[Solo suggestions.]

13 minutes ago, arcane said:

I play on a Mac. I feel your pain. Good luck building your characters - I use an Excel spreadsheet on Google Drives since Mids was never quite made usable on Mac. Don’t link me that thread I’ve tried it half a dozen times 😉

 

Things did get better once I got the 2020 pro, though, as far as game performance goes. Running everything on Ultra now unless I’m double boxing.

I'm running a 2014 Pro and it has issues like Cel Shading not working, some building textures are transparent, and the audio garbles sometimes.  Its a bit of a mess.  Plus I am such a newb that i have no clue what Mids are so..yeah.

[Solo suggestions.]

7 hours ago, Icono04 said:

If you are playing on a subpar computer, keep in mind that playing at +4/*8 (or really, +anything/*8) will put a lot of enemies on your screen and a lot of visual effects from their powers, which your PC might struggle to handle. It is for this reason that I personally avoid soloing against large numbers of enemies on squishy characters, because if my screen freezes up for 4-5 seconds due to graphics overload, that can sometimes be enough for a blaster/controller/etc. to get slaughtered. Less of a problem on melee characters and/or when playing a squishy on a team.

I am segueing into playing on my laptop--but it has issues of its own lol.  Framerate is perfect, but its graphics look kinda yucky despite its good stats.  Gotta love macbooks, ne?

[Macbook performance issues.]

So, instead of playing on my toaster of a PC, I decided to try my luck with my mid 2014 MacBook Pro, running BigSur.  As much as I hate Apple, this thing does have much better stats than my ancient PC.  Problem is, I'm experiencing several issues.  I am using an HDMI cable to connect to an external monitor, which I believe is most likely besides the point, but there is that detail as well.  Okay, here's the list of issues.

1. Cell Shader does not appear to work.  The options appear, but none of the sliders do anything, except for the outlines slider, which has a binary effect.  If it is on at all, all vfx will disappear (auras, portals, etc) but otherwise does nothing.
2. Occasionally the audio starts to gargle rather bad.
3. Certain building textures appear transparent.
4. Colors look really flat, even at higher gfx settings they look in some ways inferior to my ancient PC on lower settings.  I'm guesing this one is a hardware/chipset issue with pos Mac.

I have a feeling there is nothing to be done about any of those, but if anyone has any insights they would be appreciated.

[Solo suggestions.]

10 minutes ago, arcane said:

If you want the security of melee without the melee, consider a Time defender.

Yeah, something like a time/energy defender with idk...combat jumping or hover could be fun.  I got to play with time a little as a secondary at low level, and when I recently did the Midnighter's Mansion arc in Dark Ward I got to see how terrible time magic can be when you 

Spoiler

had to grab the book and fight four living spells that used time magic.

 

[Solo suggestions.]

Follow up:  (Don't feel like half a dozen quote tweets.)

A little backstory. 

Spoiler

I am primarily a solo player by nature.  Dealing with pugs is bothersome and don't have any friends to play with.  I also like to go at my own pace and just chill.  There is also the fact that my main PC borked and I am currently playing on a potato that lags every time I drop burn.  I might consider installing it on my mac if I don't have to deal with wineskin.  I read an install guide before I started, but it might have been outdated as there does seem to be a 64 bit client now...so I don't know.  Anyway, I typically don't love melee dps toons in mmos.  I've played many a tank in my day, but was never quite fond of things like rogues, death knights, fury wars, etc (wowspeak.)  My first toon here was a dark/time corruptor.  Was fun until I hit lv 10 and had a mission where I only had to fight 2 mobs--that was it.  But they were orange and lv 12.  I hit a wall.  I know a lot more now, and realize I wasn't taking advantage of everything available to me, and so I'd likely be able to pull it off, but I made another toon anyway.  This time I decided that having a squishy with no meat shield was a mistake, so I made a mastermind.  Got her to 15 just fine, but grew bored.  That was when I sat down, thought about everything I learned about the game so far, and carefully considered all my options.  I decided that having to deal with large groups of mobs solo meant that I was going to need to be able to survive through res or def.  Status ailments were also annoying--especially sleep.  Also, self heals seemed essential.  I also wanted good aoe damage.  Careful consideration led me to the fire/staff tanker I created.  It was a bit slow at first, but once the build got going I was very pleased with it.

I guess what I'm looking for might be something meta after all.  God-tier solo builds.  When you are into the +3-5/+3-5 range endgame is it brute force, tankiness, or something else altogether that rises to the top?  I'd like to play many of the ATs and will at some point I'm sure, but I have read that most can solo at +1 or 2, but only some builds are really capable of that top tier of solo viability.  

[Solo suggestions.]

Still pretty new to the game.  After two boring/failed toons, I'm finally playing a fire/staff tanker and it's working out pretty well (30+.)  Judging by a lot of the missions I've had to do, I'm finding the idea of trying to solo anything but a tanker a bit daunting.  I'm not going to be starting a new toon any time soon, but I have already started to think about it.  I was wondering if anybody has thoughts on what does/doesn't work for soloing.  I'm not necessarily interested in what is most "meta" as I will play what seems fun and appealing, but if anyone knows of any sort of comprehensive guides on which archetypes/builds have proven high solo viability that would be appreciated.  I always enjoy a good read.  Or, if you just have thoughts or want to start a conversation in this thread, that's fine too.

[Confusing behavior with surface snapping and ceiling trim.]

I've been getting into base building, and I've started to run into some curious behavior.  I'm not sure if I'm not understanding something properly, or if this is a bug, or just a janky quirk of the builder/asset manager.  This is my first post on the forum (as I'm starting to feel weird about posting in the help channel so often.)  Here goes.

I discovered that surface snapping with objects say... putting a medkit on a desk, would bury half the medkit in the desk with the default 1/4" x 1'4" grid.  I had to manually shift drag the object into alignment.  No big deal; I discovered turning off grid snapping fixed this issue altogether.  Moving on, I started to experiment with placing alphabet letters.  This is where things get confusing.  When placing letters on the ceiling trim, I kept getting inconsistent results.  On one side of a doorway, I got it to work fine if I turned off grid snapping and turned on surface mounting, otherwise it would replace the trim as if placing an item too close to the wall normally does.  Okay, I think I understand how to work with this...

I move to the opposite side of the doorway and repeat the same steps--only to find that the behavior is unreproducible.  Nothing I have tried has allowed me to reproduce this behavior.  Anybody have any thoughts on this issue?