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Should've named yourself GM Bagel. Everyone loves bagels. It's even fun to say. Bagel! Bagel bagel bagel! Wooooooooooo!

Less abused by developers who felt an inordinate need to punish players when the sense of failure tends to be punishment enough? Yes.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, or giving the impression of boasting, I'll point out once again that I was soloing GMs and tanking AVs on a defender with no Defense, no Resistance, no status protection, only SOs and only pool melee attacks, long, long before IOs or Incarnates existed. That I was farming at +2/x6 with a Trick Arrow defender when Trick Arrow was considered the worst set in the game, so bad that most people thought it couldn't solo at -1/x1. This is how the game was intended to be. And completely gutting everything perceived to be responsible for that ease won't change a damn thing. The game was "too easy" before IOs, before Incarnates, after ED and GDN. Being able to soft-cap Defense, or using IO sets, or having Incarnate abilities, it's all irrelevant because all these things have accomplished is making the ease of the game more accessible to a wider section of the population. Easy was always the intent, and taking away all of the things that allow some of you to just now realize that the game is easy, all that accomplishes is shifting the meta slightly. It's still going to be easy.

People requiring an emergency solution for something they had 35 levels to address is like people reaching age 35 without intellectual or physical disabilities and needing a nanny to remind them to don trousers.

They were removed in the I25 update, according to the wiki. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Issue_25 - under Rewards header. And still does. Phase Shift hasn't been phased out.

Default all characters to have no skin. Problem solved, everyone's happy.

E:\Games\Homecoming\accounts\<redacted> E is an external 1TB SSD connected via USB C. I installed the game to that drive when I switched to the HC launcher earlier this year, and I haven't moved or altered the installation in the interim. And... it's showing 0 bytes free. I haven't used 50GB, why is it reading full? OH GOD I HATE WINDOWS 10! Okay, now that I've humiliated myself by failing to perform the most basic trouble-shooting step (unplug it and plug it back in), it appears that the problem was the OS. 894GB free on the external SSD now. Logged in, moved one character, playerslot.txt is now showing a file size of 1KB. Sorting all of my characters and opening the file (now reading 2KB), I see the appropriate lines of text. The more I use Windows 10, the more I want to solve problems with a splitting maul.

Made character number 32, deleted playerslot.txt, moved characters around to recreate the file... 0 bytes. Verified installation. Logged onto every server. Moved characters around again. Everything I do results in an empty file. 0 bytes.

They don't need light bulbs, they have ambient light coming through the chicken wire they use for the "walls".

Started happening when I logged in this morning. Last night or the night before last (old, brain no worky), I made a Soldier of Arachnos, my 31st character, leveled it up a bit and went to bed. This morning, I logged in and discovered that all of my characters were out of order. I sorted them, logged into my SoA and played some more, then exited the game. I logged in again around 9 p.m. Eastern and found my characters unsorted again. I checked playerslot.txt and found it empty. I've never modified it directly, it's not set to Read Only, it was just empty. I exited the game, deleted the file and logged in again... and the file was recreated empty. No text. No server listing. No character names. No sort numbering, it's a completely blank file. Tried backing out to the server selection screen and going forward again, and all of my characters are unsorted. Deleting the file while logged in and moving characters to force the file to recreate results in an empty file, too. Double tee eff.

Contacts ask you to perform one non-arc mission, then offer you a new contact if you haven't unlocked all of the contacts appropriate for your level range. The next mission they offer is dependent on your level. If you've out-leveled that contact, they'll give you a hunt or "Talk to X security chief". If you're within their specified level range and you haven't already completed the arc they offer (which is possible, since two or more contacts can offer the same story arc at lower levels), they'll give you the arc. When origin restrictions were removed, it didn't actually open up a lot of new content because most of the content was pooled across multiple contacts. At lower levels, for example, three to six contacts will offer the same arc, and since contacts are limited to a single arc, they can't give players anything more than hunts and unrelated door missions. This is one of the reasons why The Hollows, Faultline and Striga are preferred early leveling zones, because they streamline the process by offering one story arc per contact, and only one contact per level range. In contrast with that, you'll note that in Steel Canyon and Skyway City, every story arc is offered by four different contacts, and since that's all they have, completing the arc on any one contact inherently leads to the other three having nothing but street work and unrelated door missions. CoH also has a problem with directing players to contacts with different content when they reach an appropriate level. Some contacts aren't introduced to players by other contacts, some are only suggested when using the Find Contact function, and some don't even show up then, they require the player to know who and where the contact is and go find them. Concurrently, multiple redundant contacts are crammed into the player's contact list. All of this is a result of origin restrictions. When players were restricted from accessing contacts by their origin, the system worked. Now, with every contact open to every origin, the 1-30 experience in CoH feels like it's chaotic and lacking in direction, brimming with hunts and inconsequential door missions which offer no incentive and engender ennui, and worse, the opportunity to engage in different content isn't presented to players because the contact chains are still in place. Contact A1 will tell the player to talk to Contact A2, and Contact A2 sends the player to Contact A3, but none of them mention that Contacts B1-B5 and C1-C5 and D1-D5 and E1-E5 exist and have different content. The Find Contact function partially addresses that, but not well and not reliably (still far too easy to miss contacts). The only way to access all previously origin-restricted content is to go back to City Hall and talk to the origin starter contacts, and that's not well known. From 30 onward, contacts aren't pooling story arcs with the intensity they do in the pre-30 game (30-35, you'll see up to two contacts offering the same arc, and after that, every contact has unique content), but by that time, the first impression has already settled in. There are a lot of contacts in City of Heroes, but not, comparatively, a lot of valuable (meaning, story arc) content. City of Villains and Going Rogue utilize fewer contacts to deliver roughly the same amount of valuable content, which creates the illusion of disparity, when, in fact, the vast majority of content for individual contacts in CoH is just filler, legacy chaff left over from Cryptic's attempt to give relevance to origins. You don't have to hunt, patrol and run filler door missions. There's enough story arc content "blue-side" to level from 1 to 50 without touching a single one of those missions. You do have to understand the flaws in the contact system, though, and work around them.

I can provide more detailed information on this issue. /bind <key> "powexec_location target Oil Slick Arrow" or /macro OSA "powexec_location target Oil Slick Arrow" This execution of the command is, in my experience, the one most likely to display the problems @WindDemon21 is experiencing. On any location with terrain variation, such as a hill, a scaffold, a stair, a raised platform, anything not comprising the base floor surface of a map, the command will frequently either fail to execute, giving an "Out of range" message, even when you're standing in melee range of the target; or it will activate Oil Slick Arrow, but Oil Slick Target (and sometimes Oil Slick Slick, as well) will appear to be absent because it spawned under the surface. The problem is definitely not Oil Slick Arrow itself, because manually activating Oil Slick Arrow, manually targeting the power using the mouse pointer, and manually clicking on that location, always works. Always. That also tells us that it's not a line of sight issue, nor a pathing issue (it's a projectile, it doesn't use bacon, and neither Oil Slick Slick nor Oil Slick Target are mobile). Another recent bug report indicated that /powexec_location cursor was using camera distance, rather than character distance, to determine range and whether to activate the power. This suggests that /powexec_location target may be using camera distance as well, and that it's ignoring the visible geometry, the textures and bounding areas defined as "ground" or "floor" or "surface on which things may stand" on maps, thus causing it to spawn Oil Slick on the floor of the map's geometry box (the invisible container for the corridors and rooms we see and interact with/in), or failing to activate when the floor of the map box is out of range.

I tried that. I was arrested for grave robbing and all of my scientific equipment was taken away. 😞

I keep @Bopper and @UberGuy in a shoebox. When I need a build, I push a saltine through a slit and a build pops out.

Yeah, thanks, @Hedgefund. First chance I had at getting some tongue in 30 years and you ruin it. Thanks, pal.

Believing I have the chat box active and typing a command with R in it, and running headlong into the nearest spawn.

Another game.

I can assure everyone that I was, in no way, involved in spreading a rumor that @Yomo Kimyata spent all of his wealth on Superadine and succubi, and would be busking on his top hat in Pocket D for enhancements, if anyone happened to be looking for him. However, if anyone is looking for him, a little bird told me the above, and you didn't hear it from me.

You've got seven 10% +Recharge bonuses, only five of those apply, the other two don't. You'd benefit from reslotting a couple of powers with different (non-purple) sets. For example, you could use the non-Superior version of the Will of the Controller set and change one of those wasted 10% bonuses to 8.75%, and slot Flash with 4/6 Basilisk's Gaze and two procs, adding another 7.5% global +Recharge and making better use of your damage procs (with your build the way it is, Flash will be up and ready three times for every two uses of EMP Arrow). You've slotted Flash Arrow for 23.09% -ToHit, but you've also chased enormous amounts of +Def. You could save slots and power selections by paring down some of that +Def and using Flash Arrow. You should also switch the Acc/Rchg in Flash Arrow for the -ToHit/End/Rchg (bringing it up to 24.6% -ToHit). You could also take and use Spectral Terror, which adds another 15% -ToHit and not only further alleviating the perceived need to pursue +Def, but also giving you an excellent source of control and potential proc use. You've got piles of Smashing/Lethal Resistance, but you've skipped Poison Gas Arrow, which would give you the equivalent of 40% Resistance to everything (plus a guaranteed mag 2 Sleep which would stack with Blind's Sleep and could be used tactically to put lieutenants and bosses on the bench). Chance of Knockdown in Oil Slick Arrow is a bad idea. OSA already does KD, stacked KD turns into KB. You'll be squirting critters out of your kill zone. EMP Arrow grants mag 10 protection from Holds, Sleeps, Stuns and KB, and mag 5 protection from Immobilize. Indomitable Will is overkill. And EMP Arrow makes a poor AoE damage power even with procs, due to the recharge time. You're better off using it to either provide status protection for yourself, or to stack Holds with Flash, or just removing it and replacing it with something more readily available. Your endurance management is going to be a real problem, both while leveling and after reaching 50 and finalizing your build, especially with so many high cost powers forming the basis of your play style. You're running six toggles and none of them have more than 26.5% Endurance Reduction. Several have 0%. And you've got no Endurance Reduction in Acid, EMP, Disruption, Deceive (really?)... You're going to consistently run out of endurance before you finish fights, or have nothing but blues in your inspiration tray. But if you're playing on a team with some defenders/controllers/corruptors with buffs, all of those things could probably be ignored. Solo, or trying to function as the primary (or only) mitigator on a team, you'll likely find it to be a very unenjoyable experience.

Macros can't be set to auto-fire. Macros can set a power to auto-fire, but you'd still have to manually activate the macro (click or keypress). A rotating bind file wouldn't work either, because it would continually spam the chat message and costume changes regardless of what else you did, as there's no if/then structure in the in-game command structure (necessary to prevent the chat message/costume change unless Domination was activated).