RikOz

Yeah, it's just the fact he's getting older and his powers are fading, but he doesn't want to hang it up / retire. I'm guessing he's in his 50s like me, and I can understand it. I'm only a cook, and even at that the hours on my feet are starting to get to me.

My main, Flaminatrix, makes pretty good use of the Spectrum pieces, I think:

The superhero shows and movies figured out soon enough that the spandex simply doesn't work well for live action. In print, that "painted on" look works because that's exactly what it is. The artists draw a naked figure with the appropriate musculature, and then just add the lines and colors for the costumes afterward. Real spandex on a real human body just doesn't work that way unless you actually do paint it on, so it just looks stupid. As for costume contests, back on live I only got to play for a year, since I only discovered the game about a year before it got shut down. And in that time I think I only participated in one, and was rather unimpressed when the winner they selected was a straight-up Captain America clone. I've participated in a few on Homecoming, though I don't make a specific effort to win them. I only really participate if I happen to be in Atlas Park when there's one going on, and I just join in on whichever character I happen to be playing at that moment (I'm pretty proud of most of my costumes anyway, so...). The only exception was when somebody announced a "Goth Girl" costume contest in Kallisti Wharf, and I just so happened to be playing my one villain who looks kinda goth, so I headed over there to enter (didn't win). As for capes ... I don't use them on most of my characters. I think that's largely influenced by my years of playing WoW, where they've never managed to fix the graphical clipping issues with cloaks on characters that carry their weapons on their backs. That, and cloaks/capes look awful on certain WoW races due to hunched postures (male orcs and trolls) or tails (mainly draenei, and tauren to a degree) causing the cloaks to hang badly. In CoH, it's mostly my male characters who wear capes, partly because I don't like the male run animation and a cloak hides it.

*sigh* With this pandemic thing keeping me out of work for more than four months now, I eventually needed a change of scenery from playing CoH ... I mean, I can only play the same game so many hours a day. So I broke out my bass guitar and started playing that more, and then I bought a new electric guitar, since I'd been without one for a while, and I've been relearning a bunch of the old songs I used to play on guitar before the bass became my "main". And, well, I re-upped my WoW account, and have been getting in on the tail end of the Battle for Azeroth expansion before the next expansion comes out. Of course, in my absence, Blizzard introduced a swell new mechanic that, as is typical of Blizzard, is probably great if you participate in a lot of group content, but utterly sucks for solo play. It's called "Corruption". Your new gear can randomly drop with a Corruption score on it. Corruption has the benefit of increasing your combat power in various ways, but this is balanced by various deleterious effects. Specifically, your own gear randomly tries to kill you. So I come back after a year away, get a couple of my alts to max level and start trying to gear them up, and before I understood exactly how Corruption works, one of these characters had accumulated a quite high Corruption score, and next thing I know I'm fighting some basic random mob and suddenly all these Corruption effects go off and I'm dead to some random crab. Brilliant!

Mad Freak Slammer: Okay, here's how it goes. I give my dastardly plot ideas and you all go, 'oooo' and 'ahhhh'. Capo Gunner: It's like I always say, 'If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets'!

Well, as this "home all day, every day" thing has continued, I've actually gotten to where I'm playing the game less. Even I can only play so much before my brain screams for something else to do. I've been playing my bass guitar a lot more than I had been, and I even bought an electric guitar and have been relearning a lot of the songs I used to play way back before the bass became my main instrument. Bought an interface that allows me to plug my instruments into my computer, and also a good vocal microphone, and I've been fooling with learning (slowly) how to do some recording. In any case, playing the game less seems to have freed up my system resources and allowed for more Folding. I broke into the top 100 folders a few months ago, and after peaking at #93 I hovered in the mid-to-high 90s for quite a while. But since my playing has dropped off, I've cracked 90 and reached a new peak of 83, and have been loitering around the mid-80s ever since.

Yeah, my fire blaster had an IO set with a hold proc on her Blaze power, and it displayed the electric Tesla Cage effect.

I don't think how you enter the zone has anything to do with it. All of my blueside characters arrive in Kings Row for the first time via the tram, and it feels completely random as to which detective they get, though most of them seem to get Becktrees.

Nope, Everlasting. Started out on Reunion as just "Teardrop". I moved to Everlasting when they moved the servers and Reunion was designated the EU server. Ended up needing to add the "s" to the end. She was my second-highest character back on live, but only made it to 37 there before the shutdown. But speaking of seeing a name before, a couple weeks ago I spotted a "Crimson Crosshair", which was the name of a Goldside alt I rolled, but didn't play much, back on live. It was odd seeing it, because it's not a name I would have pictured somebody else thinking up.

Sitting at level 48, on her way to becoming my next level 50, is Teardrops! She's a petite goth fairy who also happens to be a SS/Inv brute. She is also the only one of my current 95 alts who doesn't have a signature color scheme. She has a wardrobe, and wears what suits her mood. Hmm, I see I need to fix her skin color on a couple of those. She should be chalky white in all of them.

Likewise!

I try to come up with plausible explanations for mixed powers: AR/Elec sentinel: She's a mutant, but her electrical powers turned out to be strictly defensive in nature. She learned to shoot because, being very petite, she isn't suited to melee combat. A Magic-origin Archery/Dark blaster: All of her "powers" come from her magical bow. Those powers allow her to manipulate darkness, but the bow grants no special archery skills. She has to practice with it as a mundane bow; that daily practice is what allows the bow build a connection with its wielder and grant darkness powers. This takes time to establish, and then requires maintenance. To anybody else randomly picking it up, it's just an ordinary bow. Even Manticore would see no benefit from it, unless he took full possession of it and used it all the time. My lone superspeed character ... the super speed is actually her only "power". That obviously lends itself to Super Reflexes as her secondary. Her primary, Kinetic Melee, is actually her using her speed to physically compress air and slam it against her opponents at high velocity. Of course, that means her weakness would be finding herself in a vacuum. I take Flight as the travel power for most of my characters; choosing Super Speed or Super Jumping only when it fits the particular character concept I'm going for. Then I come up with a reason for why the character can fly. In some cases, sure, it's an actual separate superpower. In other cases, the character has figured out how to manipulate their basic powerset to allow them to fly: my fire/fire blaster creates a localized convection current, my electric characters create an electromagnetic bubble around themselves, etc. Some, regardless of origin, use some tech solution. My head canon says that the FBSA takes a cue from the Legion of Superheroes and issues a "flight ring" (or maybe a belt) that grants flight to heroes who can't fly under their own power.

I just bought Skyrim Special Edition off Steam, mainly just to have a single-player game available for when my internet goes whackadoodle. Holy cow, after 10+ years of playing nothing but MMOs, I'm finding the controls absolutely infuriating. The Left-Right keys (A & D) strafe instead of turn, and trying to use the mouse to turn without right-clicking is driving me nuts. Attacking without targeting is also massively confusing for me. I had the same problem when I tried Elder Scrolls Online. I feel like the only way I'll get used to it will be to completely step away from CoH for a week or so and focus completely on Skyrim, just to train myself to the different controls. Kind of the same way I decided to get back to playing guitar after focusing on the bass for the last 20 years - I had to leave my bass untouched for a few days and just play the guitar so that I could get used to the tiny neck and skinny strings again.

Must be why one of the Arachnos random lines is about throwing a hero over the edge - "just make sure it's a superspeeder".

Speaking of which, those generators baffle me. I've lived my entire life in the land of hydroelectric dams, Washington state, and generators (or, more accurately, the turbines) go inside the dam, not sitting in the middle of the reservoir. The whole point of the dam is to force the water through a smaller space, increasing the speed of the flow to turn the turbines. Of course, there's also the fact that you don't build a bunch of skyscrapers directly in front of a dam.

It just recently occurred to me to set my clickable mez-protection powers (like Practiced Brawler) to auto-fire. That effectively makes them work like toggles, and I don't have to remember to click them.

As it turns out, it was actually Karen. https://babylonbee.com/news/space-x-launch-scrubbed-after-karen-called-the-cops-on-it

I think that half the problem, across the entire game, is that the mob AI is set up to use their powers as if they're fighting on a team, but the AI is primitive enough that it has no "situational awareness". So instead of using team-oriented powers in coordination with their "teammates" and the current situation, they instead fire off these powers at either predetermined hit point levels, or completely at random. A good example is enemy teleporters. Their teleportation isn't used in any tactical manner - they just randomly pop away, often reappearing halfway across the map - and that frequently results in a tactically terrible situation for them: instead of being a part of ganging up on you, they pop away at the start of the fight and then reappear after you've defeated the rest of their "team" and now they have to fight you alone. Those Sky Raider Engineers have about the only tactically sound AI team power use in the game, since they try to get their FF up as soon as they see you.

How about some hot girl-on-girl action!

Field Agent: Countess said that Flaminatrix was hot on the paper-trail to the Protectors. Vigilant: I know. I half expect Flaminatrix to pop their face in here any second. (I show up) Field Agent: Oh man, I HATE it when you're right!

Right, but when the mission-giver says, "they got Juan Jimenez too", and he's a known contact in the same zone, it's pretty clear they're referring to that specific Juan.

On the topic of random hostage models in general, I've been thinking for a while that the original devs could have at least implemented something to ensure that named hostages, at the very least, would look the same every time. Randomization is fine for generic hostages in "rescue 5 hostages" missions. But when you're rescuing a specific individual with a proper name, it ought to use the same model every time. This is especially egregious in that Kings Row arc where that named woman is about to be executed, and it turns out that Juan Jimenez has been captured as well. Bad enough that the named woman has a different model each time, but Juan Jimenez is an actual contact in the zone with a specific model, yet he's still randomized inside the mission.

This was a weird one. Last night one of my alts had a mission from Unai Kemen in Peregrine Island. I can't remember which one, but it was one of the random missions he offers before he offers the first mission in the "To Save a Thousand Worlds" arc. One of those repetitive "go to dimension X and close some breaches" missions. I ran up to the appropriate portal and, just as I clicked on it, another player sprinted (or possibly super-speeded) up from behind me (probably didn't even notice me there) and bumped me right off of the little bridge/walkway that leads to the portal. I landed on the floor in the pit at the bottom of the portal. When I glanced up at my mission/nav window, the text had changed from showing the mission objectives to "Mission Failed". Yes, I failed the mission without actually setting foot in it. I realize this is probably impossible to solve, since the chance of another player bumping me at the precise instant I clicked on the portal was one-in-a-million, but it's worth a shot. since it basically cheated me out of an entire mission.

Okay, here's the out-of-combat: In combat, after using Blinding Feint as the opening strike, so just the bonuses from BF: And, finally, from a different combat, after completing the Empower combo: So it would appear that my scrapper is actually getting the Empower bonuses. The actual bug, then, is that it is not being recorded in the combat log for some reason.

What exact info are you asking for? In the Combat Attributes window I have this: To Hit Bonus: 82.39% Damage Bonus: 18.50% But that's just standing there, not in combat.