T_Immortalus

I have a "more stable" yet "less fast" connection.

That is both "better" and "worse".


I guess there can't be more than one quality to anything in your mind, right? There couldn't possibly be both accuracy and damage to a power in the game because that would be two different effects that could be different levels of quality so that the power is "great at one thing but sucks at the other" instead of just "the power sucks or is great".

Make it a little tougher to spell it out for you and refute your nitpick next time please.

Then make a suggestion for what is causing it only under those specific circumstances. I'm all ears and want to fix it.

I don't think it is such a common enough problem as to be my end, and I can't change the game myself.




Also, level shifts matter because they affect the sidekick code. They were a "dirty hack" because the developers used the existing "combat level" and "experience level" metrics to make it work by shifting adding to one of them. The game was not built for levels over 50.
So, when it periodically rechecks my sidekicked level status, it sometimes registers as 51-1, like before they mostly fixed the error in beta, and my character becomes level 0 because I can't be sidekicked to level 50.

It essentially resets my character to "factory new" like the Y2K thing was supposed to do to computers.

The code just can't handle a parameter outside of the allowed range, like dividing or multiplying by zero(which is probably partly what happens that causes the crash and the tray wipes, it multiplies my stats by my new sidekicked level, which happens to be zero due to the issue). (That's just a guess as to why it does what it evidently does, in the parentheses.)

Explanation:

There was a bug I heard about, in beta before the level shifts went live, where a player sidekicked to a level shifted player would register as "level zero" due to being sidekicked up to 50, which was 51-1 due to the level shift, which the game could not handle(due to the 51 in the equation) and thus they would lose access to all powers, due to trays emptying, and even crash.

That is where I got the "resets my character" guess about my power trays emptying before the crash.
(Edit: Also, certain experiments with the costume slot selection window have shown me that the default position for a character ina zone is at the center of that zone. Which explains how my character saw the center of Imperial City while on BAF trials during this bug when my character was "reset position" to the center of the "map" which was all of Imperial City.)


Also, I did go to the trainer when this happened once, to try leveling to see if that cleared the issue, and it seemed I was being treated as a level zero, as if I had switched builds but certainly did not.
This really did happen.


I really wish this would be fixed so that I would not have to worry about crashes or my powers becoming unavailable and unusable temporarily due to the tray wipe(which won't even let me add a power from the powers tab to the tray to use).




Edit:
Essentially, the bug "resets to default" everything about my character when it happens. I think this is because it can't reconcile the bugged data with the correct data.

The game crashes, not my computer or anything else, just the game.

It doesn't do it all the time. It doesn't do it every team. It doesn't do it every AE mission. It doesn't do it every zone event or big league(I join Hamidon raids every weekend mostly without issue, seems instances are more likely to have an issue than zones).

It's under predictable circumstances but at random times.



FYI, it also did not happen back in Issue 18 or before. It started with the introduction of level shifts and was most common on the BAF trial.
It actually was a more common occurrence back then, as others reported crashes on the incarnate trials(especially BAF).

I just happen to have worse internet so that it is still just often enough to exhibit a pattern for me, while others have had the issue mostly eliminated.


It's a problem with the game.

How do you think my side knows what to display for health and endurance and damage to enemies or what effects need to play on allies and enemies and when they start and stop, not to mention the buff icons when I right click them?

Everything needs to be crammed down the internet connection. It's a LOT of information even with "stop sending buffs" enabled.


Also, the level of the team lead determines the sidekicked level of the other members of the team. No matter what the level it needs to check to see if the level needs to change and to what.
Level shifts are a dirty hack, according to the developers, which have had problems before and change the combat level of the players. Those combat level changes would change what level teammates would be sidekicked to, if they had not coded it specially to ignore the level shifts.

Obviously, if my connection loses the necessary packet that keeps the level shift from affecting my sidekicked level calculations then it will break.




I don't know how it works, but I sure know that every time I crash, with these circumstances, I have always been teaming and/or on a league with level shifted characters leading. Most often it also occurs during high load times while teaming under those circumstances.



1) My explanation for why was a complete fantasy guess, yes.
2) My character did flop(as if knocked down, including the knockdown sound) and get stuck. The BAF trial times, with their high load, did have my character flop(knockdown sound and animation) while spinning my view rapidly(tended to point my camera straight up) and then showing my character floating above the road around where Mr. G would be in Imperial City, while still on the BAF trial map, facing North.

How would you explain seeing the center of Imperial City while on a BAF trial?


This is all true. I'm not making things up because there would be no problem to solve if it wasn't a real problem. I wouldn't have any reason to post then.

First, you're exaggerating how slow my connection is. It's a lot faster than dial up, in feel at least.(Edit: Oops, that may eb what you meant by "real world". That may be correct, but it definitely is a lot better than dial-up.)

Second, it is not cellular though it uses similar infrastructure. My end has a large dish/antenna that requires line of sight and is much more powerful than a small cellphone.
This ensures reliability and smooth and fast performance even in the worst weather.
(Edit: I have more reliable connection, including less lag, often than people with hard wired and faster connections, from my experience teaming with others. I don't think my connection is somehow less stable. It is very stable, though I do have more packet loss in the game than I did during Issue 18 and before(evidenced by instantaneous red spikes on the netgraph that were much more rare, or nonexistent, back then). It is still not a problem unless a specific packet unluckily is lost or under heavy load that makes the losses nearly constant at times.)

It's fine so long as I don't have "the right packet" get lost that causes an issue or get into a really heavy load area without enabling "stop sending all buffs"(this helps a lot).





Though yes, my connection is great for stress testing the game.

I forgot they were both in that movie.

"Sacred flames, protect us from the Kull!" -from "Kull the Conqueror"
That was the first thing that popped into my mind.

That was obvious.
I was just pointing out that it is the reason why Praetoria is empty, because it is restricted.

1) I just find it a pain in the butt to have a set tell me "wait for this power to recharge before you can use the other one" or "use powers in this order" when I want to buiild a character how I want and make it work.
This is not World of Warcraft where every character has to use a specific set of abilities in a specific order or they don't ever find a team, and even WoW is getting away from that or at least trying.

Some of us actually like simply beating up on bad guys, instead of trying to "make skill matter" in a hotbar game not made for skill to matter.
We want to be "super", not feel like we actually have to be super in real life just to be able to be "adequate" in a game otherwise we would play nothing but FPS games where skill really matters.


2) When was the last time we got a melee set which did damage mainly NOT smashing or lethal?
I would say the last time was Issue 7 and Electric Melee.

That is what I meant. I don't like everything being "I punch things with smashing damage" or "I cut things with a weapon, which is lethal damage".
What happened to negative energy or even psionic(which has never had a melee set)?

How many sets do they reuse the Super Strength punch animations for, or the Whirling Hands animation for? Even Martial Arts has optional punch animations taken from Super Strength, or at least given to both sets with animation customization.




Read carefully: I'm not saying "the sets we have suck", but I AM saying "I wish there were more exotic powers" such as "I mentally create glowing psionic weaponry to fight with"(like Penelope Yin in her new screenshot and Psylocke from X-Men, at least).

I just want to see a new concept other than "wind up and punch the guy with a slight glow that should not be there because I'm using martial arts I call Street Justice or Super Strength or Martial Arts".

The developers have not been very imaginative when it comes to melee power sets, not since Issue 7 at least.




I just want more actual different options. Is that too much to ask?
Is it too much to ask for a different way to do negative energy damage than Dark Melee or Dark Blast, which actually look like cigarette smoke much more than darkness?
Is it too much to ask for a psionic damage melee set?

It's not like those would be unbalanced or not make sense because defenses to them are common enough and the damage types are certainly in use by a LOT of NPCs and players, even the weak and common Skulls gang members.

I understand that.
You probably don't like /Force Field masterminds, but I quite enjoy them. I like letting the pets do the work as I don't do much or have room in my build and time for pool powers.

That is why I came up with this idea. I'm more interested in easier to manage power sets and archetypes(hence my favoritism for brutes and masterminds and the Fortunata side of widows).


Though, this idea would work best in exactly this type of game. It would be very hard or impossible to make it work in an FPS game, for example.

I'm still working on this idea, but I think it can be both mostly passive and still interesting and active enough. Also, it is more about the illusion of passivity, such as Gravity Control powers don't have projectiles so that it looks like your will alone just locks a target down.

I like attacks that are not physical, ones that just effect a target(Gravity Distortion/Lift/etc) or instantly hit(X-ray Beam/Laser Beam Eyes/etc).
Sadly, no melee power sets have that at all. They're all about physically punching and kicking and only quick because the target is so close.

Well....

1) Sometimes it is more fun to have a less active set. Active sets can be really painful to use(for the hands and fingers as well as the eyes and mind managing it) sometimes.
I know I have been put off by active sets like that. I don't like Dual Blades for this reason. The most active set I actually like is Time Manipulation, but I even find that very trying at times such as on a mastermind.

2) Sometimes I just want a change from the usual "walk up and spam attacks" with either passive defenses or defenses you need to spam. It would be nice to have the option to make offense the mostly passive thing while defense is active or still passive.
It's like a robots/force field mastermind at lower difficulties. The pets require less management then so you can just buff them every few minutes and just manage your positioning so they stay in the big Dispersion Bubble as much as possible.

3) If people didn't like being passive at least in some situations then tanks and healers wouldn't exist. Just see what a Hamidon raid tanker does sometime, or their empaths. All melee characters get this way though; they call it "scrapper-lock" or something else where they just, apparently "mindlessly", run in and spam attacks until everything is down and they move on to the next.

4) There would be new strategy for fighting against such a passive set. It could make staying in melee range a bad idea, forcing melee characters to adapt(in pvp or if used by pve NPCs), or it could make some other strategy interesting.
That is not even counting the amount of strategy the powers could take to use for you as well.

5) Being such a "powerful entity that your very presence can affect the world around you" is a VERY cool character concept.
Just look at Mot from the Dark Astoria incarnate content for an example of it taken to the extreme. Mot does not even move or fight himself(from what I gather on the wiki) yet he is able to absorb and destroy people/heroes/villains supposedly around the world.

There are so many concepts open to it as well, most of them having to do with some unseen mental control(through some method like technology or a mutation or natural willpower...etc) affecting the world.

Hell, there are examples of it in our powers already with all the toggles that affect more than just our character without requiring us to hold down a button forever or be stuck in an animation like some "ritual that demands absolute concentration and would be broken by combat".



I would find it very fun(especially considering situations where lag makes getting clicks out quickly difficult) to be a sort of "focal point of power" and watch enemies be "defeated by my mighty presence".



It also would not be completely passive, I imagine:

1) I would include at least one single target attack, probably ranged, to give people something to do(other than other things I'll get to in point 2) and make performance definitely more varied than "constant identical DPS in every fight".

2) I have the idea that such a set could emphasize positioning in battle. Instead of the usual "melee characters run into melee and just spam attacks while enemies come to them", it could encourage/require melee characters to position themselves to do optimal damage or to specific tougher targets rather than just the closest melee targets.

3) Such a set could be emphasizing setup before a fight as well, instead of just running in and spamming then. Like masterminds, it could be more about preparation before a fight or strategy/tactics rather than "SMASH!" running into combat without thinking beyond "me smash biggest/littlest bad guy(s) first".


I have plenty of ideas for it, but it is also fairly difficult to turn them into a working set idea, especially figuring out a theme for it(or multiple themes for many similar sets if I can).

I think it would be awesome and fun, especially with an awesome concept.





Edit:
I don't want to see the set become an endurance management set though. It isn't fun to have to "stop doing anything" while you wait for endurance to recover or Rest to recharge because you used it the last fight and are out of endurance.
There are already too many combinations that are heavy on endurance and suffer for it.

Endurance management is rarely fun and most often a curse.

Also, such a set needs to be active in some way, and the best way to do that is not to slow it down.
The best way to make it active is to encourage constant fighting and managing the position of the character and the enemies in combat or some other way besides a binary resource system that either has "enough endurance" or "not enough".

Just be sure to always leave your targets wanting more, because that is what "dominators" do.
Just ask Dominatrix.

If I was complaining I would have said what I really felt:

"I want Titan Weapons free NOOOWWWW!!!!!"(Edit: I really did want something that good, but I'm not stupid enough to expect it or complain abut not receiving it. I will, however, point out when something is "not worth the paper it is printed on", "metaphorically speaking"(read like Jim Carey in The Mask))

....or I would have whined about "somebody ranting".
LOL

Seriously, you whine about complainers when you're even more of a complainer by doing so.
LOL
LOL
LOL all the way to the LOLbank.

I think this was part of Mender Ramiel's arc, when they visit Cimerora and notice other meddlers. I think they mentioned it during the "find the well" mission there.

I guess they just forgot that(I sure did) when they made Dream Doctor's arc.


Edit:
Found it - http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Mender...Powers_that_Be

Sadly, controllers do not get access to dominator or blaster secondaries, and dominators do not get Illusion Control(either because of the pets or the stealth that doesn't combine well with dominator secondaries).

I suggest Illusion/Time, because they mesh together well, but I have also successfully played Illusion/Force Field and know Illusion/Radiation Emission to be amazing per Local Man's guide here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=141225

Illusion Control looks awesome. I have to say it is one of my favorite graphical sets.

LOL
What do I always say about "text and attitude"?

I'm not "yelling and screaming" about anything(the instances of caps are more emphasis, like others use the easy to miss italics), but if i was then it would be about Forbin_Project's incessant "old man syndrome" which encourages him to try to blow civil remarks way out of proportion. Even then, I wasn't angry at him, let alone "yelling and screaming".

I'm not angry at you, or taking offense even, either.

I apologize if that is the impression you got.

I was just quoting the part where you said "if it were just an inspiration I wouldn't bother" because that is what I meant by "if the item sucks then we won't bother claiming it".


I actually didn't read very far into your post besides that because that is all I wanted to comment on. That happens. In fact, I just did it for your most recent post.
Don't take offense; I meant none.

Well, the developers missed a few things that should grant the badge. Woops!