chigiabelo

Ditto. I got my 2nd purple today while casually playing a mish that was conning +1 to me. Only one boss and I think my drop came off an LT.

There are missions I like to farm with my MMs. The Steel Canyon signature arc for levels 40 and above rewards half a level or more per play on its first mission if you have your difficulty set to +2 or higher. Since I only solo, I found it quick to get from 40 to 50 in a day and a half of casual play. Now, I'm not a very serious player, so there may be better missions for farming with an MM, but I liked this one because it was relaxing and the Phalanx did a lot of the work.

I remember a few posts on the original forums, back when the level cap was still 40 and the game was new. In one post, a player was estimating that in the mid 30's he needed to defeat the equivalent of 3000 even level minions to level. I don't remember if that was really the case though my first defender took over 500 hours to solo to 50. Another post I remember was from some users on Triumph who were among the first to reach the level cap. They all knew who was 'near' because there were so few of them at that time.

For solo leveling from 40-50 and even beyond, the "Signature Arc" on Steel Canyon has a first mission that I found gives great XP, pretty much averaging 1 level every couple of times you do it and what I like about is that since you enter/exit through the train, you're not too far from things you might need like vendors, base portal in Talos, etc. I just stop short of completing it, quit to character select, and re-enter.

Thanks! I realized what i was doing wrong on the Alpha slot. I would hover over it with the mouse and see the shard recipe on the right. I didn't realize that I had to left click on it THEN scroll down on the right to expose the incarnate thread recipe.

I noticed that it doesn't really matter if you save the 2 at the end or not. If you fail to kill the Knives, you get the reward anyway.

I'm lost. I had only one L50 with the alpha slot unlocked and equipped before shutdown and my memoryis fuzzy as to how I got there. My current main has hit 50 and has been accumulating incarnate threads and a couple of incarnate shards. To equip the alpha slot, I need stuff like Essence of the Incarnate and Dimensional Keystone which I can't seem to figure out how to get without more shards. Since I only solo, TFs are more difficult for me. Other than those, how do I get the components needed for the alpha slot abilities?

Yes, but with Enhancement Diversification we already know that we can only just about double the damage on Brawl if we slotted it. I wanted to create a list of several attack powers and have a handy comparison, so I used unslotted Brawl as the baseline. What I didn't do, now that I think of it, was factor in recharge time for a good DPS figure. That tends to complicate things because past the 4 slots for ACC and DMG, you start having to be picky on what you're going to spend on recharge reductions and where you're going to spend it.

Maybe people are just too busy playing? Just kidding... A big difference between now and the early days of the game is the explosion of social media. That splits the community up in terms of where they need to get their talking-about-CoH fix. There are these forums as well as smaller ones centered around the other rogue server operations. There's at least three groups on Facebook that I read on my feed. There's Discord, which I really don't like. And I suppose other ways the community gets its fix. Without the central leadership of a team like the old devs, we're not going to be as cohesive a community, I guess. And speaking of community, I keep reading about how the one thing that everyone really missed about Coh was the great community ... I tell ya, the very first tiem I got rudely flamed by a complete stranger in my entire life was on the original forums. Since the game was shut down, i indulged my other hobbies and have been on forums for electric guitars, music, tube amp building, electronics, RC aircraft, kayaking and software development. Not once have I been rudely flamed or treated poorly on any of those. But in the weeks since the game and 'the community' has been back, I've experienced the old nasty crap a couple of times already.

Not that I think that there is a credible threat that the game might go away again since the code is out in the wild now, I actually think that growing into a bigger mass of players paints a larger target on it. Think about it: if you were NCSoft, would it be worth your time to sue a small group that has a few hundred players and who are hosting their servers outside a territory where you have more legal power? What would you gain? How much money could such a group have to go after? Now, if the player base increased to 200k, that's something that may be worth taking over. If you were Marvel or DC and you wanted to either keep more players playing Marvel or DC games, or maybe you have plans for a new superhero themed MMO, wouldn't it annoy you if you had 100k or more potential accounts that won't buy or play your game because they can make the Hulk for free in CoH and nobody is preventing these players from creating these characters the way NCSoft used to? liek I said, I'm not really worried about it, but we should be aware that having a higher profile may increase some risks.

The problem with Brawl is it's really the weakest. On a level 35 MM I tested, 4 slotted (1ACC 3Dmg SOs) Boxing and Kick were 5.42 and 5.96 times the strength of unslotted brawl against an even level Crey Infiltrator. Cross Punch was 9.02 times better than unslotted Brawl.

I recall testing some of the pool attacks on Justin and rolled a Level 35 MM, slotting all the attacks I took with 4 even level SO's (1 ACC, 3 DMG) and Cross Punch was second to Arcane Bolt in damage by just a little bit and ahead of the MM's (Beast) attacks. Of course, Arcane Bolt is single target only and has a longish cast time so between the two, I think I'd choose Cross Punch if I was making a build that required me to be in melee range a lot.

Thanks!

... on my Beasts/Thermal MM. I must say though that from 40-49 I abused the Steel Canyon signature arc by farming it; it's too full of juicy LTs to mow down to pass up and I was averaging about a level and a quarter every two times I'd run it.

The game is very solo friendly, more for some ATs over others and certainly much more solo friendly now than it was at launch. My first character at launch was a defender I tried to solo with and it took two weeks to get to level 13 on him. He would die just crossing the street because he aggro'd the wrong group and Siphon Speed would miss just when he needed it to get away. he finally made it to 50 after 565 hours of play. A few years later, my MM's were routinely hitting 50 in much less time and today (I mean, actually "today" as in THIS day), I hit 50 for the first time in 10 years on my Beast/Thermal MM after about 100 hours of 100% solo play (according to some random NPC). I don't min/max and I choose some powers for concept and keep my difficulty settings at a leisurely level, so I'm sure there are people who can solo in much less time.

If you have your own server, there is a GM command to spawn a set of doppelgangers of the character you are playing. You get 8 or so level 50 bosses with your powers and they appear in different sizes with variations on your costume. I think the number may change because one time I could swear it was just 5, but maybe some were too small to notice right away. Anyway, while playing around with various God-mode options on a server, I was able to create a Mastermind with ALL the pets and powers, then spawned a doppelganger and ended up creating a gaggle of doppelgangers, each able to spawn all the MM pets and spam all the MM buffs/debuffs and I was facing an unbeatable mass of pets and MMs. Here's what the doppelgangers look like when my blaster spawned them: It occurred to me that a GM on Homecoming could easily do this in a hazard zone and annouce a call for all heroes to try to defeat the mob. The best tactic I could discern is to slowly pull the MM's away from the main group so you could kill them one at a time, but that's tricky to do when each can spawn over 30 pets.

True this. It was harder when you didn't have Nemesis Staff, Blackwand, etc.

This, also where can I find more info about unity? If God mode is what you want, then run your own server. If you have GM privileges then typing /maxslots will grant every power you have six slots and /omnipotent will give you every power in your class so, for example, you can have all the powers of every powerset in your primary and secondary. Imagine a blaster with all the nukes and snipes from the blaster AT.

I did some informal testing of a Beast/ MM and checked out the values of its 3 attacks vs the fighting, speed, jumping, sorcery and a couple of the Epic pools to see if the attacks were worth taking and slotting. I compared these attacks each slotted with 1 ACC and 3 DMG SO's against the damage of unslotted Brawl vs several even level minions at level 35. Obviously some minions may have resists that skew the numbers slightly, but my results were: Arcane Bolt from Sorcery and Cross Punch from Fighting ranged from 9-9.5x unslotted brawl, Summon Ravens, Summon Hawk (both from Beasts) and Spring Attack from Leaping were 8.2-8.8x unslotted brawl, Fire Blast and Power Blast from the EPPs ranged from 7-8x unslotted brawl, while Flurry, Kick, Jump Kick, Air Superiority, Boxing, Swarm (from beasts, the 1st power) and Ice blast ranged from 6.4x down to 4.97x (in that order) unslotted brawl. Meanwhile, my free Blackwand and Nemesis Staff, while connecting at a lower rate and with a longer recharge, can do from 13.5 to 16 times the damage of unslotted brawl, from what I can tell. So my conclusions for myself were (1) the initial attack power from my primary is lower in damage than most pool attacks (though may have some secondary effects), (2) most of the attacks in the other pools aren't much better, though Arcane Bolt and some of the early EPP attacks are almost decent (as are the 2nd and 3rd attacks in my primary) so if I want to focus on a more defensive build with Tough and Weave plus maybe some other +DEF, I can respec out of most of the early attack powers and add the EPP powers at a later level, relying partly on Blackwand, Nemesis Staff, etc. and maybe some purchase temp attacks to fill gaps in the attack chain.

I don't think we can really consider this game to be the same as it was during Live when it had a team of developers who were paid to go to work and put in full-time efforts to keep the game going and growing. The current team seems to be a loosely organized group that is doing the work with the priority being to keep people playing, but I imagine they have their own lives and jobs outside of their development efforts here and the time they do spend on this is split between making tweaks and playing the game like we do which, as you know, is already a time sink. I surmise that changes will be prioritized based on a combination of (1) the most blatant bugs, (2) the easiest changes to make, and (3) what the most people are asking for.

Well, your mileage may vary, but in my case, I think it depends on how the db server executes the check. We were taking a massive 200+MB csv file and sending each row to the server to be inserted and the query doing the insert had a complicated WHERE clause to check for uniqueness. When we tried the constraint method, it was much faster. Also, if you're going into MySQL instead of SQL Server, it may have a different way of doing things. If I get some time, I'll try to quantify the savings.

I've had a similar challenge importing Azure billing information into a SQL server because we import the current month daily and there's usually some slight variances from the last few days, so we reimport from the beginning of the month to the current date, which can be hundreds of megabytes by a certain time of the month due to our size. The method I have found that works faster than checking if a record already exists is to set a SQL constraint on the table based on the fields that need to be unique and then a try-catch on the code that is doing the importing. If a duplicate exists, the SQL server fails the attempt to import that one record, the app catches the exception and goes on to the next item.

Hmmm. I got a morality mission right after the 10 tips.

How big is the MSSQL database, file size?

Funny, I was just wondering the same thing. I read somewhere that you have to maintain an alignment for seven days to get the badge, then apaprently you can get the alignment power