Ukase

I know earlier, I took a level 14 to my sg base and did the spelunker mission (missing fortune teller). Now, I am unable to do this with any character below level 25. I don't understand why. So...if possible, it would be nice to use the pillar of ice and flame so my level 14 can get the ouro portal without feeling cheap and dirty and begging for one. In the meantime, I'll use Echo:galaxy city...but it'd be nice if we could actually use the pillar.

Recently, I submitted a ticket. I go to check the status of the ticket, and I try to log in, and it says "Access is denied". So..I ask myself...is my password incorrect? So I go through that process, update a new password and still get "access is denied". Not really sure what to do about this. I've got a league of people who are wondering why preservation specialist wasn't awarded when no bombs were detonated, but defeated via snipe.

So...I tend to keep a tidy sum in my email so that when I start playing a lower level character, there's some influence in case it's needed. I was replying to an e-mail, and noticed - just barely - that the sum of influence in a different email was now "attached" or included in my message which I was about to respond. I caught it, it's a minor thing and one you'd never notice if you didn't keep a few million in your email. Still, it seems like a bug to me.

I want to thank all of you for taking the time to reply. Hyperstrike - what server are you on, leading these raids? As for FPS, Lag, and all the reasons not to do the MSR -- I don't have those problems. I guess I'm fortunate that my system seems to handle the large zone events like MSR and Hami without any problems. Everything in computers will bottleneck somewhere, no matter how good the system, so I'm certainly not immune to such things, but they just haven't impacted me, aside from some targeting issues - which I took for the league killing quickly. It's been a few days, and particularly trying to look inward, it's true that it was my own enjoyment in busting the grate open and watching the ritki simply be unable to hit me while the progress bar slides down is what I was after. As stated by one of the earlier responders, it's just not worth it for me to worry about things outside of my control. I had just hoped that there was a prevailing norm that I could call upon, that maybe I'd missed. As for pylon order - who came up with the odd numbering system for those anyway? Seems like they expected us to do 2 revolutions around the mothership for some reason. <shrug> That said, I remember in live, playing on Liberty, and then Champion. The same event - but a different meeting point, and a different pylon order for each server. Ultimately, the order isn't that big of a deal, but having the league split means less merits for them and me, unless someone on my team splits from me. (something I now communicate prior to the raid) As for the time invested for a relatively small return - that will vary with all of us.

I'm sure that many have never even done a Mothership raid before. And, many of those who have, have other things on their minds other than this admittedly minor issue. Most MSRs are led by someone who simply wants to do an MSR. They may or may not call out pylons in any specific order, with the server population simply clearing them in the order they see fit. Often - a league will go their own way, despite what the league leader calls out. Skipping 7 and going to pylon 4, for example, or half the league leap-frogging a pylon to get the pylons down faster. While that bugs me - because it will be 3 merits I won't get - what really bugs me is when I proceed to take down a grate to click on a bomb, and someone who's not on my team slides right in and steals the opportunity to click from me. Obviously, there's nothing that can be done about this, aside from my making a note that this is not a savory character I'd want to team with. But what do you folks say? Am I getting irked over nothing? I'm the one taking the risk hacking the grate - and some yahoo zips in and steals my opportunity for accumulating bomb planting for the badge. I would form my own msr and state various rules about each team being assigned a given grate/bomb, but I wouldn't be able to enforce it, so what's the point?

What I found best for merits was the sig story arcs. 20 merits for typically a very short time. And don't do these in groups, it just makes things take longer. Not necessarily in the mission, but in forming. It's a chore. Waiting for this person and that; "how do I get there?" etc. For example: Theoden, the contact in Skyway for the first sig arc story. All you need is a few purples and you're gold. First mission - you only have to kill 1-2 bad guys. A mage and maybe a minion. Then you leave out the door to the left of the one you entered and make your way out from there. A "reveal" temp power makes this about idiot proof. Second mission: you just run past the igneous; you see the glowie in the dirt, you pop a luck or two, click. With added defense, they'll miss. Worst case, because you were smart enough to set your notoriety to 1/0, you only have to kill 2 bad guys. Then proceed to the Lost Boss. Kill him and one other bad guy, exit. Third mission - hop/fly/run to the back island, and beat 3-4 igneous, and the bad guy. If you have flight, it's super easy. If not - he uses Flurry more than not and whiffs half the time. When he's dead, they send a scrapper and some CoT - maybe 3. Clobber them, a cut scene, and then it's over. 20 merits for 9-11 minutes. Granted, some more aggressive players can finish an ITF that fast and get a few more merits - but they lose on the time it takes to recruit. The other Sig Story arcs are not as short, but most all of them can be done in about 30 minutes or less (I have not done the second line of story arcs - only speaking of the first series)

Just thought I'd add this "pro-tip" on getting the Ouro port without begging or bugging anyone else. Use your sg base Teleport Beacon to Echo:Galaxy City. You're going to get those badges and plaques anyway. Then, you take the Ouro portal - which is the train - to Ouroboros and get that badge. **************** Edit: Revisiting to see if there's new information since page 3 dropped, and this Pro-tip is no longer accurate. But, now, if you want an ouro port and nobody is around Atlas to give you one, enter City Hall, and visit Recluse's Victory at level 1 !!! And, no need to worry, you can zone in at level 1, it would be quite a feat for a villain to get through everything to get you. Highly unlikely. Once you zone in, you'll get the portal (which will be grayed out because you can't use Ouro in a pvp zone), but zone back to Atlas and you'll have it.

I know that with the abrupt shutdown years ago, that many want to take time to absorb the environment, soak it in, and not take it for granted. But, honestly, I notice certain avatars and think - "Oh, clever name" or "Well, what a tart to dress their avatar in such a fashion". Beyond that, I am quite obtuse.

I know I'm not the only one to experience this. I'll be getting xp and threads, and vg merits on my vet level 33 Sentinel (That means level 50 with 33 vet levels) - and I stopped getting xp and influence. I did get some threads, but nothing else. Why is this happening only during MSRs?

I have to realize that it's not the case that players visit these forums. They used to visit the CoH forums, but even then, that was probably only 10% of the player base. But, I think it could be argued that the folks that read the forums were the best 10% of the player base, as far as knowledge of game mechanics, character builds and overall skill. In any event, I don't particularly enjoy standing around (or sitting, as the case may be) doing nothing, waiting for someone else to finish something up. It's a waste of my game time.

I'm sure I'm in the minority - but Battalion? I know some players have multiple toons in the high vet levels already decked out with tier 4's and they are honestly bored with running BAF and Lambda. Heck, I'm one of them. That said...there are still plenty of level 50 players - about 5 each time I'm on a BAF that have absolutely no idea how to do BAF, because they've never done it before. And most leaders don't take time to explain anything. Some do - and I make sure to make a note in game about how well they do, because those are the folks I look to team with for future trials. But if you add Battalion -- there's going to be a large chunk of the player base that gets left behind. I say, if it's not broken, don't fix it. We have our game back for the time being. Can't we just leave well enough alone? CoH could have left the game as it was in Issue 4, and given all the power choices, that would have been fine with me.

For the time being, given that it took an hour just to form the league last time, there doesn't seem to be that much interest in the time slot I've chosen. So for now, I'm putting this on hold - at least at that time slot. I'm going to try something before the hami raid, or after and see how that goes.

I had initially downloaded Tequila in my downloads folder for Paragon Chat. When the game came back, I dug up an i-23 copy of VM and basically downloaded it into my downloads folder. Probably not the most organized way. So I can just extract the new Moremaps into my download folder? Do we need to restart the game?

what's a discord? They have these beautiful forums here for that kind of information. Why would they use some other site?

I am curious as to how many of you have your screen set up. I was leading a trial last night, and when we loaded in, I no longer had the lead. No big deal, but there was a team of 8, and 5 other teams of varying amounts. 5 had crashed/gotten booted for whatever reason - and because I didn't have the lead, I couldn't reinvite those that got the boot. The fellow that did get the league star said he didn't have his league window open. Not sure why he couldn't hear/read the zillion tells and comments in broadcast, local and PMs, but eventually he did. Got a badge or two, but it didn't go nearly as smoothly as it could've been. Not really his fault, but it was a mess. When he said he didn't have the league window open, I was ...taken aback. Who else plays like this, and why? I know when I solo, I like to minimize the clutter. But when teaming, it's helpful to see who's taking damage, etc. For example - how do you know if your entire team got wiped out? I'm sure there are ways to see - defeated teammate at your feet, orange-ish triangle on the map, etc - but seriously, I'd like to know how others are organizing their screen. Maybe I need a bigger monitor.

Leading a BAF- and boy what a fiasco. I zone in, but I'm not the league lead. Instead of 3 teams set up with good team composition for the prisoner escapes, I get one team of 8, a team of 4 and the rest scattered in 4 remaining teams, and missing 5 people. Someone apparently (from what I was told - no idea if they knew what they were talking about) started the cut scene, and because some hadn't loaded in, the game forgets they were part of the league, and boots them. The guy that got the league star, "didn't have the league window up" (who plays with that not showing????) ignored or didn't notice tells, or broadcasts or local to give me the star so I could fix the teams. Finally, after the defeat of Nightstar, he does, and I reinvite those I could, but we're still short a few. Is this a known bug? Locking teams doesn't seem to do anything, is that a bug too? I'm almost ready to forgo incarnate stuff because I don't want to deal with glitchy things unless I know about them prior.

This happened to me on one of my characters, but not another one - it showed up. And I used it up, and I thought - let me redo that arc through Ouros to see if I can get it again. I did, and it gave it to me again but it had 5 minutes instead of the normal time. (an hour or 2) You're not alone.

So that's the difference then, it would seem. Makes sense. The less squishy my characters, the further from the bowl they go to bring in the ritki. Okay, that's helpful. Thank you!

You can say I have no life. I have 4 level 50s. An ice/ice blaster, a fire/rad Sentinel, a fire/fire brute, and a rad/stone tank. They've all done MSRs. My ice blaster will get ...1000? 1200? Vanguard Merits. As much as 1400 last night. Or was that this morning? I forget. My brute...maybe 400? My sentinel maybe 600. My tank got 278 Vanguard Merits. I pulled half the sides at least a dozen times, giving them either judgement, if it was up or several fireballs if it wasn't, as I pulled them to the bowl. This can't be simply a question of AoE's, can it? Are we going to now have to wonder who on our team has rain of fire, blizzard or ice storm? Do we fuss if 5 of our teammates do nothing but spam heals and buffs? I'm feeling a little discouraged for my melee characters. I can't hardly consider my fire brute a single target damage character. Consume, Burn, fire sword circle, Combustion, blazing aura - it's all AoE. Can someone shed some light on what the discrepency comes from?

That would be fantastic. I'm a bit old school - I don't particularly enjoy speaking while playing on discord or anything else. I talk all day at work, and honestly, I get tired of talking. I much prefer to use macros if I'm leading an iTrial that needs a lot of explanation. Earlier this weekend, although I'd posted what I was going to do, turned out there were a number of other things going on that others knew about, and I was clueless. Hami raid, MSR, etc. Certain folks have certain channels in game they use, and unless you go hunting them down - and know what they're called, you may never know of certain iTrials or other in-game events. It would be good to have them posted in the forums. There must be hundreds of channels in Discord, and I really can't spend all that time looking at everyone's posts there. Here, I can see them at a glance.

I'm excited to test this out and to see how it plays. That said, as one who has logged literally thousands of hours playing an ice/ice/ice blaster - aside from the UGT trial, I've never seen a need for snipe, but I sure wish it was an option for ice, or fire for that matter. Trade-offs, I guess.

Thanks for playing! That first bomb - I still don't know where it is specifically, just the general area. The rest of it went decently well, I'd say. I would've liked to have had the second av closer to the corner, that's for sure. But I've tanked him before - and unless the taunter flies at his head level, he doesn't seem to like the corner very well.

I can't speak for everyone, but I'm not worried about any of it, really. It's not like it's real cash, you know? Starting from scratch - like all of us, I asked myself what was the best return to get the stuff I wanted for my characters. After all is said and done, actually just playing the game - getting merit rewards - that's all that anyone needs to do - is the best bang for the buck. There are lots of ways to maximize the return on our respective play time as far as the market goes. But - the market reacts (albeit slowly) to the changes made by the devs. The flooding of salvage at max prices of 10k, 50k and 1 million inf certainly had some impact. The Vanguard to reward merit conversion is another that will impact the market. Ultimately, if people enjoy "arresting" the NPCs, everything else will take care of itself.

Back before the shutdown, on Liberty, I routinely would lead UGT badge efforts. If my memory is correct, these efforts would be following an MSR (those didn't happen all day every day like they seem to do now). I've decided that with the increasing number of level 50 players that there is more demand for iTrials aside from BAF and Lambda. I ran UGT back then for several reasons: It seemed as if nobody else was, because it is the longest of all iTrials, and people are under the notion that they've got to have a t-3 clarion slotted in order to have any real chance to succeed. This simply isn't the case, provided that team composition is half-way decent. Obviously, the more level shifted players you have, and the more experienced they are in running the UGT, the better the league's odds are of succeeding. I'll just say this: the competence of the players overall I've run into is much better than I recall it being previously. This could be from only die-hard fans of the game returning, so I'm seeing the better players, or it could just be the easier path to slotting the characters with the good stuff, as opposed to simply using SOs. With that said, on Excelsior server, I've got a really fun Sentinel called Blister. Blister is simply a generic character, not ideally suited for any specific role in the UGT. No snipe for the bombs, no taunt for any AV's, merely a big fire ball and a few blasts that lack the range that most blasters will have. My Sentinel does have one thing going for it - it's more survivable than a blaster. Having played one for at least 2000 hours, I know a thing or two about blasters. So, on Saturday nights, at 7pm central time, in Pocket D, I'll be forming UGT's on a regular basis. This first run, on June 1, it will merely be to help folks get familiar with the trial. (And to help my addled brain remember where all the bombs are - I remember the 8 in the hallway, and the ones in the curved tunnels, but right before then, there's at least one that seems to take the leagues I've been in by surprise. So, if you're a badge enthusiast, I encourage you to come out and see if there's room for you. For best chances of success, I'll want a mix of ranged attacks for the bombs (and if I can't get those, we can "space-balls" it, with a similar technique used on the Ritki pylons - we just bum rush each bomb as quickly as we can, killing them before they kill us. It's quite tense and nerve-wracking, but it's a lot more fun than waiting on ranged characters to snipe the bombs, and a nice mix of buffs/debuffs. Just like any other task force or trial. Good composition tends to make for best results. I also intend to run some of the "newer" iTrials, like Magisterium, MoM, DD & TPN - but my experience in those is not on the same level as UGT. I also plan to do these on Torchbearer with my main, Ukase, but that's for a different post.

In the market, supply and demand will always have sway over the costs of items. I noticed with catalysts that the number of bids has been reduced by about 20%, with the number of units put up for auction being increased by about the same margin. The big money makers from the past - very rare purple recipes - those days are over with Market Crash Trial awarding a guaranteed purple for a character's first run. (which gives incentive to a degree to level up those alts) MSRs, which in my experience had been a maybe 2x a week, possibly 3x a week occurrence are now run pretty much all day, every day. (allowing a lot of reward merits to be cashed in, and thus, more enhancements which don't require salvage or crafting costs) Am I the only one thinking that simply playing your character will be the primary way of making influence in a few months? I'm sure salvage will continue to be a decent nickel and dime profit center for those who play a lot and earn the drops. Just wondering about the big chunks of change and where (and if) they'll come from.