Shattersky

To reply in the 'what could make a better team' genre, I propose the following:

7 rad / electrics and a dead guy.

Properly slotted, your 7 AM's are permanent and give you all the aforementioned benefits.

As part of the leadership pool, have the 7 defenders take vengeance, at at least one have recall friend. That way you can 'port the dead guy around and be perma-7x vengeanced.

As of 38, the defender electric set gets the notably useful ranged nova in the form of Thunderous Blast. Between the vengeance and the AM's and assault, you can probably just slot it for recharge, to have it up as much as possible - you've already got the accuracy and damage you need to one-shot groups of any size. Head to the Rikti crash site when you can and clean up.

This takes awhile longer to mature, but you can get vengeance by 20 if you work at it, and start running around with the rad debuffs, some nice electrical attacks, and a dead guy right when you're buying SOs. The problem may be finding the dead guy - but hey, if you're level 4 or lower, you get no debt from dying.

Alternatively, you can just find someone who doesn't mind living in debt and have them be the suicidal guy instead of dragging along a dead guy. You can mutate him back up after he dies and he can go get himself killed again.

Praise be to Gnarly and the Precursors, masterful makers of binds!

Seriously, thank you all so much for making our lives easier. The ability to hover / fly well in a battle is invaluable to me as a controller, as a top-down perspective in a fight is about the best you can get for crowd control, not to mention personal safety.

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I have not experienced it. I play all night with these binds with no problems. I have DSL, but I do infrequently notice some lag with the movement commands being sent to the server... ie. sometimes I don't hover right away, etc.

But do you know for a fact that binds are saved server side? That makes no sense to me. I thought that the client would sort out what we wanted to do, and just send the movement commands to the server (+forward, +right etc). It just makes no network-programming sense to send what keys are mapped to these fundamental functions.

Gnarly

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I can vouch that the current keybinds are stored server side. I transferred a character over to the Test Server and he showed up there with my custom binds already installed.

How often they update the keybinds out to the server, that I don't know. I would hope (for the sake of the broadband deficient) that they didn't set it up to push the binds out to the server every time a BIND_LOAD_FILE command is issued.

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First off, I want to say thanks so much guys, especially Wasabi Joe, as I'm using his 2.4 binds - awesome stuff. If I get elected mayor, I'll direct more funding to the Paragon City Flight Academy (That would be this thread).

About binds being stored on the server - transferring a character to the test server and keeping your binds wouldn't indicate whether or not the binds are stored on the server or on your computer.

Most likely, it's just stored on your computer, primarily for the reason that it's not necessary for the server to know what your binds are - it just needs the bare bones commands that you execute. Bandwidth usage in an MMORPG is critical - something as smooth as City of Heroes shouldn't be making the mistake of having my binds uploaded to it every time I change them (I.E., every time I hit a movement key...)

That's just the logical reasoning though, and I can't offer definitive proof that this is the case. However, I do have an acid test.

1. Save your binds on your normal computer.
2. Log in from a different computer (or have someone else log in on your account) and see if your binds still exist on that machine. If they do, they're on the server. That should settle the question.

If those binds are being stored on the server, I'll eat my cape.

It doesn't answer why an earlier poster was experiencing disconnects though. My only theory would be that CoH gives a high priority to loading text files, and temporarily ignores the connection, which on a slow connection might be the cause of a disconnect. I don't see why this would be the case, however.

I suppose there's the off chance that any and all text you type is sent to the server, in case it's a command... but again, that's a waste of bandwidth, in many cases.