Stormclaw

The Core line of the Hybrid Control enhancements says it grants a chance to damage controlled enemies. Does this by any chance include enemies who are knocked down, or does it only take effect on control abilities that have a debuff icon like hold, fear, etc?

How to fix Redside:
Make all outside world objects (parking meters, mailboxes, cars, etc) destructible, a la mayhem missions.

Seriously though, I don't think the lack of population is so much due to the preference for heroic 'style' (though I do agree Arachnos is rather overplayed). It's just that it feeds back into itself.. people see the redside having slightly lower population and think, "Well, I want to play where more people are!" and so they roll on blue.. and it just keeps reinforcing the population discrepancy.

There is an inherent difficulty in writing for the Villains side, though. As a hero, it's easy to justify your character "taking orders" from so-and-so superhero league or science team and so on. But people are rogues or villains for a wide variety of reasons, and it's hard to satisfy every niche when it comes to mission dialogue and how your character is supposed to react.

Great tool! My suggestions for handling AOEs:

Add an AOE checkbox to the powers list (maybe optionally a 'max targets' field).
Then, beneath the "How many powers?" box, add an "How many enemies?" field. When set to higher than 1, automatically multiply the damage of the AOE abilities by the number specified (without going over the power's max targets number) to determine the best chain for variable groups of enemies. So we can put '1' to determine the best single-target chain, '3' for the best chain against a group of 3.. etc.

Additional suggestion: A slot or checkbox for an "aura" power that doesn't factor into the chain at all, but whose DPS (based on one tick every 2 seconds, right?) is added to the total count (just for completion's sake). Maybe just have it be any power you set the recharge to '0' to be considered an aura?

The 'Carnival of Light' Belt for female characters is not selectable when using the 'Jackets' Upper Body type. There are, however, numerous jackets that do not have any collision problems with this belt, including but not limited to: Classic Steampunk, Victorian Steampunk, Wedding Tux, Mini Vest, Biker, Racer, Retro, Uniform, Sweater Vest, Official Shirt, and so on. In fact, the number of tops that MIGHT have collision issues with this belt are in the minority. I don't see any reason to bar using it. Please remove this arbitrary restriction!

If you're not feeling like the most important person when joining pugs anymore, then it's time to stop joining pugs and start making them. Be the leader. Get those people who say "I've never beat Marauder before" or "I can't get Master of the B.A.F." Find the people who don't know how a Molecular Acid is supposed to work, or where to stand for the 9CU ambushes. Set up the groups, give the instructions, teach people the instances. Lead them to victory, then do it again. Being remembered as "that tank who rarely dies" is nice and all, but being remembered as "that awesome guy who taught me all about the raids and led us to five speed victories in a row" is a whole new level.


...also, I don't care how much I've maxed out my IO global recharge; a speed boosting kinetics will always be the best thing ever.

I agree that a No FX or PVP FX Only option for Hasten and Super Speed would be my preferred choice. I do realize that there's quite a few power pools and adding customization options for them all probably would be a reasonably significant undertaking, which is why I focused on Hasten particularly because it's simply one of the brightest, most noticeable, and most commonly taken powers around. I'd be amazed if there weren't at least 50% of all characters in active play using it, and I can say personally that about 95% of my own do.

That said, I would be very curious to hear more about why it's supposed to be so difficult. I'm not trying to be overly critical, I admit I have little idea how their engine works under the hood, but I'm just curious. I'm a programmer and designer myself with experience in OpenGL/D3D coding, networking, game engine design, etc etc. The fact that there are so many powers in this game, the majority of them colorable in some fashion, makes it seem strange that there'd be a handful of powers that are so hardcoded that they can't be touched at all. If it were merely a problem of the textures being pre-colored orange or whatever, that wouldn't be any trouble at all to greyscale them out and add a tintable flag, so I can only assume there's some kind of more low-level problem, like perhaps separate ordered lists of tintable and non-tintable power IDs that would be thrown out of whack if any of them were changed... I dunno. Would be interesting to learn more though, as unlikely as that'd be.

Ah well, guess we'll see.

On my /fire brute, when I don't want the flames to be too visible, I set them to Bright Fire and choose the darkest, deepest (saturated) pure-blue color. Choosing a "pure" color like red or blue tends to work best, as these colors will only add up to more red or blue in additive ("bright") mode. That is to say, if you choose an orange or a cyan or some other mixed color, when they all start adding together, they'll move towards a bright, blinding white.

I mean, come on.

Just do it already.

Come onnnnnn.

Geez.

It only looks bad until you actually start playing the trials. You can get Rare and Very Rare incarnate salvage as mission rewards, and they only take 20 minutes to run each and can be repeated infinitely. In just a few days of even "casual" play you'll almost certainly have all your Tier 3 ("Rare") incarnate powers without paying a dime of influence, and be on your way to collecting components for your T4 Very Rare powers.

For quite a long time now, I've had a strange problem with being unable to change the gamma setting in-game to any value between 100% and 126%. Additionally, after 126% it continues to jump up in strange increments (131, 137, etc), however below 99% it properly slides in small 1% increments. I've attached a (somewhat simulated) screenshot showing the problem below.




Running Windows 7 x64 on a Core i7-950, with two Nvidia GTX 460s in SLI (though SLI disabled because City of Heroes still doesn't support it). Video drivers are latest WHQL release (266.58). This problem has been around for years though.

Furthermore, I'm having an even more annoying problem related to gamma and brightness settings: There seems to be no way to forbid CoH from changing my brightness settings at all. As a result, even the game-default "100%" causes my screen's brightness settings to get out of whack, becoming much too bright. My custom settings in the Nvidia Control Panel are ignored, to the point where even when I quit the game and close the client, the brightness settings remain incorrect and I have to adjust the sliders again manually. Every single time. I'll attach some screenshots of this later if necessary.

So.... does anyone know any way to fix these problems? I've asked around on the nvidia forums as well, but most games don't have these problems.. just CoH.