seebs

Okay, that helps.

Now I just have to wait for a freespec so I can share slots out a little more kindly with form powers.

I came up with a fancy macro that did a couple of things, one of which was creating a new binding, so it was

blahblah command$$blahblah othercommand$$bind key "more command$$other command"

This works fine -- until I zone, at which point the binding part of it is removed. Because the binding has to have $$ in it, I can't easily remove the "" from it.

Is this a known feature/limitation? If so, is there any workaround if I want a macro to change a binding, such as loading a file defining that binding?

I have discovered an awesome bind.

Consider, if you will:

/bind shift+lbutton "powexectoggleoff Dark Nova$$powexecname Shadow Step"

If you are in Dark Nova, this works -- it shifts out and teleports.

Now consider a macro, perhaps named Nova or something. You can't do this in a single /macro, you have to edit the macro, but:

powexectoggleon Dark Nova$$gototray 9$$bind shift+lbutton "powexectoggleoff Dark Nova$$powexecname Shadow Step$$gototray 1$$bind shift+lbutton powexec_name Shadow Step"

Upon activating this macro, you are transformed into a Dark Nova, and shift+lbutton is bound to "shift me out of dark nova, cast teleport (instantly targeted where I clicked), reset my tray to my human powers tray, and rebind shift+lbutton to just cast shadow step".

This works! That surprised me.

... Oh, interesting. It is broken by something, possibly zoning or the like, such that although it works when I set it, a while later it gets trimmed to end after gototray 9. I do not know why.

Questions:
* Do I slot my form powers? Do I slot the toggle itself (e.g. Dark Nova)? If so, what do I put in it?
* Should I be sharing slots out for all my forms, or focusing more on one or another?
* Do I ever get more powers in forms, or does each start out with all the things it gets?

Currently level 10, haven't bothered to slot anything yet, probably should but don't know what to put where, or how slotting interacts with my form powers. Does an enhancement in Dark Nova affect the dark nova abilities, too? Should I be filling them with slots, or just spreading stuff around so all my powers get something?

A couple of things.

1. Don't be afraid to set difficulty to -1/x1 if you're having a rough spot.
2. For bots, I would recommend completely skipping the pulse rifle powers.
3. I usually try to arrange to get the INITIAL aggro. Well, no -- I'm /traps so it's seeker drones now. But the alpha strike, split up, is pretty livable.

The pets are never really great for tanking; you can make them less squishy, and defend them up some good (depending on your secondary), but ultimately, the name of the game is splitting damage up.

Big shift in basic approach: Despite the fact that the penalty for dying is larger in CoH than you're used to, people are much more casual about it. You will rarely see groups give up just because they wiped. A few times. Due to the same guy doing something stupid. People are more focused on playing the game than on beating specific content.

Also, this game is much more alt-oriented than you might be used to. CoH gives everyone a "global" -- a unique handle that identifies them. (That's why so many forum sigs say "@SomeName") This lets you friend people rather than individual characters, and then you can keep in touch with them when they alt-hop. You can have up to 36 characters on a server if you buy extra slots, and people often fill up more than one server.

Basically, don't try to find the One True Character. Play a ton of them. Stalk while you feel like stalking, and when you want to just mow stuff down, move to a mastermind or blaster or something. Get sick of having to watch your health, swap to your tanker. And so on.

Pretty sure some IO sets increase endurance a bit too.

My DS/Dark is naming all the demons after main characters from Charlie's Angels -- the three little ones from the movies, the bigger ones from the original TV series. Her name is Charlene White, and she refers to them as "mummy's little angels".

I'm doing okay on the market, sorta -- I've got several toons with 30M inf, now, which is definitely progress. I haven't got quite enough to start playing with the stuff where recipes go for over 50M, but I'll get there eventually. Right now, my big problem isn't so much inf as WW/BM slots.

Yeah. I've got a bunch of bids out for the two sets of Blood Mandate I wanted, and they're trickling in bit by bit at prices I like. I'm being a lot more careful with 25-40 orange salvage (I'll wait a few days to save 500k) than I am with white salvage (the difference between 500 and 25000 is, in fact, completely trivial at this point).

So, I haven't played my mastermind in about a week. See, I had this insight. I had plans to respec her at some point, and I had a free respec. So I figured I'd use that to convert some of my more valuable enhancements to cash, and the rest to, well, cash, and redo her with level 30-35 stuff instead of level 15-25 stuff.

Great idea. Except that, a week later, I'm still trying to snag a few more items before she'll have a basic set of good enhancements in all her stuff, because it didn't occur to me in advance that this would cost money.

On the plus side, I've made about 30M inf so far equiping her. See, I wanted a kismet +accuracy. Reasonable enough. But pretty hard to get, so I had one alt just fill all WW slots with bids on the recipe. Well, I won four of them... You get the idea.

I have a /traps MM. Poison Gas Trap does not take accuracy enhancements -- you simply can't slot them in it.

If I have a hold/acc enhancement, and I put it in PGT, is the accuracy doing anything?

I would never, ever, rely on Mono -- at some point, the author is going to realize that Bill Gates is never gonna sleep with him and give up. More significantly, MS has no reason to preserve compatibility with it, and a lot of reasons to actively break it if it ever looks like a threat to their domination of the API.

I am okay with not getting 100% critical from hide on an AoE, it does seem a little on the powerful side.

Depends a lot on what you're trying to do. The top languages I use are Ruby (I enjoy working in it, and I like Rails for web stuff), C (all-purpose chainsaw, and I do some low-level stuff where it is the sole viable option), Unix shell (it's available "everywhere" for my purposes, and makes up for flaws by being so very easy to reuse)...

MS has spent the last thirty years systematically getting other companies to invest heavily in a particular technology or API, then deprecating that API and building a new one. This allows them to maintain a substantial competitive advantage, as long as they can determine what the new API would be. Because of this, I'd tend to shy away from relying on their APIs. Of course, that assumes you have your choice of what you want to work on... You may not.

I tend to think that it's a pretty good experience for people to have done at least one language around the level of C, but I'm not sure it's actually all that useful anymore.

I will say: Don't dismiss scripting languages as "just" scripting languages. They're every bit as much real programming languages as the compiled languages, and they are often much, MUCH more expressive. There's a reason that, despite being a reasonably good C programmer, I still do a ton of stuff in Ruby, or perl, or sh... It's because there are things they do better.

No.

Oh, my! I didn't even realize that. I guess because I've been playing a lot of MMs who don't have health/stamina, so I never tried to put a proc in either. Do chance-for-X have a chance every 10 seconds, then, in an auto power? (e.g., performance shifter chance for +end)

Uh-oh, about half my toons blue side are parked there. I guess I'll find out later.

I've yet to get anywhere really on a scrapper or tanker. I just don't seem to be good at it.