Clave Dark 5

I had a lot of guides I had printed out that sat around collecting dust until I finally recycled them all about six months ago. Talk about bad timing!

It may be unpopular of me to say so, but you don't need to get binds to play. I ran a few to 50 before shut-down without them, and I'm doing OK on one now sans binds. Checking into them and thinking about running them and planning to memorize where they are and blah blah blah, it just felt like too much homework. Especially since you don't want to solo AVs or anything nuts, you should be OK without them. Now here comes everyone to tell me I'm gimping my MMs. :)

Why assume that? Why not assume there are a number of factors guiding their choices such as wanting to play where everyone else is playing, for example. Another interesting point I see being used here is "red side has always been lower pop" which is true, but that never stopped me from PUGing until near close when it seemed most everyone was only playing their 50s; PUGing now is nigh impossible, at least at the hours I tend to play (Late because of shift work)*. The pop was low, but not like this. The other side of that is "OK, so it's always been low, why not work to fix that?" Why leave it "broken" that way? *Coincidentally, when that pop shift happened near closing, I finally had to give up and create some heroes to play, just so I had the chance to PUG or team.

Preach it. Back in the day, I used to see posts saying the Scrapper inherent was bad because it couldn't be planned for or strategized around. But to me it's always been a fun surprise when CRITICAL pops up. People also complained that crits are "wasted" on foes with little life remaining (strangely, I don't remember anyone saying that about Scourge), but that's just an opportunity to shout "Boo yah! How do you like THAT?!?" at the monitor. I actually feel that way about scourge. On most foes it doesn't seem to trigger until it'd be dead anyway and it does feel wasted to me. Elite bosses and Archvillians being the exception of course, on those it is wonderful. I do like crits more than scourge myself. IIRC, Scourge chances kicks in when the foe is at 50% of hit points or less, so yes, it is more likely to pop up when the foe is near death because you're killing him harder! Sometimes it would have been enough anyway, other times you just shaved some seconds off the battle, which allows steamrolling and to rob that foe of taking another shot at you or someone else on your team.

I was pondering the ski badges just the other day, as I have recently taken a TP on one of my toons. Are they any TP "cheats"? :D

Gee, I dunno, "Grenade Control" sounds kinda fun! But I'd want a "real"grenade or two in there. Seriously though, I'd get a bit tired of grenading my way through the fights, but there are tons of animations we could repurpose for this, seems like.

This is big enough for my toon to comfortably fit her arms inside it if she wanted to. It's not just "slightly hovering off her body." Gunslinger belt 1 sized just fine, this one looks like a small hula hoop. Guess I'll have to try and grab a screenshot when I can. I haven't had a chance to try and replicate the issue on another toon though.

Seems to me that the flavor of the stories on either side will only apply to a fairly small subset of players, I mean, how often to radio teams stop to actually read anything? With all the PUGing I've done, I've never seen it. I'm not saying you're playing wrong to do so, but I don't really think it matters to many or most players. I do know that battling Longbow and Arachnos too much gets old though, and Grandville is a pain without a flight. But there are things to like about it, such as the smoother transition from one area to the next via ferries (and level progressions), the slightly better graphics (blue-side's city just looks like a vaporwave video dream), the once-better ATs, for example. (Personally I've always preferred the older style architecture of the zones and the more closed-in spaces over the flat boring park nature of the Blueside city too, but I know that's just personal taste). I'd still like to second the idea post6ed earlier about anyone being able to join any team; when I post "35 newspaper team LFM", anyone should be able to get my invite and, perhaps after clicking a pop-up to be zapped over to the proper villain map, be able to team with me - and vice versa. To take this idea more of a real-world, right-now possibility, I think from now on whenever I post one of those "35 Corr LFT", I'm going to toss in a "Red or Blue, either's good." Granted I can't get invited immediately, but they can know I'm willing to take the minute or so to switch.

I didn't even know these things were ever happening, I have still seen not one of any of them. And I am disappointed!

I just happened across a bug last night on a female toon I was costuming. When I give her the Gunfighter 2 belt, it's huge, like made for someone twice her size and hanging around her like it's orbiting her waist. Of course, I kept it that way for the laughs and it's there even in the rest of the game. Sadly though, she's a stealther, so no one ever really sees it. :/

I was working on a costume, probably lost it all. :/

Waaait a second... how does that work exactly? Am I understanding this right, it spreasds confusion from the original target to other foes? It spreads from the original target to foes close to them? Do we know the range of spreading, the number of affected targets possible, etc?

This is the second time I've seen you use the word "toxic" whilst saying some stuff that I found rather toxic itself, or at least the way you said it. I can tell from your posts elsewhere that you're a knowledgeable player, so I like reading your posts, but you might consider dropping a bit of the edge - more flies with honey and so on. You have your point, it's valid, no need to go so far to get it across.

I seem to recall in the old days they announced one hour out. Adding in some one half hour out, ten minutes, five minutes out would probably be pretty useful.

That's a perfect name that I want to steal for a fire power-setted toon.

Several weeks now I've been asking this on the help channel and of teammates. Everybody just cops out and asks me to download Pine's. I've used Pine's for over a month and I still have the same questions, so obviously Pine's isn't helpful to everyone. We need a cheat sheet guide that answers these sorts of questions for every Archetype and the guide needs to be stickied to the top of each Archetype forum. While the point that different people have different goals and therefore should build different, I fully support the need to stickied guides here. I've been working on a new toon recently and had to scan through all four pages opf posts to find people talking about the build I took, whereas if they were more or less in one place, I'd have saved a lot of time. Which goals and which builds can follow after some sort of guide to one has been posted. Or maybe a wiki?

I don't even know why now, maybe a bad experience or misunderstood word of mouth, but when I first started playing, I refused to team, always solo. Which was fine, but when I discovered PUGing, I sort of kicked myself for having spent so much time soloing. Don't get me wrong, it's a perfectly valid way to play and to learn about how to play for a newbie, but a steamrolling team is like shared scrapper-lock and just as addicting.

I'd like to see it all the time, but I do understand the invasions might get a bit boring for folks.

There's nothing wrong with soloing, I did a lot of it when I first started playing and learned about how my character archetypes worked through the trial and error. On the other hand, steamrolling with a team - which is something that can happen a lot - is a blast of a different sort and also worth searching out, if you're of a mind to. Other than that I don't have a lot to offer past what every one else has already said, other than a "welcome!"

Didn't the Vidiot maps used to note this sort of thing? I'm not at home so I can't check mine right now.

It might help. We had double XP when the Homecoming servers first started up, we could give all villain content XP+1/2 and that would help draw some people over. Heck, my toons would probably be split 50/50 between red and blueside if I thought I could ever find anyone redside. My experiences so far were like what I was seeing on a low pop server just before shut down. At 3 am. Which is exactly when I'm likely to be playing. But say if someone's standing about in Steel Canyon "35 MM blue LFG, please anybody" and someone pops up to say "Redside team looking for 35ish members", and that someone knows they can get xp+1/2 from that? People just might join. Hell, Null Gull is simple enough (for people who read the forums anyway), what if you didn't even need him to cross over?

I think you missed the implied point. Numbers are one of a number of causal factors in what makes something fun. They're the *only* causal factor, depending on how you look at it. All things exist in a measurable state. Colors exist on a scale that can be represented numerically, animation times and recharges are counted in seconds, resources and meters come in and are replenished in a finite quantities, etc. You could really just boil that down and say that fun is logically representable. As in, you don't even need numbers, what causes people to experience "fun" can be narrowed down to a fundamentally knowable state that one can simply measure with their senses. You can even condition people into *being* part of the knowable state, hence my mention of masochism. "Fun trumps all" as a response to numbers is not only a gross simplification, and an empty platitude... It's outright fallacious reasoning and creates a broken form of circular logic, which is utterly useless when trying to make informed decisions. You do realize that when you're creating a game you have to make objective determinations on things like fun, right? You do realize failing to do this is more or less paramount to creating a giant game of Calvin Ball, correct? Fun trumps logic. Ok, ok, so MY fun trumps YOUR numbers.

Fun trumps numbers.

I heard Bio is great on anything that can wear it, so I went Dark/Bio. I'm only about 23rd level right now, but so far it's felt breezy fun and pretty simple to play.

To start with, I began playing City of Heroes, and then... nothing. Currently? City of Heroes.