TyrantMikey

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You know, lots of blasters here are providing tons of good advice, but one thing I see missing here is this:

Don't forget to take Defiance into account. Take Hasten, and slot the heck out if it with recharge reduction.

The faster you can recharge your powers, the more damage you'll do across the board.

Another piece of advice that I'd give is this (though others may disagree): Focus more on accuracy before you worry about damage. You will naturally do more damage if you can hit your target more often. DPS increases when you hit the target; if you can't hit the target, you won't do any damage, and you'll just be wasting endurance.

If you focus on damage, all you're doing is waiting on that one lucky shot that you may never land, but which, if it does land, really frickin' hurts.

Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. Then, recharge, recharge, recharge. The damage will follow. I have a number of 50 blasters, and this has always worked very well for me.

YMMV

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we don't need a teamin badge. it is pointless. and the dev's wouldn't tie in an accolade power to a single badge. especially when we already have accolades that give these powers/bonuses. and all the badges are attainable by everyone. even the people who choose to solo. this badge would be unattainable by those that can only solo due to time constraints or whatever.


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Indeed.

My body needs water, but I want Mountain Dew.

Understanding the difference between need and want is important.

Sure, we don't need the badge, but what would it hurt? If it would encourage badge-seekers to form teams and alleviate some of the problems with folks finding teams, I'm all for it. But it would have to be done in such a way as to prevent the AFK badge farming, as has been pointed out.

Besides, the experience of one, or even a few players, is not completely representative of the experience of the whole. Scrappers find it far easier to complete the game content than, say, defenders. For many defender builds, a team is essential. So I find that argument lacking, or weak at best.

In the end:

/signed

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I'm very happy for all the proponents of power customization. I can't say it was ever high on my priority list, but then the devs exhausted my priority list when they announced Going Rogue.


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Same...

Here's your NEW priority.

New Maps. We need new maps on both sides of the game. (I think we need new zones and just can some that we already have that suck) BUT, none the less - We need NEW MAPS...

So, like... Prioritise that as something we need and advocate for it.

Kthnx

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Mission maps?

TBH, I really don't think we need new mission maps. We have plenty.

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I'm not so sure we need more maps. More map tilesets and mission types would strike my fancy.

In DDO, for instance, there are levers you have to pull to open certain doors in other areas of the map. There are traps you have to disable or you'll take damage from them. There are tile puzzles in the floor. There are hidden doors that you may/may not find. There are optional destructible objects that cough up loot (not that I think this game needs phat loot, just throwing it out there).

The truth is, from my limited perspective, virtually every mission in this game can be nailed down to one of the following:

Defeat everyone
Defeat everyone and rescue someone
Defeat everyone and click the glowies

Basically, we just run around beating the snot out of people over and over and over again on the same basic tilesets over and over and over again.

I'd be open to more missions that encouraged you to think.

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You've never been to Dark Astoria, have you?

If you had you would know that it can be quite annoying finding things in an environment like that, which is why it is something that is saved for later levels and limited to a single zone and a few staggered missions.

While I agree that this feature should be used more often (a Halloween event mission with this kind effect would be kool as sin, and I would still like a villain zone in this vein) I don't think it should be introduced at low levels to annoy new players.



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Actually, I have been to Dark Astoria, more times than I care to admit. And while Dark Astoria is foggy beyond all belief, it's not precisely the same thing I'm thinking of.

Oh, and for the record, I'm not even remotely suggesting, and did not mean to suggest that this should be thrust upon folks willy-nilly at lower levels and with any sort of the frequency of, say, a blue cave mission. No, other posters have it right: it would lose its appeal if it were common. Make it rare.

The whole point of the map would be that it would creap you the heck out. Scare the beejeebus out of you. Hero, villain--it wouldn't matter. You would be treading lightly.

And may G*d have mercy on your soul if you went down there with a Peacebringer or a Kheldian in your company.

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No, actually Saved costumes are stored in a file on your computer, not on the server.

Have you ever loaded a costume from the Save feature? Like that, but specific to the character you are playing at the time.

And yes, you would still have to purchase the costume the first time you make it, but once stored in the Closet it would be accessible to change to at any time free of charge.



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That works until you want to play on a different machine, perhaps a laptop, and want pull one of your costumes out of your closet. But your costumes are stored on your desktop machine, and not on your laptop. Now what?

Or, say your hard disk crashes, requiring you to replace the hard disk. Or your computer is infected by a virus, so bad that you have to wipe the machine. Either way, you have to reinstall the game, but your saved costume files are nowhere in sight.

You must store purchased costumes on the server in order for them to be universally accessible by your characters, even if you have to reinstall the game. The devs know this.

You know, it's always kind of struck me funny that the sewers in Paragon City are lit up so brightly. I mean, they're the sewers for crying out loud. Same goes for caves. These things aren't supposed to be lit up like a frickin' supermarket.

Just once, I'd like to see a sewer map with a REAL fog of war. You go in, and you can only see out about thirty feet or so. Beyond that, it's pitch black. That would require an artificial light source based on you, naturally; the game engine would have to generate it to simulate your field of view. The light source would move with you. If your teammates moved out of your field of view, you'd no longer be able to see them. Same for enemies.

Imagine fighting something like the Vahzilok in there. Or Council. It would certainly give the team pause for thought before they moved forward. A map like that would need Really Creepy Music(tm) as you waded through it.

A cave would be awesome that way (provided they were absolutely FORBIDDEN to use a blue cave map--those things are a nightmare as is).

The fog of war would require the team to work together. Stick close, stay within sight, and don't run off half-cocked.

Man, am I a glutton for punishment or what?

Have detectives give you their number after you've completed the first mission for them. I've never understood why you have to run to these guys when every other contact in the game has a cell phone. (Budgeting issues?)

Put a pharmacist in every hospital. He/she sells inspirations.

For crying out loud, just sell awakens in the Architect buildings. You can buy three cabs and merge them into a wakie for 150. It's not like you're stopping folks. Omitting the wakies seems kinda pointless. It's just more time-consuming to have to merge the inspirations.

Consider letting us merge 6 of any tier 1 inspiration into a tier 2 inspiration. (Rare, I know. But it happens, and it'd be nice.)

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First, love the idea, and wholly support it.

Now for the bad news.

A closet in which you will store previously purchased costumes is NO DIFFERENT in implementation from an increased number of costume slots, aside from the fact that you now need additional user interface and game engine enhancements in order to support it.

I can already hear the devs thinking, "It's the same thing they asked for before, only harder and more expensive to implement."

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No, this is more akin to the Save feature than it is the costume slots themselves. And it should be somewhat simple to make a separate smaller version of the Save feature (standard code rant applies).

It's not like the closet would open up a whole slew of costume slots (though that would be one way to do it). It would simply open a list of saved costumes in the same way the Save feature at the Tailor does currently, only this list would be specific to the individual character.



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Yes, but you would still have to purchase the costume, no?

And the costume would have to be stored somewhere. Likely, on the server, no? (If it wasn't stored on the server, it'd have to be saved on your local hard disk, which would mean that if you experienced some kind of hard disk failure you'd lose it and the costume you'd paid for would be lost forever.) So, stored on the server.

So, a closet is just a *virtual view* of all your costumes. It shows you all the costumes you have (excluding the one you're wearing). That is almost *exactly* what you have when you choose the Costume command from the menu, and when you click on any of the tailors.

What the OP has proposed is a user interface that allows us to visit a tailor, design a costume, and then store it in a closet in our base. That way, the Costume command, which only shows 5 or 6 costumes, is a small subset of all our available costumes. In reality, we have a near infinite number of costume *slots*, we're just carrying 5 or 6 around with us, and swapping them in and out of the closet. It's a question of storage on the server.

Because in reality, that's what costume slots come down to for the devs. Server storage.

Ah, the good old days of D&amp;D...

Weeding out the dumb, obnoxious players (DOPs).

DOP: Look! It's a helmet! It's mine! Give it to me:
player snatches the helm from the chest
Mage: You should let me examine that.
DOP: Shut up! I know what I'm doing!
DOP plops the helm on. The mage shakes his head.
DM: Congratulations, Zarg the Mighty. You have been decapitated.
DOP: WHAT?! Who? Where?!
DM: Well, as you have no head and your blood is spilling out all over the ground, you can't really tell, can you?
The mage casts a few spells.
Mage: Wow. Fancy that. A cursed Vorpal Helm of Cranial Translocation.
DOP: Didn't I get a saving throw?
DM: From what?
DOP: Well...from...
DM (smirking): You put the helm on. It was cursed. The effect was instantaneous.
DOP: WTF!!! That's BS, Man!
DM: May I kindly refer you to Rule Zero? Roll up a new character.
DOP (to the cleric): Can't I get a rez?
Cleric: Not without a head, you can't.
Rogue (grinning): Can I have his stuff?

First, love the idea, and wholly support it.

Now for the bad news.

A closet in which you will store previously purchased costumes is NO DIFFERENT in implementation from an increased number of costume slots, aside from the fact that you now need additional user interface and game engine enhancements in order to support it.

I can already hear the devs thinking, "It's the same thing they asked for before, only harder and more expensive to implement."

Okay, this kind of a suggestion typically devolves into a flamewar, but here we go anyway.

I think I'd settle for one additional tier in *ALL* of the the power pools. Unlock it at the higher levels. Naturally, that's easier said than done. Powers get unlocked at very specific points in your career, but it would be far more complicated with as many options as the OP is providing. (Consider the epic pools. Where would they fit in with all those extra options?)

What I might present, in the case of travel powers, is a way to enhance their effectiveness. For leaping and teleporting, increase the jumping distance. For runners, enhance the stealth. For fliers, give a minor increase to the flight speed cap. In all these cases, provide them as toggle powers that cost endurance (possibly LOTS of it).

Now what you do about the other power pools is anyone's guess. What would you do with fitness? Provide some sort of mez resistance? Strength of Mind, perhaps? I dunno.

But I'm thinking that a single tier-5 power in each pool would be far more diverse and help everyone. It would also alleviate the whole slotting issue.

Again, that's just my two cents.

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This thread title is *so* wrong...

/em wanders off to confessional.

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I think you're still misunderstanding a bit, and I'm not doing that great of a job explaining so I'll leave it to someone else to try to explain the difference between the a 32-bit OS vs 64-bit OS, and 32-bit machine vs 64-bit machine.

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No sweat. I'll just hammer the tech guys in IT when I get to work on Monday. (Home sick as hell today.)

At the very least, you've made me think. And that's *always* appreciated!

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Most new cards want at least a 500-watt power supply. They also have certain demands for amperage on the +12-volt rail. Yours has two +12-volt rails with 18A each, so 36A total.

One of the best cards around the $200 mark is the EVGA GTX 260. However, this requires a 500-watt power supply with 36A on the +12-volt rail. It's actually possible your power supply could cut it, but you'd be using it at near-100% capacity, and I wouldn't expect it to live a long (or happy) life under those conditions.

You could go with this combo:
EVGA GTS 250
OCZ StealthXStream 600W Power Supply
That would run just a little over $200. Ideally, you could put that PSU with the GTX 260, and land at about $230 after mail-in rebates.

One more question: is your computer a Dell 9200? EDIT: Disregard this.

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That card looks very close to the one I was eyeballing. It's only marginally more expensive, so still within my price range.

The advice regarding the power supply is sage, and well worth listening to. It would do me little good to put in new equipment only to have the power supply die on me because I wasn't paying attention. I'll get a combo deal.

Still gonna need a memory upgrade tho. On 2GB of RAM, COH pretty much slams the machine hard. I'd like to give it a bit more breathing room. (And yeah, I understand that a lot of that has to do with the way Vista manages memory. Still...)

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It's not Vista memory management that is the issue, it is a limitation of any 32-bit Windows OS and how memory is addressed. You may not remember is, but we had a smaller memory limitation with 16-bit versions of Windows. 64-bit versions of XP, Vista, and even Windows 7 do not have the 4 GB limit since a 64-bit OS handles memory addresses differently.

Just wanting to point this out since many people have a misconception that this is a Vista issue, not a Windows issue in general, or at least 32-bit versions of Windows.

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Oh, I get it. I made the mistake of putting 32-bit Vista Ultimate on a 64-bit machine. (WTH was I thinking?!?!)

More to the point, a 32-bit machine can address up to about 3.2 GB of memory. That's the upper address limit. I've got 2GB in here, and the extra RAM would make a noticeable difference.

And Vista *does* make a difference. It loads *far* more of itself into memory to improve performance. XP was nowhere near as memory hungry; Win7 is rumored to be far more judicious (but I can't tell because it lumbers about like a zombie on my paltry 2 GB of RAM).

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What's your current memory configuration? ie, X sticks of Y size, with Z slots free.

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EDIT: 2 1gb sticks, 2 slots free.

I've been wanting to go to 4 2GB sticks for a while. (I've got Win7 on a separate partition. Chomping at the bit for a 64-bit OS.)

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Most new cards want at least a 500-watt power supply. They also have certain demands for amperage on the +12-volt rail. Yours has two +12-volt rails with 18A each, so 36A total.

One of the best cards around the $200 mark is the EVGA GTX 260. However, this requires a 500-watt power supply with 36A on the +12-volt rail. It's actually possible your power supply could cut it, but you'd be using it at near-100% capacity, and I wouldn't expect it to live a long (or happy) life under those conditions.

You could go with this combo:
EVGA GTS 250
OCZ StealthXStream 600W Power Supply
That would run just a little over $200. Ideally, you could put that PSU with the GTX 260, and land at about $230 after mail-in rebates.

One more question: is your computer a Dell 9200? EDIT: Disregard this.

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That card looks very close to the one I was eyeballing. It's only marginally more expensive, so still within my price range.

The advice regarding the power supply is sage, and well worth listening to. It would do me little good to put in new equipment only to have the power supply die on me because I wasn't paying attention. I'll get a combo deal.

Still gonna need a memory upgrade tho. On 2GB of RAM, COH pretty much slams the machine hard. I'd like to give it a bit more breathing room. (And yeah, I understand that a lot of that has to do with the way Vista manages memory. Still...)

Okay, so I'll need a new graphics card AND a power supply upgrade to go with it.

I can accept that, and APPRECIATE your pointing it out to me.

And yeah, I can handle swapping out the power supply.

So do you think I should just stick with NVIDIA?

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Ummmm.....375 is not even remotely good.
This is a standard Dell?
No aftermarket add-ons?
If so, give us the model number and we should be ablt to find out for sure

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Model No. L375P-00

Well, at the time, I thought it was enough wattage for my needs.

I just used a wattage calculator, found here: http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine. Their estimate is that I need 252 Watts of power for the devices I have. Not debating your wisdom (as I'm no hardware expert--software's my bag), just stating.

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Need info on your power supply.
Any decent GPU upgrade will require additional power from your system above what the PCI-E slot itself provides, so it's important to know how much power you have available, especially on the +12v rail

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Well, I know that when I built the durned thing I put a REALLY good power supply in it. It's certainly not a "standard" power supply. (At least, it better not be. It's not what I ordered.) Give me a few and I'll remember how to crack this thing open and get the specs for ya.

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It's a Dell power supply. DC output 375Watt.

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Need info on your power supply.
Any decent GPU upgrade will require additional power from your system above what the PCI-E slot itself provides, so it's important to know how much power you have available, especially on the +12v rail

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Well, I know that when I built the durned thing I put a REALLY good power supply in it. It's certainly not a "standard" power supply. (At least, it better not be. It's not what I ordered.) Give me a few and I'll remember how to crack this thing open and get the specs for ya.

So, I am thinking it's time for a new graphics card.

I'm playing on a Dell 64-bit Intel Core2 Quad Core (Q6600) 2.40 GHz with (a paltry) 2GB DDR2-SDRAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS card. I play on a 19" monitor at 1680×1050. There's also an Aegia Physx card in the machine. (I've never really been sure what NVidia's acquisition of Aegia meant for that bad puppy.)

This weekend, I'd like to beef up the RAM and slap in a new graphcis card. The RAM part is easy. The graphics card, not so much.

I'm debating the switch away from NVIDIA and onto ATI, since I've had a history of bad driver issues with NVIDIA. In a wet-dream sort of way, I'd love to be able to afford an SLI solution, but that's probably WAY beyond my budget.

What I'm looking for are suggestions for graphics cards.

I'm hoping to spend less than 200 bucks on the card. I know, cheap. :-/

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First, while power customization would be nice to have, it isn't something I'm screaming for. Yes, there are toons I have that would *really* benefit from it.

Take Hasten, for example. I slot virtually all of my toons with it. For Blasters, it *really* works well with Defiance by speeding up your attack chain, and increasing your damage bonus. Problem is, the animation for it isn't suitable to every attack type. Hasten looks like fiery fists. On an energy, psychic, electrical, ice, or archery blaster, that's significantly out of place. But I'm not willing to give up the damage bonus due to a lame animation choice. Power customization would be very nice in this case.

Also, for my tanks, toning down the animations on Invulnerability would be really nice. In all honesty, as a personal preference, glowy auras don't impress me much, especially on an Invulnerabe tank. I'd like to just have them be as plain-Jane as possible. Instead, I get some guy running around who's as glowy as possible. I much prefer the Willpower animations. Which, amazingly, is why I tend to use that set exclusively these days. A shame really, since Invulnerability isn't a bad set.

For Dark characters, one thing that has always irked me is that you go through all the effort to design a fantastic costume, and then, at a certain level, every character in that set looks identical because the powers completely obscure the character. I'd like to be able to fix that through customization. One of the strengths of this game is that no two characters need look alike. It has always struck me as odd that certain powers seem to want to defeat that goal.

As far as a DirectX upgrade is concerned, here's my two cents, based on my limited experience. This game is approaching six or seven years of age (including the beta time). That's a lot of code based on OpenGL. Rewriting the engine to support DirectX would take a signficiant development effort, and cost a lot of money. However, having said that, DirectX should perform a lot better. I don't think it would be anywhere near as memory intensive, and it would provide better frame rates and support for a wider array of graphics cards.

But that's just my take on it. I would welcome the effort if they told me they've already been working on it, but I'm not sure it needs to be done. We've endured OpenGL for a long time now (and I've always thought it was a poor choice), and it's always gotten the job done--just not as well as it could have.

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We're sitting in a meeting and our Development Director said "We've contracted some Type R programmers".

I had never heard this term before, so I jotted it down on my notepad, so I could inquire about it later.

Just then our Lead Engineer asks "What is Type R?"

Our Dev Director looked stumped. "What do you mean?"

"You said 'Type R Programmers'" said the Lead Engineer.

"No, I said 'High Powered'." said the Dev Director.

"No you didn't. You said 'Type R.' See I wrote it down." I said, and showed him my notepad that said "Type R?".

So now, everything high powered and awesome in the office is "Type R".

I am now on a crusade to get it used outside our offices. I should add it to urban dictionary or something.

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What's a 'High Powered' programmer?

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The sort of person who can use Memcpy() without creating any vulnerabilities.

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Compile failure.

No such function, Memcpy().

Try memcpy().

But your point is duly noted.

Kinetic Staff: Basically, a staff that does smashing damage for some attacks, but includes a couple of knockbacks as well. If I slam it into the ground, it's like a SS Footstomp attack. Get the drift?

And in the name of all that is holy: Please give us a basic fist-fighting set to go hand-in-hand with Willpower. PLEASE?! Something that isn't all kicks?! And something that isn't Super Strength?!

That is all.

Aside from the usual mundane stuff that drags me away (grocery deliveries, bathroom breaks, projectile cat yack, yada yada), these are the freakiest ones that scared the hell out of me (and I made them all):

/afk gunshots outside
/afk mom's blood sugar &gt; 400 [she's diabetic]
/afk cat seizure [literally]