Rodion

I've been playing a Kinetics/Sonic defender and a Fire/Pain corruptor off and on in the past couple months. Sonic Blast has a lot of useful tools for a solo Kinetics defender -- slept mobs don't wake up when you use Siphon powers or Fulcrum Shift on them.

/Pain is a lot like Empathy, with a little more offense and a different kind of self-buff. It's fine, but I favor debuffing over buffing power sets; I've already played nearly everything else, Pain is one of the last few left to try.

New Dawn had Phalanx Fighting set to three allies. You had it set to zero. You get similar numbers if you increase the ally count to 3.

I notice that you didn't include Grant Cover. That gives a good chunk of your defense debuff resistance, so you might reconsider taking it.

Yep. You will be much happier if you never read the forums and just play the game. Monitor the devs' posts and avoid threads with lots of responses, most of which will be people posting ad-hominem attacks.

At 1920x1080 your GPU is moving a lot of pixels around, so if you don't mind the grainier image at a lower 16x9 resolution it may give you better performance.

I recently upgraded monitors, and although I use 1920x1080 now, it definitely does many things more slowly (side-to-side scrolling has obvious artifacts), but it's not enough to turn down the resolution again. The native resolution is less glitchy in other ways (starting and ending the game, and alt-tabbing to other apps) that I'll just live with the poorer sideways scrolling, as I don't suffer graphics lag in general.

It depends on how and who you're playing with, but I'd agree that the 30s are slower than the 40s, in large part because in your 40s you're more often on fully powered teams that can steamroll content like the ITF. The team's DPS (and XP) will be much higher, especially if you're playing with 50s who have incarnate powers. A character in the low 40s can get a couple of levels in a single ITF, which a level 31 character will have a hard time matching unless they're PLing.

Since each charge gives you half a level of patrol XP, make sure all the charges are gone by the time you're level 50. Also, use it at the beginning of a long play session; if you use it at the end and then don't come back to the character for a week, you've "wasted" it.

If you're soloing or running your own missions with small teams at normal difficulty, it probably doesn't matter. Use it when you feel impatient for the next level.

The next person in line of succession in the SG would become supreme leader. You would still be a member, but would have no access to your base.

As long as you don't join another SG your original SG will remain intact and when you return to your original alignment you would be able to enter your base again. If you were the only member, you would regain supreme leader status.

Go to the beta server and street sweep in the new Dark Astoria. It works just like street sweeping in every other part of the city. You get iXP toward both Judgment and Interface incarnate slots once Alpha is opened. It's not particular fast leveling compared to a trial, but in a trial you're fighting tons and tons of level 54 bosses and EBs.

Once you've got your level shifts, level 50 mobs con gray on the street. It's like being level "53" all the time, not just inside a trial.

The Incarnate system in this case, for all intents and purposes, is the same as adding three extra levels. So it would seem unlikely that the devs would create a second parallel advancement track that gives the same kinds of rewards.

The F2P/premium offering for CoH is essentially the game that we all played prior to the market and IOs. In that game advancement stopped at 50. If players feel the need to continue advancing past 50 they can simply create a new character and try something new. That's what many veteran players have been doing all this time.

The core of the microtransaction model is that all new features pay for themselves directly either through subscriptions or purchases on the market. If the devs were to add additional advancement after 50 that wasn't incarnate, it certainly wouldn't be free.

A more likely development would be a monthly "Incarnate" license, making the game more a la carte, or allow premium players to purchase each Incarnate slot for a point cost.

Have you ever done any software development? Even the most trivial change to a program requires coding changes. In a system with client and server components, it's even more complex because you have to make sure changes work properly on two or more platforms.

First someone had to write a design for it. And someone had to read the design, and approve it, and then estimate the amount of work involved and then schedule that work.

They had to implement the alignment change token, which required software development. They had to implement they actual change, which involves teleporting you from wherever you currently are to Mercy/Atlas and flipping all your alignment bits. If there's any graphic icon involved, they need to have an artist do the art. Then they have to integrate that art into the system. If there's any text involved, they have to translate into French and German.

Then they have to document it and write test cases. Someone has to sit down and think through things that might cause problems, like switching alignment in Ouroboros, or while sidekicked, or while on a TF, or in AE, or on a Trial, or ... well, you get the picture.

The programmer had to code it and try alignment switching over and over again to make sure that everything worked right. That could easily eat up a couple of days. Most likely the programmer encountered some assumption that the original programmer had made about alignment switching that wasn't true in this case (like, maybe, a hero can't turn directly into a villain -- they have to be a vigilante first), and then something about the original code had to be changed. And that meant that the normal way of changing alignment had to be checked and double-checked to make sure that the new changes didn't break the old way of changing alignment.

Then someone has to go through the test cases for QA and make sure that things all work the way they're supposed to work, and then add new test cases as they think of them. And then make sure nothing was broken in all the possible ways of changing alignment on a character who'd switched "naturally" and quickly.

Then there's the software integration task: every time you change the system you have to make sure that the changes get propagated to the right code base at the right time. When you're running a live system, a beta system, a test system, and are coding for i21.5, i22, i23 and beyond, making sure everything is where it should be is a non-trivial task.

Then these things represent time spent by workers who could be doing something else that might make even more money for the company.

So, yeah, this probably isn't a big task since most of the complex machinery was implemented before this. But when everything is said and done, I wouldn't be surprised if they spend a hundred or more man hours on a "trivial" change like, and that could easily cost upwards of $10,000 when you consider salary, benefits, lost opportunity costs and the like.

And people who actually work for NCsoft can probably rattle a dozen more things that I don't even know about that cost them even more time and money.

Mycroft Holmes appeared in the original stories written by Arther Conan Doyle. He wasn't an invention of the movie. In the stories he was unmarried and was definitely an odd duck; sexual orientation was not discussed publicly in Victorian England, so we have no real way of knowing whether he was gay unless we search the texts for subtle clues. My recollection of the stories aren't sufficiently clear for me to have an impression of Mycroft. I do remember he worked for the government in espionage and belonged to a club that valued its members privacy highly.

As for switching alignment on demand, it seems that the devs' position is that it's best for character development and game play if you take the time to do it right.

However, if some of us insist on doing it immediately, the devs are here to please, and will give us that. But those impatient people should bear the software development costs involved with making it possible.

That seems completely reasonable to me: we can have our cake and eat it too, but we'll have to pay the baker for making it.

Changing the basic data type for inf would be a non-trivial programming task. There would be inevitable bugs that caused people to lose inf during market transactions and trades. That in itself isn't reason to not do something, but the potential for bugs should be taken into consideration when there are multiple solutions.

One solution that's been mentioned before is the idea of a new type of salvage that would convert to inf. Think of this as a gold bar or a bearer bond. These could be traded freely among players (unless it caused you to exceed your F2P or premium inf limit), and could come in several denominations.

A new kiosk could be added to Vault Corporation that let you convert a million, 10 million, 100 million or a billion inf to one of these nuggets of inf for a small fee, providing another one of those inf sinks that everyone seems so fond of. The kiosk would let you convert the nugget back to its face value free of charge.

This would allow us to exceed the inf cap without the inherent risks of putting the inf into actual physical items like purple IOs, which can fluctuate in value and are difficult to carry around in large numbers. It would also avoid changing a basic data type that could have negative effects that ripple throughout the system.

All single-target mez protections are still single target. Increase Density from Kinetics was changed to be AoE for the Damage Resistance buff, but the mez protection affects only the targeted character.

Freeze Ray will hold most lieutenants with one successful hit, though some, like the Lost Anathemas and certain Arachnos LTs, require multiple applications.

Bosses generally require two successful hits, though again, some (like certain Arachnos bosses) require more.

Of course, for the hold to work you have to score a successful hit. To maximize the chance of your hold working, try to have at least one SO's worth of accuracy (33%) in your attacks by level 22 or so. If you like to fight mobs at higher relative levels, you'll need correspondingly better accuracy bonuses.

Ice Blast comes with two holds, Freeze Ray and Bitter Freeze Ray. Many players skip Bitter Freeze Ray, but I like to get it because I can stand outside the aggro radius of a mob and use Bitter Freeze Ray on a boss (it has a range of 80 and a fairly long activation time), then take a few more steps and use Freeze Ray (range of 60, but very fast activation) to hold the boss almost immediately, often before they have a chance to retaliate.

The practical problem with speed runs is that not all characters can run through the Shadow Cyst cave without getting creamed. I dread speed runs when I'm running a unstealthed squishie because I am almost certain to be killed if I try to run through the mobs, and I'm almost certain to be killed when the ambushes spawn in response to the shadow cysts being destroyed. And, no, knowing that your allies will simply be rezzed is the wrong answer: in-game lore has established that the emergency teleporter can fail, and I for one would be very hesitant to count on it thousands of years before it was invented...

From an in-game point of view, making sure your own team survives the assault is more important than roaring through the cave at top speed. A helter-skelter mad rush is also not advised if you want to avoid hurting the very people you're trying to save with lightning blasts, fireballs and nuclear detonations.

Furthermore, freeing the sybils is completely pointless if you leave hundreds of enemies in your wake who will simply recapture the hostages after you free them. But in the game the freed sybils simply flounce past hoards of minotaurs and soldiers.

Finally, competent strategists would not barrel through crowds of enemies, auras blazing, leaving hundreds of enemies chasing after them, allowing them to be surrounded and overwhelmed just as they reach their goal. But we all know the way the game works: the mobs quickly lose interest and don't follow. Which is complete balderdash in reality.

If these missions were done the way they'd be done in the real world, we would defeat or chase off all hostage-takers, collect all the hostages, escort them back to the boat, see the boat off, then assault the temple on the hill. A mad rush is unnecessary because the sybils are useful to the Cimmerorans, so they won't kill the women. But we all hate escort missions with our very breath and soul, and are all glad we don't have to escort all those sybils out of the tunnels.

In summary, you can't justify a speed run with real-world logic when its success depends on completely unrealistic in-game logic (AoEs can't hurt friendlies, freed hostages just waltz out unharmed, mobs lose interest quickly, and the aggro cap is some small manageable number).

The real problem with speed runs is that the devs created conflicting goals when they introduced valuable end-of-task rewards like rare recipes (in the KHTF), Notice of the Well (weekly strike task), Empyreans and rare salvage (iTrials) for tasks that some players need to complete slowly (defeating many mobs). Further compounding the problem are badges that depend on performing the same task repetitively (such as the WST).

People who need the experience (sub-50s in the ITF or iXP on trials), or people who need raw materials (shards on the ITF, threads on iTrials) can have a hard time finding a team or league that satisfies their needs, when the most experienced players who are organizing them long ago completed those requirements and are now focused solely on the one end-of-task reward.

I prefer to do TFs and trials in the most efficient way possible for the maximum gain. Speed Lambdas are bad because you don't get many astrals, and they have a very high failure rate unless you have mostly +2 and +3 characters. And they don't take that that much less time to complete than doing them "right."

In the worst case, trying to speed through these TFs and trials actually takes longer than staying together and maintaining a coherent focused force that packs a bigger punch because all your damage and debuffs are working together. If everyone is split up and dying and people are waiting around for them to come back from the hospital, you're just wasting time.

I generally save the Empyreans until I really need them for something. Since I rarely get anything beyond Tier 3 powers, I don't use Empyreans until after I've unlocked all five Incarnate slots, then I'll use them to create rares if needed. I usually wind up with more uncommon salvage than I can use, which I downgrade to commons.

With my last incarnate I also converted four uncommons + 100 threads to a rare, which was made a whole lot easier by doing the TPN.

The other thing to note is that the Notice of the Well can be converted to threads, which can be very useful if you happen to have any extra Notices on your character.

The advantage of the rocket board and flying carpet is that the entire character and the costume can be seen. With many cars and planes the character is inside and can't be seen (like those Sky Raider bosses, who suddenly fall out and evaporate when their small planes are destroyed).

Since players go to great lengths designing costumes, it makes sense to implement new travel modes that allow those costumes to be seen first, because characters will still retain their individuality. If everyone is sealed up in bat-planes and hornet-cars, they'll all look the same.

And you know the first thing everyone is going to say is that it's great, except it would be so much cooler in red, or black, or two-toned metallic blue...

This is simply not true. Memory leaks are usually bugs in the game's code, and are not the fault of your computer. A memory leak is caused by the allocation of an "object" in the client software that is never freed in order for the memory to be used for other things. These objects may describe things such as the special effects that are tossed around in a trial, or the characters appearing on your screen, the pieces of the costumes they're wearing, and so on. (Occasionally drivers do cause memory leaks, but wasn't the case this time around.)

If even a few of those memory objects describing the thousands of explosions occurring in a trial are not properly freed, over time these "lost" objects will pile up and your computer will simply run out of memory. It will take longer for a computer with more memory to crash, but since RAM is finite, any computer running a program with a memory leak will eventually crash if you run that program long enough.

If the return value of a failed memory allocation is not properly checked, any kind of error can occur, from a corrupt pigg warning, to a bad instruction trap, to a glitched display, to an audio loop, to a well-controlled crash that solicits a question about what you were doing, to a direct and immediate exit to Windows with no warning whatsoever.

I was experiencing a wide variety of crashes in Lambdas and BAFs after one or two runs, with no clue as to why they were happening. I guessed memory leaks were behind it, but didn't know. After a few months and a few patches the crashes became less frequent and were no longer random, but were limited either to corrupt pigg file crashes (i.e., memory leaks) or explicit out of memory crashes. After another couple of patches the crashes stopped.

I haven't experienced a crash in a couple of months now, and I changed absolutely nothing about my PC: same amount of memory (4 gig), same drivers, same video card.

A month or so after the crashes stopped one of the devs asked in a thread about crashes whether people had seen an improvement. I had and said so.

I haven't seen memory leaks directly mentioned in the patch notes, but things improved after several cryptic "performance improvements" were mentioned.

I'm a programmer and I know how hard memory leaks can be to track down in a live system, where you don't have access to clients that are crashing in the field. So I'm not accusing the devs of shoddy programming; these things happen, especially in programs that have been around for years and have been worked on by dozens of different programmers.

I'm just glad they fixed the problems, because I was getting pretty fed up with crashing in the last 30 seconds of every Lambda I ran...

I've done this as well, both four- and six-slotting this set on two different characters to provide the bonus(es).

It really depends on what you need the pet for. Its accuracy debuff is probably its best feature, but being a healing node comes in handy as well, though it's not very reliable.

If there's a set bonus that you really, really need to accomplish a different goal, feel free to go with that. But the recharge and ranged defense bonuses are hard to beat for most defenders and corruptors.