mechahamham

These people are going to soil themselves when they hear about hard Roman 'C's. Kinema. Keaser Kenturion

I have yet to do it with EA, but my ice armor characters dominated it as well. The characters that seemed to have the best time was my Darkness/Time controller. She didn't do a lot of damage, aside from doggo, but she kept all the NPC allies alive to fight the waves of enemies. It seemed like it was over in just a few minutes with her. In a team with a few other controllers, Recluse poofed like he was lieutenant.

You knocked it out of the park with this one, Arachne! I always felt a bit miffed that the original Wedding took place in a way that locked some players out of attending. I completely understand WHY they did it that way. Your effort to bring it back as a faithful recreation is VERY appreciated. IIRC, Sister Psyche was wearing the Bridal Heel with the Bridal & Lace texture option in the screenies posted on the original forums. (It's been more than a decade, *OUCH*, so I'm willing to be corrected on this front.) The mismatch in net textures between that and the full fishnets texture has always put me off using them for my characters. I REALLY like the anklets she's wearing in this incarnation of the event, and I want those for my own characters! At first I was put off the event from the huge mob of people swarming Sigil and Kadabra Kill in Pocket D. After doing it a few times on various characters, I've turned around 180 degrees. I love the chaos of doing it with a full team. I love the 'Boss Gauntlet' effect you get while doing the event solo. The flavor text from the NPCs you can speak with in the wedding is top-notch. I've noticed that if you can protect the ally guests at all, the event plays out MUCH faster than if you can't. Ironically, that seems to make it FASTER to complete solo with low-damage tanks, controllers, or defenders than with high-damage blasters. I don't mind that at all, and I like that it's tougher challenge for my favorite AT. 'Down in Front' is touch of genius. Let's give the players a badge for trying to bomb the cutscene, and then forcibly escort them out! You can stand in the Maid's or the Best Man's spot, but can't be in the center. I TRULY APPRECIATE that there's now a universal damage set that doesn't nerf KB. I think that with the length of the fight, the 20 hour lockout is spot-on. 10/10 all around. I'm very happy with the event and am eager to see what else is going to happen this year!

Back during the live era, I happened to be on a Bots/FF mastermind tooling around Grandville. As just a matter of course, every time I saw another player, I tapped my two ST buffs to driveby some defense onto them. This was *PRE*-IOs, so Diminishing Returns was a thing, but softcapping with just enhancements was not, so 99.999% of players were not only not unhappy to receive some extra defense for 120s, they were usually pretty appreciative. Then I ran into that .001% person. "DO NOT BUFF ME!" was shouted in broadcast upon what I saw as a beneficial action. IIRC, they were a fire/fire brute. They were melee, at any rate. I was confused, so, intrigued, I began following them around, keeping them in my big AOE bubble and keeping them topped up on single target defense. The abuse being hurled at me only intensified over about 20 minutes, until a GM finally contacted me via tells and asked me something like, "Please don't taunt them. I don't know WHAT the deal is, but they're pretty upset." So one person's 'Nice!' may be another's 'OH GOD WHY ARE YOU TORMENTING ME?!' To the OP, there's actually a villainous story arc that lets you act pretty unfaithfully towards the Midnighters if you have some kind of beef with them. Look for Darrin Wade. I have family members who shy away from any kind of fiction remotely attached to 'magic', thinking it's ultimately Satan trying to tempt you. The kind of mystic stuff that goes on in CoH's complex, intertwined lore would be exactly the kind of thing that would upset them. If that's the kind of thing that's bothering you, be aware that there's magic all through the game, at all levels. Even if you try to go purely tech/science, you still run across it. If this applies to you or anyone else, remember that everything that goes on in CoH is fiction, and the developers who wrote that fiction have been very open and straightforward about their creative process and influences. Nobody is trying to lead anyone into evil or damnation here. The story bible that contains all the original Cryptic/NCSoft/Paragon game lore is easy to come by and, unless you're trying to avoid spoilers, well worth reading.

For me, if I'm not enjoying defeating every enemy on the map, I feel like there's something wrong. If you're not enjoying the core gameplay loop of 'click powers, defeat enemies in interesting ways', you're playing the wrong character or even the wrong game. So when I use autocomplete, it's almost always for a bugged mission. Then I get to the variations on 'Rescue n+1 hostages in Oranbega'. I LIKE Oranbega maps. They're interesting without having too much crap to get caught on. If I can't find all the hostages within a about 40 minutes of starting the mission, though, the part of my brain that associates with my character turns off. I quit enjoying the game. That's when I start looking for the autocomplete button.

I'd be interested in seeing a with/without firey aura brutes numbers. At one point we had a spreadsheet that had both with/without simply because there were so. very. many. fire farmers.

The problem here is that Gunn is working against not one, but two cinematic continuities, both with some horrendous stinkers clogging the pipes. DC movies have established that these characters exist in their own cities in the last 10 years, for better or worse. (Mostly worse.) He's not really buying himself anything by pretending that the world he's working in is NOT already populated the way first superhero movies tend to. Despite all the turds DC flushed into theaters in the last few years, Gunn somehow made Polkadot Man vs. Starro work, and work *WELL* in the last Suicide Squad movie. He made Rocket Racoon work for not one, but THREE films. We *all* wept for Rocket in Guardians 3. I'm willing to let him cook with whichever characters he thinks he needs to make a non-Snyder Superman movie work.

Wine is one huge collection of edge-cases. It's amazing it doesn't break more often than it does. I've watched my darling spouse STRUGGLE to get the exact right combination of Proton versions and/or Winetricks configs to make games like Fallout 4 work. Bethesda had a big update earlier in the year that broke several previous years' worth of fixes.

The hardest part of this is converting the artwork to the texture format used by CoH, and that's been fairly well documented. Changing the color without changing the artwork is as simple as opening the images for the icons in the editor of your choice, adding a flat color layer of your choice, and adjusting the blend options on the layer until you like the color. It's more work for set IOs that tend to have color artwork on top of the colored background. I've poked around the Ourodev git repository specifically looking for artwork and haven't been able to find much. Devs, please consider making original artwork files for powersets and IOs available if you have them to make this kind of mod easier to accomplish.

Currently, Endeavour, which installs Wine straight from the Arch repos by default.

I tried launching CoH this evening under both Wine 9.21 and 9.22, but cohgame.exe hung after the login screen. However, dropping back to 9.20 allowed login and play as usual. To be clear, this doesn't seem to be a problem with CoH, but seems to be a Wine problem. There are some other games impacted, like LOTRO. (I was up in the air on whether I should post to the bug reports forum. GMs, please feel free to move the topic if you think it's necessary.) If you're on a rolling-release-style distribution or are installing from WineHQ directly (like you're using their PPAs on Debian-based OSes), you may want to consider holding back on upgrading past 9.20.

Instancing Lord Winter using the same rules as MSR would be wonderful. Part of the problem then becomes explaining that, no, you don't need a 50 to lead because everyone gets levellocked at 50, which is still far and away better than people just bouncing because you're trying to recruit but not 50. I run into this fairly often when recruiting for Summer Blockbuster or Drowning in Blood: "Wait, don't we need a high level to lead?! Won't we die if we're not 50 for this?!" "No, this one locks everyone to level 29, regardless of their real level." Occasionally people STILL don't understand that, so I explain it in terms of the level-locking that they've already experienced in Death from Below. "Y'know how DFB always starts you at level 2? This is like that, except you're level 29 for both movies." Also, at what point did players start thinking they were instantly going to die if there wasn't a 50 leading the team? (Incarnates. It happened when Incarnates dropped.) I feel like the level scaling mechanic needs a big billboard in front of Atlas City Hall explaining what it does and doesn't do. Or maybe Mender Tesseract needs a 'Level Scaling Tutorial' under her name in Ouro.

I started this Christmas event like I started the one last year, in 2023. I took my newest character to rescue Baby New Year and defeat Lady Winter. And then I logged out. Like last year, I'm finding myself just not wanting to log back in for the event, and am left wondering why. This seems out of place for me since I enjoy the Halloween event so much I run all my characters through all the badges, many of them solo. I don't really care for the Murder Motel league in PI, but I adore solo Trick or Treating and will lead Dr. Kane's trial repeatedly. I've put together a few reasons why I think the Christmas Event is turning me away: Opening Christmas Presents isn't very challenging, and is hard to do at level due to limited spawns: One of the things that makes solo or small-team Trick or Treating fun for me is that it's constantly challenging. Even well-slotted, well-equipped characters can get TOUGH fights in the form of the Halloween EBs. (That difficulty completely dries up in full groups and might as well not exist in leagues full of incarnate players. Trying to contribute to ANY league event when you're not decked out with incarnate powers is like trying to extinguish a match with a water pistol when Superdude420 next to you is dousing the entire area with his fire-hose.) The solo-friendly event for Christmas is opening presents. Unlike Trick or Treating, presents have limited spawns and always spawn at zone level rather than player level. If you happen to be opening them in a zone where the snowmen that spawn aren't grey to you, they can be anywhere from purple to green, all in the same zone. Since our population is so top-heavy, higher-level zones tend to be saturated in terms of people opening the available presents. The unsaturated zones tend to be lower level meaning that it's quite possible for a single player to control a huge part of that zone's present spawns, even if he or she defeats all the snowmen they spawn. This was also a problem during this year's anniversary event, which uses the same spawn mechanics. My suggestions: Tweak the spawn rules for presents and Snow Men somewhat: Require players to open presents in a zone their level or have the Winter Horde snowmen always spawn at the opener's level. To avoid situations where a level 50 is littering Atlas Park with level 50 snowmen, have those snowmen only agro the present opener unless attacked. To avoid the situation where you have 50 level 50s crammed into Peregrine Island trying to open all the same present spawns, populate Cimerora and the Rikti Warzone with presents. Kalisti Wharf seems to have adequate present (and time capsule) spawns, but players tend to forget the zone exists because there's so very little content there. It's possible that Kalisti could use an increased number of spawns to make it more appealing. Baby New Year and Lady Winter missions are repetitive and grindy: While Old Man Time's missions for the Christmas event have fun difficulty spikes in the form of Snaptooth and Lady Winter, the rest of the missions are very samey-samey-same-old. You've already fought lots of snowmen while opening presents, and if you want to earn rather than simply buy the Candy-keeper's badges, it means grinding the ever-loving snot out of snowmen in those missions. The missions are great for single groups, but then you have to convince the group that you're there to 'Defeat All Winter Horde', which tends to be ignored by PUGers. Yes, we know you can solo Snaptooth, Bobby. That's wonderful. Now come help us KO all these snow hydra. My suggestions: Add a more linear, indoor mission to Old Man Time's lineup. Snowmen are *okay* to fight, but having some more interesting enemies would go a long way to making it less repetitive. Consider adding a 'Must Defeat All' challenge setting to the game. Check a box to convert any mission or taskforce into a 'Defeat All'. This would help prevent the situation where that one player 'Didn't hear' that you wanted to defeat all, or 'forgot' and stealthed all the mission's objectives, not just on the Winter event missions, but for a LOT of the game's content. Also consider re-weighting the cost of the Candy Keeper's badges or the Candy Cane drop rate so that each badge is about one mission's worth of effort. Leading Lord Winter's Realm below level 50 is punitive: I don't make any secret of the fact that I simply *do not enjoy* the Incarnate game, but that's another thread. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to lead teams and leagues if your character is not Incarnate or even if you're not 50. However, trying to keep a league together long enough to start Lord Winter's Realm when you're not level 50 is an exercise in frustration. A significant number of people who are interested in joining the league simply bounce when they see the league leader is not 50. From those who stay, there's a constant demand to "Give the star to a 50", even before the event starts. Perhaps the most frustrating experience I've had with this trial was with a player who I truly believe was trying to be helpful. However, they were also dismissive and demanding. After they joined the league I was building, they started demanding to lead the league since they were 'already 50 and lead everything anyways'. It seemed like one of those situations where a person is condescending without realizing it. Regardless of if they meant to treat me like small child or not, they still managed to. My suggestions: League leadership mechanics could use some rework. I've heard people say that they're perfect and should not be touched, but even the league window has some jankyness that could be ironed out... such as the difficulty arranging team leaders. Making the process of anchoring the league's level seems like an obvious pain point that could be addressed. What I'd really like for Christmas is a 4-person trial. I adore Dr. Kane's and Summer Blockbuster, and I believe I'd still adore them without their awards. I'd love a Christmas Double Feature to play in theaters 3 and 4. Help John McClain kick Hans Gruber off of Nakatomi Tower or assist Kevin McAlister in booby-trapping his house to defeat the burglars. The award doesn't need to be equivalent to an Overwhelming Force IO, but it'd be nice if it was about the same as the award for Lord Winter. All events are not for everyone, and that's... okay... if a bit sad. I think that with a very minor bit of tweaking, the Christmas Event could be a LOT better for most players.

So the Tuatha in the Lady Winter mission are still bugged this year: One of the groups of Tuatha standing near Nuada show up as enemies. They attack the allied groups of Tuatha, but they *won't* attack the players despite the player being able to attack them. I've never had them survive long enough to see if they'd convert to Allies if you get Nuada to try to send them out.

I can confirm this. I've personally experienced this bug.