je_saist

I really wanted to insert something pithy and sarcastic here... but I can't come up with a comment that makes the fact that a large players don't think about the game beyond maximum rewards under any and all circumstances seem funny.

My hope is that the Incarnate Content will be designed in such a way as to where tactics and strategies are required beyond "buff up:: CHARGE!"

Eh. I'll agree that the solutions were probably more subtle than I could have made them.

From TCS? All he generates from me is a desire to go look up a various pictures featuring facepalms. I'm not sure it's possible to hold anything resembling a discussion with whoever is behind that player's keyboard.

okay, as to the rest of the posts in the thread: if this gets some dialog moving over what players would like to see with Group Fly, that's a good thing.

One of the questions I saw repeated was the gating content behind a specific power. One of the assumptions made in the opening post is that every-player can obtain some form of flying in the game, be it native power or temporary power.

My actual feelings on the subject are a bit mixed. As a player of the game, I'm not sure I could actually advocate requiring any particular single power for any particular in-game encounter. It would pretty much suck if you joined a task force and couldn't complete it becaues you didn't have the exact right mix of powers.

That being said, I'm often left wondering if implementing required powers for game content might not be a good thing for game longevity. One of the aspects of City of Heroes I don't like is the development process where everything winds up equal, there's no real risk, and anybody can do everything. That makes for a plain boring game.

What's the point of rolling a tank if you can get the same level of relative protection in a scrapper, with a higher damage rating? What's the point of rolling a scrapper if you an get the same level of relative protection in a blaster and do even more damage?

Let me put it this way: It is widely accepted by most players that to have a quick ArchVillain, Hero, or Giant Monster fight, you need some kind of regeneration debuff. Yes, you can take down any of the 3 classes without any kind of regeneration, defense, or resistance debuff, you'll just be a long time at it.

From a practical point of view there is already is a precedent set that if you want to get things done in the game reasonbly quickly, you need some form of buffs or debuffs. You don't necessarily need a radiation emission power set to take on these powered-classes of opponents. Yes, a Rad Emission will make the fight generally easier since their powers are toggles, but other debuff sets like dark miasma, trick arrow, kinetics, and even storm can shred enemy stat values.

What I'm trying to get at here is the class of power difference. I have no real issues with gating content behind power classes. I have no problems with enemies that can only be damaged by ranged attacks, or enemies that can only be damaged by holds, or enemies that can only be damaged by melee attacks, such as those used in the Hamidon Raid. I would have issues if the creatures of the Hamidon could ONLY be injured by somebody with Energy Blast, or by somebody with Fire Blast.

Ergo, I have no real problem with the original bad idea of creating enviromental content that is hazardous or impassible under certain conditions. I have no real problem with content that forces players to be what they are and playing to the strengths of their chosen archtypes. I have no problem with the game forcing players to make choices about how they accomplish any particular mission.

Dragging this back to group fly specifically, the power is, in my opinion, largely made redundant by the available temporary powers. Group Fly, as a power on it's own, would only truely be useful under 2 circumstances: Circumstances were temporary powers were turned off; Circumstances where a player could not go get a replacement jetpack.

What If I were to posit a situation where Group Fly was not the only mass aerial transport option available to players? What if there were a class of powers that were based on the concept of giving players a viable means of transport while retaining full mobility and control of their actions? What if there were multiple travel paths that be used for mission completion?

Let my try to set up an example here: Let's say you were out hunting a Devouring Earth Monster in a Praetorian Task Force. You are deep underground in Praetoria and you come across a chasm that you can not teleport through due to a teleport denial system, there's no place to land for jumps, there's no ledges to super-speed across, and due to an EMP that was detonated during the last fight you were in, you can't use temporary mechanical powers like Jet Packs or Rocket Packs.

You have a choice. You can fly across the chasm with a native flight power. On the other side of the chasm are 8 obelisks or some other object. With the full team assembled, you can unlock a door and proceed with the mission and go ahead and fight the Devouring Earth Monster. Fighting it early might give you a special reward: such as additional merits or a special drop.

Your other alternative is to work your way through the caves system around the chasm. Your access to this other caves system is through a new mission map that you can't return from. Say you jump down a big hole in the ground following a map, and when you get to the bottom, it's now blocked off by a cave in.

The Task Force itself can still continue. The player isn't locked out of the content, which is one of the big complaints against requiring powers, but the rewards will be different, trading off a larger special reward for increased chances for minor item drops, more experience, and more inf .

With this type of system, content could be created that could leverage particular powers and make you want to have a specific uncommon power. The game is not requiring you to have that specific power, but you might see or experience certain aspects of a story only if somebody has the power class required to unlock that specific story branch.

For another quick example: let's say that you come across a wall that you can't pass through, but you can fire through. A player with a sniping power could destroy a target on the other side of the wall, like a computer control panel, and allow you to proceed through the wall early. Players without sniper powers would have to go track down a control panel in another map, which would change the story they see and experience.


Designing more mass transit aerial powers, or mass versions of any power set, is something I'm not sure I want to get into in this particular thread. So I'm going to let those possibilities slide by for now.

you might want to read that page again, it isn't.

CoH Deluxe was the EU release of City of Heroes unlocking the EU servers.

If you already HAVE an account that uses the EU servers, you likely cannot apply the code to your account and it can only be used to create a completely new account.

I wasn't gonna bother trying to explain this for TCS... but since you got tripped up on it as well... this was created largely in response to the latest Get Rid of Group Fly thread. It's intentionally over the top and ludicrous in the opposite direction.

This.

For crying out loud, what's the problem with letting some archtypes have exclusive power sets ONLY for that archtype?

Not everything needs to be proliferated, or should.

Now, I have no personal problems with Super Strength as a scrapper set. It's not like requesting it as a stalker set where the entire mechanics of what makes Super Strength it's own unique set would have to be chunked out the nearest window. That being said, it is my opinion that Super Strength is one of the sets that should not be proliferated.

I realize that a significant amount of the player-base hardly cares about game design mechanics, and that possible a larger amount of the player-base doesn't care about thematic design elements either. My argument for not proliferating Super-Strength to scrappers is largely centered on the thematic design rather than the mechanical design.

I realize that a significant amount of the player population does not think their should be a different gameplay experience for each separate archtype. I realize that a significant amount of the player population does not think that their chosen archtype should fill any mechanically designed role in the game as a default setting. I realize that a significant amount of the player population will leverage any in-game mechanics that they can to make their chosen archtype into something it was not designed to be.

Ergo, I realize that the positioning of my argument against proliferating the Super Strength set is only going to be a viable argument for those who care about thematic and mechanic design elements. It is not going to be an effective or useful argument against a player who cares about neither design elements and simply wants the set to be ported.

From a thematic standpoint each of the melee archtypes is supposed to have their own unique play-style that their specific powers leverage:

• Stalkers: These guys are supposed to be experts at hit and run tactics. Their powers sets are geared towards striking at a single target inflicting maximum burst damage, then getting the heck out of dodge.
• Scrappers: These guys are supposed to be the lean / scrawny athletic type. They can dish out the damage to single targets or alternatively just shred entire mobs with mass point blank area of effect attacks. A scrapper cares not for the battle strategy. All they care about is just taking out the next target, and getting in as many photos of themselves as they can. A scrapper is about taking down the other guys as quickly as possible, while trying not to get too scuffed up.
• Brutes: These guys are supposed to be nuts. They charge into a fight with anything they have on hand to fight with and just wail on stuff till something dies, be it the Brute or the Brute's opponent.
• Tanks: These guys are supposed to take damage. Yes, they can dish it out too, but a tank approaches each fight as a strategic battle. A tank stands their ground where a scrapper would come to it's senses and leave, or a brute would die from exhaustion.

Yes, this is kind of a glossy once over borrowing elements from how each set has been described in the past.

The Super Strength set as it's exposed to Tankers is just a solid animation set. It's not fancy, it's not over the top. It's a simple collection of strong punches.

For scrappers, it's almost too simple. Which is why Scrappers get Martial Arts. A Martial Artist leverages their whole body when attacking. It's a fancily animated set that fits the thematic design of the scrapper archtype.

Super Strength works on Brutes because Brutes are insane.

While I realize that these thematic elements are hardly set in stone, as various new power sets like Kinetic Melee and Dual-Blades aptly demonstrate, they tend to hold up for the classically designed powerset.

I also realize that for a lot of players, Martial Arts does not quite fit their idea of a punching scrapper. There are continuous threads requesting for a proper set featuring street fighting or otherwise named dirty fighting powers.

These entirely new design sets typically fall prey to one of the basic design limitations of the City of Heroes engine: Lack of 1 to 1 character effect animations or synchronization.

In City of Heroes each player is presented to the game world as a bubble. There is no direct interaction between the player and a targeting enemy or object.

This becomes a bit of a serrated chainsaw from an animation standpoint. Many of the powers that players would like to see in a street fighting or dirty fighting set, such as elbow punchs, leg locks, shin kicks, nut cracks, and so on, simply do not look right when animated from within the players bubble.

The bubble limitation means the camera has to be pulled back where only a limited number of animation types still look believable. The key word here is types. I'm not saying the animations themselves are limited. What is limited is just how many places a punch or kick can end up, and still look like it hit the player's target within the limitations of the physical size of each character model loaded.

Basically: A kick from somebody who took the Huge Frame and made it as tall as possible still has to look like it connected even if the target of the kick took the female frame and made it as small as physically possible.

Elemental, Preternatural, Supernatural, Augmented, or Weapon based powers are easier to fudge. The animations of these sets can be designed so that the effect of the set reaches outside of the player's model and is not necessarily constrained by the physical limitations of how far the skeletal frame itself can move within the bubble.

As is, both Super Strength and Martial Arts cover a wide range of the existing types of attacks that don't look utterly ludicrous without an animation augmentation. From this aspect, I could see the developers looking at porting the Brute version of Super Strength to Scrappers to satisfy the desires of players who want a set that is mostly made up of basic punches. I can also see the developers porting Martial Arts to Tanks for those Tank players who want something that's over the top and flashy.

My personal opinion is that the developers should try and stick to their guns on these power-sets and leave them where they are.

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

In other words.

Hell /jranger no.

capped to what?

Capped to maximum HP? Easily.

Capped to smashing / lethal damage? yes, you could.

Capped to melee damage? yes, you could.

Capped to melee / smash / lethal? maybe...

yes.

Long after Going Rogue.

We already knew from last year, and confirmed earlier this year, that exposing additional power customization options, such as Pool Powers, Epic Powers, Patron Powers, Costume Overlay Powers (granite / kheldian), and Costume Overlay Summon powers (Mastermind Pets) would require additional engine work, additional user-interface work, as well as additional data-base work.

This has been documented multiple times on the forums, many times when players ask if Going Rogue will bring additional customization options.

There are several different graphical features that make up Ultra Mode. I walk through all of these settings in this thread: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219534

Minimum here is defined as: The least powerful graphics processor that can turn all of the Ultra Mode features on at the same time, against an average processor.

A stock GTS 250 will not be able to run all UltraMode features at once in maximum quality in 1440*900. Trust me. I tried.

The Geforce GTS 250 is the starting point for where all UltraMode features at once can be rendered with a 20 frames per second or higher frame rate.

Pretty much.

if you are changing brands, such as going from Nvidia to AMD, or AMD to Nvidia, then you'll need to uninstall the current graphics drivers, and run the Driver Sweeper tool mentioned earlier.

if you are changing generations of graphics cards, such as going from ATi Radeon x1600 to AMD RadeonHD 5600, you'll also want to run the Driver Sweeper tool.

Well, pretty much any Geforce GTX architecture card can run all UltraMode features at once.

Would I buy any of the 2xx series GTX cards? Oh hell no.

Would I buy any of the 4xx series GTX cards? If my money was on the line I would give the EVGA GTX 460 768 megabyte card at it's $200 price point a serious glance. Unlike RadeonHD 5830's at that price point, the GTX 460 series tends to be a good card to overclock.

If I was looking to spend over $200, well, I dunno. The GTX 460 at 1gb starts around $230. It's probably worth the cash difference in the long run if you are looking to cap spending under $250. I think I'd save up my money and go for the RadeonHD 5850.

Texas already answered this.

As far which to pick... well... I've had hands on with quite a few Nvidia branded cards. I've got a list sitting somewhere around these forums.

Basically, if it was my money on the line, I'd only be looking at two different vendors. XFX and EVGA.

The other vendors... well... maybe I can put it this way: Galaxy, Palit, and Zotac have been known to give Diamond Multimedia a run for the lack of quality award.

*ish petted!*

yays!

For reference:
the pixel area of 1280*1024 is 1,310,720
the pixel area of 1440*900 is 1,296,000

The performance profile of the two resolutions is pretty much the same with only a 14,720 pixel count difference.

Not. A. Chance.

If you look at other posts made by me, such as the sticked Ultra Mode Graphics Guide, a Geforce GTS 250 struggles to do Ultra Mode in 1680*1050, and generally will only run medium settings on 1440*900.

The GT 320 is weaker straight out, and share's the same general architecture.

Depends: you may have a driver upgrade available. Post a GPUZ of your current system: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219502

Currently the free image hosting part of GPUZ seems to be borked, but you can still save the file and upload to a free image hosting site like photobucket, picasaweb, or imageshack.

Hell. No.

For starters, the 465 is pretty much a binned chip. Most of the GTX 465's on the market are GTX 470 or GTX 480 GPU's that didn't make the cut at the fab, and thus are being resold. If you don't mind browsing Taiwanese and Korean sites you'll find pictures of 465's with the heatsinks off, and the chip markings of the 470 or the 480.

Normally this is a good thing, such is many of the Triple-Core Phenom II's, which were actually quad-core's that didn't make the Quality Assurance requirements at the fab. So you could buy a triple-core Phenom II, and if you were willing to take a hit on the operating speed or take a hit on the power consumption / thermal output, have yourself a relatively speaking fully functioning quad-core.

In the case of the GTX 465, this is NOT such a good thing. The 465 has pretty much the same power draw as the GTX 470 and 480, as well as the same heat output. That means temperatures up to, and / or beyond, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Nor does the 465 overclock, with many who try finding the cards to be more unstable than the signal strength on an Iphone 4, which again goes back to, most of the GTX 465's failed quality assurance checks to run with the number of shaders or clock speeds of the 470 or the 480.

The 465 was such a dog that even Kyle over at HardOCP wouldn't even review the chip.

So no. You don't want to buy a 465. You want to run in the opposite direction from the 465.

If you are dead set on buying the Nvidia badge with that amount of relative performance, buy a 460.

*drops from above and bounces up and down on FeyTummy!*

Actually, they didn't say that.

They said the minimum requirements might move up a bit, but they would try to enable the original minimum spec as much as possible.

Most of the problems players have had with the Ultra-Mode changes trace back to driver issues with either Nvidia or Intel. Intel in particular because you generally can't get an updated driver that makes calls to the OpenGL reference specification, rather than to proprietary extensions Intel hardware needs in order to perform even halfway decently:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...7&postcount=10
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219502
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...3&postcount=10
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...78&postcount=7

Why yes, this topic does come up semi-often.

Okay.

Maxing CoH in Ultra Mode @ 1440*900 doesn't take much.

Minimum Graphics card on the ATi side: RadeonHD 4850 for everything at once
Minimum Graphics card on the Nvidia side: Geforce GTS 250

Minimum Processor AMD side: Socket AM2 2.2ghz or higher
Minimum Processor Intel side: Core 2 Duo 2.2ghz or higher, Pentium 4's need not apply.

Maxing CoH in Ultra Mode @ 1920*1200 takes a considerable amount more

Minimum Graphics card on the ATi side: RadeonHD 4870 / 5770
Minimum Graphics card on the Nvidia side: Geforce GTX

Processor: you really want something with more oomph, but even an old hamstrung Phenom 9600 with the TLB issue can drive 1920*1200 in it's TLB-off stability mode.

Not. Good. Enough.

You can get a handle on relative graphics cad performance here: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=88

Now, raw performance figures may, or may not, tell you the whole story on performance. Let's use the min cards RadeonHD 4850 and Geforce GTS 250.

RadeonHD 4850: 10,000 MegaPixels 25,000 Megatexels
Geforce GTS 250: 11,808 MegaPixels 47,232 Megatexels

On paper the Geforce GTS 250 is a lot more powerful.

In actual gameplay... well... things change. Since I've got both a Geforce GTS 250 and a RadeonHD 4850 on hand, I put them both through Unigine's Heaven 2.1 benchmark under DirectX mode with settings of 1440*900, 8x Anti-Aliasing, and 16x Anistropic filtering.

RadeonHD 4850: GPUZ Report :: Cpuz report :: Scores 563

Geforce GTS 250: GPUZ Report :: Cpuz report :: Scores 367

The Geforce GTS 250, despite being in Triple SLI mode with a much more powerful backing processor, got creamed when the filtering got turned up compared to a system that was only running a single gpu.

I also just ran the same test again, making sure both computers were in their multi-gpu modes, with the DX10 API specified, and only 8x anistropic:

Geforce GTS 250: score 1285
RadeonHD 4850: score 1686

The GT 320, on paper, only has 8,000 megapixels, and at best 28,000 megatexels.

That's not far off the theoretical performance of the RadeonHD 4850. However, as the GTS 250 demonstrates, that particular Nvidia architecture does not fair well at actually exposing that power.


I bash Microsoft every chance I get, but even I'll admit that unless you need the WindowsXP virtualization tool there's nothing in Windows 7 Pro or Premium that's worth the outright cash over Home.

As far as upgrading: Microsoft still uses a central registry mechanic to house all of their operating system information. This central registry mechanic makes upgrades problamatic, and where as most modern Unix type systems, such as Linux or Darwin BSD (sold as Apple OSX) will change processors, hard-drives, graphics cards, and everything else without a second thought... you'll need to be familiar with tools like Driver Sweeper when changing many components under Microsoft Operating Systems... and yes... if you change major components like motherboards, be prepared to reinstall.

You should not, in most cases, have to actually wipe or format a pre-existing drive.

I'm... gonna take a minute to get back to this since:

A: Unigine just crashed on the RadeonHD system and I don't know why, I suspect it's because I had that system in hibernate and something went screwy on the Windows back end.

B: just to get this up while I look through what you actually want to spend and see if I can find something that will do Ultra-Mode without ripping you off.

I wouldn't give odds on your chances, but you won't know till you send the /petition

yep. Brought to you by the same... um... artistic... no... that's not right...

autistic, spastic, moronic, gutter bound, trash spewing maniacs that did stuff like Date Movie.

Which means Vampires Suck will likely feature more humor centered around just being plain gross and disgusting.

Sure, I'll agree Twilight could use a good Parody film, but Peter Graves is gone and Mel Brooks probably couldn't care about spoofing the series.