RikOz

Seahawk: Water Blast/Willpower sentinel. Former pro football player who had to retire due to his physical mutations being incompatible with the uniform. I also have a SS/Rad brute with Super Leap for his travel power. His origin is that, despite warnings from everybody he knew, he was always pounding down energy drinks. But they gave him superpowers! Who's laughing now?

Yeah, and there is a complete lack of "impact" sound effects for melee characters when attacking an object. It ends up looking like the character is just waving their fists at the thing.

Another potential confusion is the fact that the Midnighter Representative's name and reticle are gray, which is usually indicative of a "decorative" NPC you don't need to interact with.

Heh, here's what one of my characters looks like before she drinks her super serum:

I'd like to see a guide that organizes when I should talk to certain contacts so that I'm not missing half of the storylines due to outleveling them.

Of course, in a mainstream comic book universe, all of the characters aren't confined to one city like we are. There could be multiple characters using the same name, but they all operate out of different cities, distant from one another, and in the case of C-list characters on down, may be completely unknown outside of their own stomping grounds. Kind of like band names. There may be a bar band named "Rock Monster" in every city, but nobody cares except for avoiding duplicate names within the same city. But if Rock Monster from Spokane, WA lands a record deal and becomes nationally recognized, all those other Rock Monsters are going to need new names.

I've been noticing this kind of thing a lot ever since I came back to the game. I'm sure I remember needing to completely clear maps, but now it seems I only need to defeat the "leader" and the handful of mobs in his immediate vicinity. I usually still finish clearing them out, though, for XP and drops. As for the OP's side note - yeah, the helper characters in some missions seem to have become undesirably aggressive lately. I no longer make any attempt to keep No Mind alive in that one Shining Stars mission, since he consistently charges right into the middle of the first room that's full of Praetorian clockwork and gets his ass kicked. And on the last three alignment missions I've had where Overdrive is present, she has aggro'd on groups in different rooms or on different levels from where I'm fighting, and got clobbered. This seems like new behavior - in the past she's always stuck close to me. Which reminds me of something that has always bugged me: why do these characters insist upon flying inside buildings? IMO, they should only fly if I fly. Otherwise, stay grounded. In another Shining Stars mission, Grym (who is supposed to be the best-trained fighter in the group) keeps dying on the first fight because he insists on standing in the fire, but I think that has always been the case.

At the very end of the Midnighter Club storyline, which starts with rescuing Percy Winkley and ends with curing The Lost, there's the final bit where you gain entry to the Midnighter Club. When you finally enter the club, the yellow pointer is sitting on Mercedes Sheldon, erroneously marking her as the person to talk to. The pointer should be on the Midnighter Representative behind the desk, since he's the person you need to talk to before you can complete the mission. As it is, there's nothing to indicate you should talk to him if you don't already know.

My primary methods of coming up with unique names: Coin a new word. My main is a leather-and-chains clad, female, fire/fire blaster named "Flaminatrix". Multiple word names, because odds are good that somebody else isn't going to pick the same two-word combo. Make my characters originate in countries where English isn't the primary language, and name them in their native language. One of my self-contained super group concepts, the Solar Angels, is a team based upon the bodies of our solar system. They all have either multiple-word names or, since they're an international team, names in their native languages: Mother Sun (team leader, scientist who bestowed powers on the team), Girl Mercury, Venus Lass, Erdmadchen (German), Ms. Mars (an actual Martian), Fille de Jupiter (French), Saturn Signal, Princesa Urana (Spanish), Neptune's Child, and Notta Planet. I have a Dutch character named "Heer Oranje" (Lord Orange), a Latin-named character, "Delcambre". I've only had two "that name is unavailable" situations, and I found satisfactory workarounds. One was a SS/Rad brute I originally named "Rad Bull", whose origin story was that he drank so many energy drinks that he developed superpowers. When I moved him from Reunion to Everlasting, somebody there already had "Rad Bull", so I changed his name to "Red Beef", eventually decided that was silly, and settled on "Roentgen Bull" ("roentgen" being a unit of radiation measurement). Another was "Iron Savior", which is the name of a German metal band that sings about a sentient AI spaceship called the "Iron Savior". Alas, the name was taken, so I chose an alternate name for the same thing, based on a line from one of the band's songs, and he became "Savior Machine".

Are you talking about streetsweeping missions (i.e. getting people to choose the patrol mission when offered a choice between patrol mission or door mission)? Or do you mean just "grinding" at random bad guys for the sake of it? If the first, then the best incentive would be to overhaul a number of things to make them less frustrating. For example, doing something about all of the "Defeat X Council" missions in Steel Canyon, which are a problem because nearly every Council to be found is lying unconscious on the sidewalk at the feet of half a dozen 5th Columnists. As I understand it, those missions were created long before the decision to reintroduce the 5th Column, so they were at one time more reasonable because you could actually find groups of Council soldiers to fight, instead of having to beat up a bunch of 5th Column just so you can punch their one prisoner. Then there are the Skulls in Kings Row, which are suffering from level problems - particularly the ones in the northwest area that are several levels higher than the player characters are when they get the relevant missions (a lot of them are just plain too high level for the zone). If the second, well, grinding is boring when there is no end objective other than XP. I also have "moral" objections - I'll cheerfully stop a mugging or two on my way to a mission, or defend myself if attacked, but mindlessly beating up every gangster I see, regardless of whether or not they're actively committing a crime, goes against my conception of what a hero is. Sure, I know those Hellions in the parking lot are probably criminals, but unless I see them doing something, I don't have any evidence to justify beating them up. That's just me, though.

Well, it was "early" in my career, so I probably didn't think of that 😄 But seriously, sometimes the quest had other objectives, or there were two quests in the same area - like one quest was to kill X number of a certain kind of mob, and another quest to enter a (non-instanced) cave to fetch an object or rescue a prisoner. My usual modus operandi was to head for the cave, killing any mobs along the way and then killing the mobs in the cave, and usually by the time I arrived at the prisoner or MacGuffin, I'd fulfilled the kill count. So I found it really frustrating when the DK would stand 50 yards from the cave entrance just yanking mobs around. This was also a time when the the Death Knight class was brand new, so a lot of DK players thought that Death Grip was really neato and used it gratuitously. Many even had macros that would cause their character to yell, "GET OVER HERE!" every time they used it, apparently in emulation of a character with a similar ability from some arcade fighting game that I never played.

Early on in my World of Warcraft career, I ended up always declining group invites from Death Knights. Why? DKs have an ability called "Death Grip" that allows them to target a distant enemy and yank them to the DK's location. The first couple times I teamed with a DK, while I was on my paladin, the DK just stood in one spot, while I ran around trying to hit things with my sword, only to have my targets repeatedly Death-Gripped out from under me. I was all, "Look, the point of teaming up to complete a quest is that two people can kill the requisite number of mobs faster than one person. You deciding you want to kill everything yourself completely defeats the purpose of teaming, so I'm going to leave this team now." EDIT: I should point out that I'm describing open-world quests, not instanced content.

My psi scrapper's secondary is electric armor, and that seems to be working quite well. Granted, he's still low-level, so don't know how it will work when he's higher.

Would be cool if it were possible. I have a "team" of heroes who are all science origin, having all gained their powers from a scientific process invented by their leader. For one of them, at level 15 or thereabouts I decided her powers just weren't working for me, so I deleted her and rerolled, and got her up to 15 again before I realized I'd inadvertently selected "mutation" for her origin. D'OH!

Well, I guess I'll look for an alternative. Thanks for the help!

Okay, switching to "Windowed" made the problem go away. Alas, that is a less than optimal way to play. I wonder if this could somehow be related to DirectX 12. When WoW finally moved to support D12, they outraged many people by getting rid of "Full Screen" mode and forcing everyone to use "Windowed Full-Screen", on the grounds that D12 didn't, for some reason, support "Full Screen" games. I'm assuming that CoX doesn't "support" D12, seeing as how it didn't exist when the game was live.

Using Windows 10-1903, including the update that got pushed last night/this morning. AMD Ryzen 5 1400 Quad-Core processor, 3.20 GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 GPU, with up-to-date drivers 8GB RAM

Oh, also logged into World of Warcraft (heh - misread launch date of WoW "Classic", reactivated account a month too early) and took a screenshot about a minute after logging a character in. Screenshot turned out exactly as is should have.

Okay, changed setting to "Open in editor". First screenshot immediately after logging a character in: Blank black screen. Exited university in Founder's Falls, flew toward tram station. About halfway there, stopped and took another screenshot. Resulting image was of character standing inside the university, unmoved from login. Continued to tram station. Landed and moved inside tram station, facing the tram. Took screenshot. Resulting image was the character hovering in the air, where I took the second screenshot. Took another screenshot while standing in the same place in the tram station. This one appears to be correct. But can't tell for sure, since nothing had changed. So... Turned character 180 degrees to face the map on the wall, took screenshot. Resulting image showed character still facing the tram. Took tram to Atlas Park. Took screenshot in tram station immediately upon disembarking. Resulting image was character facing the map in FF tram station. Flew to flag atop City Hall, took screenshot. This one came out correctly. Traveled to Brickstown, where I had a mission. Entered mission door (blue cave mission), took screenshot. Resulting image ... character looking at flag in Atlas Park, but in slightly different pose compared to previous shot. Completed mission, which took somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. Before exiting, took screenshot where I defeated final enemy. Result: character standing just inside the cave entrance, immediately after entering. This is almost looking like a memory issue - as if Greenshot is grabbing frames from the cache instead of what is currently onscreen.

Not MM-specific, but this is something I thought of adding to the thread (which I now can't find) about what WoW does better than CoH: the decision to make all characters, player and NPC alike, non-solid. Granted, the main reason Blizzard made the choice was to prevent griefing, i.e. jackholes purposely blocking important things. While "solid" characters are more realistic, what isn't realistic is seeing them from a camera somewhere behind them. That factor means that you don't really get an accurate idea of the distance between your toon and the enemy toon when moving into melee range. I've lost count of the number of times I've run up to a group of enemies and bounced off the first one into a wall or corner, and been immediately surrounded. Now the camera is in the same position as my head, I can't see my character, I really can't even see the enemies because their models are now clipping into the camera, and I'll be frantically trying to attack but failing because I've been knocked down, and I can't see that I've been knocked down. And I can't see the enemies well enough to figure out if I can move in any direction.

Gah, this is starting to break my brain. I took a screenshot of my character hovering in the air in front of the Steel Canyon university, and the resulting image was the same character at the character select screen.

Well, CoH is about the only thing I'm trying to screenshot, so hard to say. I just now hit Print Screen a few times with this page open in my browser, and it worked just fine. But that's not really an equivalent test, as my desktop isn't constantly changing/animating like the game screen is. And yes, it's running in the background.

Hmm. Aside from my "Save Directly" vs your "Open in image editor", and changing the hotkeys so that Print Screen by itself does a full screen capture, everything else is the same. I did specify the destination folder in the Output tab. What I'm experiencing seems to be, largely, a "timing" issue, as if it's somehow holding my shots on the clipboard and then actually saving them later. For example, yesterday I attempted to take a screenshot of my character hovering near the tram station in Atlas Park. I immediately checked the destination folder, and that image was not there. About five minutes later, I took another screenshot of the same character standing under Atlas' statue. Again, I immediately tabbed out to check the destination folder. Now there was a new file, and the timestamp in the file name indicated that it was the last shot I had just taken. But when I opened the file, the image was of the shot near the tram station, not the shot standing under the statue. Some factors that might be contributing to this: My game install is on my SSD, but I'm sending the screenshots to a folder on my hard drive, since I don't want to fill up the SSD with screenshots. (don't see how that would cause this) Greenshot is conflicting with something else on my system? Aside from other games (all various MMOs - WoW, FFXIV, SWTOR, ESO), I actually have very little 3rd-party software installed on this machine that didn't come pre-installed. It's a gaming PC from CyberpowerPC, and came with just Windows 10 Home and the GeForce Experience software for my GPU. The GeForce software has some sort of screenshot ability, but I've never used that function, and don't have it running when I play anyway.

Hah - just now, I took a screenshot immediately after defeating Kurse in the second mission with Fusionette in Faultline. Here's what I got:

Since I'm among those who have a problem with the game crashing to desktop when I try to use the game's native screenshot function, I followed a recommendation from another player (Philotic Knight, I think) and installed the 3rd-party screenshot utility, "Greenshot". It has some weird behaviors, and I'm not sure what's going on. * Sometimes the "screenshot" ends up just a plain black image * Sometimes no screenshot files gets saved at all * Sometimes I'll take a screenshot that turns out correctly. Then, a few minutes later, I'll attempt to take another screenshot, and when I press PrintScreen, my entire screen reverts back to that shot I took earlier. This seems to be related to the function that lets me use crosshairs to select only a portion of the screen, as using that function "freezes" the screen while making the selection, and it appears that Greenshot is then holding that still image in memory and popping it back up the next time I hit PrintScreen. * I think the weirdest screenshot of all was the very first one I took - I logged into the game, loaded in a character, and took the screenshot. When I looked at the file, it was a screenshot of the login screen. The last one in particular makes me think that Greenshot is running afoul of the game's windowing, somehow.