styopa

Mu Mastery's Electrifying fences has a 10 second -kb attached to it. This may sound all nice and pleasant, an AoE immobilize with -kb, but it's radius is 10'. This is so small, that unless you have the mob grouped up already before you hit them with it, you'll be lucky to get more than 2 in a single instance of the power. I got it an respeced out of it shortly after I realized how little it did for mitigating the chaos.

Energy Manipulator: Chance to Stun has two problems. One is that the text changes from Chance to Disorient to Chance to Stun. The other problem is that when slotting in Lightning Storm it does not proc in PvP. Tested it last night and after 10 minutes of the Lightning Storm zapping it never stunned my target that was standing there unprotected. When I get a chance I'm going to slot it into Lightning Field and see if it's an AoE issue.

Has anyone else experienced this with Energy Manipulator: Chance to Stun?

Some blasters can solo at a higher difficulty (I run at mid level to minimize debt), whereas some sets need to solo at a lower level. This is the case for a lot of ATs though. My Earth/Storm/Ice controller solos an invincible, but my MC/FF/Primal still does heroic because I'm not set up for damage and it becomes tedius otherwise.
I'm not saying that blasters don't need some loving, because I agree that they do. I also believe that the secondaries need a lot of looking into for balance. Now, that isn't to say that all secondaries are bad in all cases, there are some good synergies with secondaries that people consider bad, just that there are some that outperform others and don't have as many synergy problems.

All ATs, all combinations within each, are supposed to be able to solo. That was a stated goal of the developers several issues ago. Some ATs, and some combos within ATs, solo better than others. But ALL ATs and combos do better on a team. Stating that blasters are supposed to be a teaming AT simply because they perform better on a team is a misnomer. Even spines scrappers and fire tanks get better (XP|Inf)/min on a team, even if its only because of increased spawn size.
Within blasters, different primaries and secondaries create different synergies. If I carry enough greens insps, my blaster has a better (XP/Inf)/min rate than any of my other characters, including my BS/Regen. It also has the highest rate of debt collection and pay off.

Not really sure if this should be here, in the Veteran rewards thread, or known issues thread, but since it has to deal with costume pieces I'll put it here and let the Red Names sort it out.

In Greek characters the 'Zeta' character is listed twice in both upper and lower case, so two upper 'Zetas' and two lower 'Zetas'. The Greek character 'Pi' is missing in upper and lower case.

Considering all of the "I like pie" comments, I'm surprised that this (Pi) of all of the Greek character is missing.

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Yes

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Concise, light hearted, answers the question while still being vague. Hehe, nice Positron, that made my day.

Before the questions, I would like to thank your for your and the rest of the CoH team's constant attention to the boards. I am also very relieved that you decided to make another entire thread AND make repeated requests to ask for questions only.

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Now for a couple questions:

In two of the items you have in your initial list, you say that the change is (1st) in Issue 3 and (2nd) not is Issue 3, but soon after. Are we correct to assume the the other items in the list are not only not going to be in Issue 3, but we have a much longer time frame to wait for them (perhaps Issue 4 or 5)?

Very minor, but in the Mind Control set, will the icon for Mass Hypnosis be changed so that it isn't the exact same as Mass Confusion?

Lastly, has the development team ever discussed the idea of eminator placement being interruptable?

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Reasoning:

For me the first question boils down to a question that has already been asked, will fear be in Issue 3 or will we have to wait a bit longer. But the armor stacking issue is something important to many tankers and DA scrappers. So controllers and other fear users aren't the only inquiring minds that want to know.

The second question is merely an annoyance. It seems that all the other powers in the game follow strict guidelines as to how the icon for the power was chosen. Mass hypnosis's icon wouldn't bother me too much if it weren't for the fact that it has the exact same icon as another power in my set, mass confusion. Silly, but I have my OCD moments.

The third question is because my super group, and other groups I have been with, refuse to fight Devouring Earth unless we have to. Although there are some tactics (if in the correct situation) that have been posted on how to deal with Devouring Earth (DE) eminators, it seems that if a battle must take place where eminators cannot be avoided (entrance to a door mission), once placed the tide of the battle turns heavily in favor of the DE. I enjoy a challenge, but all the powers in the hero line that turn the battle so heavily to one side always have a downside to them, whereas there is no downside for the DE to place theirs and there is no reliable way to prevent that placement (using an AE hold on an unsuspecting group of DE doesn't always prevent placement, even on targets that were effected by the hold).

Again, thank you for your constant attention.

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3. Tankers have top priority post Update 3 to get their increased mob control abilities. I'd love to tie this to some twinks to Controllers - so that both have a good role in mob management - but I can't make any promises about that in particular.

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I'm glad that the tankers are getting some (much deserved) love in this next issue. The idea that a "good" tanker needed to use one of their power pools for one power always seemed a bit, well, odd.

I'm curious about the controller comment though. You don't plan on swapping out one of the powers in each controller line and adding provoke instead. But seriously, my ability to control mobs is very near the level I would like it to be, and after the fear changes go through (me likes comment 2 ) I should be set. When I duo with scrappers I ask them how much control the would like to see so they can choose to fight statues or not. Would you elaborating while still maintaining your vague responses?

Also, this wasn't on your list of stuff in the pipeline, but I'm still kind of curious. My supergroup, with the exception of the DM/Regen scrapper, avoids devouring earth. We don't shy away from any other group of villians, just devouring earth. My supergroup isn't the only one who refuses to fight them unless they have to, I have heard the same sort of fear and refusal to fight from other groups I have teamed up with. It seems to boil down to there being no reliable way to prevent eminators from being placed, and once placed your best course of action is to retreat (not an option if you are pinned against the entrance in a door mission during a task force). Other than completely directing all attacks at the eminators, which tends to lead to more eminators being placed, there seem to be only three reliable ways to remove them, dimension shift, teleport foe and detention field. My question is as follows:

Has the dev team has ever discussed the possibility for devouring earth eminator placement to be interruptable?

The reason why I ask is that there have been several times where I have started the battle by using total domination on a group that hasn't seen us, it has hit the fungoid and yet a fungi still ends up being placed and comes into play seconds after everything is held. That and the horror that is switching from a zero aggro mass hypnosis mez on fungoid being switched to domination (not total domination so aggro is triggered) and watching a fungi appear seconds after the domination takes hold.

Thanks for the time.

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2. The changes to Fear are being worked on now.

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Oh happy day! Thank you for the update Statesman.

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I was also at the chat with Statesman over the weekend. The issue of dark powers was never raised, either by States or the audience. Didn't seem to be much of hot button. He did reinforce that email is a great way to make contact with the dev team, though. Maybe if you dropped them a line?

Great write-up, Bitter! It was good to meet you and I hope we see more of each other in the days ahead.

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First off, thank you BitterCupOJoe for the detailed write-up. Sounds like the devs have been very busy adding more content and powers, as well as the upcoming fixes (States said today that they were working on ways of making going to the Shadow Shard more desireable).

Next, for all of you DA scrappers, the mind controllers out there feel your pain. We haven't heard anything about the terrify fix since prior to Issue 2.

For those of you who are going to be seeing them in Anaheim, please ask about Terrify and the fear fix and anything concerning the Dark Armor fixes. The Mind and Illusion Controller, Dark Miasma Defender, and Dark Armor Scrapper communities would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

I run CoH using Debian unstable with the 2.6.8 kernel on a P4 2GHz, 768 MB ram and a GForce FX 5700. In general I play under Gnome with Metacity, but if I know I will be on the game for a long period of time I will switch over to a generic X-session. I have also gotten this working under the 2.4.26 kernel without any problems. I am using Cedega 4.0.1 and its companion application Point2Play. I am emulating Win98 and it seems to work just fine with the problem of a small memory leak.

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Heh, it's been argued to death by people other than me. Personally, I don't mind paying for software, or for some software to be proprietary. I just don't really want to give Transgaming my money because they took the freely available work done by 100s of people, made it proprietary by changing the license, and didn't contribute anything back to the original authors. Of course maybe this has changed; I don't keep up with the news very well. I doubt it though, otherwise the directx9 code from Cedega would have been folded back into the main Wine tree by now.

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When I was looking at buying Cedega I noticed that it is possible to actually download the source of their product and compile it yourself for free (as in beer). Cedega charges for two things, precompiled versions for the different distrobutions and their excellent product Point2Play. Trying to use Cedega, and all of the flags necessary to do anything with it, by itself would be a nightmare which is where Point2Play is useful.

I dislike sounding like a mouth piece for Transgaming, but Point2Play is how Wine should do its setup. It is a front end that does all of the downloading of their updates and allows for you do setup the configuration without having to type in all of the flags over and over again. Very similar to the Crossover Office setup only cleaner.

My 2 inf on the cost issue. Cedega only costs $99/year if you want to be able to use their upgrading system. Since Cedega 4.0.1 works beautifully with CoH just spend the $30 and get the product. They spend a lot of time specializing their code to work specifically for games. Would I love to see this under a Free as in Speech license? Of course. But I don't think that merging their product back with standard Wine is a viable option anymore. They are a company that provides a good, solid product that does exactly what they say it does and I don't mind supporting them and their programmers.

VMWare, as someone pointed out earlier, emulates the hardware as generic hardware so you lose the graphics acceleration. The early versions couldn't do directX either.

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Slot END reducers before slotting Range enhancers, you'll get more out of them, especially at lower levels. That first slot you get with the power should definitely go towards END. Like most things, what is acceptable to one person might not be to another, so I'm not going to get into recommending slotting levels here. Be conservative, especially before you are using SO END reduction. Slot one at a time until you are happy with your range. If you are planning to take Stamina, you'll want to be even more conservative with your slotting, you'll be able to teleport a nice long way without running low once SO END recovery enhancements become available, even with only one END Reduce slot.

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I just got the TP power pool for a second movement power (flight is my first) to be able to keep up with those SJ and SS toons. First, I want to thank you for posting this, it is extremely helpful.

Second, most travel powers have a maximum speed, which is meaningless for TP. Does TP have a range cap? If yes, how many SOs does it take to hit that cap?

Were PA modified such that they have hitpoints now? If not, perhaps they should get compensation for not getting the increased hitpoints that imps got.