Bill Z Bubba

Was my first tech job. Set me on 20+ years of IT work. I can't dis it too hard as I like money. Current office setup....

This hurts my brain. Edit: But I didn't know vertical GPU mounts were a thing now. Diggin that.

/looks left to see a big plexiglass panel on gaming rig //sees Geforce GTX in pretty white light ///ponders the horrors of people that leave rigs on the floor out of sight ////shudders Nah, I don't need color changing garbage either but I do prefer being able to see the innards of my gaming rig.

This a whole bunch. Again, my system at last job was a Lenovo laptop, docking station with dual 24" monitors, full keyboard and mouse at the office and at home I hooked it up to my network and RDPed to it from my Dell Opti with, again, dual 24" monitors. Laptops are for working while traveling. Especially when ya gots da big hands. Those tiny ass keyboards and touchpads suck a butt.

I worked at Dell back in 97-2000. The business lines have always treated me quite well over the years. Matter of fact, I just swapped out an old HDD with an SSD on an Optiplex 9020 small form factor that's been my primary workstation for a couple years now and the thing has gone back to being surprisingly quick on the draw and capable. The precision T7600 I was gifted from a prior job has been nothing but perfectly stable the entire time I've owned it. Even took my 1080 from my gaming rig and slapped it into the server when my gamer's board fried on me. Wasn't great, of course, but it worked. When it was time for me to move last year, I knew I needed a laptop for the trip and knew I had no intentions of ever gaming on one, so a used Dell Latitude was picked up on the fly. Again, zero issues. Alienware was always overpriced garbage. Became worse after Dell bought them out, agreed. Point to all this is that the company I worked for from 2006-2011 only used Dell Optiplexes. The next job use Dell thin clients for everyone in the office with dual Dell 24" flat panels. It was only my last job where I started to see Lenovos in heavy usage and quite frankly those had some design choices that I found wanting. Now, will I be buying a Dell/Alienware for my next gaming rig? Hell no. But I also won't be buying an HP or any other big named prebuilt. There's the business world and the personal world. Rue the day the two meet.

How does he do that? Absorption is typed?

I've always been a build it myself guy but my current gaming rig has a 9 year old motherboard/proc and a 1080 founders edition. As my year long vacation comes to a close today (oh joy, job hunting starts tomorrow,) I've been looking at the offerings over at buildredux.com and they seem reasonable but I'm still wary. But it being two months til I ding 50 in RL, figured now as a good time as any to get some bleeding edge back into my office but do it on the lazy. Are there any prebuilt shops known for reliability and good customer service or is that just a pipe dream?

On the topic of redraw.... I've long avoided it as I never believed that it did NOT affect overall chain times and thus DPS. I was then proven wrong by some else's testing. Yes, it still feels like redraw always kills attack chains, but testing doesn't back that up. @BillyMailman "AR/TA toon, I made a chain of Burst, Electric Net Arrow, Slug, Ice Arrow, M30 Grenade, Flash Arrow. Longer would have meant a power with too long a recharge and needing a real build for global and hasten and whatnot, so it stopped at six powers. Total Arcanatime is 9.108s, and after cycling it ten times, I got 92s. If redraw mattered, it was nothing. That 1s is almost certainly me missing queueing things, or just not being perfect with hitting the phone to stop the stopwatch. I then made a spider, and got a ten-attack chain. Single Shot, Mace Beam, Burst, Mace Beam Blast, Wide Area Web Grenade, Mace Beam volley, Heavy Burst, Poisonous Ray, Venom Grenade, Web Cocoon. Total Arcanatime, 20.064s. I stopped after three cycles took exactly a minute. Like, it's dead on."

Some would quit from any AE nerf. Some would move on to other farming methods. DA at max diff with +3 lvl shifts is slower but can still pull in tolerable levels of inf and sidekick leveling. Some wouldn't notice at all as they never step foot in AE. Some would take such heavy handed idiocy as a sign to move on to one of the other CoH groups just on principle, affected or not. Some would gloat about finally stickin it to the dirty farmers. We're a diverse group so reactions would be just as diverse. Personally, I think AE has been nerfed plenty already and it should be left alone for those that want 1000 lvl 50 characters. I used it the other day to get a new bio/rad/soul tank from 1 to 33 and will probably just farm him up to 50. Or maybe 40. Still annoyed I have to go bother with the patron arc to get soul mastery so maybe he'll just get deleted. Who knows?

It's not a trim job. It's an complete overhaul no matter what route you go. There's not a usable zone as is for a fantasy setting. Too many modern buildings in all of them except maybe the Hive? Matter of fact, the amount of fantasy only assets in the game is so small, you'd be left with barely enough for any kind of game at all. Why would anyone bother?

Now there's a SJ/WP brute....

A claws/wp brute is a non-stop blender. You've got the most balanced attack set (on the ST vs AoE front) coupled with The gogoneverstopnothingtoclick armor. I've run a couple to 50 and then deleted them so I could do it again. Yea, Claws isn't the best at ST or AoE damage and WP isn't all that tough at the bleeding edge but the fun they bring together on the way there makes up for it.

I do NOT recommend a claws/willpower brute as one's first character in CoH. After that, everything's a complete slug slogging away through sludge. 🙂

I got tired of ruling in Hell and being part of its bureaucracy. The whole point of coming to Paragon was to get my hands bloodied properly again.

I deleted it. Don't have any seismic blast users at the moment. Or any kinetics either.

Soon™

Nasty Nobodies Online? Sounds like it's dead out of the gate.

Buff-Debuff/Armor archetype. Strong as hell but solo leveling is painfully slow. /joke, I've seen it mentioned, no clue what it is. I still want my assault/armor AT. Tried to make one using a Sentinel with fighting pool. It sucked.

There's a huge difference between "playable and enjoyable" and actually good. Regen is playable and enjoyable for many people regardless of how much it actually sucks in comparison to the other armors.

Since I'm on the topic... it's something that's gnawed at me here in HC. Take Shadow Maul from Dark Melee. Since its last change, the hit effects on the enemy are no longer in sync with the punches and it's jarring every time I see it. I'm not gonna pretend I know anything about animation or character models or any of it because I don't but I do see what appears to be a lessened level of care in changes made on this front when compared to the OG animation team. And it's not something I'm looking forward to seeing more of. Edit: damn apostrophes

Just looked at gameplay footage for City of Titans and Valiance... they also suffer from the same complete clunky ugliness on the animation front.

Edit: Overly mean. I love CoH's animations. I wouldn't play SoH based on the video below.

I'd rather see the whole thing ported into UE5 and rebalanced.

Today was the first morning in ages that I've logged on. For quite a while now, the extent of my game time was logging in maybe once a week for a single TF at night, then right back off. My brother and I discussed this, as he hasn't logged on in over 5 months, and it appears that while we were both ecstatic for the return of CoH, we've both gotten from it about all we can. I don't think this is something that can be fixed and much less fixed with curbing farming or adding more stuff. The game is old. It feels old. It looks old. It has old design philosophies. It has an old playerbase. I suspect the vast majority of us are only around due to nostalgia. It'll be around this time until it's not again. I'm grateful that BZB was able to live once more but I've no illusions about the future.