Ukase

Thing is, it doesn't have to. Yes, there are a number of kill-alls, but if the team is on the same page, making wise use of Team Teleports and ATTs, 40 minutes is quite doable. With a lot of AoE builds, even 30 minutes. If I'm thinking clearly, a group I know got it done in less than 20 minutes - but those rascals had special builds just for that TF. And ...look, I understand that not everyone playing has "arrived" as far as inf goes to buy these TP powers from p2w on every character. But, this is why when I would lead a Synapse I would share my own SG base macro, which is certainly no swanky place like Cosmic's public hub. If there were a way to buy 100's of them and give them away, I sure would.

Well, damn, that's genius.

I promise you, none of my builds cost me billions. Even if I needed a dozen of those acc/rec d-syncs. I'd run Aeon ad-nauseum until I got what I needed! I ain't paying anybody that kind of loot for an enhancement. I'm clever enough to do without a slot from somewhere else if I need to.

If I'm being 100% transparent and honest, I have some days where all I want to do is team with goofy folks I don't know. Some days, I want to team with folks I've teamed with in the past, who don't type much, but get the job done quickly. Some days, I want to team with folks who are interesting, somewhat humorous, and don't care if they live or die, or what content we're doing, so long as we're doing something and enjoying the absolutely putrid puns and odd pronunciations of strange words. and most days, I solo. Not so much because I like it better, but because I firmly believe you're not much good to a team if you've no idea what you can do alone. It's always been my biggest objection to teaming. Say you start off with a support toon, say a controller. You do a dfb or two, maybe a posi. Then, you're level 17 or so, and don't see anything forming that catches your interest. You think, Synapse is next on the TFC chain, let's try and form a group for that. 5 minutes go by, you've gotten one taker. another 5 minutes...one more player. Another 5 minutes, and you still have room for 5. The other 2 have been patient. But I'm not! And I don't want to do Synapse with three. This is why I don't particularly enjoy forming teams anymore, because I'm too damned impatient. If it doesn't form in a couple of minutes, I can find something else to do. And I do. And when I do...suddenly, I'm taking more aggro than I can handle. Not enough attacks yet. No pets yet, or if I have one, it's not sturdy enough. I thought I was super, but it appears solo, I'm super stinky. This is why teaming can be bad. You thought you were super, but you find out you're not. So, you need to find out how to make your character shine without team buffs. Without a tank/brute to gather aggro. There's a lot to learn if you're new, or playing an AT/powerset that's new to you. And a team can cover up a lot of those lessons. When you have a kin on your team, you may not realize you need to be concerned about endurance recovery. With any type of buff or debuffer, you may not really realize how strong or weak you are by yourself. The same way I told my daughters to not get married until they lived on their own for at least a year, I'll suggest to anyone not to team up until they gain a level outside of AE solo. Preferably several levels. There's a lot of lessons to learn. (maybe some of you are a quicker study than I am) So, for me, I'll solo if I can until I can learn what I need to learn. And because I go afk a lot during the weekday.

Picked up Corsair 1000w yesterday.

Yeah, after my post, I kept digging, and have read that the performance improvement from pci3 to 4 is small. I was concerned about the card fitting in the slot more than anything else. The old cards have an entirely different pin configuration, and my concern was that the newer cards wouldn't fit. My MB is from 2014 or so. And, well, technology advances pretty damned fast. My i7-4790 may soon be the bottleneck in the system. I expect, if I find the right deal, I'll get a new mb anyway. And while I'm at it go from 16 to 32 ram. I have always had a great deal of fun learning about the hardware; in many ways, the folks who designed these parts have really put a lot of thought into it - like how a memory stick will only fit one way. I promise you, without that kind of design, I'd have probably burned through a couple dozen computers and maybe a house or two. In any event, I've still a lot more reading/researching to do. I may wait until Windows 10 goes the way of the dodo, then just buy a whole new system. Just depends on what I read, and what the price points are.

In line with this topic, I've been doing some research into upgrading my GPU, now that they're in stock to some degree. That led to realizing a newer GPU would require an newer PSU. Then, I'm at Best Buy, I tell the guy which MB I have, and he says the best GPU I can put on my MB is a 1080. And I'm working with a 1050 now. (I'm considering a 3060) Further research on Tom's Hardware site shows a list of a slew of CPUs on Windows 10. Here is the link if you'd like to see where I got the quote below. So, while Win 11 may steal some performance with one hand, it may return it with the other hand. But, I'm no expert, and I could easily be misinterpreting what I'm reading. "We conducted these tests in Windows 10, which penalizes the 12th-Gen Intel scores. This is because Windows 10 doesn't target threads at the correct cores with the precision that we see in Windows 11. You can see the Windows 11 results in the album in the first album in the article." Oh - and I'm not actually going to buy from Best Buy, I just go there to learn more from the geeks, usually, unless they make me a deal I can't refuse.

It's a bit odd to read of a suggestion, and then following that, read how a random player might take advantage of the change, if implemented. Is this why we can't have nice things?

I accept no shame. What I did instead was to click ad-nauseum for a few minutes until I got the 180 boosters the sg-mate was looking for and gave them to him. They were willing to pay, but I refused to accept. I already made my share of inf.

Well, you remember Snarky said he was going to stop posting, right? Someone had to pick up the slack!

Same. While I enjoyed reading the comics, it would be far less immersive. I remember watching my screen when I was installing the CoV edition. I thought the graphics were going to get this major realistic upgrade! And then, that turned out not to be the case. I do not want the game to look more comic book like, rather less so. As an example - in this image below, Batman looks a lot more realistic (to me) than Wonder Woman. That would be what I would prefer.

Honestly, I've only had these issues very rarely - like twice. When claiming, I get a system message that says "Please wait a moment", and then I can claim again. It's certainly not bad enough to lead me to buy a winter from the market when I have 1000's in my character email. That's madness. If we're smart enough to avoid "buy it now" prices, we can wait 10 seconds to claim the next item from email, no? Or - are the problems some of you having much more severe than what I described? If so, I am left to wonder why.

I'm 55. I deal with C-suite executives pretty much every day as an executive recruiter. I've no idea how such a thing would play out for me in the long run, but I seriously doubt it would instill any of my clients with confidence. As far as my real life friends, I don't think I could tell them I spend too much time playing a computer game. I would be truly embarrassed. I wouldn't tell them about Madden NFL, nor this. They might know I play chess online, but they know I travel to chess tournaments when I'm not quarantined. So, no. Not going to do it.

Anecdotally, as soon as I zone anywhere, provided something like burn or heal aura isn't on auto, I can slot a newly crafted incarnate power. If I'm on a team, I zone to my base, because no telling who's got what power on auto-fire.

So, the question posed is "Do you incarnates disappear over time?". The answer is no. Some of us are no longer seen, and you might think we disappeared. But, no, we just haven't logged in. Some of us are hidden, and possibly playing on a different server, but I seriously doubt any of us have truly disappeared over time. But, given the premise of a lower population player base, I can see why one might ask the question.

Phantom Army will never get the benefits of any inspiration or buff (or debuff). They are unaffected by everything, except, for some stupid reason, Hamidon and the Crystal Titan can now kill them after a couple of shots. I'll never understand that, as they're supposed to be indestructible for a minute, but I guess that's too overpowered in the minds of some folks. But I digress. Dark Servant can benefit from team inspirations, as will MM pets, even your Summon Pets like Positron from p2w will benefit from team inspirations, provided they are within 20 feet of you and there are less than 16 allied characters in that 20 foot distance.

So...I thought I needed a new video card because I would see costume contest winners (while I wouldn't win, place or show) and wondered if it was my graphics setting. SG had a contest to find certain items, and the only way I could find them was on max settings. In any event, because of the wafer shortage (and crypto-mining) driving GPU prices up, I went to a cyber-cafe and took a look at the game with top of the line specs. There really isn't that much difference. I mean, if I look at your screenshot with your top end machine on my mid-tier machine, I'm still not seeing what you see - but there's just not that much difference. Now, if you have a bottom-tier machine, I wouldn't expect there to be a great deal of difference there, either. But, I would definitely try to find one of those places that lets you play video games on their PCs to get a look at how things would be before you shell out the loot IF the only reason is to play CoH. Now, if you're going to stream Netflix and do other stuff, then by all means, go ahead and upgrade your system. But just to play coh? That's a bit of an over-reaction in my opinion, whatever that's worth.

For me, the mapserving can certainly be annoying, but I do have characters on other servers, so I can switch gears and play on those servers if Excelsior is down. But, that said, as for how much is too much, it depends on how long each dc lasts. If I'm able to instantly get back on, I can handle those fairly well. The longer it takes me to get back on, if I get back on and DC again, I'm likely to only suffer one per session until I move to a different shard until things get stabilized.

Last month, I made a couple of SS/Fire brutes. Both with Fold Space, but different objectives for their build. I just couldn't really get the apples to apples comparison I wanted on the Test Server, due to lack of scientific methodology, really, and some randomness with various spawns. In any event, one build had burn and foot stomp proc'd out. The other didn't. To me, there are two reasons (and only two) to go with SS. Rage, and foot stomp. To not use rage, you might as well give up Foot Stomp and go with something else with a decent AoE - but that's just my thinking. When I proc'd Burn and Foot Stomp, (sorry, and Haymaker, too) because the rage crash didn't impact the procs, despite the crash, I was able to fill those 10 seconds with good dps. If they ever change how proc's work, I might just have to re-visit SS and delete those characters. But until then - filling up the attack chain with proc'd attacks (and the nice KD mitigation of Foot Stomp) seems like a winner to me. It's a fun combo. I can get how some folks don't like rage crash - I certainly don't like it either, but using the KD and filling up the 10 seconds with a few attacks that aren't impacted by the crash seems like an easy fix for superior dps.

Slotting procs can be quite a decent path to increasing damage. But anecdotally, the key is to aim for global recharge so that those attacks that are all proc'd up can fire more often. When you take a base recharge of 16s...and can get it to fire every 8 to 10 seconds for 800 damage, that may be better than traditional slotting that fires in 6 seconds for only 400 damage. It all depends. And anecdotally, the math behind determining which is optimal is not a great deal of fun for me. I tend to just use unslotters and compare on the fly, rather than rely on mids. The easiest path in my brain says Assault from the leadership pool, and aiming for recharge, (and endurance to go along with that) and accuracy - which lends itself to aiming for tactics and/or a kismet 6%. The question though is if you'll have the endurance to handle the extra two toggles. Yes, you can increase the damage of a tank - but sometimes, that is just silly. With 1000 slots, maybe just roll a brute. Same resistances, a bit smaller area on the cones, but a higher dps without doing anything special. Nothing you didn't already know, of course. But, it is worth stating. Sometimes, (and I'm no exception) we can find ourselves aiming to take this character we enjoy and turn it into something that another AT would be better at. When we increase damage of any AT...to do this, we have to take from some other attribute. It's like chess, in a fashion. If we move a piece to control these certain squares, we've decreased the control over other squares to do this. We'll have to look several moves ahead to see if that's the right play.

I have no idea if this is by design or not, but lately, I've been running AE for tickets because I don't wish to pay the recently inflated prices of salvage. Typically, I get most of the salvage I need, but often have to supplement rare salvage from the AH. So, with a new farmer of mine, I notice that with AE ticket maps, as opposed to standard maps - I'm getting no incarnate xp. I'm thinking this may be by design, and if so - that's bad design in my opinion. This is just feedback, and my own opinion. There may be a good reason for it, I just don't know what that reason is.

I believe I'm the chap that stated the worst thing a player could do would be to quit a tf. When I posted it, I didn't want to get into one of my famous 20-zillion paragraph posts, but I'll elaborate a tiny bit here why it's a peeve of mine. Back before debt had a cap, I was on my first ever 50, an emp/elec defender. I ran into a couple of guys - both tanks - who loved to herd freaks or anything that was susceptible to taunt. But, before that - we'd joined another small group to do a positron tf (before it was revamped into 2 parts). There was a lot of mez, which resulted in a lot of dying. Can't heal if I can't do anything. And the only way to get status protection at the time was to hit the hospital and get with the npc there before you made your way back to the mission. I understand that nobody likes a team that has a lot of defeats - it slows things down and isn't terribly fun. Back then, I had no idea what the term "team composition" meant. It never occurred to me there would be a striking contrast between a fire tank and an invuln tank. I probably thought every defender was an empath - and they may very well have been back then. But..the small group we picked up, after the second defeat, they all quit. Then my own sg folks, the pair of tanks - they quit, too. They didn't discuss it with me. It never occurred to them that I could use a blast to pull one or two, rather than the trite method of tank jumping in the midst of a mob and hoping for the best. (There was no discord, and honestly, there wasn't time to type anything with all the desperate button mashing.) To this day - I haven't forgotten that feeling of being an emp/elec defender and being the only one on a task force. Everybody quit. They didn't discuss it, they didn't explain why - (in hindsight, I get it) - they just bailed. So, when I say quitting a tf is the worst, I mean quitting when the going gets tough, not referring to folks who may have to quit because the tinpex should've only taken a half hour, but for some reason you've found yourself extending beyond an hour. I get that real life happens and you can get called away. I'm specifically referring to folks who quit because they think it's too hard. And it may be too hard, depending on team comp. But these situations should be discussed before someone just quits with the ever-so-fake polite "glhf".

As some of you may be aware, for various reasons, sometimes the prices of invention salvage increase a fair amount beyond what some would consider a "normal" or average amount. Because I tend to think the worst of folks, I suspect the increase in salvage prices (rare salvage) is from someone that's buying it cheap, and relisting it at a higher price. No value added there - shame on these people! I am aware that salvage is seeded, and that the most I'd have to pay for a rare is 1M. But, I tend not to buy salvage anyway. I typically run AE for tickets, and use the tickets to get the salvage I may need. Now, it stands to reason, that if I want tickets, I would get a fire tank or brute, and just sit in the center of an asteroid type farm, wait a couple of minutes and reset. The problem is, the max number of tickets that may be earned per map is too low. You can't even finish a mission before the ticket cap is reached. If I leave at the efficient point where I get a bonus that just about matches the tickets I've earned already - I'm barely in the map a couple of minutes. It just seems to me that we should increase the max number of tickets to be earned to be about parallel to however many tickets it would take to replicate what might drop in standard rewards. As an example, about 4 rares, a dozen uncommons, and 30 common, and 5 uncommon recipes. That's about what I'd expect from a normal map that I don't exit because of meeting some ticket cap. I think 1500 would be a better target than the current 750. Alternatively, a ticket should be worth more than what it's worth now. Seems like I spend more time exiting and entering the mission than I do actually playing the mission.

Quitting a task force is a major faux pas. It's worse than being a lousy teammate. There is literally nothing you can do in game that's worse, aside from joining an SG and raiding all the loot and then quitting. For a casual team up, no big deal. But for a task force, even though with the invention system making anyone pretty much replaceable, quitting a task force is bad form.

I blame myself. I haven't been afk-farming and thus, haven't been crafting and converting/selling as a result. I'll have to see if I can't re-supply a few items.