Returning Player Diary
Exclamation marks and ones for "subtlety"... *takes a shot*
Single and vague anecdote treated as solid data... *takes another shot*
Insinuation people talking negatively about a set have only PLed the character to 50... *...*
Canine, you're trying to send me to the emergency room, aren't you?
Exclamation marks and ones for "subtlety"... *takes a shot*
Single and vague anecdote treated as solid data... *takes another shot* Insinuation people talking negatively about a set have only PLed the character to 50... *...* Canine, you're trying to send me to the emergency room, aren't you? |
And for all I know, you may *like* the emergency room. There are a lot of odd people out there on the internet <grin>
On a more serious note, I freely admitted I've not yet played the set (I have bought it, just not yet played it). I *do* like seeing opinions on sets from people who aren't at 50 and who are playing through the bulk of the game, because as far as content goes, there is FAR more non-50 than 50.
Also, I suspect my own rather peculiar at times sense of humour may not translate too well to text, I thought I'd get in with the semmingly obligatory 'but it's aoe sucks!' comment before anyone else did
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
Shh, don't you know that 'official forum sentiment (tm)' is that Street Justice's AoE sucks!1!1!!!
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The cone is tricky and took me a while to figure out, but now that I have the 'wiggle' down it's a consistent performer. And the PBAoE with the combo ring up is a thing of beauty.
I still don't really know what I'm doing with his /shield secondary, but that's fine. I'm intentionally avoiding doing any research on it- it's fun picking powers I'm unfamiliar with and don't already know the ideal slotting for. Plenty of time to work all that out when he gets to the higher levels, if I feel like it.
Oh, and Goat, what are you using to take the screenshots? IIRC you switched to using .tga's, have you tried to switching back to .jpg, to see if that resolves it? |
PS, no more Summer Event, sorry, but it should be gone after maintenance/patchy patchy today. |
Was on futzing around with my electric controller The Almighty Dollar when someone started agitating for one last summer event team, so I signed up. As I've done nothing but take 'the hitter', I have it figured out. Aparently the rest of the team knew their roles too, as I ended up getting a pile of "perfect ______" badges.
I still don't think it's the best 'style' of mission for this particular game, but it went okay. I still don't quite get what's happening or why- what benefit did we accrue for me doing my job well? There wasn't much difference I could tell between this 'perfect' team and one of the less talented squads I ran it with. Still got randomly teleported around to fight waves of goons & a couple of bosses.
Anyway, this team was plowing through the bosses for some reason so we finished up fairly quickly, and on to the better of the two 'films'.
This team rocked the gladiator arena like no other I've been on- I got the little "incite the crowd" button twice, we managed to summon the God Boss, we mowed down everything in good order and only had one fatality.
One sort of frustrating thing with Dollar is the boss/av's were all pretty much immune to end drain, which is his big thing. So I mostly just plinked away with my hold and my knockdown zap waiting for my sonic debuff to recharge. I wasn't able to get much use out of the Ring of Doom as we had no melee on our squad- a corr, a defender, a bots MM and me. I ended up putting it on the big robot because he at least occasionally got close enough for it to work.
So, fun fights but again the underlying mechanics were totally opaque to me- what was the point of inciting the crowd? How did we trigger the power in the first place? Why did we get the God Boss this time but not the last time I ran it?
Now, I know people here can explain all of this to me, but it seems that a special event aimed at the entire playerbase should do a better job of 'showing its work' so to speak.
Anyway, my final impression is similar to my first impression- pretty fun, strong on fights, weak on story.
After getting my son to bed and running that event it was fairly late. I logged back in on Cathode Ray intending on doing a bit of enhancing, but was unable to resist the siren song of someone starting up a Posi 2. They sounded like they knew what they were about, so I figured it wouldn't take us all that long.
I lucked into what was by far the smoothest run of this TF I've ever had. Everyone knew what to do way better than I did, and aside from a couple of fatal accidents involving our stalker there were no deaths. We got rolling pretty fast so I wasn't able to take my usual inventory of team composition, but I think the majority of our success came from having *two* thermals + a FF defender on the team. Everyone had a double helping of both therm bubbles, plus the FF, and on the hard targets I was getting out my rad debuffs- I almost felt bad for our enemies.
No tank, again, or even a brute- we had a couple of scrappers, a spines & a broadsword, who took turns.
I had a terrific time with Ray on this one- huge spawns, plenty of attacks to play with and not much need to worry about return fire. As with /shield I intentionally don't know anything more about Beam Rifle that what I got from the power descriptions, and it was fun figuring out an attack chain that would maximize disintigration spread. And while I don't think his AoE is that great damage wise, all those little 'disintigrates!' floating up makes it *feel* like you're laying waste even if the individual numbers aren't amazing.
Also, on a corrupter I gotta say there's a special satisfaction when you get into the range where you're seeing SCOURGE! DISINTIGRATE! at the same time. =D
Got done late, but not super late. Picked up 3 levels, made a few friends and confirmed my opinion that Ray is destined to eventually join my small group of 50's.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I still don't think it's the best 'style' of mission for this particular game, but it went okay. I still don't quite get what's happening or why- what benefit did we accrue for me doing my job well? There wasn't much difference I could tell between this 'perfect' team and one of the less talented squads I ran it with. Still got randomly teleported around to fight waves of goons & a couple of bosses.
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1) an hour ago, first half of the technical side of the heist.
2) Flash forward to an hour later/'now' as the first wave of the security/mob goon response catches up with you.
3) Flash back to just after the first half of the technical half, wrapping up the actual heist.
4) flash forward again to 'now' the second part of the security/mob goon response.
If you resequence it to 1,3,2,4 then you get the chronological sequence, whereas 1,2,3,4 is the edited film structure.
I quite like it, but you do need to be paying attention to *all* the cutscene text, like the one where is tells the Hacker to go to the generator roon in the third phase. The number of people who didn't read that, or didn't notice it, or didn't pay attention if they did notice it was moderate IME of running the event.
I don't know what missing the various parts of the heist actually do, as barring unfortunately timed DC's, all of the runs I did were pretty smooth.
Best I ever managed on the Ninja Monkey badge, however was this :
That was with 2 blasters, me on a Kinetics Defender, and a /sonic Corruptor. Lots of monkeys fell over <grin> We got 60 Ninjas too.
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
I don't know how it'll compare at higher levels, but right now it has one good and one great AoE, which combine to keep me happy...and I'm a guy who *loves* AoE.
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So, fun fights but again the underlying mechanics were totally opaque to me- what was the point of inciting the crowd? How did we trigger the power in the first place? Why did we get the God Boss this time but not the last time I ran it?
Now, I know people here can explain all of this to me, but it seems that a special event aimed at the entire playerbase should do a better job of 'showing its work' so to speak. |
Took me a few runs to really understand it all too.
my lil RWZ Challenge vid
Screwing up the technical sections has two effects. First you have to fight more minions before the AV shows up after that section. Secondly if your combined score drops below a certain threshold then the final AV won't show up.
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I quite like it, but you do need to be paying attention to *all* the cutscene text, like the one where is tells the Hacker to go to the generator roon in the third phase. The number of people who didn't read that, or didn't notice it, or didn't pay attention if they did notice it was moderate IME of running the event.
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Even so, I think it's the sort of story filigree that'd work better in a story arc you may run solo.
It's just fine at later levels. The big hubub about it on the forums is that they lowered the radius of the main AoE attack before it went live, and people flipped out. But it's still fine. It's also Targeted AoE which probably annoys some people.
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=)
Crowd approval goes down the longer you take, and goes up with every kill you make. I think it goes down every time someone on your team dies too. There are, I think, 2 or 3 times in the even where, after you've defeated a specific opponent, you can incite the crowd, which increases the crowd approval. At 500 the crowd is permanently on your side, at 0 the crowd is permanently against you. I think you need to hit 500 to get a chance to face the God Boss. |
Last night's team was mowing down bosses like ripe stalks of wheat, and our only fatality came toward end when the God Boss summons all his pals.
My nit-picking aside, it was a fun event, I liked the small team size because as you noted in some other thread it made LFG worth using and the rewards were great. I'd have run more of them except for the DFB fueled ALT BINGE I've been on the past few weeks.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
My nit-picking aside, it was a fun event, I liked the small team size because as you noted in some other thread it made LFG worth using and the rewards were great. I'd have run more of them except for the DFB fueled ALT BINGE I've been on the past few weeks.
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That's another fixed 4 person event, and another fun one, and the Murder of Crows Costume change emote you could get from looks damn good.
In case you know nothing about it, I'll stay quiet, since it's only a few months away
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
I don't recall, were you around for the Hallowe'en event, or did you read anything about it?
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Looking forward to this year's iteration!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Okay, bit of a different report today.
Didn't get much gaming in because I took the plunge and decided to install my 'new to me' video card, a PNY GeForce 8800 GTS 320 DDR 3. One of my gaming buddies upgraded & put it up for grabs, and did I ever grab.
Not state of the art, but a massive upgrade over the one I've been using, a BFG 7950 GT OC.
Had some trouble getting it to fit- it's one of those extra long double-decker cards, and describing my case as a 'mini tower' requires some imagination. I ended up having to dig a longer power cable for my HD out of a bits box and take a roundabout way to the MB plug, which is now partially covered. But got it eventually.
Booted it up, and worst nightmare time- it didn't find the hard drive and wanted to boot from CD. Stuff like this is why I hate hate HATE opening my case. Dug around and found my install cd, booted & somewhat pessimistically ran the "fix install" utility. Was giddily surprised when it found my hard drive & asked if I had any "cameras or external memory" plugged in, and if so to un-plug it and try again.
So I unplugged my USB storage drive, hit the button and VOILA! back up and running.
WHEW!
Now I know Vista gets a lot of flack from people, but for me it's been terrific- four years, zero problems. And this is the first time I've ever changed a video card so smoothly on the software side. I literally just pulled up the control panel, uninstalled the old driver, then installed the new one and re-started after I stuck it in.
For someone who vividly remembers having to install a 2D daughter board with his first video card because it could *only* render games, this was revelation.
I've lived long enough to see THE FUTURE...hurrah!
So, now the moment of truth.
My old card had reached the point where I couldn't really play "modern" games with it- a pal sent me the latest CoD to try and get me on-line to hang out, but it wouldn't run.
Fired up CoH.
Got a pop up- "this video card can support ULTRA graphic settings. Would you like to apply them?"
OH YES.
YES I WOULD.
Headed in to a BRAVE NEW WORLD.
First impression, WOW Atlas Park looks beautiful.
Second impression, holy LAG, batman!
I guess Atlas plus about 40 characters clustered under the globe was more than the new hardware could digest. Pulled up the options and dialed down a few usual suspects- shadows, particle count, FSAA, popped world textures down from ULTRA to HIGH quality.
Applied, and voila, back to smooth.
Well, a tiny bit jerky, but no worse than my old card ran at much lower settings, so I'll take it.
Biggest difference:
infinite draw distance. No more 'fog of war' hiding most of the zone as I zip around. Plus, everything in the distance has a delightful haze around it, as if viewed through the golden lens of nostalgic reminiscence. Lovely!
Second biggest difference:
OMG THE SEWERS!
Ran a mission on SilverRage and it was down in a sewer. Wow! Drips from the ceiling, moody lighting, CRAZY REFLECTIVE WATER, sewer churn around those big spinning things, etc etc.
It was like finding a new map, except I've played it like 10,000 times.
I'll take some screens tonight and see if it's solved my compression problem.
I also may have to do some substantial costume fiddling, as pretty much *everything* looks a lot different than I'm used to....
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Now I know Vista gets a lot of flack from people, but for me it's been terrific- four years, zero problems.
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However, you gained respect for playing for so long on Vista and a 7950. Dedication.
50s: Inv/SS PB Emp/Dark Grav/FF DM/Regen TA/A Sonic/Elec MA/Regen Fire/Kin Sonic/Rad Ice/Kin Crab Fire/Cold NW Merc/Dark Emp/Sonic Rad/Psy Emp/Ice WP/DB FA/SM
Overlord of Dream Team and Nightmare Squad
okay early returns on screenshots are promising- here's the bio of a DFB teammate from last night:
Ha!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
You teamed with a movie star!
Carl and Sons @Aurora Girl (Pinnacle)
I come not to praise the Synapse TF, but to bury it...
You think I'd know better, as this is the TF that confirmed my opinion that they stunk back in the day. And having run it last night with all of today's modern conveniences in our arsenal (Mission TP, Gather the Team, inherent stamina, combined train lines, etc etc) I'm actually unsure of how & why I finished it back in the day- maybe it was just a hallucination?
I should check that characters badges and make sure it actually happened.
Anyway, last night.
I had some time in the evening and logged in Cathode Ray, intent on running a TF. Not much happening in LFG, so I fiddled with slotting while I waited. Finally someone advertised a Synapse, and while I didn't have fond memories I thought "why not, at least I'll get a few levels!" and said OK.
Silly me, because of *course* right after I joined several more appealing TFs started forming. Oh well....you make your bed, you sleep in it.
So it didn't take long to fill out the team, in spite of the powerful suckitude of the TF. We ended up with not one but two emp defenders- a /water and another one, along with a water corrupter, a claws scrapper, a dark/time controller, a widow, a demon MM and me.
After we'd all gathered in Skyway the leader suggested we turn up the difficulty "for more XP", an idea instantly shot down by no less than four of us. As our "speed" run took longer than two hours, I say THANK GOODNESS. If he'd decided to turn it up anyway I probably would have bailed.
So, off we go.
I don't remember exactly how many DEFEAT ALL CLOCKWORK IN BUILDING missions we ran in a row, but I did at one point say "if we get another 'defeat all clockwork' mish I may upchuck", followed almost immediately by the leader setting the next mish- DEFEAT ALL CLOCKWORK IN BUILDING. It gave my teammates a good laugh, but rest assured I was crying inside. =P
But in defense of this TF, it did occasionally break up the monotony of DEFEAT ALL CLOCKWORK with such fun, entertaining missions as....PATROL missions? Really, game? PATROL? Good lord, I hadn't seen one of those since they launched PVP. And this thing had TWO of 'em!
To be fair, there were also a few 'defeat XXX and guards' we were able to "stealth", although it was a Pyrrhic stealth at best since they were in giant rooms and it was the flavor of 'defeat xxxx' that requires clearing the room.
So, it was basically a marathon of unrelieved clockwork destruction. Thankfully, between two Recovery Auras + my Accelerated Metabolism we didn't want for endurance, and at base difficulty everything went down like wheat before the scythe. We didn't have any amazing AoEs so sometimes cleaning up the 10,000 gears left after defeating a spawn took nearly as long as the spawn itself, but there wasn't any danger. Our single casualty came when one of the emps tried to "stealth" a mission and got Tesla'ed & demolished.
So, after an amazingly long journey through what seemed like an endless field of Clockwork, we reached the final mission.
Which was actually cool and fun, and on a really neat map which elicited several comments of startled admiration from a couple of other longtime vets who'd never seen it before. The King was cool, as always, but didn't present much of a challenge.
While preparing to face him down we were all reading each other's fortunes and applying buffs, and I hit my Mutation power.....which turned me into a rikti monkey? I've been using this power constantly on all of my characters since buying the super booster and *never* had this happen.
I got a screen of my monkey self attempting to bite the King:
Anyway, he went down plenty fast without me.
An oddity of the run, for some reason Babbage was up *before* the mission?
So we all mugged him.
But I thought he showed up after? Or maybe some other unlucky bunch of folk had just finished a run and we stole their monster.
So, having run this thing I now understand why people describe Manticore as a "good" TF. In comparison, I guess it is.... =P
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
While preparing to face him down we were all reading each other's fortunes and applying buffs, and I hit my Mutation power.....which turned me into a rikti monkey? I've been using this power constantly on all of my characters since buying the super booster and *never* had this happen.
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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
It was by far the funniest thing that happened last night, so I didn't mind much.
Actually had a good time jumping all around the king while making screeching noises in team chat...
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
My new Youtube Channel with CoH info
You might know me as FlintEastwood now on Freedom
After the second warehouse mission, you get a fedex mission to Positron to get the special hold temp power to use on the King. Babbage is the ambush for it. You don't really need to use the temp power, though, especially if you have a full team beating on him. The last time the King proved to be difficult for me was way back in the old days when the Synapse TF could take 3-4 hours and the team might be down to 3 members, including myself, by the time we got to him.
Teams are the number one killer of soloists.
Think about this for a minute:
1. Babbage spawns before the final mission of a fairly long Task Force.
2. The Kronos Titan spawns about 9 missions into Crimson's Project: World Wide Red arc. Which is full of Malta, of course.
3. These ambushes will spawn on the first person to exit the mission, or otherwise appear somewhere outside the mission.
4. If you have someone on the task force or World Wide Red ouro arc log out at some other place in the game, then have everyone else quit the team instead of leaving the mission just before the ambush (it's hard to get people to remember to do this, mind you) then when that last other person logs in, the ambush spawns on them wherever they are.
I had a friend who spent a couple of weeks setting up massive Kronos Titan/Babbage multiple-spawn ambushes. This meant he and several of us were running most of a Synapse Task Force or a Malta-filled World Wide Red ouroboros arc, over and over, and then quitting without any reward.
Now don't you appreciate your own Synapse experience more?
Granted, multiple Kronos Titans and Babbages at once is pretty neat. But man is that a lot of work to set up.
my lil RWZ Challenge vid
After the second warehouse mission, you get a fedex mission to Positron to get the special hold temp power to use on the King. Babbage is the ambush for it. You don't really need to use the temp power, though, especially if you have a full team beating on him. The last time the King proved to be difficult for me was way back in the old days when the Synapse TF could take 3-4 hours and the team might be down to 3 members, including myself, by the time we got to him.
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We fought Babbage to a standstill- he couldn't kill us because of my emp, but we couldn't out-damage his regen. Ended up yelling in /b for help, and a bunch of folks stormed over to help out. That was nearly the only fun we had on that entire run.
Think about this for a minute:
1. Babbage spawns before the final mission of a fairly long Task Force. 2. The Kronos Titan spawns about 9 missions into Crimson's Project: World Wide Red arc. Which is full of Malta, of course. 3. These ambushes will spawn on the first person to exit the mission, or otherwise appear somewhere outside the mission. 4. If you have someone on the task force or World Wide Red ouro arc log out at some other place in the game, then have everyone else quit the team instead of leaving the mission just before the ambush (it's hard to get people to remember to do this, mind you) then when that last other person logs in, the ambush spawns on them wherever they are. I had a friend who spent a couple of weeks setting up massive Kronos Titan/Babbage multiple-spawn ambushes. This meant he and several of us were running most of a Synapse Task Force or a Malta-filled World Wide Red ouroboros arc, over and over, and then quitting without any reward. Now don't you appreciate your own Synapse experience more? Granted, multiple Kronos Titans and Babbages at once is pretty neat. But man is that a lot of work to set up. |
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I wasn't clear. I was talking about beating up the Clockwork King without the special hold power.
The King is a relative push over as a low level AV and frankly, I feel that he must have been nerfed a bit at some point. The King just seem too easy nowadays. Babbage, on the other hand, is really tough without a kinetics and several dps-ers. An additional debuffer helps too. If your team makeup includes these, then you could take Babbage down without a call out for help. I've been on a couple teams that have done it.
Teams are the number one killer of soloists.
I wasn't clear. I was talking about beating up the Clockwork King without the special hold power.
The King is a relative push over as a low level AV and frankly, I feel that he must have been nerfed a bit at some point. The King just seem too easy nowadays. Babbage, on the other hand, is really tough without a kinetics and several dps-ers. An additional debuffer helps too. If your team makeup includes these, then you could take Babbage down without a call out for help. I've been on a couple teams that have done it. |
The king seemed a bit wimpy based on memory, but my memory was of a three person team trying to whittle him down so I'm willing to adjust for nostalgia. That team was about as close to a pure steamroller as you're liable to get on a random PUG- if we'd had a kin instead of a second emp it would've been katie bar the door!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
As my masochism apparently knows no bounds, tonight I signed up for yet another OLDSKOOL TF, the turgidly monotonous Moonfire. No, not Hess, which is entertaining despite its age and featuring one of the best custom maps in the game, but MOONFIRE, which is little but an endless parade of cave maps filled with vampires & wolves.
Plus side: got THE SILVER BULLET badge, about thisclose to the vamp badge, plus picked up a couple of levels.
Minus side: EVERYTHING ELSE. =P
Really, I'm going to play through all these shabby old relics just so I can rank them all on an axis of lameness/ancientness. I'm thinking of using a star ranking system, each star being the icon of a Lethargic Repose IO. Points will be awarded for each Kill All, ridiculous street hunt, or other outmoded mission type, egregious zoning, and all the other delights to which older content is prone.
Like, say an 'escort hostage' mission. And just adding insult to injury, the gal we rescued SPEED BOOSTED me, but then of course walked along at a snails pace aaaaaaaaaall the way to the door, about a thousand miles away through a Council tunnel map full of delightful geometry to get stuck on.
Oh yes Moonfire.....you'll be getting a bonus star for that one.
Anyway, it basically stunk, but as always seems to be the case I liked my team and we had a good time anyway. On this particular run I met my Old West doppleganger in the team leader, Toxic Tex, a beam rifle/poison corrupter.
Here we are in action, showing off his impeccable taste in weapon model:
And, after years of happy use, my Mutation power hit me with the monkey AGAIN. Twice in two days!
We lost a couple of folk on our winding way to the end, but eventually made it....
So, another triumph of players over content- a fun evening of gaming in spite of missions that were aggressively monotonous & generic.
Fun parts of this one were targeting through Tex for extra Disintegrate action- if I threw down an Enervating Field, things died FAST. We also had *two* Dual Pistol types, along with our bow/bow defender. We had a controller for about the first 2/3rds of the run, but lost her for the last few missions. Our scrappers were a matched paid of DB's who said they've been playing together for 4-5 years. They were great for damage, not so great for holding aggro. It was a messy run, especially once we lost the controller, but we mostly muddled through without any serious disasters. When all our stuff was up at the same time it was a fine sight- Oil Slick, ignited by Incendiary Ammo, Enervated enemies, Lingering Radiation + Glue Arrow...oh, it was lovely.
When they weren't, well it could get a little touch and go.
Okay, so Synapse one night, Moonfire the next...what should I use for a chaser, Bastion & his endless caves full of nazis? =P
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Of course, not having tried the set myself, I can't comment, but I thought the AoE was TAoE, not PBAoE?
Anyway, it's always nice to hear the opinions on a set from someone who's playing the set in the bulk of the gameplay (i.e. not 50).
Oh, and Goat, what are you using to take the screenshots? IIRC you switched to using .tga's, have you tried to switching back to .jpg, to see if that resolves it?
PS, no more Summer Event, sorry, but it should be gone after maintenance/patchy patchy today.
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.