je_saist

Yeah. This is pretty much it. Have a Controller Sonic Res toss the Hula-Hoop of doom on a Mastermind pet that fights in melee range and you'll get some idea of just how disgusting that would be in a solo condition.

Back during the Issue 12 beta I think the subject was raised over why Thermal Radiation was going to Masterminds, but not sonic. Both featured +Resistance Powers, and both have Resistance debuff.

Some of the problems cited were too much resistance. If you check the MasterMind pets, they all have resistances, and no defenses. Using the Controller Buff numbers, with a Sonic Bubble up, Master Mind pets would have nearly 40% extra resistance (around 39% if capped into ED). Coupled with the Sovereign Right: Resistance Bonus proc that was already in the game, Mastermind's would be able to deliver a near 50% resistance buff to everything but sonic.

While not all Mastermind pets have resistances, such as the Ninja, the mastermind pets with smashing / lethal resistance were all standardized at 21% to smash / lethal damage. An additional 49% resistance would be putting the pets around 70% base resistance and immune to mez damage with sonic res clarity... WHILE SOLO

The developers simply looked at that... and said no. It was too powerful.


Now does this argument hold up today? When a massive majority of the game has perma-hasten and soft-capped defense and everybody farms +4 levels / 8-team members solo?

Oh wait, I need to get back to reality.

The majority of the game is not made up of casually purpled out warshades. The majority of the game still uses SO's or vendor-trashed IO sets, and a significant portion of the playing base doesn't have a large stable of level 50's. We know that from the level 20 Epic Archtype Unlock.

Even under SO's with just one IO, sonic res on a Mastermind would be disgustingly overpowered, especially with the body guard changes. You'd pretty much have no reason to take any other secondary set. You'd have loads of enemy debuffs, and an army of nigh unstoppable cannon fodder pets.

Thermal-Radiation worked because it didn't have any toggle powers. Therm-Rad is all click powers. Even then, when compared to the Corruptor / Controller numbers, Therm-Rad is lower in everything but the +resistance and the resistance debuffs, which are identical. Therm-Rad Mastermind has lower heals, lower +damage, lower mez protection, lower +tohit, lower -damage, and lower -defense, and uses more endurance.

So no, Sonic Resonance does not need to be proliferated to MasterMinds.

yes.

so? It does mean nothing.

Code changes. It's possible that one of the background changes to the code now makes a corrected API code that only a more recent driver will properly understand.

Case in point: Intel and Nvidia drivers on the original introduction of Ultra Mode. Nvidia loves to use proprietary OpenGL extensions to boost performance of their graphics cards in certain situations. The most famous of these extensions was the Nvidia "UltraShadow" tech on the GeforceFX. Intel has to use proprietary OpenGL extensions since Intel's actual graphics chips are just glorified Graphics Accelerators that rely on the central processor for many graphical tasks.

The UltraMode rendering engine was written closer to the Khronos OpenGL API specifications, which would theoretically mean the exact same image across OpenGL API's. OpenGL 1.x cards would have one image setting, OpenGL 2.x cards would have another image setting, and OpenGL 3.x cards would have yet another image setting.

When Paragon Studios first introduced Ultra Mode, CoH Players with drivers that didn't adhere to the Khronos OpenGL API Specifications were knocked out.

So. No. In point of fact, it does not really matter that you were able to run any code-path in a stable manner before hand.

Yes. It might matter if you take the matter up with your graphics card vendor, reporting a bug in the way a driver set handles any particular expected rendering system, and you want to provide data to determine a break-point.

As to how Ultra Mode looks, check one of the sticky threads: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219534

As to the graphics card I hope you meant to type GTX 460 since a GTS 240 would be a downgrade, and a GTX 280 is hammered by both the GTX 460 and the RadeonHD 5830, both which cost around the $200 mark... significantly less than what the GTX 280 would have cost before it was pulled from the market. You'll only find GTX 280's on the used market, but they tend to actually be fairly cheap for two reasons:

• A: Nvidia end-of-lifed them. There's no more left on the direct retail market.
• B: They draw massive amounts of wattage for lower performance than equivalent cards from AMD.

Now, I've got several posts on these forums detailing why gamers shouldn't be looking at Nvidia cards right now, ranging from shoddy build quality and outright lies to ODM's and OEM's resulting in class action lawsuits, to the sheer expense and power draw of the current high-end cards.

There's also the most recent Nvidia controversy, with one of the few good board partners (XFX) being kicked to the curb, and the BFG scandal. If you didn't hear about the BFG scandal, here's the short synopsis.

BFG used to be one of Nvidia's major board partners, and was considered one of the Top-Tier Nvidia vendors. As Nvidia ramped up to the launch of Fermi graphics cards (GTX 480 / GTX 470) Nvidia declined to provide BFG with Fermi chip allocations. Since BFG couldn't build Fermi graphics cards, BFG lost contracts with major retailers, specifically Best Buy. The resulting loss of a sales channel and a entire line-up of graphics cards drove BFG into bankruptcy.

Now, this month, it's come to light that Nvidia is now directly selling graphics cards built by FoxConn through Best Buy. Evidence has also come to light that Nvidia may have deliberately declined to provide BFG with Fermi chip allocation specifically with the aim of taking over the direct retail channels used by BFG, and that Nvidia may have locked other vendors out of the Best Buy sales channel.

If you are thinking that such actions are illegal and against existing anti-trust legislation, you would be right. Now whether or not that scenario is provable within a Court System really depends on whether or not Nvidia is able to survive their other legal troubles.

If you are also thinking that this has Nvidia's other partners scared that they'll be next on Nvidia's hit-list, you'd also be right there too.

Attempting to ignore the completely unpleasant situation that is Nvidia the Company, there are also the Nvidia products. The only graphics card that really makes sense in terms of financial price, power consumption, and performance in the Nvidia line-up right now is the GTX 460. In 2x SLI mode the GTX 460 can keep up with RadeonHD cards released 10months prior. It single card mode though, the large-memory spec GTX 460 only barely outdoes a filler card designed to clear out AMD's binned chips.

That's not a good thing mind you, at least not from an investors standpoint when a brand new chip respin has trouble keeping up with the competitions binned for not meeting original QA standards product. It was a great thing for consumers since the GTX 460 did manage to push AMD to lower prices on the RadeonHD 5x00 series cards.


Now, if you want to buy an Nvidia card, and you don't care about the companies behavior or how bad their product line is right now, and you just have to have that Nvidia badge on your graphics card, the EVGA GTX 460 1gb is your best purchase. It's going to give you a world of performance difference over your existing 9800, and will be capable of pushing Ultra Mode at 1920*1200 with everything but Ambient Occlusion maxed out.

If you don't absolutely have to absolutely have an Nvidia badge on your graphics card, I'd honestly wait for November.

Thing is AMD is trying to launch their next generation chipset, the RadeonHD 6000 series. We don't know much about the cards yet, just rumors. We do know that the price points of various current AMD graphics cards will likely drop on the launch of the RadeonHD 6870 and 6850. One of the reports states the 5830 will be phased out completely, and that the the 5850 will be dropped closer to the $200 mark from the possible $240 one can be had right now.

AMD would like an October launch, but if TMSC is running into production problems (again) that will produce chip delays and shortages. Right now neither Global Foundaries or UMC are reportedly in a condition to handle producing RadeonHD 6x00 chips... UMC because their tech is reportedly behind TMSC's, and Global Foundaries because they are busy with Bobcat and Bulldozer.

Anyways, right now, bang for buck, the RadeonHD 5850's $240 price point is hard to ignore.

If you don't want to spend that much, the RadeonHD 5770 will give you a decent boost in performance over a 9800, and you can have one for around $120 if you shop the mail-in rebates.

Nobody knows. None will stay old long enough to find out.

I've also successfully tanked MoSTF's myself on an Ice Tank, and a Willpower Tank. I haven't done it with my Dark or Fire tanks though.

I also ran an MoSTF that succeeded with an Invuln BRUTE as the aggro target.

The developers also consider players who do this to be abusing the system and terms of service.

... and just what would this do to the player struggling to just SO their avatar out at level 50?

You know, 95%+ of the entire playerbase.

NCsoft won't be able to make that call until next year.

Going Rogue will be selling through the Christmas Season, and that holiday shopping spree hasn't started yet. There also is at least one issue expansion between now and the shopping season, and if Issue 19 arrives on time, NCSoft marketing will be able to offer both a new player experience and a new veteran player experience in one retail package.

Ergo, at this stage in the sales, it is too early to say whether or not Going Rogue has met sales expectations.

Well, something to remember is that C.Bruce was involved with NetDevil's Auto Assault before he was hired into Cryptic. It is possible that he could be being pulled off to work on another NCSoft published game, or it's possible that he's been head-hunted by another MMO developer, or by another game developer entirely.

It is also possible that he may have been feeling the burn-out of working on animating this game for so long, and voluntarily left, if he left.

What I can tell you is that NCSoft has committed a major chunk of cash to Paragon Studios, and to the continuation of the City of Heroes franchise. I think if Going Rogue turns out to be a sales disappointment, NCSoft will play the CoH2 card, and risk a bit more money now.

That being said, I'm not entirely convinced that NCSoft, as a corporation, fully understands the concepts of community or the player-base of City of Heroes. If C.Bruce has indeed left, and the no-comment lines are the extent of NCSoft's handling of the event, then somebody has royally dropped the ball.

Now, I'm sure several players will already make the argument that NCSoft has already dropped the community relations ball with one of their recent hires into CoH's support staff. I'm not going to argue that in the past couple of months there has been an NCSoft employee who has managed to mess things up. Part of me hopes that person was involved in these lay-offs, but we may not know for sure.

The big question is whether or not C.Bruce leaving will actually have an effect on the game as a whole.

My gut opinion is... no.

We already know, for point of fact, that a small percentage of the playing base interacts with the forums. We also have not really interacted with C.Bruce for several months now. His twitter has been gone since, well spring I think, maybe earlier. He hasn't posted outside of the Beta sections of the forum. We also know that at one point C.Bruce was swamped by constant Private Messages and requests for comments... such to the point that even I'm hesitant to poke the dev team myself.

C.Bruce's lack of interaction means that many players entering the game through Going Rogue don't really know what the rest of us are on about. Similar to how new players question the random anti-jack posts and comments. C.Bruce, as a developer, hasn't really been making an impact on new players.

I cannot come up with a good reason then why C.Bruce leaving Paragon Studios would have an ill effect on the game. There are other animators, and some of them are pretty good. They need a bit more polish, but there's the question of how much of that is the animators talent, and how much of that is the toolkit the animators actually have available.

No. You don't get it do you.

Several players have pointed out exactly how pointless it is to kill off Statesman as a character. I stated very clearly in an earlier post that the impression I got is that you have an axe to grind against Jack Emmert.

Fine, you don't like the guy. You don't like his character.

That's entirely your choice. You can't, however, use that entirely as justification to remove his signature character from the game, which is what you are doing throughout this thread.

No. We are reading malice into your desires based on your posts. You come across as a very unpleasant individual, and you so far have rejected any semblance of sanity or common sense in this thread.

The world is not broken. Ergo, it does not need to be fixed. You have not established a valid point of view that the in-game world is broken under any factual conditions.


Uh huh. See, you might not know this, but we can click on your name and get a list of all the posts that you have made, and your posts do not back this statement up.


So, you went and tried a worse game. Okay? What does this have to do with anything?

Hang on... isn't that... you know... EVERYTHING FROM THE GAMER?

Yes, yes it is. You didn't like Champions Online. We get that. Citing Champions Online and likes or dislikes when discussing City of Heroes is a mugs game.

Again, what does this have to do with anything in this thread in respect to arguing whether or not Statesman should be in the game? You've just gone off on this random tangent pulling a singular topic out of relatively no-where. So you don't like Champions Online as a game, but you like something they did in the game? This is just being incoherent.


What being said? You haven't established any sort of argument, debate, or point?

What last paragraph should not have been stated? All of your posts? A random segue into something else to try and divert attention from a bad idea?

Again, this is just being incoherent.

No. We are finding malice in your posts.

Yet you open up the thread with How about killing off Statesman, only to do an about face when you realize that you have pretty much burnt the bridges that would even enable such a discussion?

How? How is this a great plot device? Killing off a major brand-name character that is used to promote the game as a cover symbol in all markets? You have not established any practical or coherent reason detailing why this is a good idea. Other players have already come in and spelled out why it is a bad idea.

Somebody already pointed out why DC Comics got away with it in the Death of SuperMan comic-books. The Superman comic had decades of comics releases, not to mention a franchise total of 5 films, before the 1992 event.

So... let me get this straight. The community responds with coherent and thought out arguments detailing why such a move is a bad idea from a plot point of view. The community responds with coherent and thought out arguments detailing how, and why, such a move would only be seen as an insult to Paragon Studios former owners.

Yet you state the community is limited in it's vision.

No. Get this straight. It is you who is limited.

Make an effort to read the posts by the players.

Get this straight. You are the one who is lacking in perception here.

You have been proven wrong on this multiple times by multiple posters actually citing in-game events, and yet you still cling to this weak statement? You are going to have to come to terms with the fact that you are wrong.

Statesman is not overused in the game. Statesman is deliberately played down and pushed into the lore of the game for the sole reason that even the original writers realized he was a horribly unbalanced Mary Sue.

Ah. So here's how it works. You get proven wrong on a salient point, and then immediately try to change the point itself after arguing that no, you weren't actually wrong on the point.

There's a saying you should look up. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Pick an argument and stick with it. Either Statesman is overused or he is not.

Which group? The Freedom Phalanx? Last I checked Statesman actually needed them to cover his own weaknesses, and in the comics, Statesman already died without their assistance. So, this statement does not hold up in aspect to them.

To the players? Statesman barely interacts with the players, and in one specific case, actually has to call on the players because he's been countered by, of all people, Dr. Aeon.


Okay. At this point, I realized I have better things to do. The arguments are incoherent, details change at the drop of a hat, and you do everything you possibly can to not be pinned down or held to one particular point of view.

Yes, I could keep going through point by point ripping you a new one, pinning you on each and every line you type, and hoping that at some point you realize that nobody here on these forums is ever going to take you seriously now.

But what's the point? Am I that deeply invested in protecting Statesman? Am I that deeply invested in protecting one of NCSoft's brand?

Oh hell no. I'm not. I'm not being paid to sit here and pick apart brain-dead ideas from players that have absolutely failed to grasp the scope of the game's plot, or even the basic design mechanics of the game.

Like all of your other demand posts, you deliberately post in the wrong forums, and you deliberately post ideas you know are going to get shot down. Then you deliberately ignore any, and all, posts that would dare to counter anything you typed.

So I stand by my assessment. You are one throughly unpleasant individual.

Dare we test the limits of his madness?

I mean, come on, he hid Tele's remote after leaving Tele on a Barney Marathon.

Oh, I got the joke. I just didn't want Aeon dropping by and thinking... hmmm, maybe I WILL do that

This.

At this point, "killing" Statesman would only serve one single purpose. It would be an insult against Jack Emmert.

My impression is, when I read the opening post, is that is the only reason that poster wants this done. They have an axe to grind against Jack, and removing his symbol from the game is the best kick in the nads they can come up with, and every other reason is just fluff to justify the axe.

Okay. Fine. Jack Emmert has done some things that have legitimately ruined any potential good feelings a significant portion of the player-base could ever possess towards him. I don't think that our current development team is that petty.

Our current development team has not stooped to the level of lazily one-upping everything their former owners do. Our current development team, to the best of my knowledge, has only publically leveled one pot-shot at their former owners in an anniversary address.

At this stage in the game, Statesman is Statesman, regardless of who first wrote his story, and regardless of how he appears in the game. Yes, he's one big freaking Mary Sue capable of playing Frisbees with Rikti Motherships.

Big. Freaking. Deal.

Let me ask this question as seriously as I can: Who Cares?

Statesman doesn't need to be killed for the story of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles to move forward. He doesn't need to be shoved to one side and marginalized. This isn't even touching on the gaping plot-hole of How do you kill something that plays Frisbee with a Rikti Mothership?

Statesman can't be everywhere at once, and if push comes to shove, Dr. Aeon and his writing team can just punt Statesman through a portal and into another dimension for a little while if they need him out of the way for a bit.

The basic problem I have with this statement is this... I didn't get that impression when leveling an elec / stone dominator during the beta test.

With Power Boost up, I was hitting enemies for the mez effect on first mez... which would indicate a magnitude boost. But it is possible I could be confusing memories of Power Boost with Domination, which does double magnitude.

They wouldn't need to do that for another Shard TF:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Rularuu_the_Ravager :: Chularn the Slave Lord, Kuularth the Scavenger, Aloore the Watcher, and Uuralar the Mirror are not currently encountered in the game.

Another factor to consider is that in the current Cathedral of Pain the player does encounters either the Lanaru or Ruladak aspects of Rularuu, establishing precedent that players can face the aspects of Rularuu multiple times.

Given this precedent it would be entirely plausible to move the Shadow Shard Task Forces to Ouroborus and invent new story-lines that pit the players against the various aspects of Rularuu. The indication has been given though that the Rularuu will feature heavily in future events, something foreshadowed by Gaussian during his arc in the Rikti War Zone.

It may be because of these upcoming plotlines that there are no plans to revamp the existing Shadow Shard Content, and simply leave the events as legacy content.

power boost effects the strength of the mez effect, which is magnitude.

this is pretty much it. There is a large technical limitation that pretty much prevents this feature from ever being included in City of Heroes, that limitation being performance. To frame this limiation one needs to understand exactly how City of Heroes works in terms of animations.

City of Heroes is essentially a sprite based game, similar to something you would find on the Super Nintendo or Playstation 1. All character animations ranging from weapon attacks to flying capes are essentially hard-coded into the display playback system. At some point somebody has to individually draw out each frame of any given animation. Think of it like a Stop-Motion Movie if that helps.

Another comparison that might help frame how the game works is Don Bluth's old Dragon Lair's video game. Pressing a button at the right time triggers a different sequence of animated events to occur. This is why players can kite some enemies by leaping past the enemy, triggering the attack, and then have the attack animation play out while the player is in mid-leap, or at the end of the leap.

City of Heroes is largely able to retain it's performance profiles on older computers due to these canned animations. Implementing a real-time skeletal-frame based system that changes animations on context, is performance expensive, as evidenced by the system requirement differences between different versions of Cryptic's in-house engine.

What this means is that in order for a player to pick up a car, or any other object, in the City of Heroes game, is that somebody has to individually animate each frame. At some point some physical person is going to have to sit in a chair and animate each individual frame for each skeletal type (3 of them: Male, Female, Huge) performing the act of reaching down, grasping an object, picking the object up, shifting the weight of that object, and then launching that object...

Even if one completely forgoes any physical properties of that object... say like throwing a car down the street with the hood half-buried in the ground because a really short avatar threw the car, that's still a large amount of work that probably would be better spent on say... creating new power-sets.

Creating an object throwing animation for players would actually require just as much animation work, if not more animation work, than the whip power-set. There is a reason that the gravity power-set cheats on the propel power, creating an object throwing point out and away from the player giving the developers plenty of space in which to put large objects for throwing. Somebody else brought up Half-Life 2, which stands as another good example of developers cheating to get around having to make exact animations for grasping and manipulating items.

Now, if somebody wants to claim that the game should have car throwing because the Cryptic developed engine can do it, and because a previous lead designer said it would be done... well... those are both really weak excuses.

As already pointed out, the implementation of the Cryptic developed Engine that enabled object throwing did a lousy job of it, in addition to requiring far more system resources. It also is not unknown for the development staff to say that something could be done before actually thinking it through. Case in recent point being the Super Speed on top of water. It was a good idea, right up until the developers actually tried to figure out how the engine could support it... and realized that in order to support player travel to begin with, the engine was already making several hard-coded assumptions about the player and the state of the player, that made Super Speed on top of water functionally impossible on the current revision of the engine.



Now, one of the big questions is whether or not a new processing engine could resolve some of these issues.

Well, yes. An updated processing engine that utilizes more resources could indeed perform the raw calculations to make some of these wishes a reality. A skeletal-frame system with rag-doll physics, such as the current Unreal Engine, Valve Source, or IDTech5, would probably be able to handle the real-time skeletal changing and animation triggers to support players interacting with in-game objects in a dynamic manner. There's a very good reason none of the latest games on these engines do that yet: it's still bloody performance expensive.

no.

They don't do Illusion domination because Illusion doesn't fit with the domination sets. Do I really need to go back and pull out my page long dissertations on this subject? Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas and need to be left at that: Bad. Ideas.

just do a search for SLI or Crossfire against my name.

Yes. it is confirmed that multi-gpu setups do not affect CoH under default conditions. It is possible to modify driver settings with 3rd party tools and force alternate-frame-rendering, but such techniques often expose memory leaks and run the risk of corrupting in-use data.

In other words, go screwing around with the drivers and be prepared to deal with blue-screen crashes.

Now, as to whether or not Multi-GPU is worth it largely depends on the game.

Is it worth it with the 2xx series of Nvidia GPU's? Oh hell no. Unless you are buying one of the heavily discounted BFG graphics cards a GTX 260 will generally start around the $200 mark. Remember, BFG is shut down and if there is anything wrong with the graphics card, there is no one you can turn to, and almost all BFG product sales are final with no returns, so don't count on shipping the card back for a refund.

Also you need to keep in mind that Nvidia's SLI program is extremely strict. SLI does not work across different vendors graphics cards unless you use third party / hacked drivers (read above about risking system damage). So if you have an EVGA, you need to buy an identical EVGA card for SLI to work as advertised. If you have a PNY, you need to buy another PNY card.

The problem here is that the $200 price point will be getting you RadeonHD 5830's or Geforce GTX 460's... and either one of these cards in single-rendering modes have no problems blowing SLI'd GTX 260's, or single card 285's, out of the water.

So basically, to get an identical card to a GTX 260 you already bought, unless you bought a BFG, you'd be paying as much money as it would take for less performance than a brand new card.

So no, it's not worth it under any conditions.