Zed-F

Re: Official Hero Boards Super Team And Chat Channel! Check the first post in the thread!

Re: Official Hero Boards Super Team And Chat Channel! I'll echo the comment to use the chat channel if you're online. Especially if you want an invitation to the supergroup -- anyone I see in game using the chat channel and requesting an invite to the SG, I automatically invite.

Re: Do you play CO as an MMO? Personally, while I've seen this suggested a number of times, I am not a fan of splitting PvE and PvP versions of skills. The biggest reason is power creep, which I am also not a fan of. If you split into PvP and PvE versions of skills, the main reason to keep skills balanced for PvE falls by the wayside, because as a general rule PvP players are much more interested in balance while PvE players are more interested in progression. So if you split the PvE and PvP skills, over time you tend to get a constant progression of increasingly uber PvE skills that trivializes old content, which assumed a less uber balance of skills. As a result, only the newest portions of the game are worth playing as that's the only place you'll find any challenge at all. I've seen this happen with Guild Wars over the last several years, and IMHO it both hurts replayability and emphasizes FotM builds. In a game which tries to discourage FotM metagaming at least somewhat (like CO) rather than embracing it wholeheartedly (like Guild Wars), it strikes me as a risky road to pursue. I personally would rather see a balance maintained for both PvP and PvE in the same skills, and don't object to PvE nerfs as long as they also buff the underperforming skills.

Re: Crafting Pick one of the crafting blueprints you've learned that has a major and/or minor slot. There will be a pull-down or two to fill the major and/or minor slots with an enhance you've learned (which are also purchaseable from the crafters.) Fill in your major and minor enhances and then hit the 'create' button. Dead simple really.

Re: List Your CO Nemesises! Wild Huntress has, as her first nemesis, Fordaetha of Ruk, the Ice Queen. (Well, a shade of her, since the true version resides in another dimension.) Of course the dialogue so far doesn't match what Fordaetha would really be likely to say, but at least I have what I think is a passable look for her. Further nemeses are likely to include the dark sorceror Metran, and Galadan, the Beastlord.

Re: 6E Mess Yep, a 0-phase OIHID is just a SFX of power activation and is a -0 limitation.

Re: Dr. Destroyer Missions On Thursday, September 17 Wild Huntress did a second runthrough with Militiaman, Protector, and a couple other folks (I think PuGs?) and it went much smoother. Firstly, in the room where you are building a robot, we tried having just 1 person manage the switches and everyone else watch for robot spawns. This went much smoother and there were no annoying 'but the button doesn't work' glitches on the robot making machine. (I was the one making the robot since I'd just seen how it works.) Perhaps the game gets confused when more than one person is standing on the button pads? Secondly, in the final room with the Destroyer clone, things went much better if you kill the robot making parts before you kill the Destroyer clone. We only managed to get 2 of the machines destroyed in the 5 minutes we had on the timer, BUT it *seemed* to give us credit when we killed the last two after 5 minutes were up regardless of the timer having already expired. We only killed the destroyer clone after all 4 robot making machines were destroyed, and the mega-destroid was considerably easier to take down -- though it could still pack a serious punch, our attacks were actually damaging it at more than a snail's pace. It still took several minutes and a number of player deaths to take down but not nearly as bad as the previous attempt. Chalk that one up to lessons learned about how to beat the mission! As far as aggro management goes... I'd say it's pretty random. Letting the tank go in first to draw aggro is still a good idea at the start, but don't expect it to stay there. People not doing a ton of damage bad guys do tend to get attacked less, but they still get attacked sometimes, especially if by virtue of the chaos of battle they wind up the closest target to a given mob. Plus there are lots of mob AoE attacks going off regularly which can easily hit multiple players.

Re: Assistance with CO needed. I'm pretty sure there is a 'none' option for payment past the free time expiry -- at least there was for me, though I got the 6 month package (plus the free month making 7.)

Re: Dr. Destroyer Missions On Thursday, September 17 Wild Huntress is 24 and could give it a shot. She's pretty tough for a level 24.

Re: Abilities Discussion And while having access to T2 and T3 powers early can be somewhat helpful, it's by no means necessary. A lot of the really useful energy management powers, blocks, slotted passives, and so forth are T1-T2 powers so it's usually not hard to find stuff that you will eventually be wanting anyway.

Re: List Your CO Heroes! I've added a secondary alt to be a reattempt at Cyber Angel's original build while I park Cyber Angel awaiting her opportunity to respec to Celestial. So now I have (all @Zed-F): Wild Huntress (21, main, archery tank) Revenant (23, primary alt, TK/Telepathy DPS with a side in munitions) Cyber Angel (23, primary alt, power armour mongrel, parked awaiting respec) SuperMouse (11, secondary alt, Invulnerable Might tank with a side in force) My daughter also has a couple characters and I have a test character still, so I'm already running low on slots. At least I shouldn't need the test character much past halloween.

Re: Crafting I have characters with >200 skill in all three major crafting schools if anyone needs anything made. I anticipate levelling up arms and mysticism a bit more rapidly than science, though, since my main science toon is currently parked and has to rely on my other two toons for items to research. My backup science toon is currently at 101 and will eventually catch up though.

Re: Abilities Discussion From the latest dev chat, IIRC Celestial is supposed to have 2 aspects to it, and many powers will behave differently depending on which aspect is dominant. We also know all powersets are supposed to be capable of soloing with minimal delving into other trees. So I'm guessing the two aspects in question are something like mercy (support) and wrath (damage.) I've made SuperMouse to be a re-attempt at what Cyber Angel was originally intended to evolve into -- that being a melee-oriented Invulnerable character with some ranged attacks and a ranged energy builder. Since I was so underwhelmed with power armour I went with Force this time around (which is also fitting for a Mighty Mouse tribute character since the original also had some odd TK-like force powers.)

Re: Abilities Discussion Invulnerability and Regen are certainly the two most popular defensive passives at the moment, from what I've read. But another important thing to remember is to pick a build where you can actually see to block when you need to. My own invulnerability character is pretty tough defensively, but I have noticed a decline in her survivability when she uses Micromissiles because the effects are so busy that I sometimes can't see to block properly. I'm probably respeccing her to Celestial / Gadgeteering anyway once the Celestial set is out, though, so I'm not really too concerned about it. I may make another Invulnerable character later.

Re: Well, I give up Sorry to hear that things didn't work out for you. I know there are quite a number of control options to choose from, but I figure you've explored them all or at least most of them. As far as performance issues, there have been a number of people in the 'mysteriously not working well' boat (which is more-or-less normal for a newly launched game) and I'm sorry to hear that you're one of them. For most people the game seems to run fine, though I know that's no consolation. Hopefully in several months they will start handing out free trials with a presumably updated codebase, so you can try it out again if you're still interested.

Re: Abilities Discussion

Re: Abilities Discussion Taking Defensive Combo is definitely in the plan for Cyber Angel. So far I've found, however, that at the start of a fight, she tends to take more damage when she focuses on a single target with Defensive Combo, than when she just AoEs everything down with Micromunitions. Defensive Combo has really only proved worthwhile once the henchmen are out of the picture. I'm hoping with more melee attacks in her repertoire, it might prove more useful.

Re: Abilities Discussion Mini-mines were so seriously OP before that they will almost certainly continue to be very useful even post-patch. So far my main, Wild Huntress, has come out about even after the patch. Her Sonic Arrow got a big increase to energy costs, but her Force Shield got an extended duration linger to help offset those energy costs and she had ridiculous amounts of energy available on account of it before anyway, so the energy nerf is survivable, especially if she starts to stack REC to help with her Regen. The Force Shield linger mitigates less damage now but her Regen got a buff, so that comes out about the same as well. Overall she's handling herself quite well, and I expect that to continue post-patch. Her main weakness is a lack of a big single-target damage option, because I haven't decided what I want her to pick up yet since the higher tier archery powers seem very marginal. My other two primary characters, Revenant and Cyber Angel, are not exactly where I'd like them to be. Revenant is doing fine power-wise due to heavy mini-mine abuse, but I'm not happy with the conceptual direction that's taking him. At some point I plan to respec him, but I want to have a better idea of what I'm going to respec to before I do. He'll be able to keep levelling just fine in the interim because whatever damage hit he takes on the mines will be offset by better survivability from Lightning Reflexes and from picking up Telekinetic Shield. His energy management will do nothing but improve post-patch, now that I know the TK shield linger effect can also help with energy regen, even though this isn't stated in the description. (Plus, TK shield is buggy right now and the linger effect provides excellent protection from the sides and back, as well as from the front... though I don't plan to rely on that bugginess as it's likely to get corrected.) Cyber Angel is a bit of a mess right now because I didn't pay enough attention to energy management when I created her, and because I just don't like the way Power Armour works in practice that much. The PA toggle powers put global cooldowns on all other powers, making them difficult to queue properly and putting extra delays on getting energy back from her energy builder toggle. She winds up either using nothing but eye beam and wrist bolters, or pumping out bolter shots for several seconds and then launching a swarm of micromunitions (which are cool, but graphically busy enough that they make it hard to see an enemy winding up for a big attack.) I wanted to make her a Power Armour character with a melee secondary focus; now I'm thinking I should have gone Might to start with and branched into Power Armour later. I'm also thinking I should have ditched STR as a characteristic focus and gone with an energy management focus (say INT or END) instead... especially now that they've reduced the STR required to maximize non-superstat melee damage bonus. I'm going to make an effort to swing her around in the direction I originally intended, but before I do I'm going to try to do some more testing to really iron out the direction I want to take her and make sure it will work. I'm hoping the Energy Shield linger during melee will provide energy as TK shield linger has been shown to do. One thought I had is that the test shard could be invaluable for these sorts of things. As long as I don't use my free respec for a given character, my hope is that it will be copied to the test shard along with everything else, which is supposed to happen every other week. That means every other week I could try out a completely different build in more than just the powerhouse, until I find one that works to my satisfaction.

Re: My first Take Just as a note -- you have to get past the tutorial and the first crisis zone (or both of them) for the game to really get going. I know I didn't feel like my beta character had even a basic suite of tools to choose from in combat until the late teens, and the same has held true since launch. Also, you don't get into relatively open areas with a significant selection of things to do until that time either. You can't just hop in the game, play an hour or two, and come to an informed decision based on that. (You can come to a decision but it won't be sufficiently informed.) It really requires several hours of playtime at least to get a decent impression.

Re: The Archlich arises! There will very likely be another halloween event next year. Most MMOs have thematic holiday content that occurs annually. Odds are strong that the event will remain largely unchanged from year to year (because it's a lot less work than customizing everything each time,) though this is by no means guaranteed.

Re: Friday Gaming I should be on for the first part of that anyway, though probably not the last part since I'm in EST. Look for @Zed-F, or better yet use the Hero Boards Chat channel. My mains are currently 17, 14, and 14, though I expect a bit of levelling will likely occur between now and then.

Re: The Archlich arises! Canada already has a zombie apocalypse going with Kigatilik being woken from his imprisonment/slumber, so this just makes it worse. More undead to play ten-pins with! (Well I suppose 5-pins would be more popular since this is Canada...)

Re: Official Hero Boards Super Team And Chat Channel! I can be reached at (amazingly enough) @Zed-F. Also, I heartily recommend using the Hero Board Chat channel mentioned above. It allows you to communicate with other Hero Board members even if you are logged in with a toon that's a member of another supergroup, or not a member of a supergroup at all. It's also a basic screening test for participation on the boards, as you'd have to be here to know about it. I was able to invite several people yesterday into the group who were in Hero Board Chat, even though I was mostly playing on toons that were members of other SGs tonight, by virtue of being able to see their conversation in the chat channel (whereupon I'd log into my Legion of Heroes toon to do the invites.)

Re: Difference between games? FF also allowed you to build supremely overpowered characters, with no checks and balances. Since it was for a single player game, nobody complained much. Given that CO involves multiplayer and especially PvP combat, you can bet that there would be complaining if at least some token effort at playbalance were not made. So no, FF is not a good example.

Re: List Your CO Heroes! Current characters: Wild Huntress Revenant Cyber Angel @Zed-F