Quick Noob Question: Add-ons.

i'm a pretty experienced mmorpg player so i kind of knew what to expect from coh, but i have to admit there are some nice surprises. i really really REALLY like the creation process. i've never seen anything quite like it.

i do have a concern, however, regarding the absence of (at least i think) addons. WoW has been my main mmo for the last couple years and i've grown attached to the freedom that the devs allow 3rd party software enthusiasts. from what i can tell there is an extremely limited amount of addons for this game. is there a website dedicated strictly to coh addons, and if so where can i find it (outside of the wiki page that has several links to particular addons)?

also, i was a frequent reader of EJ (elitistjerks.com) which is a theory crafting website for WoW dedicated entirely to number crunching and game mechanics. is there a similar site for coh, and if not, would there be interest in the community for a site like this (a think-tank of sorts)? i only ask because i'm a real stat hound and really like juggling the possibilities between certain scenarios, and this game seems VASTLY superior to WoW in that regard considering the almost limiteless talent combinations.

i just really want to dig into the mechanics of this game. maybe there's something out there and i'm not finding it.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

There aren't any actual addons for City. Nothing will change the functionality of the base game. You can only tweak the visuals, and then only by changing texture files.

There are applications to assist information-gathering (HeroStats for data; Badge-Hunter (badge-hunter.com) and City Info Terminal (cit.cohtitan.com) for badge collecting stats, both of which can be verified by HeroStats, CIT also can be verified through a separate, low-resources program called Glycerine).

There's the Vidiotmaps Pack, which changes the base image of the map to include helpful information.

There's the various icon fixes, which changes the power icons to more standardized versions (using a pet icon for a pet, instead of a knockback icon, which is something the pet does...that kind of thing).

As for your other question, as a sometimes WoW player myself, I find this game is actually kind of freeing to not have to powergame in order to be the very best, because you can play the game without any enhancements (our version of gear) and still do OK. However, you'll find an EJ mentality down in each archetype's subforum. People tend to stick with the official forums for most of their poking at builds, that way they get the most exposure and the easiest channel of feedback. Even better, you can only post on the forums if you have an active account, so you'll always get responses from someone who is playing *right now* instead of possibly operating with old information. Mids (cohplanner.com) can help you plan your build.

Keep in mind that City is EXTREMELY casual friendly, so there's no actual 'wrong' way to do it. If you're having fun with it, you're doing it right.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

EDIT: Beaten by someone with far superior knowledge.

If you want to play around with number crunching then Mids' is THE tool to use for character planning:
http://www.cohplanner.com/

As for number crunching the wiki has most of the basic equations (the base mechanics are actually relatively simple) and if you want to discuss them the Scrapper forum is probably the best place to do so (Scrappers ahve the mix of solo damage and survivability that attracts the best number crunchers).

There is a lot of information available on the nuts & bolts of the game at Paragon Wiki.

You'll definitely want Mid's Hero Designer to plan out your character's build... it lets you design your character from the ground up and does all the calculations to give you the numbers behind your character.

There's a map pack, which is a replacement for your in-game map with all the badge locations and other points of interest indicated at Vidiotmaps

There's also Herostats, a program that runs on top of COH and keeps track of all the stats, it's highly useful.

Additionally there's these boards; many of us have been playing for 5+ years now and quite a few of us have gained a pretty in-depth knowledge of the game. You can get specific answers about particular archetypes by looking in the forum for each specific AT. Don't forget about all the various guides that have been written about almost every aspect of the game.

In any case welcome to the game; like many others I've been playing for over 5 years now so the game must be doing something right. I've seen the ups and downs of buffs and nerfs, some minor, some severe yet I've stayed through it all.

Yep, nothing like unitframes. The UI is what you get. You can only change the textures of things. An example is the map. You can change the image of the zone underneath the icons (this is what the Vidiotmaps Pack does). You can change what the icons look like (this is somewhat more involved and sometimes requires doing things that are in the gray area of the TOS/EULA). You can't change the shape of the map (other than dragging the edges of the map bigger/smaller). You can't add icons to the map that aren't available in the dropdown selector (e.g. gather nodes, even though we don't have those here).

Cooldowns, however, you can do with HeroStats. It reads your chat text, which includes power activation lines, which then HeroStats turns into cooldown (we call it recharge) timers. HeroStats runs OUTSIDE the game, though...it's not an in-game modification.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

PS; it's not so much that it's against the TOS (which technically it is), it's also just mostly not possible. WoW is built specifically to allow addon designers access to various innards of the game through mystical development voodoo. City just does not have the innards-access that WoW does. If it can be scraped from the data passing between your client and the server, we can poke around at it (this is how HeroStats/Glycerine read the chat text). If it is a texture file, it can be changed to look like something else. (You can, in theory, turn every street into a plaid pattern by dropping an appropriately-named file in a specific branch of the data folder.)

But you can't do things like HealBot to make squares to click on for auto healing. You can't do BossMods to tell you what a boss is going to do next (epic bosses (Archvillains and Heroes, here) choose what powers they do pretty randomly, out of all powers they have available, just like minions and lieutenants and bosses; there are only a few instances where a boss will do something at a specific time.) You can't install Altoholic and know in two clicks what all of your alts are carrying, if you need a specific piece of salvage for your recipe. (Keep track of that manually...*sadface*)

Incidentally, most epic boss fights last maybe 2-3 minutes. A few last longer, a few take less than 30 seconds.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Some of the key "mechanics" people on the forums are:

• Arcanaville — She is very knowledgeable about how stuff works in this game. She is, however, rather cerebral and verbose. (Take that as you will.) She is the type of poster that will randomly creep in to a thread and give someone the lay of the land far more loqaciously and accurately than just about anyone would have really needed.
• Umbral — He is quite knowledgeable as well, and is a regular poster in the already mentioned Scrapper sub-forum. He is, however, how should I put this kindly... rather direct.
• Nihilii / Werner — I mention these two together because they are both avid AV-soloers and are also frequent posters in the Scrapper sub-forum.

I've played a dark/dark defender to 50 which is the mirror of your corrupter; the combination is very effective at neutering the enemies' ability to hit you or your team thanks to it's powerful tohit debuffs. It isn't one of the bigger damage sets though; dark blast is strong in mitigation but relatively weak in damage output.

You'll be a very effective teammate but as you level up you'll have lower damage output than some other sets.