Shadowe

Welcome to the game and the forums!

Missions: The nav bar text for a mission gives a fair amount of detail about the mission, depending on where you are compared to the mission.

If you are in the mission map (whether an instanced mission map or the zone for an outdoor mission) the nav bar will give you a description of the mission objective(s), and the number you have yet to complete. Some objectives may have a map marker waypoint (open up your map, and at the bottom-right is an "Options" drop-down box - I tend to play with everything selected except Names). However, if you are not yet on the mission map itself, the text on the nav bar will give extremely limited information - typically the name of the mission and the zone in which you can find the mission door (if there is one).

Enhancements: You are mistaking the level of the enhancement for the number of them that you have. Every enhancement has a level that determines what level character can slot them - you can slot an enhancement up to 3 levels higher than your own level. Normal enhancements also cease to have any effect if they are more than three levels below your level.

Mastermind: There are indeed 3 tiers of pets, and you will get access to all of them, but you will also get different numbers of pets within each tier. You will eventually have 3 Tier 1 pets, 2 Tier 2 pets and 1 Tier 3 pet.

Alliances: The original game only had three types of targetable NPC entities: Friend (Blue target reticle), Foe (Red target reticle), and non-combatant (White target reticle). With the recent expansion (Going Rogue) a fourth type has been introduced: Neutral combatant, but these only occur in limited numbers outdoors (these are the ones with a yellow target reticle, and will turn into Foes if you attack them). Every other NPC you meet will be one of the original three types, so the fact that you are (for example) Resistance will make absolutely no difference to most NPC's you meet in missions.

I hope this helps, and I'll bet someone has beaten me to the response, because this was written at work and I've been a little busy...

Shadowe: "So... you're... my own personal god? That's an over-simplification of the matter, naturally. Fascinating. In that case, I have to ask, purely in the spirit of enquiry you understand - I have always been interested in determining the truth of certain facts of reality, and this is the perfect opportunity for me to do so - just one thing: You made me rich beyond the dreams of avarice, you made me handsome, you made me a genius. Somehow, despite all of the flaws you put into my personality, I have managed to maintain a stable romantic relationship, and apparently that's thanks to you, too. So why, please, for the love of all that's holy, why did you give me a costume that makes me look like a black feminine pleasure product?"

Luminescence: "So... my powers change so often because you actually have five different versions of me just so that you can have me wearing lots and lots of different slutty outfits? Sugar, you're weird."

Julie Slater: "My life... is all because of you? Everything in it is because of you? You *******!"

Really must "M" check my main, but the last time I looked at him, he had something of the order of 5,000+ hours. Many people think that over 200 solid days of playing one character is a little weird.

I think that second one is WAI. Completing an alignment mission wipes all progress on your alignment bars, and I seem to recall that it clears your tips, too.

The 3 levels thing is interesting: sounds like a holdover from old SKing, since that was a critical level under that system.

Haven't read everything posted in this thread, but just wondering if it's worth me pointing out that the Merit Rewards for every task in the game that awards them has what I have previously referred to as a "jigger factor" to account for the developers' perception of the difficulty of the task?

So, the current "time metric" for calculating merit rewards isn't a simple "1 merit per 5 minutes mean average to complete task" or whatever. It's actually that "plus or minus developer-set difficulty bonus/penalty merits".

Now, the calls for a time-independent method of determining merit rewards gets two big thumbs up from me, and here's my thoughts on factors that could be included:

Number of players required to start
Number of players who start
Number of players who complete
Mob-type (we all know that KoA and Malta are a pain in the proverbial, and a hypothetical TF that uses them would be a lot harder than one that uses Council)
Map size
Number of Objectives required per mission
Number of AV's (possibly with a special factor that includes a modifier for the particular AV's in question - after all, Reichsmann is tougher to beat than Dr Vahzilok)

Those are all good, solid, calculable things (for mob type, their XP modifier is probably the most suitable number to use) that can be datamined or already exist in the game. The sums of the factors involved then would be used to calculate an overall modifier that would be used as a multiplier for merit rewards.

Anyway, just thinking aloud (well, thinking through my fingers).

My 5-year-old Energy/Energy blaster would like to dispute that Energy doesn't do enough damage. I've specced him to out-DPS your common-or-garden fire blaster without even trying to do so.

Aim+Build Up+Energy Torrent+Explosive Blast is UNGODLY against large spawns, and anything that didn't get killed in the attack is probably on its back.

Aim+Build Up+Sniper Blast+Total Focus is far, far worse against single targets.

Power Push as an OMGGETAWAYFROMME! power.

Power Blast can do almost as much damage as Power Burst.

Not much beats *run up to spawn, Aim, Build Up, Energy Torrent, Explosive Blast, Power Burst on the sole surviving enemy... rinse and repeat ad infinitum* and having your teammates wonder why nothing stays on its feet for long. The answer? Knockback or Defeated.

It took me 4 years (yes FOUR YEARS, that is not a typo) to learn that you could combine enhancements that you already have slotted.

Having seen a mis-typed command from someone attempting to add a gold title to a character (naming no names), I am aware that the command which the community team uses includes a timer set to 72 hours.

HOWEVER.

I believe that it may actually be 72 hours of played time, not real time, due to the fact that I still see 6th anniversary titles on some toons.

I'd seen it in the shops a lot after EU release in 2005, but was a little shaky on the whole "Pay a fee to play a game I've already bought?" thing for ages. I'd finally managed to drag myself out of a hellish financial situation (that had lasted for the previous 7 years), to the point where I actually had a few quid to play with.

So, one Saturday in September 05, I'm in town (I think I was getting my hair cut, but I could be wrong) and I decided drift on down to my local computer game shop, just to browse, as you do.

Perusing the offerings, I'm stuck. There's a copy of Star Wars Galaxies (and I am just a little bit of a Star Wars nerd), and a copy of CoH on the shelf.

Now, I've always liked the superhero genre - didn't really buy many comic books, because I was too busy buying D&D books, and besides, my friends buy them, so I can always borrow - and I'd heard... unpleasant things about SWG.

So, seeing that the Deluxe Edition of CoH came with a month of free game time, I figured "Meh, what the hey. I spend £20 now, and if I don't like it, I play a game for a month... which is about what I probably play most games for anyway. Haven't lost anything."

Bimble round town some more, grab a pad of paper for my D&D game notes, eventually drift back to the car and head home.

Important note time: This was all of three weeks after I got married.

At home, I show Mrs Shad my new purchase and explain my reasoning on the "play for a month, pay for more if I like it" thing, and point out that I can pay for it straight out of my bank account, so no need to borrow her credit card.

I can remember the look on her face. She really wasn't sure. Still, too late now - I've purchased, and I'm damned well going to give it a go.

About half an hour later...

"DUN, DER DUN-DUN, D-D-D-DUUUUN!" blasts out of my speakers as Shadowe makes his first fumbling steps in Paragon City.

5 Years later...

Mr Shad has 2 accounts, Mrs Shad has 1, we've purchased not less than 4 computers over that time, always making sure (from about 6 months after I first got the game) that we have at least 2 able to run it at any given time, so that we can play together.

Happy days.

Okay, just to be clear.

You bring up the CoH Updater, and it requests a patch, downloads it, applies it (repeats as necessary), and then attempts to verify, during which process it crashes?

Methinks we might need to see CoH Helper and HijackThis logs to get a better idea, anyway, so I'll throw that out there for you now, but I have to say I'm a bit lost as to what's causing the crash.

Oh, and if you'd like to follow the advice above: Here's where to download the EU client from.

Go into your City of Heroes folder and delete all .checksum files.

Run the updater from desktop again.

Let us know how it goes.

The page is usually not working, however as far as I know, there's no server maint on a Wednesday (Thursday is the weekly slot), so you should be good to go.

I successfully obtained that badge on my badgehunter by going from Hero to Villain, doing some newspaper missions, doing the bank job and then selecting Efficiency Expert Pither as the contact.

It is certainly do-able. Just don't fail any of the timed missions.

Well, I've still got it, and it still works.