DoctorDitko

Excellent advice! In my experience, you can skip (or hold off on) the KB->KD enh in Lightning Storm if you Combat Jump up in the air as you fire it off. Your targets get mostly knocked down vs. back, and it leaves a slot free for moar damage or recharge! PS: I've experimented with adding a bit of Range in LS, but I suspect it only applies to how far away you can cast it.

I miss Doctor Door! (If you hadn't noticed, in the original game, going through a mish door had a bug where it randomly inflicted a minor amount of damage to your character. If your HP was low enough, it could kill you! Instead of fixing the bug, the Devs decided to add a Heal effect to the mission door. Since always heal > sometimes damage, it became a thing for overmatched squishies to run to the mish door when they got down to their favorite hit point. Bounce in and out a few times, you'd get maybe a half bar of health. Thus, "BRB, I have an appointment with Doctor Door!") I think they fixed the bug and killed off Doctor Door about the time dying in missions started to earn half the debt of dying on patrol. Probably a net win. But I still remembered Dr. Door with fondness. (old-guy anecdote alert!) In fact, my Grav/FF controller and a stalwart companion were the last members of a deserted old-fashioned Posi TF, with the front-loaded offices full of Spectres and such who'd been kicked out of Oranbega. We used Dr. Door (and bubbles) and managed to finish the damn thing! It was one of my early peak experiences with CoH. Sniff!

Suckage?

17 billion. Because 23 was taken, of course.

Yep. They could update the text with "reprogram both computers as near-simultaneously as you can manage," but I'm not volunteering... It would be nice, though, if there was some kind of bonus (merits? badge?) for doing it The Hard Way. (See also: Einstein vs. Simultaneity)

VLC can be used to record your desktop (you DO have VLC, right?): https://www.vlchelp.com/how-to-record-desktop/ If you want to get all fency-schmenzy, I hear good things about OBS Studio: https://obsproject.com/download Both are free for the downloadin', Open Source, and well worth the investment. PS: I forgot editing -- OpenShot is supposed to be very easy on the learning curve: https://www.openshot.org/

When fighting Headman Blasters, I can't resist: "Hey, pal, does that get anything but the Ugly Channel?" (And I'll keep doing it until someone laughs!)

Well, you have to return to your base to toggle it back on, but like any temp power, you can open your powers screen, right-click it, and select "delete power" (not remove from tray) to turn it off. I use it a lot when running TFs, when I drop by the base for a refresh and still have 5 minutes or so left on an empowerment buff, so I can reapply it immediately.

What's the problem, Mac?

That might actually get me to try an archer!

Oh, I so wish we could divorce sfx from power effects completely, a la the tabletop Champions. I was surprised to see some of the options already available in the power customization menu, though. Psi attacks from hands or head comes to mind. But: Let me make my PBAOE heal look like a NUKE, please, please, please! If we could use any animation for any power, archers could finally get the "healing arrow" of ur-forum fame! (Might want to add a "show only default animations" toggle to the options, though. Don't want to trigger anyone's migraines!)

Thanks, I'll give it a try!

That seemed like sound reasoning to me, too, but I found Water kind of tepid compared to Ice. Whirlpool in particular is a wonderful power that seems to last half as long as it should. What do you advise I do if I drag my Storm/Water out of mothballs -- mainly trying to maximize fun?

My Storm/Ice Offender is laugh-out-loud fun to play! She mostly soloed to 50, entertaining a few PUGs along the way. Well worth a look if you are interested in a soloable Defender, though you may need to do some 'splaining to a random group of players. As in, "Yes, I have a small heal, but it's mainly a Mez fix/resist power. My debuffs should keep you from being injured in the first place." And frequently, "If you notice me healing you, it means you've left the debuff area. Please stay in the hurricane if you are at all squishy."

Not a fan of the "Fir Bolg Zerg" mish, that one's worth skipping. I kinda like fighting Honoree, takes a bit of that "stragedy" thing I keep hearing about. I try to avoid skipping the last mish in an arc, they are usually above average, plus I feel all cheaty. When I'm running a Villain, I try to autocomplete mishes strategically, so I get to feel all cheaty!* * I'll have to try the "raise the diff to max, then autocomplete" trick next time I'm redside.

A classic! Love the reveal, too!

Plus, he was a bad guy on Owlman's Earth!

There's a new option to Turn Off XP, which he use if willing until you guys catch up.

Wow! My wife was a huge BBT fan, I thought I'd seen every episode many times, but I missed this completely! Good catch!

Aw, darn it! You are absolutely correct. My numbers didn't add up! Thanks for the correction, and R.I.P. Fry's. T'was a cool place! Incidentally, this is why "eyewitness testimony" is unreliable. Our brains store memories with a lossy compression algorithm. Every time time you remember something, your brain has reassembled the event from whatever data points it saved. And our minds love to smooth things out into a narrative that feels right.

Yes, how many times have we seen nods to CoH in that famously derivative game, Real Life?* Eben Brooks, obviously, whose 2010 album "Geek Mythology" has nods to CoH, Firefly, and Babylon 5. The original Teen Titans show has a few call-outs, I remember a Cooke's Electronics appearance that I believe was even spelt that way. I recall CoH map nods in some Titans indoor missions, sewers and warehouses, I think. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe guys have mentioned they used to hang out online in CoH, so podcasting was a logical step. Mercedes Lackey was a player, wrote some for the the game, IIRC, and she participated in a shared-blame-universe superhero series with a few nods. Formerly genericked player Jim Butcher's Furies of Calderon series has a serious superhero vibe during which his protagonist levels up rather noticeably. There's also a "melodic metal" -- that's a thing now -- album, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Heroes_(album) but I don't know if it's related, I haven't tracked it down.** Anyone notice any other call-outs? *For small values of real. ** Yeah, I could download it. But if you can't hold it in your hand, you don't own it. DRM is theft! Harrumph!

Let us hope for an appearance of the infamous Spawn Sensor and his partner Gordon "Gut" Buster. (They may not really be psionic, but they solve a lot off crimes.) There's Hadrian, the "Hermit" of San Francisco (he has the real deal OCD), and in nearby Poseidon, CA, there's Harmonica Moon and her dad. And can't we make room for the classic Rue B Rue gang in DA? (I'd love to see Thelma and Delphine pull the rubber mask off of Mot's ugly mug!)

Oy, sorry to hear it. NV have the best hardware, but someone decided to monetize the drivers, and recently most of them are all about streaming, "intelligent" (read: run on their servers in the cloud) configuration optimizing (oh did we spy? Just looking to see if you have any games we partnered with)... Disclaimer: I have been mad at NVidia since they bailed on the 3D api that ran lcd shutter glasses for stereoscopic effects. But this advice is still supporting NVidia hardware; it's just that you need to take their drivers to the vet and have them "fixed." I strongly recommend a free utility found on the legendary and trusted Guru3d.com, it's called Nvidia Slimmer. It will allow you to delete features you don't want from the NV driver package, optionally repackaging your own souvenir installer with just the features you want. Makes an excellent Mother's day gift for certain Mothers. So, you go to NVidia's site, download the latest WHQL driver package (~600MB these days), then run NVSlimmer and point to your download when it asks. Personally, I only install the driver itself and PhysX (Strange choice, I know, but there's this one game I really love that uses it...) When I'm done it looks like this: (Don't worry if it says it didn't recognize something, it just means the driver has some new features. NVSlimmer will still let you opt out of them, it'll just list them as unknown until the dev updates it.) That's an awful lot of software to put pretty pictures on your monitor! I use this to avoid the telemetry and such, but it is also helpful if the new drivers are beating up your machine. In my experience, the results are worth the extra step! I'm on a capped, wireless dialup-equivalent connection (Thanks again, Verizon!), so "little" things like chatty telemetry have their effects magnified.* (Read: make me freeze up during Hami raids!) Anyway, may this help your performance as well as your privacy! -Doc * Techie Coalition chat: I also turn off every protocol except IPV4 on my network interfaces. Amazing how NOT burning my limited bandwidth to test Quality of Service every half a second -- improves it!

A thousand blessing upon you! I have begged and dreamed for this! Thanks so much!

Grats! And welcome home!