Starcloud

Thank you, Castle.

DPS Meters are very good at showing the individual player how much damage their character puts out. However, in almost every case in other games, the player base uses it instead for "bragging rights" and "excluding sub-optimal characters" from teams.

The damage a publicly available DPS meter would cause to the City of Heroes community is not worth the programming effort it would take to account for all the variables, especially with all the debuff effects available in game that do *not* have a direct damage effect. And it would slow the servers to a crawl, adding a ton of server-side calculations.

The backpack is not a costume part. The backpack is a pet. It's a pet that's always out. Therefore, zoning forces the pet to resummon and you have your backpack back.

Then there's the fact that the Alpha Slot's effects go away when you exemp under level 45. Since, you know, the Alpha Slot is treated like a level 50 power. So it won't have any effect on the majority of the content in the game.

Just remember to set up the shortcut to run the updater in administrator mode, if you install City of Heroes to the default location.

So what? Your connection might be solid and fast, your computer perfectly running and utterly up to date and solid.

But if the City of Heroes *game servers* and *login servers* are lagging, which they do regardless of how well the game works on your computer, the "character select" button is always going to drop you to the login screen with your password filled out and a note saying "This account is already logged in." Because the logout process hasn't completed server-side, but it has completed client-side.

You simply cannot trust the global e-mail server. It's the same server that runs global chat, and ever since global chat channels were introduced way back when, the global chat server has regularly and consistently been subject to crashes, disconnects, and rollbacks.

Never, ever, ever, ever leave anything in global e-mail overnight. Never leave anything in global e-mail for more than the time it takes to switch to the character you want to have the stuff you sent, and claim it.

Do that, and you'll never have to petition CS to get your stuff back.

Tin Mage Task Force:
Director 11's 'minelayers' can no longer be targeted by AOE damage.

Okay. So there's literally only one way to get the badge in the TF where no one can be damaged by even a single mine, and that one way is to hold Director 11 at the start, which requires 4-5 Dominators, at least some of whom are in Domination, and then kill him in under a minute, which requires Scrappers and Brutes.

So really, this encourages building a team *specifically* for the purpose of getting that badge, and locks out the majority of archetypes.

This is very bad TF badge design.

However, all the numbers of a Peacebringer's attacks and defenses in all the forms are balanced around the maximum possible, after boosts by the PB Inherent, still being less than that of a more "specialized" archetype at the same level.

The *optimal* attack chain for a human form peacebringer is about 105 dps, including the very expensive Hecatomb and Apocalypse procs.

The *average* attack chain for a blaster or a scrapper runs about 200-225 dps. Without procs or expensive IOs.

Simply put, the numbers are too low for Peacebringers at their base. Period.

The "Quit to character select" isn't really "Quit to character select."
It's "Log out to login screen, do not clear the password, log back in, select the same server, and do it all automatically without input from the player."

If there's a bit of lag server-side during the log out, the "log back in" step does not complete properly, and you end up with the "This account is already logged in" message with your password filled out. In other words, working as intended, if not as expected.

I have to say I'm not exactly sympathetic here. The intended gameplay is to, you know, actually finish the story arcs you start; the book next to the contact is a reminder there is a story arc waiting or in progress. The fact you failed to do so before switching sides is not the developer's problem, nor should they address it as a special case.

Looking at Warshades and at Peacebringers, it's very clear that from the outset, Warshades were designed as one integrated package, where the powers work with each other and mesh quite well, regardless of whether you took the Forms or not.

Peacebringers, on the other hand, are a cobbled together mess that borrow blasts from *defenders*, melee from *tankers* and shields from *scrappers* and a heal from a *controller* set. There's no consistent theme, nothing to make the powers work together coherently, no really unique playstyle.

Ultimately, until that is addressed, the best boost I can think of is, yes, increasing the damage scalar for Human-form ranged and melee attacks. So at least Peacebringers can blap effectively.

Further, future slots are going to give us powers, rather than more "global IOs". It's not unbalanced and the devs are taking their time implementing it.

Definitely go with the eVga 460 over the 470, 480, or even the 5xx series cards. The 460 will get you the best performance at the best value for nVidia cards, and eVga doesn't skimp on components when building their cards.

I'd like to point out that the Rogue Isles (contrary to common assumptions) is actually much closer to Bermuda, Florida and the Carolinas than it ever was to Paragon City, which is in Rhode Island.

As a result, the Rogue Isles should be experiencing tropical weather, and would almost never experience snow (barring some exceptionally strange effect). Instead, we get a constant overcast...

At the same time, Paragon City *should* be getting snow and rain, but never does.

It's like buses. There are bus stops, but no buses. People make fun of that.

Again. Just because you *can* let it sit for 60 days, doesn't mean you *should*. The global chat server where global e-mail resides is notoriously unstable and has been for years.

Send the stuff. Log off. Log on. Claim the stuff. Period.
Never, ever, ever rely on it as another form of storage, because it isn't storage and can be wiped irretrevably in a drop, a rollback, or just by accident.

And this sort of thing is why you cannot trust the e-mail system to store anything for any length of time.

When you send stuff to yourself, log off, log RIGHT back on, and claim it on the character you want to claim it on. Period.

It's the $$goto_tray command. That has to be the last thing in the macro or bind. Because for some bizzare and completely incomprehensible reason, on zoning, everything after the $$goto_tray command gets wiped clean.

Combofix is one of those programs where you can really eff up your computer if you use it wrong.

That, and the apparent lack of experience the original poster has in searching out problems with virii is why I recommended that, if Malwarebytes doesn't catch it, she should take her computer to someone who knows what they're doing when it comes to cleaning out virus infections.

Download Malwarebytes and run it. If it doesn't find anything, you have a problem that only a tech experience in rootkit removal will be able to solve.

Take a very good look around. One type of tailor still only changes the costume. Another type, found in the same store, will also let you change the body.

The advice given above works in Steel Canyon, but the same thing happens in the Facemaker in Cap Au Diable. There are two tailors that only change the oufit, and one that changes the body, plus the Facemaker and Gorgeous Glenda also let you change the body.

Considering that the game works just fine without the EVGA precision tool, and that the tool is a third party manufacturer's program, and that you really don't need any graphics optimization tools to run CoH at all...

I very much doubt Paragon Studios is going to put any effort into making CoH compatible. It's more the responsibility of EVGA to fix their program to work with CoH.

City of Heroes can be modeled fairly easily in Hero System, actually. I've always wondered if the very first write ups of the powers were done in Hero System.

Energy Bolt: EB 4d6, Does Knockback, cannot be spread or bounced, cannot be pushed, etc...

It's just an incredible pain to do, since there are tons of powers to write up, and background campaign rules to write up as well regarding the generation of characters. At least you can ignore leveling entirely, or tie security/threat levels to total points.

I can't imagine how much of a pain it would be to write up Dual Blades. Perhaps the best approach would be as a series of compound powers... ugh.

As for backgrounds and game mechanics, I like the Hero System 6e approach. You can use Complications; game mechanics enforced aspects of your character's personality and background. You can even throw in Complications that don't give you "points" to build with if you like.
Or you can avoid Complications, especially the Complications you don't want. You can write up your character's backstory, or not, in as much or as little detail as you want and fill it in in play.

First: make sure your monitor cable is secure at both ends. It seems like a silly thing to check perhaps, but...
After that, I'm not sure what to check. If you had a second computer, you could hook it up to the second one and test to see whether its the monitor or something about your first computer.

City of Heroes currently only uses a single GTX 260, but you have your textures both on Very High. Drop them both down to high, and you can probably enable some of the other options. A 260 is a fairly capable card.

You have NERO running. You have Adobe Speedlauncher running. Your Itunes service is running and so is the badly behaved Dragon Age Updater. Google Update and Quicktime are both running. Your UPS is also running a data collection program, that's definitely not necessary. Windows Media Player is also running. All those are wasted resources that should not be running all the time.

Are you running two monitors? Because if not, I don't think you really need the nVidia stereoscopic vision program.

I can't help but wonder, with three different overclocking/cpu/gpu programs running concurrently, if perhaps they're all interfering with each other.