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Ultimately the question here is, is it more fun to be given access to something or to have to 'earn' access to something. And that's not a question every player will agree with. There's arguments for each - if you 'earn' access to something it makes you tend to appreciate that a bit more. When you only had a single costume slot, and you suddenly unlocked your second - you were elated because now that option that was previously denied to you becomes available. That sense of achievement can make rewards more special than they otherwise would be. Some people really love that sense of satisfaction and accomplishment you get when you unlock a new special privilege, and they look forward to each new unlock for that reason. But it also does mean locking people out of content. People who overlook that second slot mission, people who don't progress to the point where they can do it, and so on - they are left out. Some people can't play much (Time issues and the like) and just want to dip their waters into character customization after hearing how many options CoH has. They don't want to grind to level 20 or 30 or whatever. Granting them early access means they can experiment and have fun and all that, but it also means that now those privileges are no longer 'special', there's no sense of achievement for it. Being given a reward for free versus working for a reward is a discussion that pops up constantly in games, and there's no right or wrong answer for everyone. Personally I prefer to lock the stuff behind missions to give me goals to work towards, milestones to be pushing forward to, and a reason to go out of my way to unlock something I otherwise couldn't have. But that's just because I love that feeling of accomplishment and achievement.

Another thing to consider, that I just thought of : Damage types. Specifically, if you're the kind of person who fights a lot of CoT then mercs will suffer badly. CoT spectres have a ridiculous 40% resistance to both Smashing and Lethal damage, which hurts Mercs badly as every single damaging attack that soldiers and spec-ops use is lethal or smashing. I don't know if there's any enemies that are heavily energy resistant off the top of my head, but I know that when I play my Robots I clear CoT stuff so much easier. (CoT spectres take 30% MORE damage from energy, making robots their natural enemy) Thugs are especially bad because even their Boss Minion is pure smashing damage, while the others are lethal. Beasts, Mercs, Ninjas are mainly lethal/smashing with the bosses offering more variety with Boss damage types. Necromancers get a lot of versatility since the toxic damage from zombies is mixed with negative energy and smashing damage. And demons are all over the place thanks to each of their Tier 1 minions having different damage types.

Primarily because there's more content available for heroes. Hero-side there's 11 normal 'city' zones, 9 Hazard Zones, 6 Trial Zones, and the tutorial zone. Villain-side there's 7 normal city zones, 1 hazard zone, 1 trial zone, and the tutorial zone. Heroes can fight off 10 giant monsters, Villains have 5. Heroes have 20 task forces, villains have 10 strike forces. There's 4 co-operative ones. Second, people go where the population is - since there's so many more heroes it's easier to find a team, easier to do groups, and thus more people play them. Fewer villains means fewer options for teams, strikes, et cetera. And a big one is that I do see a lot of people who dislike villain zones. Grandville in particular is bad for villains with little vertical movement abilities. Thanks to prestige powers and abundant jetpack inventions/temp powers from mayhems/etc this isn't as bad as it used to be, but I still see complaints. Personally I love the villain side more, Mayhems are much more fun than Safeguards, but I wish there was more 'hero' groups and fewer infighting between villain groups. Villains spend WAY too much time fighting other villain groups with newspaper and other missions; the only hero groups really are Longbow, Legacy Chain, and Wyvern. If they would have added in another 3 hero groups and give the villains a more active 'evil' role and I'd be so very, very happy.

Honestly I don't care in the slightest about the performance increase/decrease. What I care about is that when AGEIA is enabled, it produces a huge amount of persistent physics objects that otherwise vanish. Used bullet shells, debris from trash cans and destroyed objects in Mayhem/safeguard missions. Leaves from trees. Rocks and rubble from stone powers. They would stick around, and interact with powers in useless but visually fantastic ways. Need to see what I mean for yourself? Here's a couple (low quality) videos showing off what it was like. Without being able to turn AGEIA Physics on, those objects are no longer persistent. The shells eject from weapons but the second they hit the floor they vanish entirely. Trash and debris does its own animation then vanishes into thin air. All I want is to be able to turn on the feature that makes those shells become permanent (While you're on the same map, at least) objects that can be interacted with by powers. The old, old option would actually have a max count of 1500 of these 'persistent' physics objects in the map : I never had an AGEIA card, but I know that old nVidia cards would allow this to be turned on because at one point, ages ago, I had these physics enabled and working. I ran around with a Merc/Storm MM and they'd use full auto to just SPRAY the area with bullet shells, and then use Hurricane to suck 'em up and swirl 'em around. Gravity Controllers were amazing too - Lift would not only grab the target, but EVERYTHING Around the target would be flung up then down. Gravity Distortion would suck up all kinds of things. Super-strength stuff like hand clap would send everything flying in all directions. All I want is for those 1500 persistent physics objects to be present in the world and to be affected by my powers like they always used to.

I tried these and they work PERFECTLY, thank you! This probably works but holy crap is it convoluted, Healix's way is so much easier

I'd like to make a macro for specific powers to toggle between them. IE : A Macro for a single key that toggles between Fly and Hover. If I am flying and I press the button once, it turns off flying and turns on Hover. I press it a second time and it turns hover off and flying back on. Or the same thing for Super Jump/Combat Jumping. I asked in Discord and was given info but I probably messed it up because it's not working for me now.

Sadly I could find nothing helpful within the profile inspector. This is gonna drive me nuts I can already tell.

I joined a frostfire team over the weekend on my thermal mastermind, we had some fun and killed us an elite boss. Afterwards, I was flying back to Paragon City and noticed a level 11 tanker (I was 18 at the time) getting into a fight with way too many trolls. So being the meddling do-gooder I am, I started chain-healing him. He didn't seem to understand that for all intents and purposes I was making him invulnerable to the trolls, since I could outheal their damage easily, so he ended up running back to get them zapped by police drones. But hey, I tried!

I did some looking into that 'refactoring' that Colette mentioned, and it mainly leads me to SEGS. I'm a bit confused about that. My assumption about SEGS was that they were trying to recreate the server-side stuff from scratch, since the code was never made available. Once the server code was made available, the advantage that SEGS had would have been twofold - being 100% legal by containing no code that was written by the NCSoft employees, and being potentially faster by being more optimized. But all the SEGS stuff I see seems to mainly be server side, and I don't see much about client. So I have no idea if that's going to be a future option or no. If CoH is using the latest PhysX SDK, however, it introduces possibilities. Slight, perhaps, but possibilities. Perhaps there's advanced options using Profile Inspector, I'll head home and dig around there to see if there's anything I can find that might enable support. I know it probably seems stupid to fixate on this, but it was seriously an amazing feature and I had so much fun with it way back when.

That'd be amazing, though I hope that someone out there within the extremely talented modder communities takes pity upon us and create some high res textures. I know a lot of games out there have had 4k retextures, but since CoH/V has been gone there has never been any reason for them to take a look our way. If I could get 4k textures AND the persistent shells and other physics objects? I'd be in 7th heaven. Well I mean I'm ALREADY in 7th heaven having this game back, but I'd be in 8th heaven or something.

If you're that upset about it, OP, just avoid outdoor missions and focus on doing indoor ones.

XP and infamy rewards from killing a mob are based on the percent of the enemy's life you damage. If an enemy is standing in a fire patch and goes down to 25% health, and you kill it - you only get 25% of the XP and Inf, even if no other player attacked it. If you and another player (Not on your team) each do 50% damage to a mob, each of you get 50% XP and Inf. That said, 'kill stealing' is a super minor thing to be upset about in this game because you'll both get mission credit for defeated enemies and even if someone does tag a mob you almost have killed, you'll still get the bulk of the credit and be able to move on to other enemies that much faster. Even then, it's rarely ever worth grinding outdoor mobs for XP/Inf versus just doing newspaper/scanner missions. The only real reason I could see that you'd want to farm specific enemies in an outdoor area is to farm salvage drops, and those are so random it seems like it's better to just do missions and buy what you need from the AH. If you are on a team, the XP and Inf is shared no matter what - otherwise defenders and healers would get shafted. Sometimes, in some areas, there are missions for outdoor stuff that are simply limited. A few that I can think of off the top of my head are many of the 'Kill X enemies of Y type' missions, such as Agent Carter's missions in Mercy (Kill 15 longbow, destroy 5 legacy chain runes, etc) or the anti-Vahzilok missions in Atlas Park where you have to find and kill several of them outside a charity event. Sometimes those specific enemies are easy to find in groups, other times they're semi-rare or not spawning for whatever reason. In those instances, getting mad that someone else hit an enemy you're fighting seems a bit petty. Yes, they took a tiny fraction of the reward from you - but they're just trying to get past that mission same as you. Sooner or later your contact will be giving you an indoor mission that nobody else can access unless they're on your team, so you can move at your own pace and not worry about it.

That is so super disappointing. I kind of wonder if there'd be a way to enable 'persistent physics objects' (Bullet shells, paper and scraps from destroyed mayhem objects, etc) without the Ageia support using some config file or something? I dunno. I know the server source code is out there, I don't know about the client-side and since all the physics stuff was purely client side I have no idea if some bored coder or experienced modder from other games would ever be interested in being lured over to take a look and enable those defunct options.

If I could add a new zone, it'd be a trial zone similar to the RWZ, where heroes and villains would both be present. Unlike the RWZ, they would not be able to group up together - instead they'd still be separate and competing indirectly in PvE content. It'd be underground vast cavern zone accessable by both heroes and villains. It'd contain five massive rock spires stretching from the ground up to the ceiling, and each one would be controlled by a separate group. One would be a Dr Aeon laboratory (Arachnos & Villain entrance), another would be taken over by the Circle of Thorns. A third would be a living extension of the Devouring Earth. A fourth would be cordoned off and taken over by Longbow (Hero Entrance), and the fifth would be a Nemesis lair. All five groups would be fighting it out in the center, and every so often one of the three non-player groups would release a giant monster from their spire that players could gang up on and attack. The CoT would be a stone golem held together by vines, the Devouring Earth would be a massive headless quadruped slime monster, and the Nemesis would be a huge drill tank. Different enemy groups would drop unique salvage that's turned into contacts on the Arachnos/Longbow sides, and reward unique temp buffs/powers and some enhancements. If both sides hand in enough unique salvage, a special zone event would occur where Arachnos & Longbow's fight accidentally triggers a magma detonation in the center of the cavern that would release a giant magma monster (Arachnos side), and a giant robot (Longbow side) that would battle. Players would fight alongside one monster or the other to try to beat the enemy directly and indirectly (IE : Seal off a volcanic vent to weaken the magma monster), or take down a shield generator for the robot, or just deal a tiny bit of damage directly by fighting alongside your team's monster. The victorious side gaining a substantial bonus in salvage alongside a zone-wide boost for their players. When entering players are warned that the battle has already made the cavern too unstable, adding extra fighting could cause everything to collapse, so they're restricted from fighting one another and instead aiding in the fight against the other groups. If one side or the other lacks enough players and it's horribly uneven, special 'mercenary' contacts will allow heroes to fight for Arachnos, or Villains for Longbow, to even things up.

I never had a separate Physics card myself, but I can say 100% for certain that I have had the Physics enabled in the past. Or rather, there used to be a setting SOMEHOW somewhere within the game that made things like bullet shells actually 'stay' in the world and could be interacted with by various powers. I'm not alone in this, I noticed this post where someone else remembers the same thing. Since I never had a separate card, I'm sure that somehow I got it working with my nVidia graphics card back when they'd advertise that PhysX was a thing. If so, in theory, there should be some way to re-enable this, right? ----- Back in the day I used to run a Merc/Storm mastermind. The mercs would use full auto and just spray bullets and casings everywhere. I'd go through a warehouse, then run back out because there'd be literally thousands and thousands of shell casings littering the warehouse floor, and I'd have fun sucking them up with Hurricane and sending them all flying.

I remember playing the game all those many years ago, I got an nVidia graphics card and it had the PhysX support. When I turned it on, I noticed some amazing stuff - used shells from my (and my pets) guns would not disappear when fired, they'd LITTER THE GROUND. There were shells everywhere, and my powers would affect them. I'd see grenades send shells flying all over the room, storm powers would blast objects and shells everywhere around with gusts of wind. My machine these days is light years ahead of that, and while it doesn't have the dedicated PhysX support it used to I imagine it should have no problems handling the extra opjects. Is there any way to turn all those physics objects back on? To make used shells from guns actually stay around and interact with powers? Is there any way to make all that fun and uselessly cool stuff still happen? EDIT : Here's what I mean! Watch these videos to see why some people think enabling physics is desirable!

So if I understand everything here, if I wanted to be able to group with heroes and do hero shit but still progress through the villain storyline and get a patron, I'd want to go rogue and stay rogue until I get all the powers I want. If I want to feel like I 'earned' the alignment change I do it normally, and if I don't care about that I can just use the magical bird in the dance dimension to change instantly. Then if I want to see all the hero content I missed, I'd go full on hero, go to Ouroboros, and do all the previous arcs. I think I have a plan now, fellows!

Help me out here a bit guys. I played the game religiously from issues 1 through 9, and far less after that. The rogue stuff is a bit unfamiliar to me. From how I understand it, you pick a faction and play it until level 20 - then you get the chance to do 'morality' missions. And in doing so you can join an intermediate alignment (Rogue/Vigilante) where you can access zones from both hero side AND villain side. That's where my understanding breaks down. Let's say I want to make my Arachnos Soldier into a rogue. Does this mean I now have double the content? I can access hero missions AND villain missions? There's no penalty for doing either? If so, why would I want to proceed past rogue into becoming an actual hero?

I've been thinking of creating a 'Spider Mastermind'. I don't have much experience with VEATs, so any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated! A crab spider soldier with Spiderlings, Call Reinforcements, and Summon Blaster from Black Scorpion's Patron Power Pool. Villain Plan by Pines' Villain Designer 1.962 Spider MM: Level 50 Natural Arachnos Soldier Primary Power Set: Crab Spider Soldier Secondary Power Set: Crab Spider Training Power Pool: Speed Ancillary Pool: Mace Mastery Villain Profile: Level 1: Channelgun -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(3), Acc-I(23), Acc-I(46) Level 1: Wolf Spider Armor -- ResDam-I(A), ResDam-I(5) Level 2: Longfang -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(3), Acc-I(34), Acc-I(42) Level 4: Crab Spider Armor Upgrade -- ResDam-I(A), ResDam-I(5) Level 6: Super Speed -- Run-I(A) Level 8: Suppression -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(9), Acc-I(9), Acc-I(43), EndRdx-I(43) Level 10: Combat Training: Offensive -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(11), Acc-I(11) Level 12: Arm Lash -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(13), Acc-I(13), Acc-I(19), DefDeb-I(40), EndRdx-I(43) Level 14: Combat Training: Defensive -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(15), DefBuff-I(15) Level 16: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(17), RechRdx-I(17) Level 18: Tactical Training: Assault -- EndRdx-I(A), EndRdx-I(19) Level 20: Tactical Training: Leadership -- ToHit-I(A), EndRdx-I(21), EndRdx-I(21), ToHit-I(23) Level 22: Mental Training -- Run-I(A) Level 24: Fortification -- ResDam-I(A), ResDam-I(25), ResDam-I(25), EndRdx-I(40), EndRdx-I(42) Level 26: Frenzy -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(27), Acc-I(27), Acc-I(37), DefDeb-I(37), EndRdx-I(42) Level 28: Serum -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(29), Heal-I(29) Level 30: Tactical Training: Maneuvers -- EndRdx-I(A), EndRdx-I(31), DefBuff-I(31), DefBuff-I(31) Level 32: Omega Maneuver -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(33), Acc-I(33), Acc-I(33), RechRdx-I(34), RechRdx-I(34) Level 35: Summon Spiderlings -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(36), Acc-I(36), Acc-I(36), DefDeb-I(37) Level 38: Call Reinforcements -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(39), Acc-I(39), Acc-I(39), DefDeb-I(40) Level 41: Web Envelope -- Acc-I(A) Level 44: Shatter Armor -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(45), Acc-I(45), Acc-I(45), RechRdx-I(46), EndRdx-I(46) Level 47: Summon Blaster -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(48), Acc-I(48), RechRdx-I(48), RechRdx-I(50) Level 49: Venom Grenade -- Dmg-I(A), Dmg-I(50), Acc-I(50) Level 1: Conditioning Level 2: Swift -- Run-I(A) Level 2: Health -- Heal-I(A) Level 2: Hurdle -- Jump-I(A) Level 2: Stamina -- EndMod-I(A), EndMod-I(7), EndMod-I(7) ------------ The innate leadership buffs and strong AoE focus is a boon for grouping, and later on the spiderlings and disruptors gives the soldier 5 pets to run around with. Later on moving into the Mace Mastery with Black Scorpion gives the soldier a Blaster, with Hasten and Mental Training the 15 minute cooldown can be brought down to 7.3 minutes. ------------

Bots : Offer tremendous versatility, but with fewer debuffs and SLIGHTLY less damage overall. Mercs : Offer slightly more damage and debuffs at the expense of versatility. Bots are a bit more tanky since they have more heals (Each of the 2 lieutenants can single-target heal, and the unique power is a single target full-heal) and some defense buffs. If you have a strong buffing secondary they can become VERY difficult to kill. Mercs are less tanky and more damaging, since they have significantly less healing but they do have the Serum which offers a significant offensive boost. Their only direct healing is the third minion pet which is a medic with a single target heal.