Zhym

I agree with you on at least one point: that should be "breathe," not "breath." If I had secretly found a login to the CoX dev servers—oh, the number of grammar corrections I'd make.

Fun little mini-arc! A couple of notes: Overall—well, it does sort of feel half-finished. I'm so used to five-mission AE arcs that I wasn't prepared for it to end after three missions—especially not with a cliffhanger. In a five-mission arc, I figure a cliffhanger is just a necessity because an AE arc can't be longer. With three missions, there's more of a sense (fair or not) of wondering why, if you have more story to tell, you don't just tell it instead of having a short arc with cliffhanger? Although it sounds like you're not sure where this is going yet, so maybe the arc really is just incomplete as opposed to a cliffhanger?

Well, okay. But there are plenty of shared spaces. Every city zone is a shared space, including the ones that are currently used for raids, like the Abyss, The Hive, and the Rikti War Zone. They all have maps. As for the "vibe" building anxiety—well, that's '80s game design. The lack of an in-game map doesn't heighten anxiety or excitement, and it's not a puzzle that anyone but the most hardcore of maze devotees finds remotely fun. In-game maps are now standard for a reason: they're really useful. No one is expected to map out the space by hand anymore like they're playing Wizardry I. And no one is going to be encouraged to team up more because there's no in-game map. And if specific locations don't matter for the raiding...what's the harm in including a map? If it's that the map is 3D and it's impossible to make a map that's at all functional for that layout, that's a legitimate issue. Although I'm sure I've seen some other in-game maps for spaces with multiple layers—even if those maps aren't incredibly helpful (looking at you, layer cake cave map).

I'm a bit confused about why the labyrinth won't have a zone map. Is the idea that the labyrinth map will change dynamically, or at least from time to time? Or is there just a static map that will be "secret" until someone maps it out and posts it on the forums? Wait. I used the future tense there, didn't I? Sorry about that. I guess maybe the intended effect of there being no zone map is that you can't see where other players are. But I thought that "figure out the map!" labyrinth puzzles went out of style in the '80s (for good reason).

He's not quite that good—43% s/l, 37% fire/cold, 17.7% energy, 19% psi, 23.7% toxic. The Bane is at 27.1% s/l, 35.3% fire/cold, 21.8% energy, 44.6% psi, and 42% toxic. Maybe it's just that the blaster is really good at taking down his enemies before they can do any damage. :) (Plus, he has all the incarnate powers at T4 and the Bane is just starting out.)

Oh, yeah., Venom Grenade is definitely great—I just wish I had a better followup once I've used it to soften up the enemies. Mace Beam Blast is kind of disappointing in that regard. My usual attack pattern for groups of mobs is Build Up > Surveillance (if one of the mobs looks tougher than the others) > Wide Area Web Grenade > Venom Grenade > Mace Beam Blast, then run into melee and clean up whatever's left. It's very effective unless I'm up against a group of powerful mobs (like the Cyclopes and Minotaurs in that big Cimerora mission from the Dark Astoria arc). For smaller groups or individual mobs, I'll just go full stalker, run up close, hit Build Up > Surveillance > Shatter, which is usually good enough to one-shot many mobs. Then fire the Wide Area Web Grenade and cleanup. It's definitely fun to play, but also more fragile than, say, my DP/MC blaster, who also does more damage both up close and at range and can do it to more mobs at once, and also has better defense and DR than my Bane has. But then, comparing almost anything to that DP/MC blaster may not be fair. 🙂

I don't quite have the alt-itis that others have. I have a total of 36 characters right now, of which twenty are level 50 and six haven't made it past level 15 (and four of those are concept characters that didn't make it level 6). The rest sort of stalled in the mid levels as I realized that some characters just didn't grab me, either for powerset or theme reasons. Of those twenty level 50s, I'd estimate that I leveled about half of them mostly solo through story mode, with just enough TFs to get some reward merits and badges. At least a couple of those did nearly all the content, Blue and Red (and, in a couple of cases that started in Praetoria, Gold). The other half I leveled more quickly (for me) by doing DFB, TFs, MSRs, and other group content, but also with some solo mission time. None of them have been power-leveled. I'm here for the story content and the teaming up for missions. As an example, I created my most recent "slow mode" alt on May 23 and hit level 50 last week. Melta (a random Atlas Park citizen who seems to be kind of disturbingly well-informed about me) tells me that that character has been online for 99 hours. That includes running the Dark Astoria arc all the way through and about 8 hours or so sitting idle taking damage for a badge, so call it closer to 80 hours or so to level that one.

@Ukase, what did you use for a build? Based on this post, I made a Bane and leveled it through (some of) the red-side content. I used builds from @KaizenSoze (here) and @Burnt Umber (here) as guides, but basically just did whatever I felt like—which meant it's far from the most efficient build ever. For example, it has Cloaking Device and Stealth (for a stealth radius of 140 with the Celerity: Stealth slotted in Sprint), probably one or two more attack powers than it probably needs, both of the available pet powers (Summon Blaster and Call Reinforcements), and some of the attack powers are still slotted with cheap Uncommon enhancement sets (Thunderstrike, etc.), although it does have both Archetype sets, Hecatomb, and an Overwhelming Force set slotted. The result has been...not bad. It's quite fun as a sort of stalker with ranged attacks. But it's far from the strongest character I've played, and I don't know if that's because of the AT itself or just that I've built it poorly. (I don't have MIDS, so I can't post the build short of typing it out by hand.) I've considered respeccing to something more like @KaizenSoze's build, or just doing my usual and using incarnate abilities to make up for a sloppy build. But I'm curious what your "surprisingly fantastic" build was, and whether you continued to like it in the upper levels when the enemies can start laying down the debuffs (and when some of the missions really benefit from having a top-tier AoE attack, which IMO the Bane really doesn't). ETA: I went up typed up the build anyway. If I did a respec, at the very least I'd probably drop the Mace pool powers and the Call Reinforcements power (it's kind of fun and on theme to have the arachnobots, but I don't get full pet control over them and they're really, really fragile) and take some Leadership and/or the Fighting pool powers to make him a bit tougher. But a respec is such a PITA...

Mot? Is that you?

Not quite tabletop, but I was in a play-by-post game ten years ago, during the Interregnum, that was started up by one of my fellow gamers who also missed CoH. The setting wasn't explicitly CoH, but the homage was clear. The setting was Atlas City, some of the major organizations included Arikas Shipping Inc, Chiron Pharmaceuticals, Chocolo Sweets, Poseidon Electronics, Rook Industries, and Supers for Hire. And my Super had a contact: Maurice Feldon. It was a fun game and I'd definitely jump in again. And running it play-by-post (under the 4c system) meant we could create characters that the computer game doesn't support. For example, my character was a robot dog. Here's his background:

Of the three missions I mentioned, the tentacles bother me the least. I'm not sure whether the smoky Cimerora mission or the "war" mission bothers me more; the first makes it hard to find everyone you need to defeat, but the second has more sheer numbers than are probably necessary. (Then again, maybe it's my own fault for always doing it without help, to get the badge. But on the other other hand, it's not like my "help" ever lives long when I try to do the mission with them.)

I love the Dark Astoria arc...for the most part. It's atmospheric, it's epic, and it's well-written. But it has one big problem IMO: the side trip to Cimerora. It's just such a slog. There's the mission where you have to find monsters and hostages in a smoke-obscured Cimerora. Then you have to beat up a bunch of tentacles that aren't really a threat but have enough HP to take some time to kill. And to cap it all off, there's that mission where you have to fight off something like 9 groups of Talons, 4 groups of monsters, and then 3 different groups of Talons all before you can face Romulus Augustus. It's not interesting, it's not really necessary to the story line, and it's not even that challenging. It's quantity of battles over quality. Plus, I could never figure out why the Cimerora part of the story starts with "You must take the Idol of Mot to Astoria!" and somehow turns to "Marcus Valerius will sail with the Idol to the Abyss the end of the world!" And I'm thinking, "That....wasn't the plan, was it?" Fortunately, when you get back to the present, things pick up again. And the trip to Cimerora does set up something important to the story later on. But it seems like the whole Cimerora part of the story could be less...tedious. Is this just me? Or do other people get to this part of the Dark Astoria arc and think, "Ugh. Not this part, again?"

Ki Push. Everything else is fighting for second place.

Your memory or your friend is playing tricks on you. There's no IP entrance to Pocket D (unless it's really, really well hidden). FWIW, you can see all the zones Pocket D connects to by going to Pocket D and looking at the map. All the zone exits are marked.

I'm sure I've seen some pretty good Sailor Moon style costumes. ...but that's probably not what you mean.

This. I do "story mode" a lot, but I usually do it solo because there aren't any merit rewards in doing someone else's story arc. Plus, a lot of the fun of the story mode missions is taking the time to read the mission text, clues, etc., which isn't entirely compatible with the way most PUGs operate. Even if a team runs the missions in "slow mode," that usually means KM, not stopping to read all the text. So for me, it's story arcs solo, then teaming up for TFs, SFs, and Trials.

I've had a weird issue recently where the game locks up (i.e., freezes in place) sometimes when I tab away from the game and try to switch back. Is anyone else seeing something similar, or does anyone have an idea what might be causing it? FWIW, I suspect it's something in Wine 9, since that was updated recently.

That sounds really cool, and I like that you have a "zone" concept. Shame there's no way to implement the zone, but AE is what AE is. However...I have to admit that I started "New Earth Rising" and then quit before finishing the first mission, because:

One thing about that—it seemed like LaunchCat the installer automatically put LaunchCat the launcher in /Applications (unless I misunderstand the various LaunchCats, which I might). Is there a way to have the installer ask where to put the launcher? Not that it matters for me personally—as long as IslandRum keeps working, I'll probably use that.

Thanks! One thing that confused me about this, though. When I extracted the .zip file, it had a LaunchCat app. Running that seemed to install a LaunchCat app in /Applications. It wasn't really clear to me what was the installer and what was the launcher. Are there they different apps, both named LaunchCat? Or is it one that ends up in two different locations?

Yeah, I've struggled to figure out what the "right" way to install IslandRum under limited permissions would be. What's worked for me is having it in a subfolder of Applications (which, incidentally, doesn't seem to have quite the full set of restrictions that /Applications has) with permissions set to have my non-admin account as owner of the folder. The subfolder approach also works well since IslandRum seems to create other folders as part of the update process (e.g., "__MACOS", "old"), so having it in a subfolder reduces clutter in Applications. If I were installing this fresh, I might try putting it in ~/Applications instead of /Applications, to see if that helped. Ideally, IMO, anything other than the application itself would go in Application Support. That seems to be the model MacOS uses. But I realize that cross-platform software can't always adhere to the Official Apple Way of Doing Things. And the whole thing about CoH being a WINE application complicates matters further. Thanks for the fix!

IslandRum actually has a configuration option for where the game files live (it's under Options > "Install Path"). @GM Manga can say for sure, but I suspect there's just a slight bug in the last update that affects what IslandRum does with that setting.

Update for @GM Manga: I installed the IslandRum update manually by unzipping the islandrum-mac-signed.zip file and moving the new IslandRum.app over the old one. Still no joy in launching the game, but: Aha! Looks like the installer is putting the install path in there twice. Here are the contents of islandrum.sh: #/bin/sh export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin export WINEARCH=win64 export WINEPREFIX=/Users/<xxxxx>/.privatewine USE="-cups" cd "/Applications/Games/CoH" /Applications/Games/CoH//Applications/Games/CoH/wine.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64 "/Applications/Games/CoH/hc-bin64\cityofheroes.exe" -assetpath piggs -assetpath homecoming -auth 51.161.76.201 -legacylayout Check out that last line—the path /Applications/Games/CoH/ (which I have set in IslandRum as the game path) is prepended twice. When I edit that script manually to remove the extra path prefix, CoH runs. But when I try to launch the game through IslandRum, it re-writes that script with the wrong path.

No joy from this method, alas. I get the message "Self Update Download failed or canceled." When I tried to install LaunchCat from an administrator account, it installed, but it put the WINE installation somewhere in the administrator account's folders, which doesn't help me run it from my user account. What files does LaunchCat put where? Is there a way I can do a manual update for IslandRum, or an install of LaunchCat, from the command line? BTW, just to make my setup more non-standard, Island Rum doesn't run from /Applications. I have subfolder, /Application/Games, which is where Island Rum and the CoH folder both live. So far today, I've just been playing CoH by opening it from from the command line via the islandrum.sh script. But that will stop working the next time there's a patch. My next attempt will be to temporarily grant my user account admin privileges, try to update Island Rum (and maybe install LaunchCat), then revoke the admin privileges again. We'll see how that goes.

When I tried to log into CoH this evening, Island Rum downloaded updates...and then crashed with an error about not being able to extract the zip file. When I tried to run Island Rum again, it just crashed. So I installed an old version of Island Rum, and let it update everything. This one at least loads and says it's on version 053120241, but crashes if I try to launch the game. So I thought I'd finally install the official launcher. I unzip and get LaunchCat, which downloads wine9.zip then says "Mac Client Download failed or canceled." Note: to avoid malware getting to do whatever the heck it wants, my everyday user account doesn't have admin privileges. With almost all software, that's not a problem: something (MacOS? The installer? I dunno!) realizes that admin credentials are needed for the install, and gives me a prompt to enter them. I don't get that prompt when I try to install using LaunchCat. I don't know if that's because LaunchCat just assumes the current user has admin rights and freaks right out if they don't, or if there's some other problem going on tonight.