Scarlet Shocker

When life gives me lemons I make a gibson martini

I seem to have my CoH folders in a bit of a jumble and I've got old data and accounts from live, from SCORE and HC and other servers. I was trying to clean up my folders and ensure my config files are all tickety boo but I can't bloody find them. Any idea where they might be?

Surely this should be /eggsbenedict ? I am sad. I thought this was going to give us a way to customise the colours of our names - I would like to change Scarlet Shocker's name to a colour that matches the name. I can but dream

most of my characters can be described as neurotic bastard

This should be in everyone's Power Tray by default

I remember there was a system in Vampire: The Masquerade, the old P&P RPG with some kind of system. but from memory (it's close on 30 years ago I played and I was inexpert and inexperienced at it) it mostly seemed like a discussion between player and GM about balancing a power/penalty and felt entirely unsatisfactory. I think if I were to have some kind of "chosen weakness" in the game I'd want the boost to reflect that. I have never been a gambler and to deliberately gimp myself would require a much better pay-off than simply penalty X= Power -1 and gives boost Y = Power +1 That said, I have often thought that elements and/or like powers should give higher def/res but the opposite powers should give a commensurately lower def/res; Fire wielders should have reistance and higher defence to fire but weakness to Ice and Water for example but some of our powersets don't have opposing forces - Radiation and Darkness for example, making it almost impossible to balance.

I use a Razer Naga Chroma and Razer Tarterus. I would not recommend them. I've used variants since before I started CoH - originally a Belkin n52 Nostromo. They were brilliant until this recent iteration but their enshittification of bells and whistles and lights caused all kinds of issues with it actually bloody working.

Civilians: Best cure for Rooted, EVAH!

Wind control is when you hold in the fart at the start of your family's car road trip across the country Storm Summoning is the reaction when you follow through an hour before the next possible stop

side note: I first read this and thought the answer would be to bang both hands together at a vastly reduced frequency

Am I right in thinking there are some -Rech powers in the Incarnate chains?

OP hasn't mentioned how s/he likes to play - solo or teamage. It's not super critical to know but can influence choices. For primarily teaming I'd suggest /thermal is a very solid support set - great buffs for your team, and some amazing debuffs for your opponents. Melt Armor is highly underrated IMO and you can get it recharged quite fast in a good build. I'd also recommend /storm and /poison as good solid secondaries with /Trick Arrow almost up there too. /Storm gives you great debuffs, keeps enemies away and generally throws stuff around enough it won't be bothering you too much. /Poison is almost all ST and reasonably melee focused, but is still deadly with some punishing debuffs and ways to reduce even AVs to poodles. /TA is a good all-round set, giving you some reasonable debuffs, good soft-control and is inexpensive in terms of endurance etc For primaries I'd say Dark is by far one of the best in terms of control vs damage giving you goodly amounts of both and has some very useful -to Hit debuffs, whereas Plant is all about damage and holds. It's also excellent but Dark just edges it IMO. Mind is also excellent at control but its damage is slow (A Mind/TA is one of the most painful characters I've ever played. Nothing could touch me but killing anything was a challenge) although a lot of enemies are weak to Psi. Stone is very good at locking stuff down but again, not so much damage. Ultimately, play what feels good and suits your style the best. I would strongly advise against playing FotM builds or following the crowd. In my experience, going left-field has often produced some amazingly fun results. My personally favourite controller builds are my Dark/Poison and my Plant/TA. If I'm ever in a position where I want to get something done those will be my go-to toons, often my first picks over any other ATs or sets. Have many funs and welcome home

That can work spectacularly well, but it can be a colossal failure. Many many years ago a group of friends and I played a long running AD&D campaign. There was this arch-nemesis team that would periodically turn up and invariably kick our butts and take our stuff. Sometimes we'd manage to beat the crap out of them and do better. But it did become tedious although our GM was good and tried not to overdo it but after a while it just stopped being fun so there needs to be a way to control it for the players.

Don't forget, Praetorian civvies are even worse, they can fell an Incarnate hero with just one well aimed rock

I'm talking about the Concealment pool. It seems to be quite effective against most enemies but there is a massive problem with it. Civilian pedestrians wave at me as they walk by! 😱

To be completely serious here for a moment (write it down, doesn't happen that often) it strikes me that it would be a very worthy project to catalogue all the missions, contacts, progression paths etc. It's not something I would do - that would drive me even more loopy than I already am - and there is already a great resource in Ouroboros which I suggest has the bones of 90% of the content. But the ability to pre-plan your journey - to find the content you find personally interesting/rewarding/enjoyable would be an invaluable resource. And, to reiterate, I'm not volunteering.

who's joking?

I had presumed (incorrectly it seems) that you'd guestimated and stuck with that figure rather than rounding up. My methodology was to take your number and round up by 50% since I figured you may be underestimating. So... Ok we might be getting into a philosophical question of "What constitutes a mission?" but I think I want to take some time to figure that out a bit more fully before I commit anything to words on the internet, for fear of looking (even more) stupid

I'd say many more. Probably closer to 7500. There's a lot more high level content I believe

My characters already have an inherent weakness The person behind the keyboard 🤣

I figured as much. It just seems there's a rough correlation of 1:1 mission per merit. I think we'll have a better idea of that ration once you've completed every single mission in the game and calculated how many merits you can actually obtain without repeating content good luck! 🤣

That's a surprisingly high number of missions... I would never have guessed so many at that level of content. I guess you're earning 1.074 merits per mission (give or take) which makes me now consider the ratio of merits to missions over the game generally, a question I'd never even imagined until I read your stuff. Good work.

I have been on lower level farms but as Ukase points out, they are rarely efficient

You are better versed in these arcs than me but I think you've captured a lot of the main issues with them I think we should change their names from Shining Stars to Shooting Stars and put them out of our misery

I always felt like Dillo is missing a d from his name.