RikOz

I rather like the way it picked out the buildings behind Venus Lass and included them on the box and screen: Original:

It seems to be the default sample prompt Google Gemini give so you can try it out. For mine, I got an e-mail inviting me to check it out, and it gave me a sample prompt that produced my Girl Mercury image: Here's Mother Sun, from the same prompt:

Tried out Google Gemini with a pic of my latest level 50, Girl Mercury:

Okay, I just got this map again for a mission in the Revenant Hero arc. I went straight to the bottom elevator first. The objective was, "Two computers to access". Which is an annoying way of stating it, because I counted one time and there are actually at least eight computers to "access", but only two of them have what you're looking for. Anyway, the bottom elevator led to three computers to click on, but all of them resulted in "The file is not on this computer". Moved up to the middle elevator, and on that floor I found both computers with the files I needed. So, again, mission resolved by the middle elevator, with the bottom elevator being useless. Still, more experimentation is needed. Like, go 1st and 3rd, and then next time go 3rd -> 1st.

Speaking of which, I sure wish they'd get around to fixing police stations and Portal Corp as safe places to log out. Every other day job location you can log out with a 0 timer, but those two locations always get the long waits.

I finally got around to doing the New Praetorians arc in Brickstown again. I ran it the first time a few years ago, on my "main" (Flaminatrix, fire/fire/flame blaster), right after she got Marchand as a contact, so around level 35. Holy crap, that was a freakin' challenge at that level, as a solo blaster, but I got through it. But I'd been nervous about trying it again, until yesterday, when I ran it again on my level 50, fully T4 incarnate, fully-IO'd dual blades/SR scrapper. It was much easier this time, even running it at +3 :D The reason I bring this up is that I made a mind-blowing discovery. The first time I did the arc, on my fire blaster, I was continually frustrated by my New Praetorians NPC allies constantly going down very early in the missions, leaving me to solo everything else. This time, after Pendragon went down for the first time, my other allies and I kept fighting, and once all of the enemies were down I had to tend to something out-of-game for a couple minutes. I got back to the game just in time to see Pendragon walking over and saying, "I still have some fight left in me." He was fully healed up. OMG. When those guys are defeated, they use Rest! If they go down I just have to wait a couple minutes and they're back up! My god, I unnecessarily soloed all that crap on my blaster the first time because I had no idea. The NPCs would go down and I'd leave them behind. Because I had no idea. I mean, I'm kinda proud of doing it solo and overcoming the challenge (I mean the only thing that saved me on the fight against the two giant robots was the fact that I'd chosen Bonfire for my first Epic Pool power--it kept those robots away from me so I could blast them at range), but it still would have been seriously less frustrating if I had only known. Nothing told me the NPC allies could do that. And now I wonder if this is true of some of the other helper NPCs that show up in missions. I mean, I've seen that Overdrive just despawns when she's defeated. But what about Grym, in that Hellions mission in the second part of the Shining Stars arc? Every time I've done that mission he's gotten defeated in the first fight, because he insists on standing in the fire. But if I waited around, would he have Rested and healed up? Anyway, my mind is blown.

Skyway City could use some work. Maybe it's just me, but most of my multitude of alts have seemed to get funneled from Kings Row to Steel Canyon, with Skyway ending up largely neglected.

LOL, that's more or less what I call it, too :D I had to ask one time what purpose that "Lab Equipment" serves aside from being something for blasters to inadvertently tab-target and waste attacks on. Was informed that getting caught in the explosion can result in a random buff or debuff. Yup, that's how I do it (always solo, though). Jump down to the bottom level and then work my way to the top.

Interesting question. I always take the elevators in the order I find them. Next time I get this map I'll try running down and using that bottom elevator first and see what happens. I always figured the spawn points were chosen when the map loads, but we'll see.

Heh. Not four pages, but there's one Indigo infodump, about six paragraphs long, that I've never been able to finish reading because Malta always ambushes me right in the middle of it. Though, to be fair, I don't think they were specifically intended to ambush me there. It's a general design problem with ambushes that spawn when you enter a zone. Those ambushes spawn near your entry point (in this particular case, usually the FF tram station), but seem to expect to to stay there long enough for them to run up on you. If you aren't aware of their presence and you immediately fly off after zoning in, they have to chase after you, which means that this particular ambush tends to finally catch up while you're talking to Indigo.

Does anybody else find certain maps that just bug you for a silly reason? For me, it's this map right here: This is the main floor of this map. The floors reached by the elevators are always the same. The mission entrance is at the top of this map. My "problem" with this map is the entire bottom section, including the elevator and the floor it leads to. It's all completely extraneous because every single mission I have ever gotten that uses this map is completely resolved by the second elevator. Regardless of specific mission requirements. For example, the mission that finally prompted me to post this required me to click on four glowies and defeat a named boss. In this instance, the first elevator led to one glowie. The second elevator led to the remaining three glowies and the named boss. Mission complete. In all of the times I've seen this map, there has never been any need to venture into the lower section or enter the last elevator unless I decide I simply want to clear the entire map. It just seems like a waste.

I didn't get a computer capable of running any kind of MMO until 2008, when I got a brand new iMac. I'd already been a Mac user since 1996, and had long accepted the fact that very few Windows PC games had Mac versions. So I was more or less locked into Blizzard. I played Diablo II, as well as the WarCraft RTS games. So when WoW came out, I naturally wanted to play it, and signed up in 2008 as soon as I had the new iMac. I didn't bother looking into other MMOs, just naturally assuming that none of them would run on a Mac. And I really enjoyed WoW, coming into that game shortly after the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I ended up playing mostly solo, as the bulk of the playerbase were veterans who were busy with the new expansion content at high levels. But I absolutely loved the exploration aspect of the game and spent countless hours going everywhere and doing everything. I spent so much time exploring that I only managed to get one character (Eilyssana, my human retribution paladin) to max level by the end of WotLK. I'll admit a bit of frustration with the open-world questing model, as it was designed at the time. I could see that it was designed with the idea that players would be forming teams to complete quests, but by the time I joined up leveling had evolved into a solo activity because everybody's goal was to get to max level as quickly as possible to experience endgame content. So I was quite happy when the next expansion (Cataclysm) completely revamped the "old world" and made it more solo-friendly. The veteran players complained endlessly about "dumbing down" the content, but I could see it for what it was: Blizzard acknowledging that most players now leveled solo, and realizing that it was discouraging to new players when, every time a solo, low-level player attacked a gnoll, they were beset by seven more of that gnoll's closest friends and would die because they didn't have the tools at those low levels to deal with big groups of enemies. But the Cataclysm expansion, as much as I enjoyed it, introduced a new problem for a soloist like me: At max level, there just wasn't a whole lot to do if you weren't a raider. (The job I had at the time, working as a cook in convention catering, had an extremely irregular, unpredictable schedule, so I couldn't commit to a regular raid schedule.) I got seven characters to max level in Cataclysm, but with nothing interesting for me to do with them after that, I started to get very bored. I was part of a WoW discussion thread on an unrelated forum, and in that thread I expressed my boredom and my wish that there was some other MMORPG that would run on a Mac. Somebody replied, "City of Heroes has a Mac version." Well that was cool. I hadn't even heard of City of Heroes. (Well, actually, I had a few issues of the comic in my collection, and I think my comic book guy may have mentioned that it was tied into a game but, being a Mac user I didn't bother to check into it (see above).) So I checked into CoH. Sure enough, it would run on a Mac, though as far as I could tell it wasn't really a "Mac version". It seemed to be the Windows version running in a Wine-like wrapper that let it run on Macs. Suffice it to say I was instantly hooked on CoH. This was late 2011, so after Freedom. I chose to pay the $15 monthly sub for the VIP access rather than one of the FTP options. My first character was Flaminatrix. Her basic appearance (sans costume) was based directly on the basic appearance of the aforementioned Eilyssana from WoW: red-haired human female (which is pretty much my first character in any game that allows customization). But I made her a fire blaster, more or less emulating my #2 WoW character, a draenei fire mage. I suppose Titan Weapons would have been a better set for more closely recreating my main WoW character in CoH, but I can't recall why I didn't notice that set at the time. Was it only a purchasable PS at the time, not available by default? Or not yet introduced? Anyway, I continued to play both WoW and CoH for the next six months but realized I was spending a lot more time in CoH than in WoW and decided it was silly to keep paying two subscription fees, so I canceled my WoW sub and played CoH exclusively. I had a lot of alts in WoW, but my altoholism really kicked in with CoH. I eventually had 93 alts ... ... and then NCSoft shut down the game. I was heartbroken, and I had only played for a little over a year. I can't imagine how the longer-playing veterans felt. In the leadup to the shutdown, I did take the precaution of screenshotting the costumes of every single one of my 93 alts so that, in the extremely unlikely event that the game somehow came back, I could recreate them (turns out that paid off!) On the plus side, the CoH shutdown roughly corresponded with the release of WoW's "Mists of Pandaria" expansion, so I went back to WoW (still because of the lack of Mac support for other games). MoP turned out to be a really fun expansion that I thoroughly enjoyed. The following expansion, "Warlords of Draenor" was kinda "meh", but the leveling/questing experience was still a lot of fun, and I managed to get at least one character of every class to max level by the end of that one. Then the "Legion" expansion was completely awesome. But toward the end of that expansion, Blizzard announced that they were finally ending support for the OpenGL graphics API, which meant that, as of the next expansion, the game would no longer work on my old iMac, which was ten years old at that point. I understood their decision; they'd been holding together OpenGL support with duct tape and gum for a few years just to keep it working on Macs, and it had reached the point that OpenGL could no longer handle what they wanted to do with the graphics going forward. My old iMac could not upgrade to the newer Apple graphics API, and I couldn't afford a new Mac, so I reluctantly bought a Windows gaming PC. I probably would have had to anyway, at some point. I'd spent the last few years gradually lowering and lowering the game's graphics settings to keep it playable on that old iMac. Getting the new gaming machine made it feel like I was playing a whole new game, because everything suddenly looked and worked so much better. I took the opportunity to finally try out some other MMOs, but could not find any that I liked as well as WoW or CoH. WoW released the "Battle for Azeroth" expansion, which I mostly liked, but it featured some prime examples of one of my frustrations with Blizzard: They introduce innovative new things that are actually fun for casual, mostly-solo players like myself, then the obnoxious, hardcore raiders complain about being "forced" to do this content they don't like, and Blizzard stops developing them. And then, I found out about the "revival" of City of Heroes. I was led to Homecoming in May 2019, signed up immediately, and promptly canceled my WoW sub, and I've been here ever since. I did take a break from CoH during the Covid lockdowns--playing one game 16 hours a day inevitably burned me out a bit, especially since I was rolling so many alts and doing AP/KR/StCan over and over and over. I resubbed to WoW during that time, mainly to see the end of the BoA expansion and check out the new "Shadowlands" expansion. Shadowlands finally killed any remaining fondness I had for WoW. In all previous expansions, regardless of the overall quality, I'd always found the questing/leveling experience enjoyable. Not so in Shadowlands. Questing was boring and frustrating. And then at max level it turned into "start grinding multiple currencies" to unlock new power. I quit and haven't looked back. I've played CoH exclusively since then. I'm up to 142 alts, ultimately hoping to have alts with every powerset combination for the ATs I play. Though for the time being I'm mostly holding off on rolling new alts to focus on leveling up the ones I already have (currently working toward my 52nd level 50) and getting my existing 50s fully T4 Incarnated (currently at 13) and fully IO'd (6). Here's hoping that Homecoming sticks around for a long time, as I can't think of any other game I'd rather be playing!

Nope, I'd never even heard of that. The glowing body is basically her "final form"; her previous costumes were normal costumes. She's part of a small, themed SG I first created back on Live, called "Solar Angels". The team consists of Mother Sun (the leader, inventor of the super serum that gave all of them their powers), Girl Mercury, Venus Lass, Erdmadchen (from Germany), Ms. Mars (an actual Martian warrior, so no "powers"; only member of the team whose origin is "Natural" rather than "Science") Fille de Jupiter (from France), Saturnal, Princesa Urana (Mexico), Neptune's Child, and Notta Planet. Plus two others I consider "auxiliary members": Haley Komet and Lunagetic.

If you're happy and you know it, overthink! If you're happy and you know it, overthink! If you're happy and you know it then your brain will surely blow it If you're happy and you know it, overthink! :D

Today I discovered that the Shadow Shard (or rather Black Swan's shadow dimension) looks amazing with cel shading turned on.

5150! Girl Mercury (Kinetic Melee/Super Reflexes scrapper), my only speedster, is my 51st level 50 :) Yeah, more Spectrum. The alts I'm currently leveling were rolled back in 2019, and I was designing their first six costumes before level 10 (when it's free). I had discovered the cool look I could get with Spectrum pieces, and I used them a lot for different alts' "level 50" costumes. Though I have made a few alterations to my original designs.

There is an odd issue that pops up from time to time, where your keybinds for the 1-0 keys stop functioning. It can be fixed by simply alt-tabbing out of the game and back in. Although if you're actually clicking the power buttons (as suggested by your wording), rather than using the top row of number keys, that sounds like a different issue. When the 1-0 keybinds stop working, clicking the power icons still works.

I entered one AE mission where I gave up after only two rooms because almost every spawn included an Electric Armor lieutenant who was already in Power Surge form before I even attacked them. Just (mostly) untouchable balls of lightning standing around waiting for me. Not sure if that was intentional on the part of the author or not.

Thanks, but not necessary :)

Heh. Even when I'm still using SOs, I slot those in the same specific order every time. Like, for attacks: ACC, DAM, RECH, END in the first four slots, then the last two slots either get slotted for any "special" effects the attacks have, or more ACC/DAM if there are no special effects. I get extremely irritated at my job when coworkers don't put things away in the same place they got them. I work with food, and putting stuff in the wrong place frequently leads to waste, or at the very least having multiple containers of the same thing taking up space. A few years back, I asked a question online about why, every time they release a new version of their operating systems, do Microsoft and Apple hype up the Search features over and above everything else. That's when I learned that there are tons of people who save things and have no idea where they went. That blew my mind. This more or less, given how expensive purples are.

D'OH! Maybe I need to turn that back on once I get to 50! I guess what happened to me is that, after creating a massive number of alts, I've spent the last couple years focusing on actually getting my existing alts to 50 instead of leveling new ones, with the side effect being that it's been a very long time since I last saw that particular warning pop up (I mean, I'm leveling to 50 alts that I rolled all the way back in 2019), so I completely forgot that it existed. But, mainly, I was thinking of a warning that was specific to these high-value enhancements.

I have noticed a similar issue with Phoenix Rising (self-rez) icon from the sentinel version of Fiery Aura. When the power is unavailable, the icon displays as an attack power: But if I'm defeated, and the power becomes available, it appears with the correct icon.

So, the game provides a warning when I'm about to use an enhancement unslotter or an enhancement catalyst (at least the first time, until I disable it). Additionally, it prevents the inadvertent vendoring of purple and PVP enhancements/recipes by completely removing the ability to do so. What it doesn't warn or protect against is accidentally replacing and destroying an already-slotted purple/PVP enhancement. Which is what happened to me yesterday. I had a certain power slotted with Obliteration (an orange set), except with Armageddon (purple) in the first and sixth slots. I crafted a new Armageddon enhancement. As I assume many players do, I like to slot my enhancement sets in the "correct" order (that is, the order they're listed in the set description). So the new Armageddon I had just crafted would fit into the third slot. But I mistakenly unslotted the Obliteration enhancement that was in the second slot (wanted to save the Obliteration piece to sell on the AH). Realizing my mistake, I moved to put the Obliteration enhancement back into its slot, but overshot and dropped it onto the first slot. *POOF* Armageddon enhancement gone forever, just like that. I admit that this was mostly carelessness on my part. But it's carelessness that could happen to anybody, with a simple slip of the hand while dragging an enhancement. But it's exactly the same kind of carelessness that the other warnings protect against. The lack of a warning against a far more expensive mistake really seems like an oversight. A warning like: WARNING: You are about to destroy a Very Rare enhancement! Are you sure? (Y/N)

Mother Sun (Rad/Fiery Aura sentinel) is now my 50th level 50!