Thunderforce

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The travel isnt the pain.

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It certainly can be if you have someone with no temporary power and you have no Recall Friend. Bonus points if they are the leader.

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Think of it, Task Force is pretty much what we have here for an "instance" in WoW.

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Much of the appeal of CoX is that it is not WoW, notwithstanding the hideous bag on the side that is loot. WoW players go for 40-man raids because inexplicably being abused by teenagers on teamspeak seems like fun; generally on CoX 8 is a crowd and dynamic duos and trios are a lot fo fun.

From that point of view, I think the best change would be if Positron emphasised that an 8-man team is not necessarily best; if the "start of TF" dialogue was specially adapted. He could also warn about difficulty settings for anyone who missed that point.

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The CoT just have way too much at their disposal: holds/immobs/earthquake before scrappers get mez resistance.

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There are one or two exceptions (first that springs to mind is that /WP gets mez resistance at 10th), but in general I agree that the CoT mezzers are very harsh in Positron. Do the Ruin Mage boogie!

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Synapse because it's just boring and can take quite long. It isnt annoying though.

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And the final mission is definitely something a little out of the ordinary. I quite like Synapse, the door-missions-in-Steel interlude notwithstanding.

Positron, on the other hand... it's long and it can be a deathmarch, but in a sense it's become a rite of passage. Rather than the more radical suggestions, what if Posi issued a temporary travel power for the duration of the TF? That would ease some of the pain for novices.

Confirmed this. Today, I fitted a CMI 8768+ based soundcard (Terratec Aureon 7.1), which is pretty cheap, but a big step up from the AC97 on the motherboard. When I was testing this before, I recorded a demo on a 6-man mission in Faultline to play back with different graphics and audio settings (so as to be viewing exactly the same piece of gameplay each time). Sound off, it's fine; sound on on the AC97, performance very poor; sound on on the new card, performance fine.

I dunno if we have a sticky, but I think it's well worth recommending that people with framerate problems in large teams try playing sound-off before they splash cash on posh graphics cards. A cheap soundcard upgrade may be all that's needed.

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personally i thing it should auto defult to the not exceping invites untill you choose to change it.

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Assuming you mean "not accepting", I don't think that would work unless the current situation where people generally have the default left unconsidered was changed. If the last setting was "sticky", as I propose, you'd only have to change it once, of course.

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also i think it would be better if once you where on a team you didnt show on the search window.

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People do rely on that to find teams with space (not that that flood of tells when on-TF isn't mildly irritating), and also you might use it after a "Get Local Name" or similar to discover the AT and level. Personally I would like a facility for teams to advertise a desire for more members, but that's a bigger change than the original proposal.

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Once they've done that they kick you and solo the lot. More enemies means more Inf and Drops.

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Although there's an obvious fallacy here, the same one that runs 8-man Invincibles in the Hollows because "u get mor XP" ("I made you a Karma +Knockback but I ated it") - what matters is not the amount of drops inside the doors, but the time it takes you to get to each one. Just as it's more efficient to street sweep blues and greens because you can chop them down quickly without ever stopping, it may well be more efficient to not inflate spawn sizes to a point where you need actual thought to beat them. It also obviously increases the rate of Pool B drops.

[Disclaimer: I personally don't care about XP/ or drops/hour - I'm really looking forward to Merits not least because then we'll get some TF action that isn't ITF ITF ITF Katie ITF - but I'm not convinced the people who do have really thought it over.]

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Guys it is a game.

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If it's "just a game", fine; please remember that when looking for extra team members. It's just a game; your desire for an extra team member is not that important.

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Some think it is unreasonable to blind, I think it is really rude not to reply to a tell. And I am not talking a min or so I am talking after a 5 min wait and seeing them zone to other maps and enter missions.

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If someone doesn't reply to your tell after five minutes, _take the hint_.

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Sure it is. It's rude to leave someone at the door, and I'm willing to bet that most of the time you would finish what you are doing as quick as possible and answer that door.

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Depends. If I'm (say) in the bath and I'm not expecting someone I actually know, it's just too bad. If I get a tell and I'm knee deep in Rikti, it's also just too bad.

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But if you are busy surly it is polite to respond with the 6 key press answer and have actually answered????

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There are no circumstances under which I am willing to talk like some sort of semiliterate.

The whole "it's polite to send a tell, therefore it's polite to reply" argument is bogus anyway. It's polite to ring the doorbell when you arrive at someone's house, rather than barging in - that does not mean it is rude not to answer the doorbell even if you are busy somehow.

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The problem i have is that the grey is so ambiguous.

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But I think the grey is ambiguous only because people get set to it when they log in or leave a team. A third part to this suggestion would be to preserve LFT status; if you're set LFT, join a team, and leave it you should be LFT afterwards.

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I think it should work the opposite way round. the white looking for a team should be default and the user should have to express otherwise. This'll make people more aware of their LFT status. With this being a game largely based on teaming i don't think most people will mind. It's easy to just set hide.

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I wouldn't go that far. For one thing, I don't think it's a game largely based on teaming - if I look at the search list, blue and grey are present in roughly 50/50 proportions, even amongst players "on mission map".

I would say that the game normally allows you to choose for yourself whether you prefer soloing or teaming, and many of the design decisions made since release seem to be aimed at making soloing easier; obvious examples are the way AVs turn up as EBs if you are solo or have a small team, multi-builds, Containment, and the way all the CoV archetypes are at least reasonable soloists.

When you're set "Not accepting invites", the Team element of the chat display turns red.

I think there's a persistent annoyance with people not really being aware of the state of that setting - both to people trying to assemble teams, who end up blurting tells to people with plausible search comments (if they're nice) or all and sundry, and to people who want a team but don't get one.

Suggest that the Team element turns colours appropriate to _all_ LFT statuses - obviously distinguishing the LFT white and the non-LFT grey carefully. Furthermore, it'd be nice if the appropriate symbol applied too.

If we wanted to go further, it would probably not be overly onerous if a message appeared reminding you of your LFT status on zoning.

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And how hard is it to hit backspace and type no ty. Involves 6 kep presses.

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Please remember that some of us speak English, not lolcat. "No, thank you." is rather more.

I think, though, the underlying issue is that almost no-one uses the facility for marking yourself LFT - and particularly that people forget that if you're on a team for any purpose (even inadvertently accepting a blind and quitting immediately) then you go back to the grey not-LFT. I'll be posting a Suggestion pertinent to that, although I suspect it's a hardy perennial.

That said, I score at least one "And what does my search comment say about fills?" every night. Mind you, at least they don't send blinds.

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I was using Shockwave and Energy Torrent a fair amount and the more i used em the more [censored] off the MA scrapper got.

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Particularly odd from an MA scrapper, because, well, Crane Kick. It's a good attack but it's a prime suspect for "knockback, follow, knockback, follow, knockback, follow, oh - here's the next group of mobs. Hi, guys!"

In particular it has a bad habit of working on bosses, which both lets you KB someone further before they die and KB them off somewhere that's awkward to drop after them - so you switch target, and an angry boss turns up unexpectedly thirty seconds later.

That said, to be fair, Energy Torrent is an odd one because it's a cone. Normally if an energy blaster (or an MA scrapper with Crane Kick) knocks back someone, it's because they've set their teeth into the mob and will be killing them shortly. A cone doesn't have that characteristic.

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Maybe they could make one special location where you can log out without getting the double XP?

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I would also be pleased by that, but I think as minority complaints go "too much XP" is likely to be down somewhere below "please find and fix all apostrophes", "I don't think swords count as melee because... er...", and "please can there be in-game adverts for cheese?"

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I thought that was just for one location and badge type? Aren't you able to avoid the double XP by just logging out, say, in a hospital every time?

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My understanding from the widely quoted preview was that Patrol XP was in addition to any actual Day Job; "In addition to all of the Day Jobs, every character is "On Patrol" after they log out of the game."

I will be pleasantly surprised if that is not the case, but...

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Although having to slot each one on its own sounds majorly dispiritng, given im often too skint to afford ONE build, let alone two =[

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I can see that there are good technical reasons why the two builds are completely disjoint entities, but I also think the market is going to go utterly insane for a bit as people with 50s and huge budgets suddenly try to fully slot second builds, and I do wonder if there are any plans to increase the supply of rares to compensate for the demand doubling.

Put it this way, if I get one of the golden drops (like Karma +KB) between now and i13, I'm going to hang onto it and see what the prices do once everyone's slotting multibuilds. I think (because of the fixed Merit prices [1]) we may even go through a phase where it's worth running 50 Merits of TFs, getting a Karma +KB, selling it for a squillion influence, slotting yourself with cheap stuff... the people paying the squillion could do the TFs themselves, but they will want it NOW.

I also strongly suggest gathering up recipes and IOs for your second build _now_. I'm not doing it because I'm too lazy, but do what I say, not what I do. :-)

[1] Which have the-devs-are-communists crowds completely a-froth; I like it already. Of course the same thing could be achieved by tweaking drop frequencies, but either way I'm glad to see a bit of actual design going into deciding how readily available certain rare recipes should be.

If you'll excuse topic drift, you shouldn't have trouble kitting out good solid PVE builds for relatively little influence. Five-Frankenslotting is better than Six-SO-slotting, and you've saved slots for other powers.

First of all; if it's orange, you don't want it. From 22nd, use a combination of regular IOs 25th and Frankenslotted yellows - the latter are expensive at precisely 25th because everyone with a large budget likes to buy in at the "knee" of the IO effectiveness curve, so be patient. Powers that do one thing get regular IOs; powers that you don't have the set IOs you want yet get regular IOs.

Did I mention "be patient"? Leave lowball bids lying at the market. It's cheap to fill in regular IOs 25th if you wait for people doing the crafting badges to dump oversupply (cheaper than SOs), and I don't ever pay more than 12K for my A/D/R and D/E/R triple-aspect recipes, although with crafting costs you're still looking at 40k.

Of course none of this is any good if you don't have much influence, but that's not hard to sort out. Vast quantities of SOs and recipes are dumped on the market by people who would rather spend their time playing than extracting the last speck of value; work your way down the list of 45-53 SOs and recipes submitting lowball bids (say, 1,111) for anything that's for sale with no bidders and when your trays fill up, sell the lot. A recipe always sells for 1/4 its crafting cost.

This eases the early game; for a very little time, you can be fully kitted out with TOs (not normally worth it, but when a single trayful of SOs brings in the inf for every TO you'll ever want, why not?), DOs, and Yin-Os.

When you get a big-ticket drop - and, sooner or later, you will - resist the urge to use it for yourself. One really good recipe drop can pay for a complete set of yellows at around 25th, and then you're set with a solid PVE slotting all the way to 50th. Everything else is icing on the cake.

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hehe well I dont suddenly want access to racks with 999 spots for invention salvage, that would be insane, but 30 is a little low too.

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I think that depends on whether it cuts "flipping" of common salvage off at the knees, and forces other people's drops out onto the market rather than gathering dust in base racks. If it does you won't really need invention salvage for anything but expensive rares, and it's not like you get enough of those to fill up the Vault Reserve...

At the moment - I don't have a base rack - when my salvage fills up I take absolutely everything to Wentworths and sell everything whose history shows it goes for under 100K; then I just buy what I need when I need it. This is not the most cost-effective strategy _but_ time is money - if I spend my time running missions and earning influence via drops I get more influence per hour than I would if I spent it agonising over what salvage to keep and how to squeeze the maximum value from mine - and it's much more fun.

The only downside to this approach is every now and then some Yank who thinks they're George Soros has bought up all the Circuit Boards, or something, and I have to wait two days. If that ends I won't feel the need for a base rack at all.

What I'm saying is that far more common and uncommon salvage drops than is needed for the recipes people actually make up and slot. If it becomes impossible to hoard it, we should just be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it. Don't think of it as your base rack shrinking; think of it as everyone else's base rack shrinking...

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I like the idea of Merits, but it's gotta be a working feature, if a lot of people like the random recipe drop then why lose it when you could have a choice of both systems

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Because if any TF granted a random drop, it would be impossible to grant higher rewards for longer TFs, which is part of the point of the system. You can get a random drop from the Merit Vendor if your TF was worth at least 25 Merits - and the intent is that taking random drops is still overall more profitable, although I think that will vary wildly based on what it is you want (for example, I've always regarded KB protection as stupidly expensive while levelling up a character, but I might well drop 50 Merits on one).

I do thing the devs should recognise that some TFs have a very wide variance in time spent. Eden is worth a paltry 2 Merits because it can be very effectively speedrun (under 10 minutes!), but most people's Eden runs are much longer because they do a bunch of stuff that isn't strictly compulsory, and they'll be disappointed to get 2 Merits. It would be best if more of the Trial was unskippable. I'm not saying "turn every boss+guards into a defeat-all", but it would be worth the devs' time to look at TFs where there's a really high difference between average time and shortest time.

Of course this may be a self-correcting problem - the speed-Eden-runners will have less incentive to do it in i13, fewer Edens will be speedruns, the average time will be more representative, the Merit value will go up?

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the Day job rewards

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Hm. I think the Day Job system's ingenious, but - and this is a complaint you won't hear often - I'm a bit uneasy about the extra XP. An altoholic's going to be playing with double XP almost all the time, and even a regular player is going to get a bunch. Now, I notice the XP curve has been rejigged a bit while I was away, and of course debt became a joke some time back. When the toon I started since returning hit 25th, I cleared up an open arc from 20-24, did radio missions for the IP Safeguard, and did the Striga and Croato a arcs. She's 28th, halfway to 29th, and hasn't touched an origin contact yet. With Patrol XP it's almost going to be too easy.

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The main gripe I have with the bases is the meagre storage: 30 pieces per rack when they used to hold 999 seems a little tight.

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I suspect this change, at least for invention salvage, is because the mad US speculators who'd rather play market-PVP than actually run missions (and are currently pouring out gallons of the-devs-are-communists LJ-drama) need a lot of salvage storage for flipping common salvage. You might well see an end to the problem that the common salvage you need has shot up to 25,000 and you have to wait a couple of days for one - and then you won't need as much base storage.

(I don't have a problem with people having fun playing with the market _inasmuch_ as it isn't a nuisance to people who want to play the game. Call me an old socialist, but I think of the market as predominantly cooperative, where we pool our resources to help each other...)

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My other main gripe is with the multi builds, though it's only a niggle and from what I've heard it's due to a bug: When selecting your second build you then have to level up in the traditional way...

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I don't think that's a bug, although it would be nice if you were dropped in the respec interface if you switched to a second build that's at Security Level 0 (ie, no power selections made at all).

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me: you must be bugged, best log out and wait 15 mins before logging back on. Happens sometimes.

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"Your insp tray is clogged. Hold down Alt - now try pressing F1, F2, F3, F4, and so on..."

(I have no idea if Alt-F4 works ingame, actually. I might try this and find out.)

I start grumpy 90% of the time because I spell "you" with three letters.

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I agree that all builds are compromises; the compromise you are making by skipping AP is to improve soloing but at a considerable cost in your ability to support a team in the early levels.

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Not really, you're quoting one example where it was useful against an AV.

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Er... yeah. It's an example. That's how examples work. I'm not saying it's the only time AP has ever been useful; I'm saying it's the most striking time, when a power that you say increases the risk of dying actually saved me from dying repeatedly.

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The majority of time at low levels are spent doing Heroic missions where Healing Aura and Heal Other are adequate.

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The missions may be Heroic, but in many other respects things are worse. Players may not be as disciplined, tankers have weaker defences, aggro management can be poor, blasters don't have enough attacks to dispatch enemies they aggro, scrappers are less self-sufficient, controllers can't lock down as much, Healing Aura and Heal Other cycle slowly and heal less, endurance is in shorter supply...

I would say quite the opposite; once you're into the 20s Healing Aura, Heal Other and Regeneration Aura are fully slotted, your team members are more likely able to manage things, and Absorb Pain gathers dust. It's precisely at low levels you are likely to want it.

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The extra damage from attacks would probably be more usefull in these cases.

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Again I must disagree. The extra damage from attacks is only worth having if you don't aggro stuff and get yourself in trouble - especially if trouble means being mezzed. That is much less likely to happen once tankers and controllers are fully capable.

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Mmm. So what are you going to skip? The traditional answer's Absorb Pain,

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Yep; I hate this power, anything that increases my own chances of dieing is not for me

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Giving the tanker their health bar back in one go doesn't necessarily increase your own chance of dying. I remember a bad Synapse run where I was having serious endurance problems; I kept the team alive fighting the Clockwork King only because I could stand well back and pop Absorb Pain when I was out of blue. I didn't faceplant once; without AP we'd have taken multiple team wipes against the AV.

I agree that all builds are compromises; the compromise you are making by skipping AP is to improve soloing but at a considerable cost in your ability to support a team in the early levels.

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Six slot Healing Aura early - beneficial for you and the team.

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Agree, except probably five-Franken-slot it.

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Take your 1st two attacks - for most Defenders their bread and butter through their carreer.

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Mmm. So what are you going to skip? The traditional answer's Absorb Pain, but the early levels are just where Absorb Pain is strongest; enemies aren't flinging around so many AoEs, it doesn't need any extra slots to be effective (and slots are in short supply), you don't have 3 SO Recharge Redux to cycle Heal Other quickly, and you are far more likely to have endurance issues and have to fall back on zero-endurance Absorb Pain.

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Take Air Superiority to access a travel power.

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I must admit I hadn't thought of that, although of course it does leave you stuck with Fly instead of Super Jump.

Another approach is Hasten+Super Speed - more viable if you have the Good versus Evil jump pack. Obviously Hasten increases your attack power when it's up, and it's also ultimately valuable for the ability to have one of the Recovery/Regeneration Auras up almost all the time.

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This is true of all ATs but Blasters(both primary and secondary cause damage), even with a Scrapper early slotting is a toss up between increasing your damage output or increasing survivability.

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Yes, but with an empath (and many other defenders) early slotting often has to go to powers that are no use at all soloing. With a scrapper you always get _something_ useful (and with many scrapper secondaries, the early powers are so uninspiring that the slots almost inevitably fall into your primary).

Mind you, tankers who slot for teaming often end up as tickle-to-death merchants - no risk of faceplanting, because you're massively over-defended for soloing, but agonisingly slow defeats.

Controllers were miserable before Containment, but it's not so bad now; but again, at least you're generally taking powers that do *some* damage.

I do think the problem is worst for empaths. Most of the powers you're taking and slotting in your primary don't do any damage (unlike a controller); they don't do you any good soloing (unlike scrapper secondaries or - say - a rad defender's powers); unlike a tanker you aren't particularly robust. All these things are true of some other kinds of defender (like bubbles), but additionally all your primary powers are good and useful. Those other kinds of defender can figure out *something* to skip.

If you go for a traditional build with travel power and Stamina and take all the primary, it's _24th_ level until you can select a second attack. I think one reason people leave Absorb Pain alone is not so much its double-edged nature but the sheer desire for another power selection.

But... I've said it before, but multibuilds changes all this. Forget PvP vs PvE; think solo versus team builds. You'll never be a great soloist, but at least you'll have a decent bag of slotted attacks, and you won't have to compromise your team support for the sake of soloing speed.

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Map the keys on your numpad to select the members of your team:
Then you can map your fave single-target heals/buffs to the other keys on the numpad, eg:
/bind add "powexec_name heal other"
/bind subtract "powexec_name clear mind"


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I don't think this approach is the best possible, because it is toon-specific. I always map team members to the numbers on the main keyboard and powers to the numbers on the number pad (nothing wrong with the other way around, but I use WASDQE for movement and I need powers more often than I need to select team members, so I keep my right hand free for powers) - that way when I switch toons I've only got to look at the numbers in the power tray to see which powers are where (and I try to be consistent with the location of shields, "panic buttons" like Dull Pain, attacks, travel power, etc). These days, you could use one of the loose power trays to have the powers in the same arrangement as the keys on the numpad, too.

The more alts you have, the more useful it is not having to do much toon-specific configuration (I load one power-binds file for everyone but teleporters) and not having to remember which of the favourite power keys is which. You are also marginally quicker with a team heal or buff if one hand is selecting the team member and the other the power.

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As I say, only works if you're happier with the keyboard than clicking


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And, frankly, if you're not, practice. Mousing's never going to be as fast as the keyboard for this job.

It's _sound_.

Sound off, FPS fine. Not great in really big fights, but the sort of "oh, there are lots of guys around, I'm getting 15fps" way you expect in 3D games.

Sound on, either Performance or Compatibility, runs like a drain when things get busy. Still varies by enemy group, but of course sounds vary by enemy group.

Checking m/b drivers and what the performance is like using the USB headset instead of the soundcard.