Syntax42

I'm kinetics / archery and only level 40.

My defender is basically dead against Malta when soloing (a single LT is enough to hold and kill me) unless I have a break free. Acrobatics is a mag -2 hold protection. I'm not sure if that is enough for the holds the gunslinger and titans use, but I hadn't planned on obtaining it for my build due to the prerequisites, the low magnitude of protection (KB protection is easy to slot), and kinetics already having a super jump power.

I just won't fight Malta solo until they do something about the number of mezzes they have. A 40+ second stun from operatives, holds from gunslingers and titans, and endurance sapping is a bit too much for most non-melee types.

I was trying to do a patron mission to unlock patron powers on my defender and I ran into some malta. I have my difficulty set to -1 x1. The malta gunslinger was somehow a +1 lieutenant. He landed a hold on me and I died. I went in again, this time with a break free. It expired before I could attack the lieutenant because I was dealing with the minion in his group. Again, he held me and I died without a chance to heal or fight back. After three deaths, I had enough and requested help in /b.

Where is a defender supposed to get hold protection? The game is getting frustrating in the 40s instead of having the fun debuffer/buffer/attacks I could do in the early game.

Don't forget to consider the mechanics of defense debuffs versus resistance debuffs, and that a lot more enemies debuff defenses than resists.

If you have soft-capped defense and get hit with a 5% defense debuff, you will now have 40% defense (assuming no defense debuff resistanace) which leaves you more vulnerable to get hit by another defense debuff. Some monster power sets are very heaving in adding defense debuffs with almost every attack. All it takes is that first one to get through and you quickly become squishier than a blaster. Instead of avoiding 95% of attacks, you now avoid 90%, making a tiny 5% defense debuff effectively double the amount of damage you take.

If you have capped resistance, however, a 25% resistance debuff simply means you will take 25% more damage. Further debuffs consider your original resistance.

Debuffs favor resistances over defense.


My suggestion: Play a resistance powerset and add defense through pool powers and sets. Stacking both defense and resistance increases your survivability much faster than stacking only one.

I haven't checked it in game. I was going by what I read in other threads. Excuse my ignorance if I submitted this thread in error.

For people who have limited time to play, a 24-hour timer on alignment points leads to playing later in the evening every day due to the completion time of the first mission being later than the cooldown of the alignment point. If you consider that we have to farm for a tip at least 24 hours after completing the previous day's mission, then do another mission, it can easily cause a 1-hour delay each day, which leads to days of not participating in the alignment system. Many MMOs have realized how a 24-hour (or multiple of) timer causes this and have reduced their raid lockout or similar timers by 4 hours to accommodate casual players better.

Simply reducing the timer to 20 hours would allow casual players to participate in the new system each day without giving powergamers an advantage in the system. Even powergamers have to sleep sometime...

I know about the color scheme. It is hard to see the difference between orange and yellow for the color-impaired like myself.

If you don't have space, replace the origin column with alignment. I doubt anyone uses origin to determine who to invite to their teams, but alignment could be important.

Get faster hard drives.

Dual Raptors in a Raid 0 is nice. My patcher takes less time than it took to write this post. A solid state drive could be faster. If you can't afford those, consider upgrading to a 7200 RPM drive instead of your antiquated 5400 RPM drive.

The patcher doesn't even read your screenshots folder. Mine says 3.6G and I just installed the game last week.

From the patch notes:
http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/pat...release_n.html
[ QUOTE ]

Fixed a bug where certain powers, such as Plant Control/Carrion Creepers, would not properly pass enhancement bonuses to the summoned creatures.


[/ QUOTE ]

I couldn't find anything explaining exactly what this means. I've read that damage sets don't enhance all damage aspects of Carrion Creepers, so people use regular damage IOs in that power. Does this mean we can use damage sets in it now?

I think I have the patience for waiting for a character to become powerful. I leveled a worthless stone brute to 38 just because I knew how good it would be after I got past that point.

I played CoH back when it first came out and quit before getting to 30 because it was too much of a grind back then. I tried rejoining when CoV came out, but it was still just a long grindfest. Now, with AE, it doesn't seem like leveling a character up is as much of a pain. I don't have to find people within 1 level of mine just to get decent groups going. The XP also seems to go faster with efficient boss-farming in AE. I think if they do something drastic to the AE XP farming, I would quit the game again.

Edit:
Looks like I'm going with Plant/Storm/Ice controller. Kinetics was very time consuming to maintain SB on everyone in the group and I don't need that again. The resistance debuff from freezing rain will stack nicely with FS when I team with a kinetic.

Thanks for the quality replies instead of flaming me for my ignorance. It looks like Hero ATs are more focused on one role, but I've usually preferred hybrid classes in MMOs, which is why villains seem better to me. I may give blaster or controller a serious try if I can find or make a build I like. I'm leaning toward fire/kinetics controller after reading StrykerX's post.

I'm not seeing what EM has to offer for Blasters. Many power sets have a build-up. Endurance shouldn't be an issue for most characters. Primary power sets offer plenty of attacks, so the few from EM shouldn't be needed. I just don't see the advantage it has, especially over a kinetics corrupter.

Willpower is a great secondary for scrappers or brutes. I think I would prefer to have it on a brute, though, because of fury damage bonus. If I'm not getting hit, it might be hard to get the fury going, but I know a /WP character can take a beating with the high regen and the right defense set bonuses.

My corrupter is AR/kinetics because I didn't want to be a fire primary like most are. Flamethrower and burn patches do plenty of DoT while I'm buffing or doing something else. The burn patch does enough damage by itself to kill lieutenants with fulcrum shift up.

I am trying to decide what to make for my next alt. I have a 50 kinetics corrupter and 50 stone brute. I am open to suggestions, but it will probably have to be a villain because nobody has convinced me of anything superior about hero ATs, except for the tanker's ability to take damage.

Blasters have pretty good damage, but their secondaries seem weak. They don't buff or heal and the secondaries don't add any significant damage. Corrupters do almost the same damage, while having the ability to heal and buff when not focusing on damage. One might argue that blasters are only focused on one thing, however with more damage power sets on Villain side (Dom vs Controller), a corrputer can slack off and things will still die fast.

Defenders and Corrupters are almost identical, except that corrupters have higher base damage for almost everything. The minor difference in amount healed or buffed amounts to nothing in actual play.

Controllers appear to have the short end of the stick when it comes to power sets. They can use their crowd control, then they don't have anything else to do, usually. Buffing isn't a full-time job. Healing won't be needed if they have everything crowd-controlled and the tanker has aggro correctly. Dominators are the clear winners here because they do damage after CCing.

Scrappers do decent single-target damage, with limited AoE options. They aren't meant for tanking, and brutes do it better. One might pick a scrapper for PvP, but I think a stalker would be preferred for the stealth. Once a brute gets his fury up, I think the damage would look better. I could be wrong, however, since I'm not completely familiar with scrapper crit mechanics.

Tankers have better mitigation than brutes, which is all I see going for Hero ATs. Unfortunately, the damage on a tanker is poor compared to a brute with fury going.

So, I don't really have any interest in playing Hero ATs. If you suggest one for an alt, please explain why it will work well, either solo or in a team. Currently, I am looking for an alt idea that will likely solo well, so good DPS is a plus.

Here are some builds I've been thinking about: Electric/Shield brute, Energy/Willpower brute, Stone/? tanker, and maybe a blaster if someone can explain what makes them better than my kinetics corrupter.

//The picture produced is bad video memory and/or overheating of the video card GPU itself. Whether you believe that or not.


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That's all I needed to know.

So you can tell me my sound card driver is out of date? I have not seen a logical reason to post CoH Helper or Hijackthis information for this issue. You'll just have to take my word for it that my OS is up to date and I don't have viruses or trojans interfering with my video card. I'm not an idiot when it comes to computers and I will not be made to look like one by someone who tries to point out one out-of-date driver. Post something useful or don't post at all.

Other games run fine on my system. There is no excuse for it being more "demanding" on a system than every other game on the market because it isn't. The game is much older than my computer which runs brand new games just fine. If CoH is crashing my computer, it must be the one to blame. I can, however, accept that it uses certain code not found in most games which exposes a certain flaw in my video card. For example, if it is using corrupt video memory that would normally be corrected by other games, I would still need to replace my video card soon.

If anyone has anything useful to add to this, or specific reasons or information needed from CoH Helper and HijackThis, please add it.

Ok, I have an actual screenshot from when my graphics went corrupted, here:
http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/j...0-22-36-06.jpg

The screenshot doesn't show it, but the 2d interface was still visible and working. I could chat with people just fine.

I ran a temperature monitoring program. After the crash, I checked the logs and the temperature never went over 145F. I have seen the temperature as high as 160 in other games with zero problems.

I am hoping my card isn't bad because I don't want to spend money to replace it. I would like another opinion on this. Please do not blame this on heat again as I have completely ruled that out. Any more input?

No, it is not a single random triangle or a wedge of an extra polygon. It is literally thousands of random triangles on the screen. This is the best screenshot that I could find that is similar to what I see.

Similar to this, but with a lot more triangles.

If I thought posting Hijackthis and CoH Helper logs would help, I would have. I know Hijackthis can tell us if something is interfering with another program or if there is malware on the computer. CoH Helper only shows driver versions and settings, which are not the issue here. I stated which video drivers I am using because this is a video issue.

If it was overheating, I would see problems in other games. I don't want to spend the money on a new video card just because one game has issues.

This kind of problem has only happened in CoH for me.

I ended up installing 178.26 video drivers. The game ran without glitching, but I did not test extensively. Also, there was a noticeable drop in framerate, but I would rather have stability, of course.

Only the 3d graphics get corrupted. It happens randomly, usually after extended play and more frequently after/during grouping with others rather than soloing. I can still see the interface just fine and I can type in chat. However, all I see behind the HUD is random triangles of different colors. Exiting the game causes a hard freeze on my computer immediately after the game closes.

I am using 185.85 version of Nvidia's drivers with Windows Vista. I have auto-updates enabled so I don't have to micro-manage my drivers. Service pack 2 was automatically installed some time ago, so the hotfix in the sticky does not apply. When I was using a previous video driver (182.xx), I would get a white screen (sometimes when logging in) and the game would freeze, but I could close it with task manager and go back to Windows just fine.

The first thing I thought when I saw the graphics corrupt was overheating. I ran Nvidia's temperature monitor and my GPU temperature rarely goes over 150F. I know for a fact that I don't start to get overheating problems until it goes over 170F because it used to do that when I had the stock fan on it. I know my CPU is fine with a giant Zalman fan on it.

I'm suspecting the drivers I'm using are not very good for CoX. Has anyone found good drivers for CoX? I'm going to try the 169.xx drivers mentioned in the sticky, but if I can't get it running without crashing, I'll just have to switch to CO when it comes out since they will be officially supporting Vista.