GastlyGibus

When I was a teenager I was hired by a fast food restaurant to come in on the weekend (when they were closed) and use a pressure hose to clean the parking lot. I'm fairly certain that the strength of that water jet could slice your fingers off if you were dumb enough to stick your hand in it. That thing tore up concrete if you sprayed it in the cracks, and I had to be really careful if I didn't want to ruin the parking lot further with it. It's like that scene in The Last Airbender cartoon where Aang and Katara slice through metal beams with their water bending. Water can be extremely dangerous at high pressures and could probably cut through bone if pressurized enough.

So long as you change the topic title, you can post whatever you'd like and ask whatever questions you have. This is the general board after all, so pretty much anything goes topic-wise, so long as it's related to CoH.

Yeah, story arcs still give out a random enhancement upon completion, equal to your level. It's a remnant of the days when enhancements were the only real "gear" you could get, and back in the day they were a lot harder to come by.

That is seriously one hell of a base you've put together! I absolutely love the idea, and I am seriously considering making myself a pirate-themed character just so I can play around in there. 😄

Already been answered, but I can also confirm that content and teams exist for all levels on Excelsior. The only issue is finding teams for villains, since redside has a much smaller population in comparison. It's not impossible, and I've ran a few redside teams myself, but it's not nearly as prevalent. And also, welcome back, hero (or villain 😉 )!

As far as I'm aware, the costume files should still work. AE content you have saved locally should still be usable as well.

I can't speak to the other shards, as I've not played on them much at all. I tend to stick around Excelsior, if only because my SG is on there and it gives me folks who will tolerate my presence to hang out with. 😛 That being said, Excelsior is pretty busy most days, and as some have said here, is probably the highest population server. There's no shortage of teams for just about any kind of content, so if you're looking for a more "busy" server with team advertisements every few seconds, it's a good place to go. Excelsior also has nightly Hami raids (every night at 10pm EST).

Said by an Arachnos Crab Spider to his recruits in St. Martial: "Treat those weapons as loaded, men. I'd prefer if you keep your toes. It's not mandatory, but I'd prefer it."

From random Goldbrickers in Cap. [NPC] Bombardier: The next person to say "I can see my house from here" loses jetpack privileges.

My co-worker and I quote this movie far too often at work, glad to know I'm not the only one. Favorite words? I mean, honestly, I swear like a sailor, and my favorite words or phrases are probably not appropriate to string together in a forum post. 😛 Not an uncommon word, but I do like the word "colloquially." I just think it's fun to say out loud. Colloquially!

The shoulder pieces for the Ascension costume set are oddly misaligned, and it only seems to happen during idle animations, specifically when your character put their hands on their hips. I first noticed this on my Brute who uses the piece, and again on my Stalker who also uses it. No other shoulder piece does this as far as I'm aware. This one specific piece, and only the left shoulder (your character's left), seems to have been put on wrong.

Things I find odd Trolls explaining to other Trolls on the street the effects of superadine. I constantly see Trolls in Skyway saying things like "Me have body by superadine!" to a guy whose skin is literally green because he's already hooked on the stuff. Also seeing Outcast lieutenants and bosses struggling with a civilian while trying to steal their purse. Dude, you have super powers! Just give them a quick zap and they'll drop it!

To be the killjoy know-it-all, the official reason given is that after the Rikti War, with all but 8 super heroes left in the whole world, crime ran rampant since there was nobody around to stop them. But really, it's because the Skulls have great dental plans.😉 I mentioned this in another thread before, but the office designs in Paragon City are actually a really ingenious security measure. In a city where super villains are constantly trying to kidnap people and take over the world, you have to be creative. Hiring security guards and installing cameras just won't cut it. Instead, you make the layout of your office so ridiculously nonsensical and complicated that any would-be evil-doers get lost in the labyrinthine layout of the place, giving the heroes more time to show up and save the day. I mean, do you ever wonder why virtually every single time you show up to save the office, you get there just in time to save the day? Unorthodox problems require unorthodox solutions. 😄

Yes it does. Any views you get on your channel at all will make money for Youtube. Even one single view will make them some tiny bit of pocket change. That's making money off of NCSoft's property, which is illegal.

No, I'm not talking about fear and paranoia. I am talking about US Copyright and Intellectual Property laws, which you clearly do not seem to understand. To put it as bluntly as I can: It is 100% illegal for Homecoming, or anybody at all, to make any profit whatsoever from this property. This is not fear or paranoia. This is basic understanding of how copyright and intellectual property laws work. Homecoming does not own City of Heroes. It is straight-up 100% illegal to make money off of this. Period. It's not paranoia, it's the law. No means no.

No, that's not what they're saying. Amazon owns Twitch. Twitch makes money both by ad revenue, and by viewers donating to their favorite streamers, which Twitch takes a portion of for income. If people stream City of Heroes on Twitch, Twitch makes money off of it by proxy. Twitch doesn't care about City of Heroes, but NCSoft clearly does, and unfortunately for the rest of us, making money, even inadvertantly, from someone else's property is considered theft, and is illegal. Homecoming doesn't want to deal with NCSoft having any excuse to shut down the servers. So no, you're not allowed to stream. EDIT: Furthermore, the constant droning of "can we get some news please??" is pointless. Legal talks almost always come with an NDA; a Non-Disclosure Agreement. An NDA is a legally-binding contract that forbids any of the involved parties from telling anybody about the talks in question. Even mentioning that you signed an NDA can be a violation of the NDA, and can get you in deep legal trouble. Stop asking for news. You're not going to get it, and as far as I'm concerned, no news is good news.

Oh come on. If I can't even play City of Heroes on my Commodore 64, then what's the point? 😛

In all cases, TF = Task Force, or SF if it's redside, which means Strike Force. The letters before TF/SF relate to the Task/Strike Force contact's name, not the name of the actual arc. Nobody ever calls it "A clamor for the people," they'll just say "Yin TF." Some of the frequent ones I see: ITF = Imperious Task Force LRSF = Lord Recluse Strike Force MLTF = Ms. Liberty Task Force (formerly known as the STF, Statesman Task Force, and some folks still use that name.) LGTF = Lady Grey Task Force All the others will just state the name of the contact. Posi = Positron, Yin = Penelope Yin, Manti = Manticore, etc... In the case of trials and other raids, it's different since they aren't task forces. Common examples: BAF = Behavioral Adjustment Facility LAM = Lambda Sector MoM = Minds of Mayhem DFB = Death From Below trial DIB = Drowning In Blood trial MSR = Mother Ship Raid Hami = Hamidon Raid Those are the ones off the top of my head. If you're ever confused, just send a PM to the group leader asking which one it is again. Most folks are happy to help if you're unsure. Hope this helps!

As I'm running through Redside as usual, Kelly Uqua sends me to go deal with a bunch of Freakshow who have gotten their hands on some Rikti weapons. There's two amusing bits of dialogue in there. First is some random chatter from freakshow. Rikti Freak Gunner 1: "Man, this new tech feels weird." Rikti Freak Gunner 2: "New Tech: t3h ph@t L3wt!" Rikti Freak Gunner 1: "Dude, don't do that." And then at the end, you meet a familiar face who I'm pretty sure has been mentioned in this very thread! t3h R1k70-Fr34k: "0nc3 m0r3 1 r3tRuN, Cr34t3d 4n3w 4s: t3h R1K70-Fr34K!!1!LOLOMGWTFBBQ!" "1t's n0t1hng Pw3rs0nn4l, but I c4n'7 w4yT t0 t3s7 0u7 t3h p0w4r 0f m n3w b0di!" (Translation: "Once more I return, created anew as: the Rikti-Freak!! It's nothing personal, but I can't wait to test out the power of my new body!")

Why fix the pothole in the road when you can just take another route to work?

Now imagine if we, the audience, had to sit through Batman's 20+ hour flight to Japan. Imagine if in The Dark Knight when Batman goes to Hong Kong, Bruce Wayne packs his things, gets on his private jet or Batwing or w/e, flies the 18+ hours it takes to get to Hong Kong, scouts out the buildings, climbs to the top of one, and finally begins his little extraction, and we, the audience, had to sit and watch the entire 24+ hour affair with no cuts or edits whatsoever. How many movie-goers in the theatre would have walked out within the first hour? Yes, I am aware it's not nearly that severe of a problem here (thank God). I get that it's "realistic" for a hero to travel all around the city to stop crimes, but from a gameplay perspective, it's annoying having to travel to so many different zones. And honestly? The whole "but you get to explore!" aspect is not accurate, and let me explain why. This might be long winded, but bear with me. Let's say I'm a brand new player; I just installed the game, make my very first hero and get dumped in Atlas Park. "Wow!" I think to myself. "Look at that statue! This place is pretty!" My very first contact is, of course, Matthew Habashy. So I go talk to him, and he sends me on missions in Atlas Park. By doing his missions, I get to travel all around Atlas, explore the city at a nice, even pace, I get to street-sweep and stop random purse-snatchers and drug dealers, and I'm feeling real cool. By the time I've finished the whole Atlas Park contact line, I've gotten to explore a good chunk of Atlas Park. I'm level 8 now, and I've had fun, but I've been in Atlas Park for a while now. I've seen what it has to offer, and now I'm eager to see more. So, off to the next contact, Shauna Stockwell. Now I'm in Kings Row, a brand new city with brand new sights and brand new villains for me to fight. Awesome! All of her missions keep me in Kings Row, and as I'm stomping about the city, going from mission to mission, I'm exploring the whole zone at a nice pace, maybe fighting more street mobs on the way, having a ball and getting to explore and find my way around Kings Row. So now I've explored two cities pretty thoroughly. I finish the Kings Row stuff, and now it's off to the next zone, Steel Canyon. I go into another new zone, this one all bright and modern like New York. And once again, there's brand new enemies for me to fight and a whole new city to explore! Look at these Council and 5th Column guys! And those Outcasts! New stuff, super cool! So I grab myself a police scanner, go beat up some baddies, and get my next contact, Wes Schnabel. I go and talk to Wes, eager to repeat my previous experiences in exploring a new city. "I need you to go to Atlas Park and beat up some bad guys." .... Atlas Park? But I've already been there, and I wanna explore Steel Canyon some more! "Nope. Atlas Park. Get to it." Okay, I begrudgingly accept. I take the tram back to Atlas Park, go do my thing, ignoring all the street mobs because they're all grey and not worth the time, and eventually go back to Wes. Cool, now I get to explore Steel Canyon, right? "I need you to go to Kings Row and retrieve this stolen thing." What?! Kings Row? I just left there! Come on, Wes, you're in Steel Canyon! Don't you have something for me to do here, so I can see the sights and explore a brand new city? "Nope. Kings Row. Get out of my face." And this is how the rest of the standards contacts will treat you from here on out. Every time I go into a new zone, instead of being given tasks in the zone and given the opportunity to explore a zone at a nice pace as I travel from mission to mission, getting to fight street mobs appropriate to my level, I'm instead forced to constantly backtrack and go to places I've already been, and since I've already been to these places, I don't feel like taking my time and exploring the zone. I just want to get the mission done and get it over with. And this problem only gets worse as you get higher in level, as every new zone contact keeps forcing you to leave the brand new zone and go back to old places where you're horrible over-levelled and there's no incentive to get on the ground and get your feet wet. Being constantly thrown around from one zone to the next with no rhyme or reason doesn't let you take a breath and really explore. As soon as you get in one zone and finish a mission, it's off to a completely different place. No time to explore, no time to see the sights, no time to smell the roses, and no time to fight street mobs. It doesn't make sense to have a contact in Bricktown, which is a level 30-38 zone, with missions for level 30 heroes, to constantly keep sending you back to places you've already been and where the mobs out on the street are beneath you and not worth the effort. Sure, in some instances it might lead me somewhere I've never been, but the majority of the time, it's just constantly throwing me from one zone to the next. Having contacts stay in their zone would only naturally lead to exploring more of that zone at a nice, even pace, being taken on a tour of one zone at a time, compared to sporadically throwing darts at a map of Paragon City and letting that decide where the mission is. Admittedly, it is a minor inconvenience, but it's one that should be pretty easy to fix and has absolutely no reason to exist. The whole reason blueside even does this is because of the old MMO mindset of inconveniencing players by arbitrarily padding out game-time. After all, if you have a player running from zone to zone, that's more time spent playing the game, and that's all that mattered. In addition, the fact that these changes were added later, the fact that new contacts added later didn't have this problem, and the fact that they were actively working on revamping and improving the "dead" zones that nobody went to just goes to show that the original developers knew this was a problem and were working to address it. They realized it was unfun and boring being constantly shuffled across the entire city for no reason, and actively began taking steps to remedy it. The way I see it, making this change only continues that goal of making the game just a little bit less inconvenient and more fun to play. And finally, to bring an end to what is my longest forum post to-date, it doesn't even make sense from a roleplaying perspective. All of the standard contacts on blueside have in their description that they deal with specific villain groups. Kong Bao, a standard blueside contact, has in his info "The recent and terrifying rise of the Tsoo is of particular concern to Mr. Kong. He has redoubled his efforts to curtail the gang's recruiting among Hmong youth, with some success." So tell me why Kong Bao, a guy who mainly is concerned with the Tsoo, is hanging out in Skyway City? There are no Tsoo in Skyway City. Wouldn't it be more appropriate from a roleplaying perspective that a contact who resides in a certain zone would give you tips and clues on happenings in said zone?

And that's precisely my point. The old guard realized that it was boring and unfun, and the new content reflected that shift in attitude as it was added. The only problem is the old content was never brought in line with the new, and it gradually just fell out of favor instead of bring fixed. The issue of hazard zones being virtually deserted is pretty well established. And besides, the problem of hazard zones and what to do with them is another topic for another day. The issue here is that hardly anybody runs standard contacts because they send you out to a bunch of random zones. The overwhelming majority of teams I see being advertised blueside are running radio missions, because they're more convenient and don't send you to twenty different zones to arbitrarily pad playtime. Does literally everybody run radio missions? No, of course not. I'm one of the players that likes to run the Issue 0 contacts, but I dislike being sent on a giant tour of the city as a consequence, and I don't like forcing my teams to do it with me because not everybody has the SG teleporter macro handy. Hazard zones need their own unique content to draw more players in; having a contact force me to go to Boomtown for a one-time mission isn't going to make me stop and enjoy the zone.

Nobody ever goes to hazard zones anyway save for the occasional giant monster. Hazard zones are a dead relic from launch. Even Paragon Studios was aware of this, which is why the old devs were steadily working on revamping and repurposing them until the game shut down.

This is a change that I believe is long overdue. Every blueside team I join ends up just doing police scanner missions over and over, and the reason why is obvious. It's far easier to just get an endless stream of missions all conveniently in one zone than it is to deal with hero contacts sending you on a giant Paragon City road trip. Contacts for villains learned this lesson, and it's one of the many reasons I prefer redside over blue. If I get a contact in Sharkhead Isle, I can be reasonably sure that 90% of that contact's missions will be in Sharkhead. Contacts for heroes, on the other hand, do not do this. I swear every single mission they give me is in a zone other than the one they're currently in. I'll get a contact in Brickstown and they'll be like "Hey, go to Perez Park and do this thing." "Hey, go to Founder's Falls and do that thing." "Cool, now go talk to this guy in Independence Port so he can send you on another mission in Terra Volta." No wonder people constantly run radio missions. Even with the SG base macro, it's far more convenient to just stay in one zone and run missions. And honestly it makes me sad, because radio missions are boring, and I'd love to see teams run story arcs again, but nobody wants to because it's just such a pain having to travel all over the entire city twelve times over. Make hero contacts stay in their zone wherever possible. My legs are tired, I'm running out of money for monorail passes, and my supergroup is wondering why the electric bill is so high because I keep using the teleporters. 😛

Others have said it here, and I concur with them. Mace Mastery is popular because low-health archetypes benefit more from defense than resistance, and Mace Mastery is the only epic power pool that provides a defense toggle rather than a resistance toggle. That being said, it is by no means a necessity for anybody. If you're trying to farm +4/x8 on a squishy toon, then sure, you'll want all the defense you can get. But for players like me, and the majority of folks who don't farm, it's not needed. I took Mace Mastery on one character only, my TA/Archery Defender, and only because it fits thematically with the character (Mace Mastery is the only weapons-based epic for Defenders) and because it pairs well with Flash Arrow's ToHit debuff. My Crab Spider went with Leviathan Mastery, and my Night Widow doesn't have an epic pool at all. Both of them perform perfectly fine both solo and on teams. Min-maxing is not a requirement whatsoever in this game. The overwhelming majority of the content in-game is balanced around SO enhancements; using IO's and building "the perfect character" is something people do for fun, and not because it's a requirement.