Samuel_Tow

You don't really need to worry too much about making Scrappers obsolete, because an Assault set just doesn't have a full set of melee attacks, or indeed would be justified in having a Scrapper melee damage mod. It's actually in-line with why such a set doesn't out-damage Blasters at range. You have an Assault set which has both melee and ranged attacks in it, so you're really not going to have to worry about it outdamaging either AT.

In general, I never bought the Tank/Mage argument. As long as Masterminds exist in this game balanced at the point they are, no-one has the right to grumble about the danger of Tank/Mages. And again - we already have ample evidence that such a concept can be balanced, as Epic ATs are just that. We just need an AT that works kind of like this, only has more choice in appearance and powerset selection, as well as basic concept.

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If people are irresponsible enough to skip one tutorial, how is a second tutorial that they're going to skip just as readily going to help them? Tutorials, guides and explanations are only useful if people actually read them. You can't inject knowledge directly into their brains. So if people refuse to read the game's explanations and tutorials, I'm afraid that's just not the fault of how the game is set up. I'd understand it if this were something very complicated that's never really explained in-game, but you have at least two tutorials on enhancements, so if people don't read any of them, then I don't think even more will solve the problem.

You don't need it. You never have, you never will. I would be VIOLENTLY opposed to a tutorial that suggested you needed Stamina, because that's both a crutch and really bad practice, considering how many people complain about having to waste three power picks before level 20. A tutorial that tells you HOW to build is incredibly damaging to the game in general.

And, really, how much is there to know about enhancements, or even Inventions enhancements? Yes, creating Inventions and the effects of certain sets are complicated, but the whole Inventions system is optional. Beyond that, you have basic enhancements, and they're about as simple as any system gets. What is there about them that isn't directly obvious from powers' Real Numbers or enhancement percentages? Accuracy makes you hit more often, damage makes you hit harder, recharge makes your powers come back up faster. The powers tell you what you can slot into them and their real numbers (for the most part) tell you what enhancements did. I understand that, say, to-hit mechanics may be more than a little opaque, but you don't need to understand the base system to use the enhancements.

As far as going on Training enhancements and not knowing about the rest, I COULD have gone with that back in the day when stores were "secret," but these days DO and SO stores are on the map. You need enhancements, find the $ sign of your origin, go to it and you'll notice it sells better enhancements. I mean, I found out about these things back in the day when the stores were "hidden" and I just ran across the Mutant store in Steel Canyon, finding out about DOs that way. There's really no reason to NOT find out about them when they're marked on the map. To boot, you get DOs and SOs for doing your own story arcs, so at least you will know they exist.

Speaking of which, it's starting to really irritate me how the reflections system in this game is set up. I thought Ultra Mode would fix that, but no. It's still the same as it was before, only instead of a random unrelated picture, our costumes reflect an environment map.

What's the problem? Black doesn't reflect. At all. I mean, it's possible it does, but I don't have the bionic super sight to actually SEE that. I just see black. Some areas might be imperceptibly a little greyer, but really, it's just black. Of course, setting my costume to white turns it into a mirror, but that's kind of besides the point, because white isn't what I wanted.

Which is kind of odd, really, considering white objects in real life tend to not be as reflective as black objects. Those funny people who make custom cars always complain about how black cars need to to be perfectly smooth, or the black paint's reflection will highlight every defect. I don't know what the system for reflections actually is, but it seems like it's another one of those subtractive systems that, starts off of white and then adds colour to it, so if you start off of black, black is all you get.

Considering environment reflections don't seem to work well for me in building windows, it's kind of disappointing that I can only get reflections I can see with bright colours.

See, that's kind of what I mean about powers being useful for players, themselves. This is, much as I try to pretend it isn't, a team-focused game, and getting people to be good team-players should be essential, in my opinion. As such, forcing people into either choosing a team-only functionality or skipping that important functionality altogether just causes less focused team players like myself to not even bother, thus causing our team prowess to suffer in the long run.

Ever since I argued my *** off over Shield Defence, I've held something very important to be true - if you include at least SOME amount of self-service into team-support powers, a LOT more people will take them and use them. And when more people actually have the powers, then more people will use the powers. Grant Cover is a good example - people will take it for the defence debuff resistance (which I believe is slottable for defence) and then basically run it for that. Good for them, but what they're actually doing is supporting the team, too, because their self-service power grants cover to their team-mates, as well. In a cheeky way, a self-serving player is still guided into helping his team, sometimes even unwittingly.

Howling Twilight, again, is another good example. A LOT of people take it, yet not a lot take it because it can resurrect. The result is that a lot of people HAVE it, so when it actually becomes needed, chances are good it's going to be used as a resurrect, anyway. That's kind of why I've always wanted to see ally-only powers have at least SOME functionality for the solo player. Not necessarily full functionality, not necessarily great functionality. Just SOMETHING. I really don't know what that could be with ally resurrect powers that don't target an enemy, though I suppose they could apply a minor buff or heal to the target henchman and never to a player. I don't know. I'm really stabbing in the dark here.

See, years ago I learned to just keep my hands off of Defenders and Controllers, because I got slapped across the wrist so many times it became clear I have no business messing with the AT. "It's a team AT!" they yelled at me. "Leave it alone!" Which is fine, I can roll with that. I don't have to play all AT to get my money's worth. But when it comes to Masterminds, I still want to see their secondaries be self-serving in their entirety. Again, team-only powers don't have to have a MAJOR use when solo, but just SOMETHING so that I can trick my own subconscious into believing that no, this power is not a waste.

Oh, a good example of that would be Taunt/Confront. Most people scoff at the powers, especially Scrapper Confront, yet I have that on EVERY Scrapper I've ever made. Why? I mean, isn't that a team power used to take the heat off squishies? Well... Yes and no. Yes, it very much is a team power, BUT it has the uncanny use of stopping runners from running (and much more consistently than shooting them with ranged attacks) and it is a nice pulling tool, should the need arise. Neither functionality is exactly GREAT, but both functionalities EXIST, so when I look at the power, I think "Well, I don't use it much, but I CAN use it, so why not take it?" I can't say the same for an ally-only resurrect power, and it bugs me.

Can't really say, since I don't have the system specs on me and Everest won't tell me. I could have a look inside the box, but I tend to not want to unscrew the case too much, and I doubt I'd see anything anyway, since it's a jumble of cables in there, anyway.

I do know that my power unit comes with cable plugs, rather than how normal units come, which is cables basically coming out of it in a clump. I'll have to see how those are plugged in, myself, but are you saying I should have both cables to the video card on different sockets? That'll be hard to do, since even so much as touching the cables would require me to take the power unit out of the case. It's just too cramped in there.

Thanks

That's actually something I had to fast-learn on my Bots/FF Mastermind. Buffing all six of my bots with both forcefields is a significant chore, but when I'm on a team, I tend to want to bubble the team, as well, even if that means not bubbling the bots. A decent team-mate will contribute much more than a Combat Drone could ever hope to, especially in the higher levels. Even the Assault Bot falls far behind.

I realise Masterminds have a reputation of only ever using their support powers on their pets, and I agree that's bad practice. As long as you HAVE the powers, then frkkin' use 'em! It's what they're for. Masterminds, by and large, are strongly encouraged to take ally-only powers because of how the AT is designed - as henchmen count as allies, then taking ally-only powers actually helps you directly. The problem is that resurrect powers don't work on Henchmen.

And again - why? Are the developers worried that your henchmen will never be killed, then? I haven't checked the stats recently, but doesn't an ally rez have a recharge time of something like two minutes? That's hardly THAT big of a deal. I can see Howling Twilight not affecting henchmen, but that's OK, since it has other effects usable without an actual team-mate. But OK, you can't resurrect your henchmen. I can live with that. Can't the powers still do SOMETHING to them? Minor heal, minor stat boost... Just SOMETHING to make solo Masterminds want to take them? Because I know for a fact that the biggest hurdle is actually taking the power. Once I have the ally rez, I'm gonna' use it as much as I can, because it's just satisfying to help people like that.

Speaking of Howling Twilight (and we were), I actually did a villain Respec trial where I had to use that power for its resurrect A LOT. People tended to refuse to listen to me when I suggested we needed SOME plan on how to take down the vines, so we ended up dying a lot, and I ended up resurrecting a lot of people, being that my Necromancer was also a teleporter. I mean, I had the power, people were dead, so it made sense to. That's kind of why I'm convinced that as long as I can even pretend the power does something for me so that I can take it, I'm going to use it when that situation comes about. It's just that taking it in the first place is what stumbles me, for the simple fact that I hate levels when I take a no-power. "Great! I'm level XX! What power should I take next? Oh. That one. Great. So that's three more levels until something hopefully cool, then." It's just a groove-breaker.

That said, I actually learned a lot from this thread. I'm aware of the mechanics, I just wanted to hear what people felt on the subject more than anything else. At this point, it seems safe to put an ally rez off as long as I want and possibly not even take it at all, so that's a load off my mind. At this point, I may or may not grab the rez. I've taken junk powers before for lack of alternatives, and with villains lacking appropriate (read: fire) Epics, I constantly end up with power picks to burn, anyway.

*edit*
And, no, I wouldn't even consider a second build. I don't team even remotely enough for such a thing to have a point, let alone be worth the cost of time and resources. Normally, I'll team up once a week for a few missions MAYBE, and usually with people who aren't really big about efficiency anyway. I just don't want to catch wind with some random PuG ******* who feels I insulted his intelligence by not taking a must-have power.

Well, that was probably a fumble on my part. I skipped Poison and Poison has a resurrect power, but if I inferred they were connected, I misled you. I've never really had a concept that could use Poison as a secondary, as I don't have too many Masterminds in general, owing to their limited primaries. The closest I cane to taking it was on my Necromancer (fairly by-the-book), and I still went with Dark Miasma for him simply because I'd already written a three-chapter story for him that relied heavily on curses and black magic, so Dark was the obvious choice. Beyond that, I have a techno-soldier dude, a ninja-wizard (that is, Ninja/Storm), a robotics dude (Bots/FF), a kind of occult gang leader (again, Thugs/Dark) and I think that's about it. Right now I'm looking at a Demons/Thermal Mastermind, so I just never had a reason to take it. Poison, Trick Arrow and I think Pain are things I have yet to even consider using, but maybe in time. We'll see.

An ally rez may have figured into my decision-making process, but I didn't skip a set because of it. If that were the case, I wouldn't have touched Forcefields or Dark Armour with a 10-foot pole, thanks to the sucker traps that are Repulsion Field and Cloak of Fear, respectively. Skipping the rez, at least for my current mentality, isn't that big a deal, just so long as I don't end up taking heat for it.

Well, the power unit in my PC is about as powerful as they were offering, and I don't think I can plug anything more into the card. Is that even fixable without serious expense? I mean, the guys at the shop assured me it would be enough.

I really don't have anything that I've actually modified in the game, to be honest. Just saved settings and screenshots. I have a few costumes, but those are based on models currently in the game that I can dump the costumes out of. I may have had arcs at some point, but both of mine are currently uploaded, and I assume I can save a copy off those... Right?

Isn't that DirectX 9, though? It says "Version: 9.28.1886." Not that I specifically need anything over 9 (like, say, DirectX 11), but now that I've finally switched over from XP and into 7, I thought I might as well. I'll try that download anyway. As far as I'm aware, DirectX won't patch itself to an older version even if I tried to make it.

I'll give it a shot as soon as test stops being dead. My experience with v-sync off was that my framerate did indeed shoot up into the 80s, which is actually more than I can physically see by virtue of my monitor not being able to dsiplay more than 60 refreshes per second, but that's because I had spare performance on Live that was getting capped off. I'll have a look at it on Test.

I seriously doubt that will fix my slow-loading textures, though.

*edit*
Nope! Doesn't even budge my framerate, even when it's below 60. And I get vertical tearing, to boot.

OK, so basically, what do I want to save? Off the top of my head, I'd say Screenshots, Costumes, the folder with my character order, chat.txt, options.txt, keybinds.txt and wdw.txt. Anything else should be replacable. Oh, and that Excel spreadsheet with enemy resistances. Am I missing something? Also, do I do a complete uninstall first and THEN delete, or just go for a delete and run the Updater afterwards?

The network shouldn't be problematic, not more so than usual, at least. I tend to get between 250 and 300 ping consistently, and I get almost no packet loss. But this isn't packet loss related. In fact, come to think of it, I'm not sure it's CoH-related. I keep forgetting I saw the same problem playing Final Fantasy VII before and after the switchover to the new machine. Before, battles in that game would run smoothly. Afterwards, every time the game called up a new texture (usually a duplicate floor to be broken in some manner), all video would freeze for about 2-3 seconds while the looping music would play uninterrupted. I've not actually tested this after wiping my drivers, but I've no reason to believe it's different now. Will do, though.

*edit*
Retesting the above now, it SEEMS like the delay is shorter, down to about half a second eyeballing it, but it's still there, and it wasn't on my old rig. Will probably call up support tomorrow morning.

It's a bit of a custom machine, in that it was ordered specifically. It's basically a standard setup, but it has an added video card and a new power supply. As far as I'm aware, this one should be 700 Watts. I was warned about this when we were drawing lines in the sand and the power supply unit was one of the things we talked about extensively. It should be well sufficient.

However, I didn't plug in the hardware, myself, and as I mentioned before, I can't guarantee ALL power cables are plugged in. From what I can see through the jungle of cables, the GTX has two 6-pin power sockets, both of which have power cables plugged in, and an additional 2-pin socket that I assume is power, as well, which has nothing plugged into it. Since I've been unable to find out what needs to be plugged into the card, I'm keeping my hands off of it.

By the way, I've had problems with a weak power unit years ago. The PC would randomly reboot itself as I stressed it and occasionally shut down entirely. I've not seen this happen so far. I did have a couple of crashes on City of Heroes where Windows 7 told me "Your graphics driver stopped responding, but the system recovered," but since basically all error messages on that thing have been re-written since XP, I assumed that's its way of telling me my game crashed. That's actually not intermittent, however. Both times it happened when I set a zone to load and IMMEDIATELY Alt-Tabbed out of the game. Given that City of Heroes doesn't seem to like Alt-Tabbing under this operating system, it doesn't surprise me it would crash occasionally.

I've not had that happen since I installed the new drivers, though the game did stop responding once when I logged into Pinnacle while it was loading my first-spot character. I have a sneaking suspicion that Windows 7 is causing this by insisting on Alt-Tabbing out of it at the first hint of hangup. It does this to me if I click my mouse a few times while the game is loading on startup. I know it hasn't crashed, but Windows will still recommend I shut it down anyway. XP never did this. It would simply sit and wait until I called up the Task Manager. Which I actually prefer, by the way.

In my defence, I don't actually know the first thing about the I7. I saw my system recognise eight processors, so I went with that. Oops! To be fair, this one isn't as clear as the old ones. A Pentium Core Duo kind of HAS to have two cores, right?

As in, delete the whole folder and run the updater to download the whole client? That's a pretty big step to make, considering my download speed caps at around 200 KB/s. I suppose I could let it download overnight, but I still want to save my default binds, costumes, screenshots and so forth. Isn't there something specific I can delete and let the game re-download?

Good call. I did fiddle with those when I had driver problems before, but it seems I reset all settings and removed all compatibility modes I may have placed. The shortcut, the updater and the game exe are all clean.

I tend to force vertical sync on all programmes because vertical tearing bugs me and not all games support it, but it seems this reset when removed my old drivers. Everything is currently Application Controlled and the problem persists.

I coulda' sworn I saw an option for this before, but I can't seem to find one now. If there is one, I haven't touched it, and this is a brand new install for the drivers, as of my previous post.

I was referring to the inference that infinite space not completely filled up with worlds means finite worlds, but I don't really want to go on that tangent here. Was just exercising my inner math geek, be it correctly or incorrectly

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The current Live client runs fine, but has the tendency to lag in places where it shouldn't be. I'm running it on the same settings now on a 285 as I did before on a 9800, and it STILL slows down, which shouldn't happen. Pushing my World Detail to 200% makes it slow down, as well. This only happens in specific locations, however. I should also note that when I say "slows down," I mean slows below 60 FPS, where I'm determined to keep it. But if the 9800 could keep 60 FPS almost everywhere, shouldn't the 285 do better than that?

My primary indicator of a possible flaw remains - my system halts for a second or two when a new texture is rendered into a scene. This did not happen before, and it is not something that I perceive as normal operations for this card.

*edit*
This is probably a good time to ask if I should start thinking about calling up PlayNC customer support about this. I COULD call up HP, but... That's not gonna' work. I don't want to make trans-Atlantic phone calls, and calling up my local HP representatives, that is, the people who sold me the PC, is not going to accomplish much. I know how they work.

Thank you. Using this, I cleaned up all nVidia drivers, but there doesn't seem to have been any result. The game still loads its textures slowly on the log-in screen, where it didn't before, and this has me concerned. To elaborate, City of Heroes on a GeForce 9800 GT with 4 GB of RAM and a Quad Core processor on Windows XP loaded its textures faster than City of Heroes does on a GeForce GTX 285 with 8 GB of RAM on an I7 (I believe 8-core) processort does on Windows 7. I suspect this speaks to some kind of underlying problem, because I saw almost no performance gain in the switchover between the two systems, where there should have been LOTS.

*edit*
Oh, by the way:

Purely mathematically speaking, subtracting a finite number fro from infinity and dividing infinity by a finite number still results in infinity. As well, infinity calculations are largely restricted to calculating limits and, as far as I'm aware, don't really factor into regular calculations. Just a small tangent because your sig intrigued me

I live in an actual noisy city and I would still LOVE to have those noises in the game. But then I'm one of these weird people who walks through the streets without headphones on, without a cell phone on my ear and without shouty people telling me stories I don't care about. I enjoy to just walk around and listen to the noises of the city in the distance. It's what makes the world - both real and imaginary - feel more alive.

I also live next to an extremely loud fan that spins 24/7, and that hasn't bothered me in years, either.

Point is, I enjoy detail and I enjoy a fuller experience. Currently on Live, the city is DEAD, and I don't like that. It makes the world feel dead and empty, like some kind of ghost town just waiting for the Langouliers to come down and eat it. It has the same lack of verisimilitude that your typicial "empty square room" map has in most FPS games. Because you can TELL this is made by a map editor and no-one attempted to hide this fact. It kills my immersion when my fake world doesn't even attempt to seem real.

I enjoy all of the sounds of I17. I enjoy the footsteps, the cars, the rushing wind when you fly. If I wanted to play in an audio desert, I'd shut down my speakers. And, honestly, some days I feel like if you left it to people to decide, the game would run completely silent all the time, and this IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.

Yeah, I don't miss SK scrabble, either. One thing I always tried to do was pair up a sidekick with a mentor of the same AT or, failing that, a mentor of an AT that would usually be at the same range. So a Scrapper sidekick would go with a Tanker or Scrapper mentor to ensure both sidekick and mentor would be in melee, and Blaster sidekick would go with a Controller, Defender or Blaster mentor for the same reason.

It's a bit disconcerting now that you can leave your mentor alone in a zone 20 levels over his natural level while you're on the other end of the world shopping, but that little hickup is quickly lost to the happiness of no having to worry about staying in range and ESCORTING PEOPLE OVER FIVE ZONES! Screw that! Now sidekicks can escort themselves, and I am very happy about this

The plug in question is actually on the inside of the PC case, and it's the same kind of plug that I can put a power cable in. I have two outlets coming out of my power unit that I'm confident could fit in there. The problem is that I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't feel comfortable just sticking wires into holes without knowing what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

I was actually surprised that this GeForce actually required two power cables, but given how much real estate it takes up inside my case and the fact that it has a radiator grill on the back of my PC, I guess that's to be expected.

I lack a digital camera, or I'd show you snapshot of the inside of the case to see what you mean. Incidentally, the inside of my case looks like the inside of my abdomen, with tangles of chain mail wrapped cable bundles looping around each other thick enough to keep me from getting my fingers in to pretty much anything. Worst PC parts arrangement I've had to date.