Playing two heroes at the same time

[Lost Ninja]

2 hours ago, WarriorBSD said:

OK, here's my findings. It's obvious at first and was proven at play.  Make your primary toon a ranged hero and your secondary toon a melee.

 

To control my secondary, I use a wireless external numeric pad and keep it next to my main keyboard. To reduce relying on the mouse for the secondary, I assigned "Follow", "Select Nearest Enemy", "Select Next Enemy", and "Select Player 1 (or Player 2 if the mish is for the secondary)" to 4 of the keys (non-numeric) in the numeric pad.

 

Before I engage a group of villains before me, I left-click (using primary's mouse) on my secondary (that way you can see what your secondary is targeting), "Select Nearest Enemy" (using secondary's numeric pad), then "Follow". Basically, my left hand doing the shooting/healing, and my right hand doing the bashing. On occasion a villain sneaks in to attack my primary. So with a "Select Player 1" - "Follow" - "Select Nearest Enemy" - bash (one of the numbered keys) I get rescued.

 

Also, I suggest that secondary should have flight power.

 

Finally, you should make sure that the secondary's camera is pointing to the same direction as your primary. Once in awhile I would make the mistake of assuming my secondary is targeting a group before me but when actually it was targeting a group behind me.

 

 

If that is what you want to do that is of course up to you, but I would have thought that that is massively more difficult then just having the secondary as ranged following (and targeting through) the primary melee. You don't have to do any complicated following or extra targeting on the follower, any friendly power (heal/buff/etc) will hit your primary, any offensive power will hit your primary's target. The only things you have to watch for are things that break follow. Which for powers are mostly teleport style attacks (not common for ranged ATs) or clicking on things... which you generally can avoid while in combat anyway.

 

If you don't want to use a multiplexer (InnerSpace/Octopus/Keyclone/etc*) you can bind the secondary to another keypad (as you have done), or just use different keys on the same keyboard. In the dim and distant past of Live, I used 2-3 PCs (depending on how many accounts I could afford to run). The "follower" PCs had wired game pads (Nostomo N50/N52), the followers followed and targeted through the leader and their powers were used separately.

 

Even though I use a monitor per character I frequently have a browser on top of one of them (I watch/listen to videos while playing), as long as you're aware that you have a character on follow you don't really need (IMO) to be able to see their client all the time (though useful for clicks (doors/lifts/etc)).

 

Generally I play 3 near identical characters, but I have also played:

• Brute + 2x Corruptor. 
• 3x brutes (I farm on these). (Not really dissimilar but indicating you don't need to use with ranged characters, for the record they're Spines/Fire with none of the primary ranged attacks (I have the two from Moo Mastery ofc).
• MM + 2x Defender (wasn't as effective as I had hoped).
• Scrapper + Controller (On Live)
• 3x Defender but using different power sets.
• All the rest are 3x Blaster, 3x Defender, 3x Corruptor... etc... etc... etc...
• And more controllers than you can shake a stick at (think I'm getting close to 40+ by now).

*I use InnerSpace/ISBoxer, previously I have used Octopus and Keyclone (though Keyclone was in WoW not CoH), you can also find solutions that use AutoHotKey.net or similar macroing programs. Since I started playing all my clients on one PC I have found that many don't work very well (it's an issue with poorly supported DirectPlay as CoH was written/designed to use OpenGL and most of the multiplexers are designed to work with DirectX (because most were designed for use primarily with WoW which is of course DirectX).

[Ade Lucas]

On 12/21/2019 at 10:06 PM, boggo2300 said:

If I'd been one of the door sitters, and known that I'd feel terrible, I really would

I can run my own toons any time I like, I also like company and the banter between people with nothing better to do than chat makes the farming fly by a lot quicker. It's like everyone says though, team leaders mission, team leaders rules. If I drop my own toon to allow someone else in it's my decision. There isn't anything for someone else to feel terrible about 🙂

 

At the end of the day I enjoy farming, but I also enjoy the satisfaction of helping someone else, be it levelling past the early levels till they hit IO level, making that little extra xp to hit 50 or open an incarnate slot, or to help gather inf for those more expensive sets. We all play the game the way we want to play it. I have around 30 different alts at various levels, almost all of them were levelled the old fashioned way, in teams or solo doing missions. I farm more for the inf than anything else. It doesn't make a massive difference if someone else wants to come along for the ride.

[boggo2300]

6 hours ago, Ade Lucas said:

I can run my own toons any time I like, I also like company and the banter between people with nothing better to do than chat makes the farming fly by a lot quicker. It's like everyone says though, team leaders mission, team leaders rules. If I drop my own toon to allow someone else in it's my decision. There isn't anything for someone else to feel terrible about 🙂

 

At the end of the day I enjoy farming, but I also enjoy the satisfaction of helping someone else, be it levelling past the early levels till they hit IO level, making that little extra xp to hit 50 or open an incarnate slot, or to help gather inf for those more expensive sets. We all play the game the way we want to play it. I have around 30 different alts at various levels, almost all of them were levelled the old fashioned way, in teams or solo doing missions. I farm more for the inf than anything else. It doesn't make a massive difference if someone else wants to come along for the ride.

Sure it's your decision, however since people don't get to say how they feel about things no-one else does either, I understand your points, and indeed that would lessen it, however I would still feel I'd robbed you of something.

[Frunobulax]

I do this if I farm, but I don't farm much anymore. I used to do this on hami before the lower zone cap too. But for almost anything else, I like movement powers in this game way too much to be reliably autofollowed.

When I did try to duo box for challenging content I had the best results with trap mm, mainly because that allowed me to not spend much time actually duo boxing in real time.