Call Me Awesome

I had the same impression, it was a single player game with some MMO elements grafted on. I spend about a month playing it a couple of years ago and lost interest. As a single player game I preferred Skyrim; as an MMO it was lacking.

<looks in the mirror> Nope, not much silver here yet even though I hit level cap just after shutdown. Are you suggesting we're all... er, experienced players?

Ok, you owe me a new drink and a paper towel to wipe off my monitor. 😁

Razor Nostromo, AKA Belkin Nostromo. The layout hasn't changed, but apparently it's hard to come by nowadays. Razor Tartarus 2, nearly the same thing but with an extra row of keys. Still available new from Amazon for $75. In a quick search I found lots of other choices but most lack the directional thumb switch. Probably not a big deal if you're starting from scratch and used to using a keyboard but I'm used to using that thumb rocker for movement forward/back/left/right along with mouse look to rotate direction.

That BAF was the first time I'd encountered that problem in Homecoming and it came as a bit of a surprise. I quickly dropped to about 60% and hit Dull Pain followed by a purple candy then finished pulling Siege.

It's rare that I need Dull Pain on CMA; the only times I've used it recently have been on the BAF while I was pulling the AV's and out of range for Invincibility. Facing ranged foes while I'm out of melee drops my defenses significantly; thus the fall back of Dull Pain. If I was doing lots of I Trials I might shift things a bit to get another 5% defense to reach the Incarnate soft cap; although it would likely come at the expense of loosing some resistances.

I was cautiously optimistic about it and tossed them a few bucks when they started. But as they've missed deadline after deadline and all we have to date is a beta character creator I'm becoming less and less convinced that it will amount to anything. They're going to have to get funding and a full time professional PAID staff of developers to get a playable game up and running in the next few years, relying on all part time volunteer staff isn't going to work anytime soon. I give them credit for trying but they all have day jobs and can't devote the time it takes to get a massive project up and running. Once it's actually running the developer hours will drop dramatically but for now they're in over their heads. From what I've seen on their site it looks like they've managed maybe 1/3 of the work needed in the last what has it been, 7 years? At that rate they'll release around 2030. The stuff they do have looks very nice but there's so much left to do.

Interesting, I haven't had any of their stuff die without good reason, but I've only had two mice, one of which I use now (but have only had for 3 months or so) and another I didn't like and ended up in a box of spare parts. The Nostromo game pads I've had die were both Belkin before Razor bought them out... since then I've bought 3 game pads and all still work, one of which has seen enough use that all the numbers are worn off of the keys.

Moving beyond the edge in PI would take you to Talos; I was never sure if it was a bug or intended and it didn't affect much. Frankly I don't know if it still exists or not, and it wasn't a specific spot, anywhere along the west side of the zone would work.

It was a glorious amount of fun. Hami-O's were also 50% enhancement value, there was no ED so attacks were generally slotted with 6 Nucleous (Acc/Dam) HO's giving the attack about twice the damage it's possible to get now. Pull the entire map, which took about 10 minutes, duck around a corner leaving about 4' open in front of you and most of the hundreds of mobs chasing you ended up in that same location standing inside of each other. Pop a red, Seismic Smash and everything but bosses were dead and everything slowed way down while the game popped up a few hundred red numbers.

The old days where mobs had no collision with each other. You could literally herd up hundreds, pull them around a corner and they'd all jump into the same exact spot. Hit them with a heavy single target attack and you got ALL of them. This lasted at least until issue 5; I know I used that tactic at the tail end of issue 3 and all of issue 4.

My experience with Secret World was that it was fun solo and teaming in the early game but late game teams were complete gear snobs, if you weren't the equivalent of a 500,000,000 inf build then you were wasting your time trying to team. It's been years, I only played there for about 5 months after CoH shutdown so maybe it's changed but that attitude really soured me on the game. The game I lasted the longest with was Star Wars Old Republic. It was a fun game and the classes were interesting. Unfortunately it was basically a single player game with some MMO mechanics tacked on... your class missions were forced solo, at least some of the time. While everything could solo, and most were fairly good at it you always ran into a forced solo mission whenever you started running with a team.

Looks about right for the old days of herding the entire Drek map into one convenient location for disposal. Back in issue 4 I could /e newspaper with hundreds of freaks beating on me.

Sounds like robbery to me, it used to be ~$60 new. Try out the Tartarus or I believe Corsair also makes something similar. Since you're starting fresh you don't have to relearn the layout of the pad. I always put my travel power (or macro if I'm using Super Jump/Combat Jumping) into slot 6, it's under my little finger. Space bar is set to button 11, also under the same finger. Slots 1-5 are my most used attacks, 7-10 are usually AOE or other attacks. Buffs are usually side buttons on the mouse (Dull Pain, Aim, Buildup and the like) and buttons 12-15 will be other powers I frequently need. And of course the thumb rocker is my movement control along with mouse look. It quickly becomes second nature to reach for the right key.

I bought a Tartarus and while it has an extra row of keys (20 instead of 15) it just doesn't feel as good to me as the older Nostromo... likely because I've used it for 15 years now and the Tartarus is different. Over the years I've had two Nostromos die on me (they were Belkin Nostromo's at the time) and I bought the Tartarus as a replacement for my last Nostromo. Unfortunately I have short fingers and it doesn't fit me as well... fortunately my Nostromo still works fine. The things are capable of extremely complex programming and can have 4 different setups with the touch of a key cycling through them. I just stick with one setup to keep things simple, and because I can get most everything I want from one setup. The top two rows I set as 1 - 0 corresponding to the bottom tray, the third row has spacebar and 4 keys I can bind to various other things. The thumb rocker is bound to forward, back, strafe left, strafe right. The button above the rocker is target nearest enemy and the button below is follow. I'd suggest walking into Best Buy or somewhere similar and try the Tartarus, they'll likely have one sitting out, and see how your hand feels reaching for the keys. It will take a bit for it to feel natural gaming but once it does you'll feel lost using just the keyboard. Interestingly enough I didn't buy my first Nostromo for gaming. My business is video production and I bought it for editing video... they're much more capable than the controllers designed for that purpose and much cheaper. I think the cheapest editing macro controller costs around $800; a gamepad is more capable and costs less than $100.

I'll second this, I have the same mouse and it's a great option. I also use a Razor Nostromo gamepad with 15 programmable keys under my fingers, a rocker pad under the thumb for movement and another two buttons for the thumb. With all that I have Tray 1 mapped to the first 10 keys, the last 5 are spacebar for jump and 4 more for binds, usually any other powers I need easily at hand. On the mouse I map the thumb buttons for a heal, aim, buildup and anything else I need to be able to access instantly. With the gamepad and mouse I only need to go to clicking a power for toggles and other things I don't usually need in combat.

Unfortunately most Corruptor combinations are at least as good if not better as Defender combinations due to the higher buff/debuff values and the way the Defender inherent works. Corruptors are still very good, they just don't have much if any advantage over the same Defender. That makes me think that Scourge may need a tweak of some kind to differentiate the two. What that may be I'll leave to the more mathematically inclined. The main advantage of higher damage on a Corruptor is largely nullified by the better buff/debuff values of a Defender.

Bill, at shutdown I had close to 50 alts that WERE level 50... I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing though. I've no idea how many I had in total but it got out of hand when we got all the extra character slots.

Actually back on Live there were experiments done and it IS possible to get a Granite tanker to Super Jump... I believe it took 6-7 Kinetics hitting Inertial Reduction.

You mean people can affect the TF members prior to entering the mission? That's always been the case teamed, leagued or solo.

It does come at 18 which is when Invulnerability gets it's taunt aura.

Hmm, favorite Defender. That's a tough question as I've played 4 of them to 50 on Live and enjoyed most of them so it would probably come down to how I felt on a given day and what else the team had already. The 50's: Rad/Rad - Lots of fun and quite effective for -def debuffing on top of all the other Rad/ goodies. Still, possibly a notch down Rad/Sonic - Good solo, great damage multiplier on teams. One of the best. Dark/Dark - Can you say "to hit floor"? Capable of dropping an entire spawn's to hit drastically or taking a single mob to the floor effectively turning the entire team into SR scrappers. Kin/Sonic - Similar notes apply as to Rad/Sonic. I had probably another half dozen on Live varying in level from the 20's to the 40's but they don't really come to mind. I know I had a FF/something in the 20's and a TA/A that died in the teens... that combo really took forever to accomplish anything; by the time the TA arrows were out the spawn was dead.

I have a Nature/Sonic defender in the mid-30's and it's not bad, still, I prefer Rad as it just feels better to me. I haven't done any direct numbers comparison of the two sets, it's just my gut reactions to the sets. Possibly I'm just more familiar with Rad but it seems easier to play.

I hadn't considered Ninjitsu, I'll have to look it over. As to Willpower I did consider it; back on Live I had a 50 Fire/WP brute that was ok but nothing special so that's likely coloring my opinion of WP. Well, that and the fact that it flat out sucks as a Tanker set trying to hold aggro.

I'm not sure about that, I've run windowed mode and stretched across both monitors and I believe I got the extra horizontal you'd expect. The problem was that your character was smack in the middle split between the two monitors and that 1/2" of bezel on each side of the monitor was distracting. If you had two monitors with screen to the edge then it might work with just the horizontal line in the middle. Still, I found it bothersome and stuck with a single monitor and a web browser up on the other screen. Or Mid's when I was working on a respec.