DoctorHugh

Haha man that video has been in my "favorites" list for soooo long now! Thanks for giving me an excuse to watch it again today. 🙂

As similar issues appear to have happened to you multiple times, I'd say purely from a practical, time-savings aspect, maybe it's best to reply to action invites with something like "I'll join if it's +0" rather than just "Sure I'll join". That said, you're free to waste your (and others) time any way you like. It's a game, after all... we're not here to earn efficiency ratings.

Playtested? Refined? My builds are the result of whim and fancy, and supernatural occurrences beyond the ken of mortal man. Just like real superheroes! In practical terms, I pick what's interesting and convenient and looks useful. If the job is getting done, I'm under no pressure to change it. If I run into something I simply can't handle with current build, I find out what needs to change. If that's the case, I'll usually google a discussion of the various pros and cons and pick what I like from there. (Any resultant level of refinement is sheer coincidence, and entirely due to the many very helpful playtesters who've been posting build discussion for over a decade now. Thank you all!)

Aww, I'm sorry to hear you're unemployable. That's what happens when you study Classical Greek though! "If you gaze into the wierd convoluted tragedy, the tragedy gazes also into you."

Controller-level Confusion.

You can essentially start with Hamlet and move forward from there. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouKilledMyFather

When my plane tickets didn't come through on time, I emailed a complaint to Customer Support. Anybody know how I can reach Customer Support directly for the complaint status?

I'm still waiting for the refund on my spacation to the Galaxy City Renooze-U franchise.

Some other forums have a waiting period after joining, or need to go through a forum tutorial before being able to post. I recall one game way back that didn't let you post in forums until you had reached a certain level in the game. Probably not needed here, but that poster this morning was pretty egregious - spambot signs on to forums and within minutes had half the first page filled.

I'm not a mechanics wonk, but one thing I do consider is the magnitude spread of incoming hits. If I understand it correctly, resistance mitigates damage on every incoming hit. Defense means you're more likely to avoid the hit, but when it does hit, defense does nothing to mitigate it. In my experience, there's a significant difference between a stream of incoming, smaller hits (which I can react to), and having two defense rolls in a row fail and smack me for max damage.

One thing I do to speed things up a bit, I set the costume colors linked, and select my two "main" colors so all outfit pieces are color-coordinated by default. Then I click the Link icon to Unlink them, and adjust each item as needed. It's faster that way if your costume needs a few tweaks here and there, but doesn't help if every piece is going to be different colors. Power color customization works similarly.

Game-forum participation goes back a long way for me (pre-internet), and followed on needing to use other discussion boards as sources of information to find out how to get various things done. (Like getting your USRobotics 1200 baud modem with the fancy new protocols to connect to your buddy's cheapo Cermetek.) Once you've started searching forums for one type of info it's pretty natural to check there for other things. I greatly appreciated the help and advice I got on some early gaming forums (Everquest and earlier) and tried to "pay it forward" by helping newer players with some of the things I'd learned. Eventually, like other posters above, it also became a way to stay somewhat connected to a game even when I couldn't play. Plus of course, posting on forums is a chick magnet. Chicks dig an active poster kids!

I know a fair number of people who're, by and large, decent folk, but who have their little triggers. Maybe it's being called on insensitivity. Maybe it's a knee-jerk response to any "woke" issue they can see (on either side of the response-spectrum). Maybe it's being rude or harsh to others. (I've got friends who call harsh responses "friend abuse" and almost criminal, and others who call it "tough love" and sincerely mean it.) What I do note is that it does little for "the community" for people to look for reasons in unrelated threads to drag ancient dirty laundry out so everyone else can sniff it. You do yourselves a disservice when you give the impression that snarling and backbiting is your primary concern - especially when the body of your posts show you typically do much better than that. I've read and enjoyed other posts from all the arguers here present... but these ones aren't on the list. I hate to quote myself (actually I don't, I'm wonderfully quotable), but: Publicly vent your anger/mislike if you must, just keep in mind you're not doing yourself any favors in the process.

Things tend to get personal and can seem out of hand when people have strongly differing opinions. One thing I sometimes remind people about when grudges and acrimony start to become an issue, is there may be something like 20-30,000 players, of which maybe 1-2,000 are logged on at any one time, out of which maybe a few hundred total are active on the forums. Out of which typically, a person expressing strong issues is having problems with maybe a dozen or less individuals. When you're talking about "the people you have problems with", you're not talking about "the community". You're talking about less than 1/1000th of "the community", 99.8% of whom don't even know you're arguing. Watching 10 people argue vociferously can be quite stressful if you're focusing on that. Stick them in a crowd of 20,000 people and they disappear into the background noise. It takes two to tango... if you're one of them, there's a good chance that's on you. (Note: all references to 'you', 'them' and 'people' are purely generic and refer to no one specifically.)

Over the years I've seen this sort of comparison a number of times. "Back in the day, X was a real challenge. Not any more." From what I can tell, a number of seemingly unrelated factors tie into old hard content becoming routine/easily handled current content: - Over time, the addition of more content/missions/XP payouts means you're more likely to be level X+3, for instance, rather than level X when you tackle a task. - People learn exactly how to do it, so they no longer tackle rooms full of baddies that someone knows can be bypassed - trouble points are minimized. - People learn the minimum they can tackle the task with, so they do it with smaller groups (even solo) - which actually cuts down on the chaos/adds/weak links. - Adjustments are made over time to the game if teams are consistently having trouble with X, so maybe you don't get a boss in every spawn. - Better gear availability makes a big difference. (I'd assume most players are doing Frosty with SO's in their Enh. slots - pretty big difference right there.) - "Power gaps" in ability sets are slowly filled in, so characters at that level have fewer glaring omissions in their power choices. For what it's worth, from my (questionable) memories of doing Frosty back in the day, we often tackled the task when the mobs were yellow/orange/red/maybe even purple. We often did it with near-full teams, which led to lots of chaos, adds, aggro on people you didn't even have LoS on. People didn't know how to control their ice sliding, so would end up way out of position and pulling extra aggro. I recall being short on effective 'control' powers for shutting down difficult mobs long enough. I recall more Lead Scorchers summoning Imps. In the half-dozen Frosty runs I've done on HC (small sample of course), I've yet to see a team bigger than 4. I've yet to see a mob higher than yellow, except I think one orange. Players know exactly what rooms to do and which to walk past. Control isn't a problem. It appears that a handful of different small improvements can lead to a major change in the difficulty.

A number of games I've enjoyed over the past few years have a different set of graphics settings for your own visual effects, and visual effects created by others. In some cases suppressing the visual effects of others entirely, but often it's different particle count, bloom, brightness etc. Not sure if CoH code supports that splitting, and I myself am not asking a volunteer dev team for this (I've had no FX problems in my admittedly short CoH:H time). Just saying the options out there.

If you jiggle it, they will come.

Dude, somebody saw your post on this and tossed 200 of them on the market for 100 inf each. Why? Heck, why not? You can get forum entertainment on your phone while on the train to work. As Yomo said, if yours isn't selling, it's likely just not the lowest offer.

Sorry to hear that man, my heart goes out to her loved ones. Better to have burned brightly and made the world brighter for others, than to never have shone at all.

If I don't like the idea of farming or fast-levels to 50, I choose not to use them. Every character levels his own way up, develops his contacts, turns XP off if they're about to out-level something. No farming, no XP/offense/defense/survival boosts. Although I do use the 5 early prestige IOs and the free prestige powers. It's irrelevant to me if other people are farming, PLing, slapping bonuses on their character or maxing IO sets. It's irrelevant to me how many other characters are maxed-out incarnated level 50+'s, or how fast they got there. Does Rocket Racer care that every Avenger can wipe the floor with him? No way man. He just goes out there and races. With rockets! Homecoming can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Wanting everyone else to wear a straitjacket because you have fond memories of the bughouse seems an odd position to me.

I think you recently mentioned a TF gone south, due to an ambush while entering City Hall. I've seen some people mention using intangibles in situations like that to get a team past a sticky point. Not sure how many places that would apply though.

What, none in white satin?

No balloons here but I brought the knockback! Because you can't spell "party" without KB! @Aeroprism, few games are currently matching their 2020 numbers. Covid was hard on the world but great if you were an MMO! Just means we could all spend a few moments here and there reminding people that CoH is back, large as life and twice as ug... entertaining!

Valid discussion I guess, but you've used two different qualifiers, "better" and "stronger", without describing what you mean by either. Is 'better' more surviveable? Is 'stronger' higher DPS? Is either of them the ability to take down a GM/AV faster, or with less chance of faceplanting? Are you talking about farming speed or soloing TFs or whatever? Basically, answers will boil down to "in general, it's easier to make the tanker more surviveable, and it's easier to make the scrapper do more DPS. With some exceptions. And depending on what you're doing, and how much budget you have."

Agree with Tidge and others, it's a numbers game. If your chars are chewing through vast numbers of foes and missions your RNG will trend towards the average. (Assuming you're doing things that actually generate the drops you're paying attention to.) If I felt I was getting odd RNG results, I'd check to see the results of other people engaging in similar activity. In some games, I've got characters swimming in loot, and other characters destitute. Lo and behold, when I check their histories, the destitute ones are the ones that help in help chat, show teammates how to complete missions, wander through zones looking for easter eggs, and do stuff "for the lols". They're also the ones that have less "action" time and more "waiting for the rest of the group to be ready" time. The ones with overflowing inv bags are the ones I've pumped some resources into and they chew through content for hours at a run, complete the hard tasks, join ready-to-go alliance raids, etc. Where, what and how you're playing your character can explain a lot of the difference between two sets of results. But in the end, it's mostly just about which char has generated 500 random rolls vs. which char has generated 15,000.