je_saist

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edit: Okay, for the sake of the original poster, I am going to be blunt here, and possibly say the coldest thing I've ever said on the forums.

I use the statement as to whether or not Jacob's Ladder is worth taking as a yardstick as to whether or not a player has ever actually played an Electric Melee avatar, and whether or not any advice should be taken from that player.

Thing is, there's a reason Jacob's ladder is the last Primary power on my elec / elec brute, but was taken much earlier on an ice / elec tank:



I made the mistake of believing somebody when they said Jacob's ladder was a sucky power, so I didn't take it.

They. Were. Wrong.

Jacob's Ladder is an awesome close-ranged cone. It's actually got a slightly wider cone than Dark Melee's Shadow Maul. It's base DPC @ level 50, 6.47, is better than Thunderstrike (3.84), or Lightning Rod (2.09). It's base DPA is also better than Thunderstrike's, (37.46 vs. 24.77).

The catch to Jacob's Ladder is that the power takes patience to get the most out of, and requires the player actually think about their avatar's positioning and the positioning of their enemies. It is my opinion that the idea that Jacob's ladder was somehow a "bad power" was driven by players who simply could not figure out how to use Jacob's ladder properly, and rather than step up, chose to step back.

question is: where would it go? I've got no room to take it.

Well, I take that back. I can see a possible option as being sacrificing some direct damage, maybe dropping charged brawl or havoc, and make up the 5% recharge on Crushing impact with the 5% recharge on Efficacy adapter, just need to pull a slot from somewhere else.

Actually... that's rather tempting to try.

well... truth is, most of the suggestions that are made are not made with "what is City of Heroes" in mind. Most suggestions fall into two categories:

• Suggestions based on how other games do something, and are designed to implement feature of other game into City of Heroes
• Suggestions based on personal whim, and are designed to answer players personal pet goal

Neither one of these categories really leave room for any discussion or development into something that can be presented to the developers as a viable suggestion or idea that can or should be implemented as a new game feature, or an expansion of an existing feature set. The perceived result is that many of the threads created quickly descend into a dismantling of the original idea and a series of quick put-downs. Very few posters bother with trying to explain basic game design or basic game theory, and then relate how any particular proposed suggestion relates to those basic elements.

There have been cases where any one particular poster can rise to infamy with a series of ideas or suggestions that are so far removed from the basic elements of design or gameplay, that trying to relate the idea or suggestion with the basic elements of City of Heroes is impossible within the context of City of Heroes. Such strings of posts, coupled with the nature of an international community with different cultural ideas on what is fun and what is not fun, or what is good and what is not good, coupled with forum cliques that do not respond well to being confronted and shot down, and there is a perfect recipe for a mental fatigue that can quickly descend to expressed annoyance.

Basically that is a long and flowery way of saying: Stupid posts make heads hurt. Continuous stupid posts drive players away.

At this time no other means of digital transfer is made available by NCSoft to obtain the City of Heroes software outside of the official City of Heroes updater.

gonna go with Sharker's call. Unsigned, works fine right now.

Shades of Avatar: The last Airbender?

It does strike me as an odd choice.

That being said, this was the old B&W tonto:



and one of that actor in color:



Depp isn't actually that far off...



Now whether or not Depp can actually pull off PLAYING a Native American... well... entirely different story.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Midnighter_Club

Right there on the Midnighter Club page. Not that hard to find.

No, you are not doing anything wrong. Ashley is it, and you do indeed have to wait for level 30.

while I sympathize with your position in being unable to purchase the booster packs and support your MMO of choice...

posting about it here does absolutely nothing.

NCSoft's marketing and web development departments famously avoids doing anything with the forums here, leaving the Operators to talk up special deals, while not actually answering any questions. Case in point on marketing being the on-going thread on the 7 months for 6 and 14months for 12 which already had several good questions in the first couple of posts that marketing has as of yet declined to answer or allow the forum moderators to address. Case in point on Web Development is the active problem with the forum actively logging players out.

Your best bet, and the best bet of other South American players, to do anything about the situation is going to be to snail mail... not email or forum contact... send a physical letter... to the Corporate offices: http://www.ncsoft.net/global/support/contact.aspx

Personally I would send letters to:

NCSoft Korea
158-16 NCsoft R&D Center B/D,
Samsung-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea

NCSoft America
6801 N Capital of Texas Hwy. Building 1, Suite #102,
Austin, TX 78731-1780

echoing this question:

Last time I did the 12 for 14month plan, I wasn't actually charged for the plan update until the existing time ran out.

Is that still the case with this promotion?

If I upgrade an existing plan to the 12 for 14month plan, I won't be charged that money until the current subscription runs out?

Praetoria is supposed to introduce you to the core of this game's flow of play: running missions from contacts.

Upon exiting Praetoria you should be presented with a small number of available contacts. As you run their story arcs they will present you with options to meet more contacts who have more story arcs.

The original City of Heroes game was designed around the concept that players would follow story arcs based on their power origin. Players would follow contacts that sold their type of enhancement: e.g. Tech players would follow contacts that sold tech enhancements; science players would follow contacts that sold science enhancements. The original concept was that following each origin story contact would cause the players to experience a relatively cohesive set of storylines.

Various changes to the game over the years, such as making all of the enhancements available for any origin at a regular store, have removed the need to chase your origin type when running story arcs.

Still, it's probably a good way to go if you are running through as a new player and don't know where to go next.

Yes / No / Not really.

Something to keep in mind is that the CoH forums reflect only a small percentage of the active playerbase, and most of the players here are the vocal get in your face type.

• A section of the game chases after level 50 as fast as possible.
• A section of the game takes it's time to explore the various stories of the game.
• The two sections will never agree on anything and will continuously meet in a fiery ball of rage.

One of the things that City of Heroes does drastically different from other MMO's is that it encourages you to field multiple avatars. In this game you don't just have to settle for being a healing mage because you don't have the time to be anything else. Here you can field a tank, a healer, a buffer, a debuffer, a blaster, or whatever you want, as many times as you want.

The opinion I hold is that if a player treats every character as a race to 50... they've missed a key point of the game. It's not the destination that matters... it's the journey to getting there.

Again, yes, no, and not really.

Yes, there is an end-game in the sense that there is content that is explicitly set up for max level players. The problem is that the existing Shadow-Shard end-game was designed to appeal to the players of Ultima Online and Everquest, and features Task Forces that will easily take 6 hours or more for a casual pick-up-group.

At the same time, no, there is no such thing as an end-game. There's no point at which you play one game, then suddenly switch and play a completely different game because you've hit some particular level.

Unlike other MMO's, CoH leverages the concept of just everything being "the game" with what we call Super-Sidekicking. You can join any team of any level and receive experience and rewards for playing at that level.

Starting with the upcoming Issue 19, the developers are adding in additional high-level content for those who want challenges above and beyond what the current game offers. It's being called, and referred to, as end-game content. However, as the only real requirement for the Incarnate Content is that you have a level 50 avatar that has completed the Incarnate Story Arc, there really isn't a barrier, as of yet, between the Incarnate Content and the "regular" content.

Our developers have been talking up further raids and events for future "Incarnate Content". I'm not entirely sure anything they have planned will really equal what SOE likes to refer to as Raids.

Not... yet.

CoH's usage of enhancements is drastically different from any other game on the market. Trying to wrap your head around completely new game mechanics and the labyrinth that is the I/O system probably isn't a good idea.

From a realistic point of view, Invention Origin Enhancements are not required to partake in any part of the game. During the Issue 19 beta test I was one of the players trying to "break the system" by doing things casual players would do, like attempt the new Incarnate Task Forces on Single Origin builds only.

As of yet, I'd be hard-pressed to say that any content in the game is going to require you to use I/O's to be useful to a team.

That being said: if you like to solo a lot of the content, Invention Origin enhancements will give you several advantages such as increased defense, increased recharge, increased health, increased regeneration, increased recovery, or increased accuracy.

Because it hasn't been in quote "active works."

The developers were very explicit after Issue 16 launched that power customization for costume overlays such as MasterMind Pets and Granite Armor; pool powers; epic pool powers; and patron powers all required additional database and UI engine work that would not be available until after Going Rogue launched.

The earliest the development process for adding in these features could have started would have been the week after August 17th, the launch of Going Rogue. That means the earliest practical time for new code to enter the game is going to be on the next major release cycle.

That would be Issue 20.

Next Year.

Now, as to whether or not it's easy or simple, as the examples in this thread would imply:

No. It is not easy or simple.

For starters, all of the examples in this thread deal either with power choices that were already represented in the major primary and secondary power pools; or with weapon choices presented in the costume interface, not the power interface. None of those are good examples.

Now, the point could be made that the existing power colorization system does indeed leave room for Pool / Patron / Epic powers to be added at a later date. This goes back to needing the Coding / UI resources to actually make those options available and expose the colorization options to individual powers.

... where's that brick wall picture when I need it.

A: No.

B: No.

C: No.

Now, I'm actually debating whether or not I really want to go into debunking this particular derailment of how the game actually works.

For starters there is the idea that the Doppelganger tech is applicable to the player controlled player pets tech. After all, the technology has been in the game since day 1 to display another players unique costume on another players game, so of course the code is easily interchangeable and can just be copied over.

What we know from the developers is that all of the pet-class objects in the game are exposed as costume overlays using hard-coded costume definitions. We know that the database and rendering systems that contain, dispatch, and render these costume overlays were never designed with the idea that the players could, or would, be able to modify a pet-class costume design. We also know that redeveloping the backing processing, database, and rendering engines just for the primary and secondary powers, took the better part of a 2 year period.

Now, given as you don't know how the engine works, why it works like it works, or what the developers see on their development branches, there's no way you can make a judgment call about how long any particular feature would take to develop and implement, nor whether or not any particular segments of code are indeed re-usable in a copy and past format. We do know from public statements and at least one convention demonstration, that simply copying existing customization code segments is not a viable a solution for pet-class costume overlays.

ever notice that all of the cartoons that were decried as being "violent" were not actually that violent?

I mean, I remember lots of "anger press" on stuff like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, and other 1980's / 1990's Saturday morning TV stuff... but having actually watched them at some point... the shows were never violent.

I caught Swat Kats on most of it's original network run, and I'd be hard-pressed to describe the show as violent, especially when compared to contemporary or older animes out of Japan. I'm not even sure the violence level would be comparable to some of the stuff pulled off in two of Disney's action productions, Mighty Ducks and Gargoyles.


Part of me hopes pre-order sales on Swat Kats DVD's are enough to get Warner interested in the property again. It could be interesting if Swat Kats was leveraged as a multimedia property. There is probably potential in the game for a good Tribes / Planetside style MMO, or for a good co-op action game.

there was reasoning?

Anyways, I'm off to the junkyard to refill my missile launcher.

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btw, the store page is here: http://www.wbshop.com/Swat-Kats/1000...,pd.html?cgid=

Warner Brothers is taking Pre-Orders.

I am aware of no particular problems in running CRT's from modern video cards. Both Nvidia and AMD specific fairly high quality RAMDAC's for use in their graphics cards. While you'll occasionally get a really poor picture quality on low-end add in cards, all of the GTX 460's on the market should drive a CRT without issue. Most vendors pack-in a DVI to VGA adapter.

I'd have different reasons for telling you to get a 6850, but it's your money.

Honestly, I don't have anything to add here since I haven't seriously approached the modern overclocking market since I haven't had the money to invest in overclocking products.

That being said, I have heard of the 3Rsystem from those who do overclock, and it probably is worth your money over the Zalman.


Thermaltake has a B-Stock shop and I've gotten my last 4 power supplies from there, including the 850 watt power supplies that drive both my I7 Crossfire rig and my Phenom Triple SLI rig.

If it was my money on the line, I'd go for this thing: http://www.thermaltakestore.com/w030315.html

SLI is enabled in the Nvidia driver, not in the game. Have you updated your Nvidia driver?