MistressOhm

The only change I'd make to Energy Blast is to add the Impact proc like we see with Gravity Control. Any time something gets slammed back or knocked down, throw a chance for Impact, which would be X% of power damage added as Smashing damage. Double the chances of the proc occurring if the mob in question hits a wall or an object. Hitting another mob with a ragdolled mob would proc a KD on the mob so struck (the famed Marvel "Fastball Special").

My antihero's nearly always get this one:

Can I just point something out, here? People are 'lagging' PI because they're running ToT leagues with their 50's, right? since it's one of only a few zones that are level appropriate for 50's. This is a direct result of everyone and their brother PL'ing themselves to 50. if you don't like the lag... roll a new version of your character, PL them to 15 or 20 or so, and go nuts in the lower zones. Zero lag, zero drag. 🙂

I'm on the fence here (which yes, makes me a pain in the ass). On the one hand, tweaking numbers here and there to balance things out, without changing the Way The Powers Work, is to be expected, from time to time. Fixing bugs (which also means closing exploits based on those bugs) is to be expected, from time to time. The point is to set things up so there is no "I Win" button, no specific build that Everyone Goes To if they want to accomplish a set goal, be that pwn all in PvP, solo most of the content without having to do the Run of Shame from the hospital, or farm merits at the highest rate per hour. You should (!) be able to do any of those things with any archetype, any powerset, within reason. On the other hand, rearranging how powers work at their baseline, without an in depth discussion on "hey this is why we want to do this" is really yanking the rug out from under. I get wanting to make travel powers less of "you have to burn a pick HERE to get this cool travel power THERE" and also shifting powers everyone takes into an inherent pool for everybody. Those make sense, they let people actually get creative with their powersets, and not insert pools that are absolutely essential for the rotation to work. But, just as an example, I don't 'get' why Electric Blast now has these Static charges that ONLY seem to do any good if I put a hold on a target with a big chain of them. It's a gimmick! And I don't understand why can't I have a hold that works just as a hold, and not an AOE besides. It seems like this was a "Wouldn't it be cool if... ?" and no one bothered to ask if that was anything that people were asking for in the first place. Now, granted, I've leveled a couple of characters with it, and I can see how it'd be useful, but... it still seemed like a 'change for the sake of change' rather than either a Fix or a QoL update. And yes, I see that there's a bunch of other powers that do similar things... okay... so for balance, we added this... it just seems like someone said "hey let's link it to the hold because it'd be a cool chaining effect off the Tesla ball". I wasn't privy to the lead-up to this change, so not knowing those details it seems ... arbitrary. Which brings me 'round to the closing point: It's obvious that the people doing the dev work do not know how we all play. They can datamine the logs and find out prevailing trends, they can post threads up asking people to test and provide commentary, or... they can change stuff "because it would be cool" or "it makes more sense" or "it's a more efficient way to code the powers, making them more portable for later" or whatever. We're not privy to their process... and it appears, they aren't always privy to ours. Take that as you will. Me, I'm going to see how many Skulls I can shock with a Tesla coil.

Oh damn. Totally forgot about Tomo Hotei. Nice pick.

Anyone looking for some Mayhem theme tunes? Here's some Tangerine Dream / Michael Mann for you... "Dr. Destructo" from the sountrack album "Thief". (Press F to pay respects to Edgar Froese and James Caan)

I make my lasagna with ricotta, which means it's kind of blended with the sauce and the meat. Parmesan goes on top, but not too much. ALWAYS Italian sausage, never just 'ground beef'. I also will slice thin, then soak, a zucchini or a calabacita squash, and use that as a layer along with the noodles. Effing delicious.

Add to that list, "Lullaby" by Maragold. Meghan Krauss just blows me away with her vocals.

I have one character, Catalys (Catalina deVries) with a really weird power. Close contact with Catalys unlocks mutations in others (something she is unaware of). She's a superpower 'broker' in that she takes on jobs from various companies, government agencies, and the like, and then subcontracts them to supers with the appropriate skills. Oddly enough, her social circle keeps developing powers for some reason! I leveled her far enough so that she summons two mercs as her bodyguards. She exists only as an origin hook for a few of my other characters.

Demorecords aren't 'just a vid'. They're a text file that the game 'replays' to create a cutscene. In that text file are all the elements of the scene, and their placements. Which means if you had a method to read it back in when building, you could theoretically restore (or copy) a base you recorded. I don't think such a command exists, so in this case the demorecord file is more like a blueprint/shopping list than a backup.

Just a small takeaway from the OP's description of what went down: The supergroup in question had to deal with both IC and OOC flak from rival groups. This is a form of trauma. They aren't trying to be unfair or elitist, they're literally gun-shy. Their trust is damaged. The OP knows exactly what was referred to, they admitted that the VG they were in (for a short time) become a bunch of jerk-hackers and they, too, pulled the ripcord on the whole thing. The point I'm trying to make is, please, be respectful of other people's pain. If a group has had a bad experience with Villain Group X, they're not going to be at all enthusiastic about admitting anyone who had anything to do with Villain Group X, be it long term or probationary. They got burned, and they will flinch. That's to be expected. If someone brings up "Starfleet Dental", I have flashbacks of mass-griefing of holiday events in STO. If someone told me they were part of that fleet? I'd question their motives and likely their parentage, also. It is That Bad an association. That said, hopefully whatever group the OP ends up joining, or forming, perhaps at some point they can interact with the group in question and actually have a good time roleplaying.

I don't think the Rikti are as big of a threat to our world as the Praetorians are. I'm also seeing a resurgence of Council/5th Column plotting led by the Center, colluding with both Earthlings and extraterrestrials to take over not just our dimension, but all dimensions wherein "we" exist. So yeah, while the billboards are ... kinda valid? in a way, they're a form of tunnel vision, on only one threat at a time.

MoG and Elude are good times to plink at them with your T1 attack, or Brawl. Run the Rope-A-Dope on them, conserve your own endurance, once their "I am INVINCIBLE!" wears off, they drop like sacks of potatoes. Wait for it....

I think Shriekback saw him at a concert and wrote a song about him. Maybe. Or maybe not.

While I love (♥) Speed Boost and Accelerate Metabolism for the End Recovery, the speed boost is ... enh. It's fun out in the open, but in close quarters, unless you're running as a Kinetic and used to the twitchy nature, it can be ... unwieldy. So I am glad that there's a mechanism for denying that specific part of a buff. As for Mystic Fortune... I honestly forget I have it. I rarely team, so if I do take it as a power it's for 'flavor'. Secondary Mutation, same thing. It's like, okay, what buff do I get this time? Oh! I'm a monkey. And I forgot all of my powers. Time to zone to Atlas and slap around a few Hellions, I guess. My go-to P2W power is Inner Inspiration, because who doesn't want a few extra insps every X minutes?

Since Fine Print was taken, Small Print is now a thing. 4'8" ninja stalker, in white with black trim. "The Large Print Giveth... and the Small Print Taketh Away!" Always fun when I get to create a character around a Tom Waits quote.

@Zhym thank you. That's a good argument for the HC crew to spin up another PI instance (so that those who aren't doing big teams have a relatively mellow place to do their thing).

This is actually a good thing, because it means that HC is paying per virtual host (the hardware that virtual servers run on) and they can spin up as many instances as they need for the same cost. So if (!) we see a big influx of players because of events and/or people getting time off over the holidays, HC won't have to pay out more $$ to keep us all happy. That said, the lack of volunteers is concerning. I'd consider helping out more directly, except 'retirement' seems to be bleeding money and I may have to return to work at some point.

When you don't do this (summarize, then expand, then go into detail), it's known as Burying the Lede. That's when your headline doesn't match what the story is about (or it doesn't seem to match until someone finds it in the middle of the fourth page.) We have another name for stories like that: Clickbait. 🙂 (And there's a free concept for someone: ClickBait - A down on their luck social media influencer, playing a hero or villain specifically to pump up the rep cos they're reporting on their own exploits.)

Lag is network-related 99% of the time. the more people in the zone, the more power effects going off, the more mobs being spawned, contribute to lag. This is because the clients all have to communicate what they're doing so as to coordinate what's displayed. Turning your graphics to minimum probably isn't helping as much as you think it would. Reducing draw distance MIGHT help, because even though your game will still be told about everything going on, it can safely ignore more of it rather than trying to acknowledge it and render it. Also, having fiber 'net is nice in that it eliminates ONE bottleneck between you and the game, but it doesn't do anything for all the ones you have no control over. Put simply, having a superhighway interchange built as your driveway does nothing to alleviate the traffic jam on another segment of highway someplace else. All the above considered... if playing on another shard on the same server makes things better, then it's a sign that HC has done a decent job allocating network bandwidth between virtual servers. The bottleneck is likely at the virtual machine itself. If switching shards is still laggy, then the physical net connections to the host systems are likely maxed, and you'd probably have to play on another set of VM hosts or even another datacenter. If EVERYTHING is laggy... then there's an edge router someplace (likely on the network provider feeding the game, something like Level3, AT&T, or Convergys) that's getting a ton of traffic or it's dropping packets at random and needs to be serviced. The only thing popping up on DownDetector at the moment is Overwatch 2 and Overwatch, apparently they're being DDoS'd. IF (!) that malicious traffic is flowing over the same network segments as what your connection to CoH uses? Guess what, you're in the jam-up too. It's unlikely though; the first D in DDoS stands for Distributed, which means the bot clients spamming the service are located all around the world and hosted by different ISP's (often running on systems where the owners have no clue they're there). If you want to see what's contributing to your game being slow on your system, open up Task Manager, and select the Performance tab. Your network connection (which should be Ethernet, I know there's fast WiFi but it tends to get crowded real quick with all the 'stuff' we connect to it) should look relatively even with a few spikes here and there. If it's completely pegged at the top, then you're likely exceeding the throughput (up and down) on your network adapter, and it's time to go thru the list of processes and see which ones are hogging the network. The game really shouldn't be that bad since most of the heavy lifting is done client-side, it's told what to do and it reports what it's doing, it doesn't have to transfer sound or graphic information back and forth. This is what my perf tab / network view looks like in PI right now. This is on an ultrawide monitor (49") being driven by a GFX 1080 with 8gig RAM onboard and 16gb system. Note that while there are some spikes to max on the network interface, they don't stick around. So this is pretty normal.

I've gone with the concept first, then looked at how I could shoehorn a powerset into that concept. Baroness Samedi, straight Rule 34 of Geoffrey Holder's character in Live and Let Die... and as one of the original CoV characters (Beta, represeeent!) she was a dark/dark corruptor. And now I see the Bone Daddy Skulls bosses branching out into Death Walkers and Death Dolls... and I'm thinking, "I did that already, and I'm -better- than you punks will ever be." BUT... I've also seen new powersets come out, diversification of powersets into different archetypes, and thought, okay, what do I do with this? Seems like my Beam Rifle characters are all 50's sci-fi tropes (one is literally done up as a black-and-white version, no color hues anywhere, not even the weapon effects), and my scrappers usually end up as some kind of anthromorphic monster girls of some kind. My Dual Pistol wielders are either cops, ex-cops, or hardboiled noir (need to break that habit) and there's all manner of other tropes that I should break out of when it comes to controllers, how many time-displaced vaudeville performers do we need anyway? But, I never min-max. I don't use Mids to map a build. I see what works in the early game, and tweak it as I use it.

Peanut butter and onion. Everyone I've ever told about that says "What? Ew!" but they're actually quite good.

So enhancements have several 'flavors'. Back on Live we all started with Training Origin (TO), which could be used by everyone but were really not that good for boosting stats. HC has ditched those and gone straight to Dual-Origin (DO) and Single-Origin (SO) enhancements for sale. Dual-Origin are a step up from the TO's but you have to get ones that match your origin (Magic/Natural, Science/Mutant, etc). Single-Origin must match your origin exactly, but provide the best 'boost' to your stats of all the purchasable enhancements. Then we get to the Invention system (IO's). These, unlike the enhancements above, do not 'age out' and stop working when you level up too far. A Level 20 IO will provide the same percentage of boost regardless of what level you are above it. But, you can't buy these from vendors, you have to either make them yourself from salvage and recipes, OR bid on them from the Consignment House. Not only are there generic IO's that boost a specific stat, but also Set IO's that boost multiple stats, AND when slotted in a power together, add more stats. Some also add "procs" which are basically effects that process on a set frequency of probability. These can be used by anyone as long as they're the minimum level for the Set IO. Attuning these Set IO's make them level with you, so that they get more effective as you gain levels. Some IO's come in Superior (purple) variations, which ONLY work with Level 50 characters, but can be exemplar'd down and still work. They also have larger boosts to your stats/procs/whatever. At the top of the food chain are the Archetype Origins (ATO's). These ONLY work with specific archetypes, and as was explained by @Lazarillo, they provide specific benefits for that archetype, such as a "hide" proc for stalkers, or a mezz pet for Dominators, things like that. They tend to be very expensive on the Consignment market (several million inf) but also are often found in the Heroes and Villains superpacks if you like to 'gamble' on lootboxes at 10m inf a pop. We could go into the other "origin" enhancers, Hami-O's and the like, but those are dropped from specific content in the game, and unless you've got influence to spare or generous friends, you'll need to run that content to procure them.

Some folks enjoy creating a good story, others just want an action setpiece or a target range. That's fine. But, let's not get all up in arms about 'creativity' when the end product is Yet Another Fire Farm with all the powers tweaked just so. It's another form of min-maxing, only this time you're doing it to the opponents, to get as much XP and rewards for the least amount of effort from the players. That's "Spreadsheet Creativity", all math and probability. I'm sure someone had to work out the precise formulas, but let's not kid ourselves here, this stuff is shared as widely as any Internet meme. Yowling about "Stifling Creativity" is a false narrative. What is REALLY being protested here is the ability to earn Architect tickets, because people won't play farming arcs that don't net rewards. Get back into the spreadsheet, find the new sweet spot, tune the arc to hit it, and you're back in biz, yeah?

Always loved the Last Starfighter as a movie. Got another one for you all... presenting "Dynamo Diva", a 70's inspired scientist turned crimefighter. The Image: Dynamo Diva (by Daggerpoint) The Theme: Eumir Deodato - Super Strut