Hyperstrike

I would not be caught DEAD wearing a "Prince Valliant"!

No. Prebuilts from system integrators have priority over retail. So the wait is FAR less. Sometimes maybe a week or two, though 3080's and 3090's are still, usually, a month out or so. This is why, if you want the vidcard, it's easier to buy the prebuilt, swap in a cheap card, and then resell the system.

Not a lot of info on Starlink. Website doesn't talk about coverage, speeds or even price. From other sources, $100/month, $500 up front. And speeds slower than 5G.

I recommend loading CoH to the SSD. It'll load and zone faster. Bad assumption. USB-C and USB3 should be more than fast enough to handle movies. When I build my new desktop, I didn't bother moving any of my internal opticals. I just bought an external. No. Again with the advent of streaming, optical media has been in decline for about 10 years or so now (hell, my Netflix account is coming up on its 10th anniversary).

That's kinda why I built a repel-ball field in my base e.

NICE! Poor Babbage! He was just trying to go uptown!

Long range. Short range. Melee range. I'm the Sentinel with the gun!

Agreed. Guys! REALLY recommend using the Light Blue (US) color scheme and Universale Codes. Like so.

Translation. Unless you've been able to SUCCESSFULLY restore from an archived file, YOU DO NOT HAVE A BACKUP! As someone working in IT as a "Hail Mary" level of disaster support, I've seen horrendous data disasters at even carefully managed clients. I've seen backup vendors simply stop backing up directories because there were live files in play and they didn't like "messy backup logs with "errors" in them". Had a client come close to losing a year of data because of that. When we found THAT out, the company was shown the door and they were sued into oblivion. Currently I have two backups off my local machine. This is the larger of the two backup devices. The reason it's not fuller is because I'm currently still moving files and doing testing. Rather than just plopping EVERYTHING over there and HOPING it works. And, on top of that, using an internet backup tool. With versioning. Even so, this is the "cheapskate" option.

Generally, Scrappers have a SLIGHT edge in Damage output. However, fully tricked out, the differential isn't "make or break".

As "Mr. Invuln Is Now The Gold Standard", I'm pretty sure that this is what Un-Granite is achieving too.

I dunno if I'd say "inferior". The playstyle's different. And you can rock fairly hard. Heh. Stoner. Rock... Basically, with Stone and the modern IO and Ancillary power sets, Granite is firmly reduced from ABSOLUTE NECESSITY to "an option:"

If we were talking about an actual TANK, yes, we'd draw and quarter you as a heretic. With dental implements... But on a Scrapper/Brute? Taunt's a TOTALLY optional thing. I don't usually max it out and just drop the Zinger Psi proc in there. Mainly because it just jiggles my giggles to imagine someone SO insulting and annoying that poor, sensitive widdle villains start BLEEDING AT THE EYES AND EARS! Or, if you cherry-tap them with it? SCANNERS!

And swapping out for another ranged attack, like the Soul Epic/Gloom works just as good! The build is basically a demonstrator. There's still room for personalized tweaking.

Have a new version of my Rikti Mothership Raid for HC! This one has been cleaned of "Rush the Rikti" names. Since RtR was a Protectorism. And HC isn't Protector. Also removed the 14 redundant zone invites since the days of asking a dev to spawn you a new zone are effectively done. Now, you have invite menus for 2 options. Zone Instanced Also replaced @Hyperstrike with $name so you don't need to go in and edit it yourself. Still trying to figure out if there's a way to auto-insert zone-name. Like $zone (my digging into this is VERY cursory at this point). Note: You WILL have to edit your bind button. Since the script/mnu is now MSRHC. Simple enough to do though. Right click on the macro button. Select EDIT Change the name of the menu from RTR to MSRHC Reboot the game. MSRHC.mnu

Here's a newly cleaned up version of my Rikti Mothership Raid script. Been meaning to do this since the advent of the Instanced mothership raids. This way I can remove the 14 separate instances that are a legacy of the now-dead practice of having a GM spawn a new zone for you. Now there's just 2 options. Zoned and Instanced (the Incarnate raid type). MSRHC.mnu

Knew I had a Stone/SS Tank! And he's JACKED!

If you're above 45% Defense (or 59% for Incarnate Content), you're better off working on your Resistance. More defense above that point gives you a buffer Defense debuffs and Cascading Defense Failures. But that's still not as valuable as cranking your Resistance.

Sorta. Some people have priorities outside of simply price and capacity.

The way Backblaze runs it: They try to balance capacity and price and buy the most economical drives within their budget. They build their own storage "pods". These monster beasty hard drive torture chambers. They then fill it with drives, connect it up to the network and begin replication. They monitor drive failures on a quarterly and yearly basis. And every few years, they refresh their entire architecture with new units and give away their old ones. Usually after turning ###.## percent profit off the thing. SANS HARD DRIVES OF COURSE! I've said elsewhere, I generally look at the Backblaze drive reports. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2021/ If I need to buy drives, I look at the most durable ones on that list. Because if they can survive THAT environment, ain't NOTHING in a consumer-grade machine (other than dropping or soaking in soda/coffee) that'll kill 'em. And as I said, they kinda don't CARE if drives die over time. They replicate their data to an insane level. So even if the storage pod with all your data went up in smoke, your data's striped throughout the entire rest of their platform. And so, utterly recoverable.

The backup company, Backblaze, OPERATES on this. They go for "least cost" and make up for drive failures with massive redundancy. Early on, I remember one of their blog posts talking about buying USB drives because they were cheaper than the bare drive. Then shucking their little hearts out.

Yeah, it's the other Stalker ATO set (Superior) I think I'm gonna have to push up new copies of the templates. The old ones are presenting problems to newer Mids.