roleki

Amen! And to dovetail onto that, there was a thread a couple days back where someone was wondering if they should sweat being at 44.5 Def vs. 45.0; to get that extra blip of +Def, folks were recommending the character ditch Kismet +Acc which I believe is questionable advice at best. Kismet +Acc is a 6% ToHit buff and that sounds tiny, but if you're swinging at +4's it actually buffs your base ChanceToHit almost 16% (.45 vs .39) and that's before factoring in critter Defense or -ToHit debuffs. Not every build can fit Tactics slotted to +15% ToHit but every build should be able to slap a Kismet in there somewhere. It's one of the best single enhancements in the game!

Can't speak for others who do the same, but at least for me, dual-boxing my alts is about streamlining the execution of a build moreso than the inf/drops. Sure, it's nice to have resources coming in while I go about it, but if accumulating inf was my goal, there are much faster ways to do that than farming. And once that alt steps out of AE, I can always exemp down into content I've skipped, or wiggle around in flashbacks if the urge strikes me, though admittedly, the urge has not struck me yet. Now, I don't begrudge people who enjoy the grind (such as it were) of playing through content, but to me it's like sitting down on the couch and watching all 9 Star Wars movies, then racing over to the recliner to watch them again... except in HC, it's like settling in for that marathon when you know you're on the second notice from the electric company and they could cut you off at any moment. Running around in a sewer with 0 end while something is trying very hard to puke on you might be someone else's ideal position to be in when the lights go out, but it's not for me.

Biggest pet peeve - people who lurk in the Help Channel waiting to fart out "THAT'S WHAT GOOGLE IS FOR!!!" the very instant a question comes in. What they are basically saying is, the Help Channel is exclusively for asking questions whose answers cannot be found after an exhaustive google search. If that is the case, why even have a Help Channel? Also a peeve - people who AFK in a spawn zone, (like the parking lot outside of Portal Corp) whose presence effectively prevents mobs from spawning until the camper moves/is DC'd. Also a peeve - tanks who herd mobs on the streets and spend the next 45 minutes trying to kill them with their arsenal of piss-poor attacks; meanwhile, nothing can spawn behind them.

I guess that's why I like CoH so much; even though I am pretty much entrenched in Controllerdom, each of them has different strengths, so the game (to me) is about finding the best workflow for whatever character I happen to be on, and maximizing the efficiency of that 'algorithm' as much as possible. I suppose that would make me a min/max type, but, it's not always in the popular vein of soft-capping Defense or whatever. Sometimes I just want to see how many different powers I can use at one time to knock stuff on its butt (Fire/FF), or if I can keep a Lightning Storm, Bonfire, and Freezing Rain going at all three ramps for the entire duration of an MSR (very nearly).

RNG can be a real jerk sometimes. That said, I have been told by a few people there was (is?) a mechanism in place to skew the odds against earning purples if you just do the same stuff over and over and over. That's tough to verify given that purples don't rain out regularly enough to differentiate between an epic dry streak and a mean old clamp; all I can say is, I seem to get purples more consistently on my farmers if I take them out of the AE for a chunk of missions/raids/etc then bring them back in. THAT SAID... a few weeks back I went on a zombie streak where I just farmed up a fistful of characters in a week, and didn't bother to alternate farmers... and got three purples in one door. So maybe the only thing that really exists is the RNG and our own varying degrees of luck.

Has there been any indication what is causing this? I guess they had an outage last night as well.

If your office workstation will run Calc, chances are it will run CoH. The rest, I leave up to you.

Sorry, Taco Thursday conflicts with THAC0 Thursday.

And that answered my next question!

I had no idea! Awesome!

Can't wait to try this, but it is going to make me sad when AI builds more +Rech into a build than I already packed into it by hand. All my hours... gone!

I don't know if it's because I find the movement animations so amusing, or if the idea of punching a Titan in the kneecap until it dies is funny to me, or if it's just that it's easier for me to come up with character names if the toon is a juvenile/diminutive adult, but now that I am like 50 toons in to HC, it seems that I prefer rolling tiny characters. Like, over half of them are tiny. And I am ok with that! But this morning I was brushing my teeth and the idea for a tiny plant/dark Controller popped into my head: Leaflet. Onliest problem is, I already have a juvenile Plant controller, Lawn Boy, and it seems to me, Leaflet should be even smaller, almost Tinkerbellian in stature. But Lawn Boy is already max small. Or is he? There were some characters in @Briggs Comic Con missions that seemed even smaller than what my usual dudes are, and I could swear I've seen smaller toons in the wild, skittering past me and mocking me for my not-as-tiny-as-they proportions. So I ask... is there a way to get characters to be even smaller than just dragging all sliders to the left in the character editor?

Even if it were easy, it would need to be ported to Storm, to Gravity, hell, I think I saw an Emp knock people out of the bowl once. I had suggested an Accolade as a toggle before, and people nearly lost their minds. There's like a KB NRA or something, where any talk that isn't centered around getting MORE KB into the hands of players is shouted down with all the fervor of an addict.

Of course! Why do you think I waited until Tuesday!? I nearly burst.

Of course not! But, there are some people who think the world is flat, yet companies still intentionally produce globes for sale in stores, despite the obvious pain they're causing. I've come around on Sudden Acceleration in general, but at 1/6th of a power's enhancement (or more, if you underslot) and 4M a pop, that's a fairly high tax to not be THAT guy at the MSR. Me, I'm willing to pay it because A) I'm not really paying for it and B) it's worth it to know I'm not inadvertently the person getting yelled at in chat BUT there are a lot of people who still don't know how to deal with KB or how to leverage it for their benefit, so the topic comes up a LOT more than it should if it were a done deal.

Which person? What items? Going to need proof of that happening. That said, blame for any inflation/price gouging/insane pricing will inevitably be laid at the feet of farmers, and not the people who gleefully toot about generating billions of inf in no time flat simply by playing the market.

This came up in General a couple weekends back, wherein some vocally complained about unchecked KB, and others lamented having to dedicate slots to deal with KB, and still others suggested those builds prone to KB should learn to deal with it. So it was, you know, the usual conversation whenever KB is brought up out of the blue. Anyway, as someone who slots a TON of KB:KD enhancements, I got to thinking... would it be difficult to add a -200% KB:KD component to the Tactics toggle? Figure, that way those people who love KB when they are solo don't have to make adjustments when joining teams, and small teams that still benefit somewhat from the soft control KB gives them would (theoretically) mitigate SOME KB, and larger teams/leagues where KB is most usually frowned upon would (theoretically) eliminate KB entirely. It also fits into the theme of Leadership/Tactics, as in "You know what would be a good tactic? Making sure everything that's in an AoE isn't inadvertently blown out of the AoE." I realize, that would lead some characters to unwittingly/unwillingly self-nerf their KB, but, since the topic of KB still comes up quite often even with the SA enhancement in wide use, it seems something that could use some more spitballing.

These are all great things to aspire towards, but I can't help but wonder how many players will stick around for that first month, and of those, how many will be around for the second and subsequent months? I know *I* would be on board, but I'm a weirdo. How many normal folks would kick in, and how many would just let it go?

I can't even imagine that. I play a character for 20 minutes or until they get a Catalyst, whichever comes first, then switch to something else. I like the builds too much to leave them in the garage for more than a couple days.

Interesting. So each Fire Imp would carry around a Chance for Buildup. Hrm.

That said, the Soulbound Allegiance: Chance for Buildup, is that a Chance for Buildup on the pet, or for the pet's controller?

I'm still trying to figure out what this altitis is.

There's also the possibility that the glacial pace of the negotiation is a calculated response on behalf of NCSoft's accountants. They can either go all-out and waste (potentially) millions of dollars in legal fees playing C&D whack-a-mole every time a rogue server pops up, or they can put the whole ecosphere on pause while 'negotiating' with the most visible operators. To put it another way, it's more economical to allow a few, known dens of iniquity to operate in plain sight than to have to commit resources to chasing down every instance that pops up, but at the same time, if they were to allow the rogue servers to go without SOME level of interaction from their legal department, then they appear to not be interested in protecting their IP. The negotiations with the Homecoming team gives NCSoft a low-cost way of keeping a finger on the IP now that it's out of the barn, and latitude to do something about it down the road.

I agree, Storm feels more effective on a Controller because you usually have multiple patches/immobs that can keep things in one place fairly easily; slap a KB:KD in Gale/Tornado/Lightning Storm and you're basically an A-10: lots of firepower brought to bear on a small area for an extended amount of time. I've got 5 /Storm controllers rolled up: Ice/Storm is a fun combo thematically... Storm shores up Ice's relatively weak damage, and the slows/patch out of Ice keep the Tornado/Lightning Storm doing their thing. Arctic Air/Thunderclap pretty much eliminates all incoming damage from anything less than a boss. Dark/Storm can be awkward (due to your AoE immob being a cone) but the -ToHit and numerous pets/pseudopets make it very survivable. Having 2x PBAoE stuns comes in handy as well. Ill/Storm is chaotic (even with KB:KD) but it's a very easy build to get perma PA out of; start off a mob with PA -> Freezing Rain -> Spectral Terror and you can practically AFK. Grav/Storm is a classic that only got better with the KB:KD enhancement; Wormhole and Hurricane mean things happen where you want them to happen, and TO whomever you want them to happen to, and a good sprinkling of FF+Rech means those things happen more often than they should. But my favorite so far has been Fire/Storm; Gale, Bonfire and Freezing Rain keep things flopping around, and whatever manages to stand up through that finds itself swarmed by Imps, Tornadoes and Lightning Storm. Fire/Storm melts mobs quick - sometimes too quick; there have been many times I've swept out one area of PI and moved on, only to have an angry mob come running after me because they spawned on top of a Bonfire or Lightning Storm I fired off three mobs ago.

I appreciate your making the attempt! I used to be up on this stuff, but then we had kids and I haven't bought PC hardware in forever, so I am not sure how much is hype and how much is "yeah, you're going to need this." I'm running a GTX 970 and am getting 60ish FPS at 1920 x 1080 in the couple games I do play, but now it occurs to me maybe I could be getting higher if I splurged for a more expensive monitor. Dang.