even on the maximum warning level.

The devs working on this code now probably didn't write the original code that had the problem, and probably didn't select the suite of tools used to develop the code.

The lesson I take away from this is that a huge project like this should be run through a hyper-sensitive version of LINT on a regular basis to catch bugs like this.

There's only one contact between levels 1 and 5. If you've made one character of each origin, you've run all the content there is at that level. There's also a fair amount of overlap in the missions for the low-level contacts. You're not missing anything if you skip that content.

Several of the arcs also include street hunts. At those levels just a few mobs will level you. These days, if you prevent Hellions from dealing drugs and harassing citizens on the way to and from your missions, you will level up several times on the street.

At level 5 you're eligible for the jet pack. You need to do three radio missions and the Atlas Bank mission to get that. By the time you're done with those four missions you're probably level 7-9.

There's only one contact per origin between levels 5 and 10. The first mission for all those contacts is to go the Hollows. If you do the Hollows missions you are level 12-15 when you're done, and you've outleveled the contact that sent you to see Wincott.

Ditto for levels 10-15. If you do the missions you need to get the contact for the Spelunker badge (required for an accolade), you're usually level 15 and have outleveled all the content again, unless you happened to be Magic origin, in which case you may have time for part of another arc before you outlevel the contacts.

Again, if you do radio missions and the bank mission for the temp power you've made another level or two. In fact, all the temp powers for the bank missions for levels 5-24 are extremely useful.

Your level 15 contact will usually send you to Faultline, and if you do those arcs you're level 25 before you know it.

The content that most people are missing due to steamrolling in the Sewers and farming AE are the level 1-20 arcs that came out in issue 1. Those missions involve a lot of street hunts and running around all over town. Once you've done them two or three times, there's no need to do them again. I find the Hollows and Faultline arcs more interesting and rewarding, especially with the revamp of the Hollows and the availability of the jet pack.

I prefer doing radio missions and bank missions for the temp powers that help you be more effective. But much of the level 1-20 original content is similar and eminently skippable, so I can certainly understand why someone would prefer to do AE missions for tickets and the sake of variety. And I also find it fun to steamroll through mobs on a big team. You hardly even notice the levels go by.

The only thing I don't get is why everyone is so obsessed with leveling up so fast. The low levels just zip by in a couple of hours. There's really no need to PL through them door-sitting. Even before AE and the latest changes you could easily get to level 20 and stamina in a few hours without PLing.

The term "lag" is so general as to be almost completely meaningless. I and many other players have no problems with "lag." Instead of simply complaining about "lag" you should analyze the type of performance problems you have and take steps to remedy them.

Have you tried adjusting the graphics options downward? Turned off getting status information about other players? Have you rebooted Windows recently?

Are you experiencing low frame rates? If so, you should consider upgrading your graphics card, or updating to the newest graphics driver.

How much RAM does your computer have? A couple of gigabytes are really required for smooth operation. Similarly, what's your CPU clock speed? A 2GHz dual core is almost a minimum requirement.

Do you have a slow Internet connection (dialup, perhaps)? If so, you should consider upgrading to cable modem or DSL, or possibly mobile broadband if you don't have hard-wired connections in your area. The game seems to be constantly transmitting 5K of data pretty much any time you're teamed now, and if you're in a crowded area it will spike much higher. A Rikti invasion will easily send a constant stream of more than 10-20K.

Are you experiencing high ping times due to transmission errors? If so, you may need to have a tech look at your setup and determine whether you have a flaky connection between your computer and the Internet.

Is your ISP reliable? Some ISPs can have weird problems with routers that can manifest as transmission errors. Talk your ISP and see if they can help.

Your DSL/cable modem may have outdated firmware. Your modem may be infected with a worm, or be in a funky state. You should try reinitializing the modem and installing the latest release of drivers and firmware.

Finally, there are known issues with connecting to certain CoH servers that manifest as transmission errors. This appears to be related to network connectivity and routing. The techs at NCsoft may be able to help identify your problems.

Demands from players and competition with other games with fancy graphics options force NCsoft to constantly add new features. Those features place higher demands on your computer memory, graphics hardware and Internet connection.

For their part, NCsoft should reexamine the hardware requirements for the game and state what is currently required for full enjoyment of all the new features.

I have a friend who used dialup until recently, and it appears that the SSK system, running AE missions and customized powers all significantly increase the amount of status data being transmitted on an ongoing basis. We have noticed a doubling or tripling of the standing data rate (2-3K increase) when teaming and starting AE arcs.

This is most definitely in the server code.

A "local variable" is a variable declared inside a function, as opposed to global variables that can be accessed by all functions (assuming this is written in C/C++).

By default, local variables are not initialized to anything: they have whatever values were in the memory assigned to them before the function was called. Local variables are "on the stack."

That means that previous functions that were called set the value of the variable's memory to some value. If the sequence of function calls changed, or additional local variables were added to some of the functions previously called, then the value that the uninitialized variable has now could very well be different from what it used to have. It may have always had the same value in the past, due to some fortunate accident, and now it essentially has a random value.

I actually nailed the cause of this, but can't really claim credit because I listed several other possible causes as well: