Curveball

I've also noticed this!

So I finally got Mids Reborn to work on KDE Neon, as long as I update the databases manually, and I've been enjoying the whole "let's see how this build would pan out" minigame... except that for the last few days something happened that caused all my defense values to display as MINUS NINETY THOUSAND PERCENT and my resistance values at MINUS NINE HUNDRED PERCENT: So my first thought was yikes, they really did nerf tankers. But when I went over to my Windows partition, Mids ran fine. So my second thought was "the half-assed way I managed to get Mids to work on KDE Neon has somehow broken it." But then I noticed this: That's right, I had accidentally toggled on "rest" and Mids was faithfully applying the rest debuff. Which is, apparently, quite large. When I clicked it off all my values were at sane numbers again. So, to summarize: I am not always an observant man, that rest debuff is extremely large, and--at least according to Mids--positional defense is unaffected by it.

OK, so for all practical purposes it's too late to chime in here I guess, since the devs have decided to pull the SR changes completely, but I still feel the need to put in a word as to why I, at least, would have cheerfully and wholeheartedly taken the Master Brawler toggle on Tanker, Brute, and Scrapper, as is, without so much as blinking. So these are the reasons why I, an uncultured buffoon, would happily take a Master Brawler toggle power that does nothing but give status resistance: 1. Fire and Forget. This one is obvious, and mostly dismissed by everyone who's against it, but I find having to keep track of a click power's expiration a pain in the neck, especially if there are other things going on. Most of the time in combat I realize practiced brawler has expired because some rando mob knocks my character down or mezzes him or does some other thing the power is supposed to stop. Sure, you can make it auto. Most of the time you can make it auto by slotting a single SO and building up your global recharge and then setting it on auto. But also, if you're really trying to build up your global recharge, that auto happens a lot faster than it needs to and when it goes off it interrupts pretty much anything you're doing, OR the thing you're doing prevents it from firing off and you don't notice and then the next thing you know you get knocked down or mezzed. So: Master Brawler lets you turn it on and keep it on (though there was a post stating that MB was being detoggled when nothing else was. If that was intended behavior rather than something that needed to be ironed out, that would make it a lot less useful in my eyes). 2. Save Ctrl+L click for something else. If you have Practiced Brawler set on auto, you don't have Hasten on auto. I'd rather have Hasten on auto. 3. Save the Slots. With Practiced Brawler now getting the HP buffer, there will be temptations to add slots to it to add heals or reduce recharge even more so it can be fired off faster than necessary. But the Master Brawler toggle would just need a single end reducer, and all those extra slots can be put in some other power. My second favorite thing about Quickness is I don't have to slot it. I just add a single +run or +fly and I'm done, and those extra slots can go into some other power. Slots get precious at the end of the game. A power that does the thing it does without you having to fuss with it, and allowing you to save those potential slots for something else you'd rather build out? Yes please. I know that's not a particularly long list, but it's sufficiently a QoL improvement (not an EFFICIENCY improvement or a POWER improvement, just MORE CONVENIENT) that I'd gladly take the tradeoff. I'm disappointed it won't make it to the live servers. Oh well. Life goes on...

I think I'm at the point where I don't really need the end recovery part, I was more interested in the sapping potential though it appears that's not it's primary purpose any more. It does stilll seem quite useful as a massive buff to regen before you engage large crowds, though! At this point I think I just need to get the right HOs and I'll be good.

OK, I'll start thinking of it as primarily a regen click power and go from there. Thanks!

So I've been playing with staff as an attack set, and I read somewhere (reddit, maybe?) that it paired well with EA. So I made a Staff/EA brute, thinking that yeah, Sky Splitter adding round-up-to-10% resistance would be a nice boost to this resist set which seems to be a little weak on the Negative Energy, Psi, and Toxic side (stronger for Psi than a lot of others, but still on the low side compared to other defenses). I'm at level 48 now, and I've capped out resistance to Smashing, Lethal, and Energy (obviously energy), and I'm at 68% fire/cold, 54% negative, 59% psionic, and 39% toxic without any staff buffs. So as far as damage mitigation goes I think the character is in a good place. And offensively, the staff attacks combined with the EA damage field do great. I know staff is generally thought of as a lower damage set because of the long animation times but his basic attacks aren't appreciably slower than the others, the AOEs are a little longer but they're fantastic AOEs, and sky splitter is a bit on the maddeningly slow side but it does have the 10% resist buff in form of body and it's awfully satisfying when it lands. I can live with that. In fact, I really don't have any complaints with the set beyond an innate irrational desire for my character to be perfect in every way which is just one of those things I have to route around when I'm playing games. But I'm bothered by the fact that, for the most part, I just don't use Energize or Power Sink, and Power Sink seems like such a set-defining power based on discussion that I figure I have to be doing something wrong. I mean I obviously haven't built it up properly - it's currently two-slotted with recharges, so it's not sapping at the levels it could, though I've read that its ability to drain energy from mobs sort of falls off a cliff when you get to the high level encounters, which is where I'm about to be. The biggest use case I see for it is to jump into a huge crowd at the start and fire it off in order to get the 15% per hit recharge (EDIT: regeneration, I meant regeneration) bonus, and then fire off Energize to get another 100% on top of that, to help recover from the damage I don't already block. I can see the use of that in crowds, less for fighting the end boss or AVs or GMs. So I thought I'd ask: how should I be using Power Sink? Is it the set defining power I assumed it was? Does it become less useful at the end game? Do I need to completely retool everything in order to properly build it out? (slots are precious commodities! I've only got three to go!)

I tried searching "teams" and "groups" but never thought of just searching for "experience." Sheesh. *headsmack* 😄 OK, so if my calculator hasn't failed me... Assuming Reward Scale 1 lvl 35, 10 minions 429 per minion, so 4290 but lets assume the minions are four levels higher than you, so level bonus 1.8, so: 772.2 per minion, so 7722 but TEAM SIZE OF 8: Team size bonus of 2.5! 1930.5 per mob, so 19305 total, but divided among each member it becomes 2413.125, rounded up to 2414 So assuming I can multiply and divide properly - jury is still out on that - yes, I see it now. You get less overall xp per kill in a team even with the bonus so it becomes an issue of "can the team kill fast enough to make up for it," which is definitely possible to do.

So someone asked the Help channel why there were "sitters" in farm groups. I don't farm but my assumption was that increasing the size of the team increases the overall xp you get while farming, so sitters, while not being as useful as hitters, were still allowing the hitters to collect more xp per kill. However, people who apparently had more experience pretty much said that the xp bonus was negated by the fact that you were still taking the same amount of time to clear map, because the sitter wasn't doing anything, and you were splitting xp with an extra body, so there was no net gain from having a sitter and farmers were basically just being nice. Which mostly makes sense to me, except that the longer I thought about it the more I started to question one of my basic assumptions of the advantages of grouping in game, which is that you got an xp bonus from grouping so that playing in groups, assuming the group doesn't just fall over and set itself on fire, is that you get xp faster and you get _more_ xp faster. I still feel like the math has to ultimately favor group size - if you were getting a net xp loss for being in a group than you were by soloing, there would be a lot more soloing. I can see that being offset by large groups tearing through mobs faster, but it can't be _just_ that, can it? I mean, maybe it can. I can't work it out.

I know FA is the go-to for farming builds, but how is it in the rest of the game? It has some obvious gaps but I think those can be patched over enough to work. I just don't really hear about it being used for anything other than farming, so I'm curious.

Here is the issue I'm having... certain text that NPCs use in missions have a weird fade out effect that keeps from reading it. I've attached a screenshot. You'll notice the [NPC] text is fine, but [Caption] fades out from bottom to top: Is there a way to change how caption text is rendered? I haven't found anything in settings - or if I have, I'm oblivious to it - and I don't think I can use /bind because /bind is focused on what keystrokes I use, not what the game is doing on its own.

Which content do you mean? CoH saves a number of configuration files locally, and if you don't manually copy them over you won't have access to them. Certain bind files, costume files, power customization setting files are all saved as text files on your computer, so if you just install a fresh copy on a new machine none of that will come over. You'll have to find those files on your old machine and move them to same file location on your new machine to keep using them.

If you have Steam for Linux, you can run CoH as a non-Steam app. I use Proton Experimental and have zero issues with the game whatsoever (running KDE Neon).

For Brutes it's 4%/9%/15%

It might not, since Combat Attributes reported 9% at two... but that could be some transient stat reporting weirdness. Also, it's different per AT - 15% is for my Brute; my Tanker only gets around 13% at 3.

Answering my own question, it's 15% at level 3. (I completely forgot that Combat Attributes breaks down all your bonuses so you can see where they're coming from. I'm so used to using the Attribute Monitor to see just the totals I'm out of the habit of opening up the big window)