Milk Sheik

+1 to the Dual Blades idea. The Dual Blades costume options include Greek falcata, which the single broadsword doesn't have. I used DB falcata, axes, and khopesh to round out my Greek and Trojan armies (and Aethiopian allies) in my time-traveling Trojan War arc (see my signature below), and it adds some good variety. +1 also to Greek spearmen using staff fighting, if only so we can get a spear costume option that doesn't look like a naginata or trident. (I'm biased -- I have Diomedes Tydides of Iliad fame as a toon, and while the Warriors could easily have a trident man, it doesn't seem as go-to as a nice basic spear.) The Eye of the Storm animations aren't necessary on a minion toon who probably isn't AoEing anyway. The first two attacks and Serpent's Reach will get the job done. +1 to Leadership as an idea. Powers such as Tactics, Maneuvers and so on are definitely in-character with a group who have natural training as their primary edge. Being able to see through invis makes any group tougher for stalkers and toons trying to ghost. +1 to Street Justice, which distinguishes them from the Tsoo's martial arts theme. +1 to gender diversity. Any weapons are great, but dual blades, archery/trick arrow, and spear are all obvious choices for the "Penthesilea duelist" and "Artemis/Atalanta huntress" kind of archetypes. Titan Weapons seems more appropriate for EBs/AVs -- special occasions.

Also, just to state the sometimes-but-not-always-so-obvious -- there's 2 KB to KDs out there, Sudden Acceleration's (which is just KD/KB) and Overwhelming Force (which is damage/KB-KD). If you hate the "slot tax" of SA, OF is a pretty decent set to stick into the power, whether frankenslotted or not.

Also, in case you don't have the endurance to fling that AoE immobilize one more freakin' time (looking at you, my level 20ish Earth Controller).

CoH being my first MMO, when I started I didn't know how to switch chat channels. (To be fair, I don't think the Quick Start instructions with the game disk I took home from a convention included anything about them.) I got up to level 7 or so on my first toon and level 8 on my second toon only chatting in Local, so when we were running around in Troll tunnels, sometimes my team couldn't hear me. When someone tried to explain it by saying "there are little buttons down in your chat window that help you switch," I said "Uh, no there aren't," because I didn't register those tiny cubes as buttons. So my faithful friend The Green Line said, "okay, just type /team and then your message" and off I went. For the next week or whatever (I don't know how long) I was marveling at how fast other people could type /team before sending their messages. When I expressed this to another player, he started laughing and I figured out the buttons.

I can't give much in the way of advice, but I can say this is where my emp/rad defender finally came into her own. Between Electron Haze, Irradiate, Neutron Bomb, Thunder Strike and Ion Judgement, I could aggro 10 AVs for max AoEs and fling out low-damage attacks that triggered the massive DOT buff on many of them at once. I dragged them near the Ouroboros temple entrance (the Crystal Titan doesn't fit inside too well) and hit them regularly while being careful not to kill any. I don't remember how many millions of damage it was an hour, but it was a *lot* more than if I just put Ion Judgement on autofire. Putting other AoEs on autofire is too much, though, since the DOT is designed to be high enough to kill even with your lowest-damage attacks. It worked all right to whittle the mob of AVs down to 1/3 health or so, then work on something in another window while they healed up, then switch back and fling out some more AoE. Some AVs like Romulus will lose aggro and wander back to their starting position if you don't hit them again, so watch out for that. You want 10 in PBAOE range to truly maximize your damage. Sister Psyche's also hard to catch in the AoEs since she's a ranged damage dealer, so swapping to target her and zapping her with your snipe or other long-range single target attacks can net you a few more points, too. Switching targets to check the health of the AVs is important, too, since it's easy to inadvertently defeat one. Fortunately, if you mess up, you can kill the front 10 without completing the mission (there's a few more AVs up near the objective) exit and reset.

My supposedly-all-knowing goddess is getting there. Still got 24 or so to go. My "closest to completion" says I'm missing Triple Threat and Master of Magi... lycans, 50 Weekly TF assists, incarnate Cims, RHW and refusing 1000 recipes. Other than that... I'd better try this badge tracker thing, because that doesn't add up to 24.

I knew two nun characters on Live, both using a black hood as the closest you could get to a wimple. Pinnacle had Sis of No Mercy the broadsword scrapper, and Victory had Nun of the Above, the kinetics defender. If I recall, they went with miniskirts or plaited skirts, because, well, CoH female robes mostly stop at the waist. I was dismayed to find that females don't have the Japanese style for hakama/pantaloons the way male toons do. Not sure why, it doesn't seem like a complex piece.

Now in enormous size for better reading... and because I'm still working out this stupid photo capture stuff.

Milk Sheik and all those toons with dual blade scimitars who *aren't* Drizzt Do'Urden approve of this post. While I'm here, can I add one more beast head idea? Gorilla. Whole lotta character concepts out of lab primates escaped after horrific experiments. You could have a whole SG of Planet of the Apes-like toons with one head model. Grodd can't have all the fun.

I made a dual flintlock pistols/ice melee blaster called Aaron Brrr. He's on Torchbearer, and I think I have an old copy of him around on Indomitable, but I can delete him on Indom since I never play him. If you want the name on non-TB servers, go ahead.

Teleport Target. Clicking on a teammate, then hitting a key and clicking on the ground is faster and more preferable than three mouse clicks. (It also means you don't need to have the icon in a visible tray, freeing up a slot for some other power). Add a team announcement of "teleporting $target to my location" so you can TP them out of the danger zone for a rez (or heal if they got separated from the group and are in trouble). Super-useful. Can't count the number of times people try to rez while the dead teammate is still in a monster wall or whatever and will just die 5 seconds after the rez. TP 'em out.

I did this with two PUGs -- the first stalled when our tank DCed and the Vindicators were all in one room. They divided and conquered us and we decided "heck with that, we'll rerun tomorrow night." Next night we had a tank, a scrapper, 3 blasters, an illusion troller, me the emp defender, and I forget the last AT, possibly a widow. We handled the Vindicators okay (though there were some wipes, each time we took another one of them down and after 2 attempts we steamrolled the rest of them). I *really* missed my KB-resist enhancements. I normally run 3 for a total of 11 points of resist, and found myself getting knocked on my butt continually unless I had Flight on. The final fight was suitably epic. We didn't have Vengeance in the group, so we took it up to the top of the Atlas Globe so only the flying heroes would get pulled. Standard procedure was to take out Numina first. We whipped out pets, but quite a few of them fell off the globe and got ganked when we tried to pull the next AV (blaster pulled, I healed). Got through most of the heroes without too much of a hassle, leaving States for last. Not having a real debuffer, States was *tough* and whenever he got low on health, he popped Unstoppable and spammed Lightning Bolts of Zeus every 10 seconds or so, so I had to heal a ton. We burned I-don't-know-how-many pets we'd collected over a lifetime of badging: Shivans, Snow Beasts, Clockwork, Loa Bone zombies, mini-mechs from RV, whatever. He smashed them all. Our smart blasters stayed out of lightning range and threw damage; the others never really caught on, and I healed and rezzed 'em constantly. After about a 7-10 minute fight, his Unstoppable dropped for a second time and our Envenomed Daggers finally did their job. My toon now wears the Worthy Opponent badge instead of Immortal, because I earned Immortal AFK, and this one, the polar opposite.

Practiced Brawler goes off because you set it to autofire like you're supposed to? Redraw. Yeah, I'm annoyed by this too, and I'm pretty sure there's no option for it on scrappers at the moment.

AoE Sleep has one very useful function, which is "oh s*** here comes a second mob from a different direction and everyone's focused right in front of us, SLEEP!" Responding to someone else's comment about Levitate, I find it useful for getting knockable bosses (i.e. most of them) off me or others Right Freaking Now while Dominate is recharging. This is particularly useful when exemped down to a level where you don't have a lot of other powers accessible or the enhancement nerf means they don't recharge as fast. I threw a Chance for Hold into my Levitate for the obvious troller-y benefits.

The mobs are garbage, but the exploding building will kill you even if you're a tank. It's a *lot* of damage. If you don't have cold powers, you can work on badge credit but you're not soloing the event, since the fires spread faster than a single extinguisher can handle. The powerset argument is legit; the difference is probably extreme. My only water blaster's a corruptor at 22, so I haven't seen what a full-on 50 can do to the fires and I've been playing since issue 6. I was underwhelmed when I tried to put them out at 20 and the extinguisher worked better than my attack chain. My experience is that I'm always fighting them solo or possibly a duo or trio tops, and the heroes helping out have never actually had cold powers. If there were an incentive, maybe the ice and water folks would show up more.

The Praetorian event "The Protest" offers a few rewards, like the option for a badge or 1 reward merit, or a dual origin enhancement if I remember correctly. I'm thinking something along those lines. Not much -- Steel and Skyway are low level, but it'd be nice to encourage players to chip in.

So, I like my firefighting badges all right, but considering there's danger that scales to level and it's bogusly hard without a duo or trio, maybe there should be a few reward merits or some kind of drop for successfully fighting a fire? As it is, only my badge toon really paid attention to the fires in Steel, and after getting the badges, they're highly ignorable. Contrasted with the Praetorian events or the yummy merits from the giant monsters, the ol' fires and Troll raves could use some love.

Oddly, I just explored the files that it did successfully create, and started the Homecoming.exe file to see what would happen. It said another copy may be running... so I closed the window that gave me the error message, tried again, and was rewarded with the HC splash screen. It is now installing, so... fingers crossed! EDIT: I'm in... characters present and accounted for. 🙂

I downloaded the HC installer (I'm on Windows 10) and started installing. It asked me for a directory, and started copying my Tequila fine, but then I got this: My Internet is connecting fine with other applications (Google Chrome, etc.). I made sure to put an exception in my antivirus for the upcoming folder name and tried again, same result. In possibly-related or possibly-unrelated news, I also had trouble getting the CoH Modder to work (it thought I had a closed port), but the game was working as of last night, complete with I27p3 Vidiotmaps, which I manually downloaded since the modder wasn't working. I had another issue with Tequila (see "Disappearing Tequila.exe" post elsewhere) and hoped to circumvent it by downloading the Homecoming Launcher, but as evidenced here... no dice. So in summary, I can't get into the game using Tequila, nor can I install HC to get around it. Any thoughts?

Opened up my usual COH directory this morning only to find the usual Tequila file used to launch the game is missing, the one titled "Tequila" that has a little icon of a glass next to it. The other usual text files named Tequila are present. I did a "search this directory" and found nothing but the text files. It's not in the Recycle Bin, either. Trying to copy and paste the .exe file from my other computer is an exercise in futility at the moment. Besides the dire warnings saying "for god's sake, don't ever download an .exe file from the internet!" the thing disappears and tells me I lack permissions in many ways. I do not recall deleting this file. As for what might have caused it, I recently downloaded the CoH Modder (but I wasn't able to get it to be compatible, so it's unlikely that it is doing anything) and downloaded the VidiotMaps pack for I27p3, but I have played a few times since then with no problem. Now... poof. No way to start the game that I know of. Any thoughts? EDIT: I got around this and back into the game by installing the Homecoming Launcher and switching to it, but my Tequila remains unusable. Leaving this post up in case anyone has similar issues.

Okay, Thanks for the help -- that site is handy. I'll do what I can. I've got AVG Antivirus, which is not the most common antiviral program among my friends and sooooo often more trouble than it's worth. EDIT: There's a happy ending -- I found the VidiotMaps file in another forum thread, which was really all I was looking for right now. I downloaded it manually and now Cimerora looks good.

It's closed, according to that site.

Tried that just now (Googled how) and tried to make an exception in my antivirus as well. No go.

Hi, PK and Bluejay, thanks for spelling stuff out so much. I've hit a bug in the install process, too. The download went fine (Windows 10), and I've got the file extracted, but when I try to run the .exe to install in my C:/CoH/ directory, I get this:

I guess that was it. I tried playing today (after shutting the computer down for the night and restarting it in the morning) and everything seems normal. Probably wasn't caps lock, since I was typing and communicating normally. I probably held down Shift for 8 seconds or whatever the Sticky Keys requires. Thanks, Milk