Captain Fabulous

There's always room for characters to become more powerful. There is no need to nerf them first. A fully IO'd character with T4 incarnate abilities is significantly more powerful than one without. No one at Cryptic felt that characters needed to be nerfed before they introduced Incarnate abilities to make room. In fact they kept SOs as the balance standard despite introducing IOs and Incarnates. The reality is that the game suffered immensely from ED and the defense nerf. CoV came shortly thereafter and boosted the playerbase for a time, but in the end it was still a superhero game in which you never really felt super. IOs didn't come till two years later, after Jack had pretty much left the game and was working on the Marvel MMO that eventually became Champions (which also suffered from a massive day 1 nerf from which it never recovered) and Star Trek Online, and the remaining devs were desperate to find a way to inject new life into the game without undoing any of Jack's edicts. From a developer point of view it's a great scheme; make people weak in order to slow their progress and force them to team, which in turn keeps them paying for longer. The invention system expanded on this, forcing people who want to be stronger than what SOs allow to grind their way to be better, again, keeping them playing and paying. But it also created a power schism that Cryptic/Paragon never figured out how (and some would argue purposely never wanted) to fix. They continued to balance the game around SOs despite there being an entire subclass of players who were significantly more powerful than that (equal to and in some ways even stronger than what was possible prior to ED). With the introduction of F2P, the Incarnate system, and various paid-gates the game allowed some people (those willing to keep paying and grinding) to get even stronger, creating yet a third tier of player strength. At no time did they ever institute another across-the-board nerf to make way for the increased power the Incarnate system would bring. Nor did they ever attempt to rebalance the game around it. So yeah, they told us ED was necessary to balance the game (just like how they told us the day 1 CO nerf was necessary for the same reason), but it's always been a flat out lie. ED came about because Jack didn't like how we played his game, that we found ways to surpass his "one hero equals three minions" design mentality. He straight up admitted he thought repeatedly dying on missions was a good thing that enhanced the game's enjoyment. But achieving both required nerfing the hell out of our damage and defense potential. And here we are 20 years later debating what life could have been like without ED 🤣 But I will say this, even now playing with just SOs or even common IOs is still a slog if you're not on a well-powered team. Soloing at anything above +1 is a decidedly un-fun experience due to constantly running out of endurance, non-stop debuffs/mezzing/KB, or simply getting curbstomped by 3 minions. Which is exactly how Jack wanted it.

The actual claws part aside, I think a Savage/WP Brute fits Wolverine better than Claws.

Null gets lonely. This will force people to visit him. 🤷

One more nerf to Regen and it will actually damage you whenever you activate a power, saving you from the embarrassment of being defeated by 3 even-level minions.

The biggest problem with integrated graphics is they often don't have a lot of allocated RAM, and what little they do have is shared with system RAM, so it's slow in comparison to a dedicated card. It doesn't mean you can't run CoH or other games, but you will often have to run at reduced resolutions, texture quality, and graphics settings because there simply isn't enough RAM to process a detailed high-resolution image at 60+ FPS.

Lower the resolution and/or renderscale value, lower the draw distance, and turn off vsync, antialiasing, and name plates. The biggest problem with integrated graphics is that they don't have a lot of memory to work with, and when they run out it slows everything down. The graphics engine was also never fully optimized after the last upgrade, so that doesn't help. If you get good framerates indoors but it drops when in populated areas or if looking in a particular direction there isn't much you can do. It's simply a limitation of the client and your graphics subsystem.

Saved it from what? It wasn't broken and we wouldn't have needed IOs. We would have gotten a crafting system that did something else instead of restoring, for a price, what they took away. And no reason to think we wouldn't have gotten Incarnates either way.

Since IOs didn't exist at the time, yes. Most of the benefits from IO sets and globals restore what everyone already had organically prior to ED and the defense nerf, creating a two-tier system of haves and have-nots that ultimately wound up making the game extremely difficult to balance. If you need to see this imbalance in action, playtest a character with just SOs and then again with a full IO-set build. The difference is night and day. Now imagine you could get 90% of the same functionality as the full IO-set build on your SO build, without having to grind TFs or play the market. It raises the bar for everyone, not just those who have the time and will to grind. The game was far worse off for ED, and dare I say never really recovered from it. All because one man who believed that dying in games was fun.

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Countercounterpoint 1: while Sentinel Regen is arguably better than others, it's still not great, swapping out +regen for a tiny amount of +absorb. Countercounterpoint 2: if you're gonna be a hover-blaster you want to focus on ranged defense, not S/L/M.

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The best advice I can give you is to take Willpower instead, aka Regen v2.

If that's your processor you don't have Intel integrated graphics. You have AMD Vega graphics, which is far better. You could just find an add-in graphics card that will fit that machine. No need to buy a whole new system. But honestly, as the game is almost 20 years old you shouldn't need to even do that. When you say "lag" do you mean you see a delay in moving and/or activating powers? Or is it just a really low framerate?

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Ditto the others on Shadow Maul, especially on a Tank.

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I've said it before and I will die on this hill: ED broke the game.

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Check all the character slots to ensure it didn't simply get moved. After that you'll have to file a support ticket, see if they can figure out what happened.

It's a long animation for sure, but no reason it couldn't be trimmed to fit.