MistressOhm

Wonder how insanely nuts it would be to get "pet customization" such that one could swap out different model sets? ex: Robots could have the standard set, or Clockwork, or Praetorian Clockwork... Ninjas could have the base set, Knives of Artemis, or Tsoo-themed, Soldiers could go stock, Arachnos, or Malta... that sort of thing?

Kinetics. Because travel powers that don't sap mobs on the way by are just toggles. 🙂

Moar. Arc. Slots. Three stories is too small a number. 🙂

Great minds think alike. Mine is Baronessa Samedi (the Rule 34 version of the Live and Let Die character he played).

Something I noticed a long time ago (yes, on Live) was that the bio panel seemed to be somewhat HTML driven. You could change colors, bold text, and the like. But, with that, often the editor would throw in codes in place of characters, likely to keep those characters from 'escaping' and causing havoc. Yes, this is a thing in coding - special characters need to be isolated so that program code doesn't try to interpret them. This meant that extra characters were being used, only you couldn't see them. So you'd fill out the bio, and... it'd get cut off. Or the text focus would jump around, and you'd have trouble editing the thing. What does this mean for bio length? Well it's both a problem, in that you're only given so many characters to express yourself, and a solution, which is to redirect the bio to a Web-based resource that the game loads when you pull up someone's info panel. Everyone here has a profile page, for their forum identity. Imagine if there was a thread linked to your bio, with a post for every character you create (@global&server&character). Now, this trick DOES presuppose the game having enough resources to load that page, no matter how long it gets. But it should (!) get around the issues of stuffing character bio info into database entries in the game's backend. All that gets stored THERE is the URL to that character's "bio post". It also means that your character list/bios would be available outside of the game itself, perhaps as a persistent link or table on your forum profile. Now, let's talk editing, and redirects. Obviously you shouldn't be allowed to throw just any link into the bio, and have the game load it for you. That would be dangerous and foolish. So, here's a possible scenario - 1) You can put in raw text, as how things work now. 2) you can click a button to spawn your browser to your character thread, with either the post for your character displayed and an Edit button featured, or (if blank) a new reply to that character thread, with a blank text box ready for editing. I would expect the rules for what could go into such a thread would be very restrictive, likely text only, or if images were allowed, limited to size AND hosting domain so no adult pics were featured. There's still a lot of risks, as people who know HTML, CSS, and the like can tell you. But it might be a possible solution. YMMV.

"Why, no, but if they'd like to hire me on as a consultant, I'd be happy to send you my rate per hour."

The files should be saved in your <COH>\Settings\Live folder, mine is C:\Games\Homecoming\Settings\Live

I must be getting blind in my old age, but, where did you guys hide the macro to run thru all of your existing badges and output them to the chat log file? I've switched computers, and I don't know if I copied over the actual macro txt file. Thanks! 🙂 AANd I found it, buried in the Parser Help section. Thanks! 😄

I would expect any power that transports you to a specific location when you invoke it, would work this way also. IOW, if you have to click the ground after invoking Savage Leap, a bind to trigger it on a targeted mob should work.

Hide is so cheap to run that it's practically a passive. Just slot for Defense (or as stated, Kismet global End Reduction) and run it all the damn time... unless you have to lead some poor fool to the door, or a box, or whatever, in which case, you have to put your clothes back on and stop being invisible.

Stalker "Hide" is Uber-stealth, and as such, you'll rarely need to stack it with anything. If something can see through Hide... it'll see through Concealment as well. That doesn't mean you can't stack defense, though, and a lot of Concealment powers allow positional Defense slotting. If you have any 'strike at a distance' powers, hitting things like Rikti Drones from Hide will usually Crit and blow them up, whereas trying to get close to hit them will aggro the whole spawn. That said, triggered ambushes ALWAYS know where to find you for some stupid reason, and stacking Hide with another concealment power probably wouldn't really change things. Best thing there is to Run Like Hell, because ambushes tend to trigger on the location you're standing at - many stalkers (myself included) have been able to avoid the ambush by putting some distance between the trigger point and the character... and if an ambush does give chase, at some point they give up and drop aggro, and then you're truly in Hide again and can pick them off.

Loved my MA/Nin from Live, recreated on HC. You get much less "Jackie Chan Street Fight" (staff fighting and Street justice) and more "Chuck Norris Karate Movie" flavor. Altho with /Nin as the secondary, your 'tricks' tend to be AoE and cone based gadgets along with SR-lite "disciplines", whereas with SR, it's all about avoiding getting hit. Eagle's Claw is always good to smash someone upside the head if they didn't get Feared by your AS. Unlike Staff or Dual Blades, there is no real 'rotation' you have to adhere to with MA. Obviously putting the 'chance to hide' Stalker proc into the Assassin's Strike is a given, drops you right back into stealth on a hit. Word to the wise on /Nin's "smoke flash" AoE placate - beware of what you slot this with, anything that debuffs the spawn's damage will also aggro them, which... defeats the placate. This is all due to Placate now taking Taunt Enhancements as "Reverse Taunts". It's been noted with other placate powers, that some of the Taunt sets (designed for Tankers and Brutes) also apply a -Damage, don't use them on a Stalker.

*AHEM* Snow Storm While active, the chill from this Snow Storm can dramatically Slow the attack and movement speed of the target and all nearby foes. The torrent winds of the Snow Storm are enough to bring down flying foes. Recharge Slow Minimum Level 4 (Controller) 4 (Corruptor) 2 (Defender) 4 (Mastermind) Effects Toggle: Ranged (Targeted Area of Effect) Foe -Recharge, -Speed, -Fly Enhancements Reduce Endurance Cost Increase Attack Rate Enhance Slow Set Categories Slow Movement So, it's a toggle, end-hungry, BUT... It debuffs the target AND any nearby mobs, preventing them from flying or running away, and slows their attack rate. This is a Must Have for any boss fight, and was my go-to power for taking on the Halloween EB's (since many of them had Fly and some summoned adds.) Gale, skippable. O2 Boost... yeah possibly skippable. Snow Storm? noooot skippable, IMO. Couple this with Freezing Rain, and now they're slowed even more, -Def and -Res are debuffed, they're being dealt KD ticks, and taking DoT.... and they can't scoot out from under. Freezing Rain Summons Freezing Rain at a targeted location. Freezing Rain deals minimal Cold damage to anything that passes through the storm. It also Slows the affected foes and severely reduces their Defense and resistance to damage. Many foes may even slip and fall trying to escape the storm. Damage Minor Damage over Time(Cold) Recharge Long Minimum Level 16 (Controller) 16 (Corruptor) 8 (Defender) 16 (Mastermind) Effects Ranged (Location Area of Effect) Foe -Recharge, -Speed, -Defense, -Resistance Enhancements Enhance Accuracy Enhance Damage Enhance Defense Debuff Reduce Endurance Cost Enhance Range Increase Attack Rate Enhance Slow Set Categories Ranged AoE Damage Defense Debuff Accurate Defense Debuff Slow Movement Universal Damage Hurricane is ... tricky. It has a constant Repel effect and KB ticks, so tends to disperse things, but the biggest thing it does is -ToHit and -Range. Affected Melee mobs can't hit anything reliably, and affected Ranged mobs can't target things reliably. These debuffs persist for a bit after they're out of the area of effect. Hurricane You can summon a Hurricane. The wind and rain from this massive storm reduce the range and chance to hit of nearby foes. The massive winds of this storm continuously force foes away from you. Recharge Slow Minimum Level 20 (Controller) 20 (Corruptor) 12 (Defender) 20 (Mastermind) Effects Toggle: Point Blank Area of Effect Foe -Range, -To-Hit, Repel, Knockback Enhancements Reduce Endurance Cost Enhance Knockback Distance Increase Attack Rate Enhance ToHit Debuff Set Categories Knockback ToHit Debuff So, on the topic of End Drain/sapping. It's a viable strategy on a Defender, since there's less damage overall (no Scourge). But on a Corruptor, the secondary effects aren't quite as dramatic, AND with Scourge, once you've got something below half health, you can start to double up your damage more and more often. So you will probably be draining the life as fast or faster than the end. Keep in mind that with TT, you get an AoE Immob AND DoT. That Immob effect automatically converts KB procs from your Storm powers to KD. Doubling it up with Freezing Rain ought to be worth some laughs, too.

That's the big problem with Stormfending, is that it really does yeet things around, so anything PBAoE that counts on things not being yeeted is kind of at a disadvantage. Hurricane with a couple of Rech does recover pretty quick, so you can toggle it off and on if needed. Steamy Mist should have a LoTG global recharge just as a mule, and yeah, you get a bit of Defense out of it also.

If I need to alt to get onto a TF, or do a monster, or whatever else, I will tell the Team/League recruiter "Give me a moment, I'll alt and then let you know when I'm in zone". And then I do exactly that, as soon as I'm in the right zone I pop off on Broadcast "I've arrived on my alt, for <whatever>" and also the same as a Tell to the recruiter. Showing up and standing around not saying anything? Catch the next bus, this one's full, mate.

A lot of Shield tankers put Active Defense on auto, but... yes there are End and Recharge concerns until you have the slots to fix them. Personally, I only tap it when I'm going up against something that I know actually has a knockback component (Family Consiglieri's, some Council, Clock Princes, BP Avalanche and Storm Shamans, and so on.) It does disrupt the flow of battle a bit if you run up against something that could knock you off your feet, and you have to wait for the recharge to finish... but at the same time, I'm not trying to set speed records for clearing a +1/+3 map either (I pair up with a Fire/Rad Corruptor, so we clear the maps pretty effing fast, as it is.)

Dude, keep your inter-archetypical purple prose out of this! 😛 Seriously, a Swashbuckler ranged/melee hybrid would be fun. Gimped to hell having a few tools from many disciplines and no specialization, but still fun.

I thought it was elephants that had long memories, and ravens that never forgave. I'm CONFUSED!!

To begin a demorecord, ingame: /demorecord <name_of_file> ==> name_of_file.cohdemo in your COH 'demos' folder. Your character, and all other characters and NPC's in the area, are defined, their poses, animations, movement vectors, activated powers, everything. The zone is specified, along with the sky (day or night, and is updated to 'move' the clouds by displacing the sky texture). The camera position is defined, and if you move the camera around (zoom in or out, or pan in any direction) that gets recorded also. Once that initial Big Chunk Of Data is written, if you activate a power, summon pets, change poses, this is all recorded. The same with other players and NPC's in the zone. EVERYTHING that the game would render to you during play, gets recorded. /demostop ==> Stops the recording and closes the above file. To play back a demo, you invoke the CoH Game Client in "demo mode", specifying the filename. The game client starts, and immediately replays the scene. You would use FRAPS, ORBS, Twitch, nVidia's recording client, or other screencap/streaming software to 'capture' the playback and save it on your hard drive either as a movie clip or a series of stillframes. The power is in the .cohdemo file. It's a text file, and can be edited. You can change coordinates of the camera, and whatever it's looking at (the game only looks at you, but this isn't a hard and fast requirement for demo's). You can cut and paste other characters to the scene from their own .cohdemo files. You can delete extra characters, add NPC's, or change the zone or in-zone coordinates. Don't like the sky or lighting? Change it to something else. Want to be looming behind Veles's shoulder when he's talking to Morana and Atta? You can do that too. At one point I believe someone had come up with a demo-EDITING program, that calculated all the math to do the above, but if you're a masochist, you can do this in Notepad. A noted vlogger and demo editor on Live, Samuraiko, held a panel at HeroCon 2008 outlining her process. Links to the clips are provided, but since a lot of her content has vanished from Youtube since, they may not be valid any longer.

Just to put a thought into brains about AWS - while OVH currently charges for hardware (run as many hosts on it as you like as long as you don't max out what the hardware can support), AWS often goes for usage, which means that the more people play, the more CPU cycles are consumed, the more network packets are transmitted, and the more RAM memory is occupied... the price goes up. This WOULD force HC to scale down operations and consolidate servers, because a lot of people on a few hosts would be a cheaper overall cost than a few people on a lot of hosts and therefore being charged a larger base cost. Neither one, however, would be a better deal than the OVH "use this hardware" cost. Something else to consider: While Amazon does provide "close hop" connection to Content Distribution Networks (fat-pipe network providers like Level3, Convergys, and AT&T), they would charge a LOT of money for CDN edge connections in the multiple-terabit range. And if HC had to branch out into another AWS superfarm (say, on the Eastern seaboard instead of just Oregon or San Francisco), any intra-network traffic between the servers would be crossing across the country, possibly internationally, and likely charged for it, whereas if they're in the same datacenter, no one's going to meter that nearly as closely - communicating via fiber to another server in the next rack is NOT an expensive thing at all, and any company that did charge by the gigabit for internal dataflow would soon be lacking in customers.

Yes, demoedit can do that. Poses, power effects, auras, the whole nine yards. Demorecord files are text. Once you record a sequence, you can tweak parts of it (or insert other characters from their own demorecords) before re-rendering it in the game engine. You can move the camera around, "change the scheme, alter the mood, electrify the boys and girls" if you desire. And since it generates a sequence of still images (like an animator does for cartoons or anime movies) any one of those stills can be your screenshot.

How long was the character in question logged off? A day? a week? Several months? The longest I've had a character sit 'idle' is 55 days. When I logged back on to that character I had five bars worth of patrol saved up. I used it all in about an hour of street sweeping. Another character that had about two bars worth, I lost it all because I'd forgotten that I'd set them to higher notoriety, and encountered purples in a mission instance. Two Wakes later, those two bars were gone. 5 minutes, tops, to earn the equivalent amount of Debt to zero it out. NOW... I am NOT saying there Should Not Be a toggle to turn Patrol on and off. If there was one, I'd not use it, but that's no reason to say not to put one in. However, what I am saying is, that no toggle currently exists, and because the Patrol XP mechanic encourages people to Not Play All The Time (you know, real life concerns) I believe that getting HC's devs to burn limited manpower and coding bandwidth to implement such a switch is ... not likely. Thus, since this is the second time you've chosen to basically rant about this one minor feature, and apparently NOT understand or appreciate the work that would go into coding your desired feature, testing it, balancing it, and making sure it didn't break anything else... yeah, I'm not sympathetic. Sorry.

I like the base idea (but agree that flashbangs would be better than frag grenades), and also think that having three different looks (PPD, RIP, and Praetoria Powers Division) would make the set really shine. The question is though... this is a heroes and villains game. While we can create characters with police uniforms, would it make sense that ANY police agency from the three represented factions would assign a squad to follow a character? So having them be private security is a bit more story-cohesive. There's also a lot of overlap with Soldiers and Thugs, as well. As for a Clown MM set... umm... no mimes. That's all I ask, is no. mimes.

That's part of why people tune their builds. You can be OP, or have great staying power, but not both. End issues you are expected to manage, yourself, regardless of archetype. If you don't need an anti-KB or anti-mez toggle, don't run it. If you don't need a DoT aura between mobs, turn it off. If you can take something down with a T2 blast attack, don't use the T9.

Patrol XP is a benefit of a character's "Day Job" (what they do when You, the Player, are not making them be heroic or villainous). It's basically "Rested" XP that you get from other games, where time logged out charges a meter so when you log back in you have a period of time to level faster. There currently is no mechanic to 'turn it off' because it's considered a Gaming Ergonomics and Safety issue. You can toggle XP gain on and off. That's it. If you want to delete it, go to a high-level zone, no armor, no auras, with a tray full of Wakes, and punch a purple mob in the face. Burn all the Wakes to rez in place, get faceplanted. When you're out of Wakes, rez at hospital and restock. If the zone is high enough, you should be able to turn that Patrol XP into XP Debt (what you get when you're defeated) within a few minutes, not an hour. Or you could use it as it was intended. Get into a mission arc. Join a task/strike force. Level up a few bars. It'll get burnt either way.