RikOz

Surprised I hadn't seen this exchange before (Kings Row): Skulls Girlfriend: Your excuse is like crap. Gravedigger Slugger: Whaaat?

You've reminded me of a Christmas at my grandparents' house in the 1970s, when I was a young lad. My cousins, Jeff and Brian, got Rock'em Sock'em Robots, and instantly began to loudly fight over who got to be "the red one" before they even got it out of the box :D Couple new ones for me: Alt #103, "Fletchetta" (Archery/Super Reflexes sentinel): #104: Rho-Man (Broad Sword/Energy Aura Brute):

I run into this all the time on that "Mysterious General Z" arc, in the mission where I have to rescue him from the Sky Raiders. He decides to attack a Porter, the Porter ports away, and General Z races off across the map to find him. Then I usually never see him again.

Could we get Overdrive to slot some KB->KD? She's so annoying when I'm playing a melee character.

I did observe, last night while doing some of Maria Jenkins arc in Peregrine, that the various Freedom Phalanx members I was paired with in the missions kept up with me just fine, so I know it can be done. I recall having the opposite problem in WoW. In that game, NPCs that accompany you tend to follow so closely that they obstruct your view of your own character. That was especially "fun" when one storyline had a friendly ogre accompanying me, and I happened to be playing a gnome. Could not see what I was doing at all.

Psy melee: Yah, any psionic power set is painful against robots and zombies. I learned that right quick when one of my psionic blasters ended up in a Banished Pantheon arc. I currently have two Psionic Melee characters, one scrapper and one brute, and I gotta say the brute is a lot more fun. Beam Rifle's mechanic is odd, and it's not what I think of when I think "ray gun". I suspect it would be more fun if it let me feel like a Star Wars stormtrooper or something. I've recently discovered that Kinetic Melee really gets fun around level 35. One of my "top 10" alts is a kin melee scrapper, and while he felt "tedious" for a while, once he got to 35 or so he seemed to turn into a powerhouse. The animations actually allowed me to get extra creative with another kin melee scrapper. That particular character is a speedster, and in my head canon, super speed is her only superpower. But she's learned how to creatively utilize her speed for combat. Those elaborate animations are her using her speed to actually compress air into semi-hard balls that she then hurls at her opponents.

QoL inquiry: Can something be done to speed up the various superpowered NPCs that appear in some missions as helpers, so that they can actually keep up with me? The majority of "civilian" NPCs that I rescue and have to lead back to the exit seem to have no trouble at all sticking to my heels all the way back to the exit. Mr. Yin, in particular, is a remarkably speedy old guy. But in other missions, I rescue the likes of Miss Thystle, Frostfire, Silent Blade, etc., who are then supposed to "help" me, and I can't run 30 yards without them falling behind and complaining that I'm too quick and they can't keep up. These guys should be embarrassed that Mr. Yin can outrun them! I mean, yeah, I can complete these missions without their help, but I'm one of those story-focused players who enjoys the immersion of "randomly" encountering another hero and teaming up with them, and it seriously breaks immersion when I have to repeatedly stop and go back and find these guys. It doesn't help that some powersets include run-speed boosting effects (like SR's "Quickness") that can't be turned off, but I also run into this problem with characters who have no speed boosts at all. I did one redside mission where I literally had to drag "Walk" onto my bars to escort an NPC to the exit, because I couldn't run 15 steps without this NPC "losing" me. While following me in a straight line, across an open field with no obstacles (outdoor map). (Flying "helper' NPCs can keep up, but they have their own set of problems, like Overdrive flying clear to the other side of a large warehouse, far enough away from me to trigger her "I can't keep up" line.)

These days, I'm pretty much leveling as much as possible via Tip missions. Then I can go back later and do the arcs I want via Ouro.

Heh - when the live game shut down and I went back to WoW, my first several days back were spent being extremely frustrated every time my character (on a horse!) couldn't clear a waist-high picket fence!

What are some "game mechanics" that never (or rarely) work in video games, even though they work just fine in real life and in pencil & paper games like D&D? The main one I've noticed, between CoH and WoW is "character size". The problem is that, in a computer RPG, the size of your character is simply cosmetic. There are no mechanical advantages or disadvantages to playing a character that is larger or smaller than "normal". This usually seems to be for "balance" reasons. I first noticed this in WoW, when I tried fitting characters of different races through tight spots. That's when I discovered that, if a tauren (WoW's physically largest race) can't fit through that space, neither can a gnome (one of the smallest races). More than once, I tried to move a gnome through a space that, visually, was more than big enough for her to fit, but nope. For the purposes of fitting through spaces, all characters are treated as the same size. Today, in CoH, I was playing a character who is eight feet tall, and uses the "huge" model. Additionally, it (it's a robot) uses Titan Weapons. So he's eight feet tall, and he's swinging a 10-foot laser sword. Now, in D&D, his size alone would give him extra "reach", and his weapon would probably also qualify as a "reach weapon". He'd have a similar advantage in "real life". But in CoH, none of that matters. For the purpose of making melee attacks, he's exactly the same size as everybody else, and he still has to be practically bumping chests with his opponent to hit them. Have you noticed other examples?

I don't drink any more, except on rare occasions (When my wife is away. I stopped drinking because she's a recovering alcoholic.) I can't recall if I ever played CoH drunk, but there were a few occasions when I played WoW completely hammered. Mostly back in the Wrath of the Lich King era, so 2008-2010 or so. I discovered that being drunk didn't seem to have much effect on my muscle memory, so I'd queue up for random dungeons on my fire mage - I was intimately familiar with the dungeons, having run each of them many times, so I knew what was happening (not to mention how minutely scripted they were) and barely had to think about what I was doing. Autopilot! So I'd jump in with a random group and just blast away, and I never got any complaints about my performance. Nowadays, due to a combination of age and infrequency of drinking, I don't have nearly the alcohol tolerance I used to have, and I don't even attempt to game while drunk. I tried once or twice, and even just solo questing, I couldn't focus. So on those rare occasions I get to drink now, it's Netflix instead of games.

Yikes! Yeah, it's currently 109F where I am in eastern WA.

Overheard in Faultline tonight: Construction Worker: I'm hiding from my wife. Why are you up here?

Well, since I couldn't play CoH, I spent last night playing Microsoft Mahjong.

Not to mention that the idea that a non-superpower set like AR doing less damage depending on who's pulling the trigger is absurd.

Alt #102: Coldcore (Ice Blast/Sonic Manipulation blaster)

Ah, I was wondering this myself. Except it was with the Sonic Manipulation blaster secondary.

My main, the first character I rolled on both live and HC, is my fire/fire blaster. Love it. Close behind is my energy/energy brute. Alas, my energy/energy brute's younger sister is a dark/dark brute, and she is such and Endurance hog..

Oh god, this. As to revamping Goldside, my issue with Praetoria is probably due to my altoholism (102 as of last night). Boiled down, my problem is the complexity of the story, with all the double-agent stuff between factions and sub-factions. I've only rolled one Praetorian on HC, and I gave up in the middle and rerolled the character as Blueside. Likewise, when resurrecting my old Goldside-turned-Blueside character from live, I just rolled her Blueside to begin with and added a bit to her backstory, saying that she has a vague memory of once living in a different world, but she can't otherwise remember anything about it. The problem is that, as an altoholic, I rarely play the same character two days in a row. This meant that I rolled my Praetorian and got a few levels on him the same day. Then I didn't get back to him again for two or three weeks, because I was rotating through my other alts. When I logged him in for the second time, I realized that I had no idea where he stood. He started out Resistance, but had done at least one "undercover" mission before I logged him out the first time. I realized that, if I had already forgotten "the story so far", it was going to get even worse as I progressed when days or weeks might pass before I returned to the character. So that's when I decided to just delete and reroll Blueside. Essentially, I think the only way I could play a Praetorian all the way through the storyline would be to completely ignore all of my other alts for however long it took to get my Praetorian to the end. I suspect that "fixing" this would require a bunch of programming to build in some sort of flowchart that would track the character's progress.

I noticed something in Atlas Park yesterday that I had never noticed before. Several times, I was helping a mugging victim, and other passers-by stopped to watch the fight. Then, when the last baddie was down, they turned and continued on their way. Was wondering if this is something new, of if it's always happened and I somehow never noticed.

Posting for the curiosity: The curiosity is that I got inf for that defeat, because I have the +100% XP buff, which cancels all inf gain from defeating mobs. I actually "died" on that fight, and I'm guessing that what happened was Overdrive got the killing blow, and it happened in that moment between my dying and clicking "Go to Hospital". So since I was "dead", the XP buff/inf debuff didn't apply to that one kill.

The mission, "Stop the next Rikti assault", from Steven Sheridan. takes place on the "Wylie Park" open-world map (a "Board Transit" mission). For whatever reason, the red-enclosed "exit" area is not working. I tried to enter the area both in the air and on foot, and ran around inside the red-enclosed area, but could not trigger it to exit the mission. To exit without completing the mission, I had to log out.

Alas, I wish I could actually remember where I first heard/read the joke of somebody being described as half- & half- & half-. In the case of this character, I did it simply to justify his ridiculous name :D

I like the way this one turned out. He's Khan O'Copenhagen, my half-Chinese, half-Irish, half-Danish dual-pistols/ninjitsu sentinel:

Don't see too many of us using the various head options like that. My villain, Moldav, uses the same one: