Six

Just soloed it redside on my fire/earth dom. I love the new maps. I like the story. I like that it's low level, but I hope that future ones are higher level, so when they're done we have options across a wide level range.

However, there were a few things that bugged me...

(Potential spoilers ahoy)



1st mish: Couldn't find the exit, took the ouro-bus out. Not a huge deal, but it did feel a little bit like cheating.

2nd mish: Ugh, more Praetorian-style multiple ambushes. Took out the first two ambushes, ran out of end on the 3rd wave and died, used a wakie but got taken out straight away by the 4th wave arriving, so then I just alt-tabbed out while the timer ran down before using my final wakie. These sorts of things aren't challenging, they're just frustrating, especially on low-level toons with limited inspiration capacity.

3rd mish: Yes, it's lovely to have these wonderful new powers to beat up the incoming heroes with, but who has time to sit there and rearrange their power trays when you've got waves of ambushes coming at you? I have 4 power trays on my screen, all full, with powers locked in place. If I'd popped open a new tray, gone into the menu and found the unlock option (or even used the /optionset disabledrag 0 command), then opened up my Powers and scrolled through the 50 temp powers I have looking for the new ones to add to the new tray, there's no way I'd have been still alive by the time I was ready to fight - I ended up just using all my regular powers for this bit. Thankfully Domination recharged and I dinged in the middle of the fight, which I'm pretty sure was what got me through it.

One final thing: Telling us that one of our reward options is 5 times the normal amount of merits for that task would be far more helpful if it actually mentioned somewhere in there what the normal amount of merits is...

Just for the record, I bit the bullet and went ahead and bought the laptop I was looking at - I got the RF511 with the 15" screen, rather than the 17" RF711.

I can definitely confirm that there's no problems with the Optimus thing, and the GT540M does kick in when you fire up CoH - I'm comfortably getting 30+ fps frame rates with the Graphics Quality slider put up to Ultra (haven't played around with the Advanced Graphics Settings though). Cranking the FSAA all the way up has a noticeable effect, but setting it to 4x still gives me 25+ fps, which is fine for me. Overall I'm perfectly happy with the laptop so far - it's not the most powerful around, but it does a pretty damn good job for the price.

(The 17" model does have a higher resolution screen though, so the results for that might be slightly different of course.)

According to this thread the problems with the nVidia Optimus thing should have been fixed with i20 - can anyone confirm? I was considering the same laptop.

The number shown on the barcode chest emblem is 75646-00083. But if you scan the barcode, it reads as 6583-3254.

Conspiracy theorists, I want at least 3 different explanations by this time tomorrow of how this is a Nemesis plot.

Probably not much beyond a bit of curiosity value, I'd guess. Given that they'll turn red and stop working at lvl 6 it's unlikely anyone would be interested in buying and slotting them for that short a time.

My fire/earth has just hit 32 - been having a lot of fun. Like Lazarillo said, the only real problem I've come across is that you don't get the damage mitigation from the kd when you use your immobs, but without the immobs you'll be constantly chasing things that are running (slowly) away from Hot Feet. I'm finding that as I level up I'm using the AoE immob more and more though - between Flashfire, Cinders, Char and Seismic Smash you've usually got enough mitigation to make it worth throwing out there.

I understand why they do it when they do it, but it's still annoying, especially when there's multiple maintenances per week like we're getting at the moment.

I do wish they'd at least stagger the maintenance windows by a couple of hours though, just so we don't get screwed around every time.

Two minor QoL issues that have recently made me think "Hmm, it'd be kinda handy if they put in..."

1) "...a 'Hide Empty Tabs' option for the Salvage window."
It's been years since any of my toons have had Base salvage, and my non-Incarnates don't need a quick way of checking how many shards they haven't accumulated. If I'm not actively selling or crafting, 90% of the times I open my Salvage window are to check how close I am to filling up on Invention salvage - at the moment, the unused tabs just take up space, and make it so I have to click a bunch of times to scroll across and see the tab I'm after. Why not have an option to hide the empty tabs, so they stay out of the way when I don't need them, but then appear when I unlock my Alpha slot and drop my first shard, or buy myself some Glittershrooms off the market?

b) "...more crafting tables hero-side."
With the addition of the Abandonded Labs, there are now 3 red-side zones where you can run back and forth between the market and a crafting table without having to zone, but blue-side there's still only Steel Canyon. Surely by now Mr. Wentworth would've seen the value in sticking a table or two in the back room of his outlets, or even better, some entrepreneurial Paragonian street vendor would've traded in their hot-dog cart for a portable crafting table and set up shop under the tram in Talos or in the courtyard near Blue Steel in KR?

The changes to Taunt where they removed the end cost and added a range debuff were originally suggested by someone in the Tank forums, from memory.

Not to dismiss the serious problems some people seem to be having with this, but I'm a big fan of the new launcher for one very specific reason: clicking on links now opens them up in your default web browser, instead of firing up Internet Explorer every time. That's been bugging me for years!

Most definitely /signed - I've done this so many times.

I'd start working my way through the stack of xbox games I've been meaning to find the time to play...

...that, or get addicted to Minesweeper again.

I've got an earth/elec at 50 - was my first 50 dom, so it's definitely a combo I enjoyed. Never went perma or anything, but could solo most EBs without needing to pop a trayfull of purples. That was definitely more due to the earth than the elec though - earth is great, elec is... pretty good, I guess. You can counter the KB from Thunder Strike with the holds or immobs, but the problem there is that also stops the KD from Earthquake, which is not good - keeping things on their butts with EQ is how you survive a lot of the time. Must admit I never found the end drain from elec to be really worth bothering with - you'd have to slot pretty heavily for end mod to get any real benefit, which would most likely mean sacrificing damage. Voltaic Sentinel is definitely kinda meh - I picked it up very late, and only ever use it for a bit of extra damage in boss/AV fights.

Bottom line: it was fun enough to keep me going all the way to 50, but I haven't really felt the need to play him much since then, and if I was doing it over again I'd probably take a different secondary.

Once you add a quick way to get to south IP, people are gonna want the same for north IP as well. That's why the boats are a good idea - definitely preferable to cluttering up the list of tram stops with 3 entries for a single zone that doesn't really have all that much of interest there anyway...