DoctorDitko

I believe they removed the Stealth effect from Super Speed in favor of Speed Phase, no? A shame, because SS + any other stealth effect (even just the IO) gave full invisibility, without the side effect of pets losing boss buffs because you're not with them.

Still fun, though! Just a bit more of a carpet taste-testing party than I usually hope for.

Asterphobia is real. Some folks just freak out at the idea of leading a team. I'm a mixed bag: sometimes I want to lead, but often I feel too drained from work. I can almost always be talked into leading an SBB, though. "Come on over to Pocket D to join the Summer Blockbuster now filming! The director promises no nude scenes (this time)!"

I would do a tight copyedit on all the newer mission arcs. OK, I get it: you're a game designer, and a famous author loves the game, and offers to contribute an arc for free! What kind of lunatic would edit her prose? (The kind that got a degree in journalism, rather than creative writing!) Print editors were ruthless in cutting excess verbiage words. There are arcs where every time you talk to the contact there are four pages of text! You can't tell me that's all essential. But, again, who is going to tell a Mysteriously Loquacious author "chop it in half?" Well, it's many years later, and the time has come. Edit, edit like the wind!

Welcome home!

And many, many of the Live clocksuckers removed!

Smugly entitled door-sitters.

I know, right? And filling a good team takes *forever!*

The thing is, they suck at being friends. Do they help you move into a new base? Nope! They offer to sell you stuff, do they give you a discount? Nope! I say, to Thunder with them!

For me, it's Rikti Comms Officers. Specifically the pointless, XP-less Conscripts they summon!

For me, it's the Clockwork! (Not those cheap knockoff clocks from Praetoria, the real ones!)

Yeah, but you can only exchange those for other Flainian Pobble Beads, so what's the point?

What's your system, especially graphics card? I'm on the end of a crappy Verizon Wireless connection, and CoH is about the only MMO I can play, since it was designed to work with dial-up. A lot of new graphics cards are skimping on essentials like data path width* (128 bits wide. In 2025? Thanks for nothing, Nvidia!) This can cause all sorts of stuttering, buffering, and cussing. * it's the bus that connects your card to your CPU and system memory. Don't settle for less than 256 bits wide. And don't buy any card with 8GB of VRAM. The gfx card makers should be ashamed for offering them!

Oh, so? I've been trying to update my pen for ages now, and don't get me started on paper! More seriously, Brainstorm is my Mids.

I spent much of my college years playing TTRPGs: Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Fantasy Trip, RuneQuest, Traveler. Do I miss Champions' ala carte power picks? Where you could gimp your character if you wanted to. Some of my favorite characters were deliberately powerful in one area and gimped in others. Captain Federal was almost entirely indestructible, but he couldn't dish out damage to save his soul. (Kind of a proto-Tick character, if I'm honest.) CoH is the only game that has let me re-create those favorite characters, to one degree or another.