...but I just got finished teaming with Mercedes Lackey and Gail Simone.

Wow!

Hey gang.

For those of you that haven't seen me in my brief moments online in the last week or so, I thought I'd update you on my AWOL-ness. My computer is have serious overheating problems all of the sudden. I cannot do ANYTHING processor intensive, down to and including rapid navigation on Google Maps.

So, no CoH/V for me for a while (at least until I figure out whats wrong). No Galactic Pelican teaming. No Pentacle teaming. No Double XP Weekend. Oh well.

On the plus side, I'm using the downtime to make excellent progress on my new small business. If it continues like this, I may cancel my automatic resub, which would happen in a few weeks, so that I don't get drawn back into the game. I'm not gone for good, but I'll be on extremely rarely at the most.

Yay!  Sorry, just vastly enjoying the "go me" moment of having myself and the "Incarnate" video mentioned in the July 14th COH Podcast... (it starts with Viv reading Lighthouse's announcement, and then they give their opinions, which start about 26:55 into the podcast.)

 
YEAH!

Michelle
aka
Samurai_ko

PS - I will even forgive Viv not being able to pronounce "Samuraiko"... mostly because she apologized profusely in the podcast for messing it up. :D

I was on a team tonight of people who've played since the beta and they were doing the "remember when..." for city of heroes.

For me - the one that rung a bell with me was "remember when tanks could actually tank."

That's so true. Tanks today can not tank with a defender.

I was looking at the combat stats on my tank the other day and the defenders fire shield did more damage resistant than my resist physical damage (which is in my main power pool).

It's so broken. You require having a healer or a buffer to actually tank.

Sorry - but the HULK doesn't need a healer.

The only tank that's playable (still) are fire tanks, and that's funny because fire tanks are the reason why all the other (non-broken) tanks were gimped. They never should have gimped the invulnerability set as badly as they did....


As someone said on the team, "One of many wrong turns make in the evolution of city of heroes."

I was running through Galaxy City, and I saw this:


Hmmmmmm.... wait, isn't that, THIS?!?

Yeah, I thought so...  now even our fantasy world escapes are venues for real world advertising! 

*sigh* 

Edit: And no, I don't spend time on the dev boards and don't read every announcement... this is a game for me, not a lifestyle, so this is just me being "not in the know". I'll go shut it off in my options. Thanks to the early responders whom made me aware of this.

I apologize again for anyone I may have inadvertently killed on my drunken binge teaming. :x

-Designation VENUS // @Aggelakis

So, I'm not a shutterbug. I don't take pictures in real life, and I still rarely remember to hit the Print Screen button when something cool is happening in City of Heroes.

Still, after over 4-plus years in the game, and remembering to copy my screenshot directory over every time I move computers, I've amassed around 1,500 screenshots. That's probably a drop in the bucket compared to some players, but what it really is to me is an album full of memories. I have pictures from pre-beta characters to the first Rikti invasion, each screenshot revealing both my graphics settings for the time and the graphics of the game. In some ways the game hasn't changed at all, in others it's become wholly new. Some characters that have lasted over time see radical costume changes, making some of the old ones nostalgic.

I'm thinking of actually going through and organizing it like a photo album, but then part of me still enjoys just seeing them all in order without mucking with it.

Either way, how's your screenshot folder looking? Large or small? Do you go through and delete bad pictures, or keep them all? Do you keep your folder when you move computers? Do you remind yourself to hit Print Screen when something cool happens? I've also been on many teams where if it was a fun enough experience, we have to pose for photos after. Do you take artistic care when snapping shots, like you would with a camera? There's a culture to this, I'd like to know where everyone stands.

Is anyone from the LJ community planning to attend Paradise Comicon in Toronto next weekend?

I shall be taking up residence in Artist's Alley for the weekend, sellin' my stuff and sketchin' some superheroes if anyone's in the neighborhood :)

Well, the Cape Radio folks rocked out with a damn good meetup on Saturday! DJ Shecky and One Hit Wonder did a fantastic job on this meetup. They even got Ex-Libris to send some NC Soft goodies to them, and all us CoX'ers left with goodie bags! (I'll take pics later)

I didn't have a camera in hand but some of the fine folks there did. DJ Shecky's photos can be found here.

Here's a link to Rex Celestis' photo gallery on Picasa. I'm the Magnificent Kuso! :) [Photo Link fixed! Thanks grahamwest!

Who’s who in Rex’s pics:
( A who's who in the above gallery, courtesy of the lovely One Hit Wonder! )

All in all, a wonderful night, thanks again Shecky and One Hit Wonder! Already looking forward to next year =)

Say there's an Emp or a Rad or some other toon with an AoE buff. It seems reasonable to me for that person to call for people to gather, wait a moment, and then fire off the buffs. It seems reasonable to me to give enough time for people who want to gather to get there, but it also seems reasonable to fire it off before everyone gets there if it's fairly obvious that someone isn't coming or isn't paying attention.

There are apparently some people who feel that you should not even call for gathering, that you should just fire it off when you think you can get the most people. In fact, one of the comments I saw was "They actually call out for people to gather for buffs. Ew!"
- I find this less than ideal because, personally, if you give me half a chance to get there I am more than happy to trip over myself and get to you. And usually, I could really use the buffs.

There are apparently some people who feel that you should call for gathering and then wait until every single person has gathered.
- This seems less than ideal to me because there are people out there who either do not want or need the buffs, or aren't paying attention, and so may not gather in a timely manner, and so this can hold up the team.

I mean, in my mind, my first solution seems perfectly reasonable. Call it out, wait a few seconds (looking at the map to see if people are still trying to move within range), fire it off and move on. Is my solution not as reasonable as I think? O_o

Ranty bits. My new pet peeve - backseat drivers in teams.

Two nights in a row I've been on teams, once leading the other not, where a guy joins and keeps up a running list of suggestions: Invite Bob. Invite Kathy. We should do Bob's missions, they're harder. Reset mission. Set your difficulty higher. Give me star. Invite Jim. Both times led to absolute disaster, and the whiner blaming the team wipes on everyone else.

The hard part is when this starts, as leader, I know where this is usually going. Options? A simple 'no', or I could argue with the foo, or I could follow evil instincts and just kick at the first sign - but any way, I get the feeling most of the team isn't as experienced, isn't as pessimistic, isn't on the same wavelength, and I don't want to appear the unreasonable one- but GD it after almost 4 years I have a pretty good gut feel for how many levels up a team can safely or even efficiently go (which is not very if you are without debuffers or buffers, and low 20s, like we were). But I suppose everyone knows they're an expert in this game :)

Argh. Now I realize why I hate leading, and probably why so many others do too. I think next time I'll just quote Serenity - "Do you want to run this ship?"

I'm leaving in an hour? anyone going? If so I'll be there with a Decepticon shirt on :)

Hope to see some of you fine LJ'ers again and meet new folks!

Last night I decided to tweak my ice blaster's build a bit. She had skipped five powers from her secondary (the melee powers, the slows, and the AoE sleep) and instead she took her fitness and flight, AND stealth and combat jumping, just for the extra defense. Which, I still don't regret doing, however I suddenly decided I wanted to have fun with slows! So I respecced out of CJ and stealth and took chilling embrace and shiver.

ANYWAY! That's besides the point. The point is I was running one of her missions on test to make sure this build was going to work, and I ran into an invisible object. You can see screenshots here. Luckily, Ice Patch is handy for revealing inivisble objects. Yes I /bugged it and included a link to the screenie.

ANYWAY AGAIN! (I have had coffe, I am hyper, I apologize.) The point is, since this happened right before I went to bed last night, I dreamt about it. I'm not sure when I dreamt about it, if it was last night or this morning, but it was pretty vivid. It was myself, my partner, and a third person who I think was one of my coworkers (though my brain could just be filling that in now). There were six hidden objects that we had to find and destroy, only later in the dream I figured out that we only really had to destroy three of these objects (which all looked exactly like the thing in the screenshot), and the other three objects were our "prizes" (though we still had to find them). And of course, since the mission from the screenie was a Rikti mission, we were fighting Rikti the whole time in my dream (though the dream was set in more of an outside instance, with some lab-ish parts). Now, I've had City dreams before, and I know others have as well... so this is a call for any recent City dreams you've had! :D

- No, I don't think this is important enough to take the Devs' attention away from anything else in the game.
- Yes, I know we used to have "/em salute" only, and "/em militarysalute" was added later.
- I'm not angry or upset about this, I just wanted to flail for a second.

All that being said: WHHHYYYY is the military salute *so*freaking*wrong*? I know the answer, of course, it's probably that none of the Devs has ever been in the military. I don't think I've ever seen a movie get it right either, so if that's what they were going from, it's no wonder. This site has a pretty good description of a proper salute:

"To salute, raise your right hand smartly until the tip of your forefinger (index finger) touches your handgear[sic], above above and slightly to the right of your right eye. Keep your thumb and fingers extended and joined, palm to the left, with your hand and wrist straight. Hold your upper arm horizontal, and your forearm inclined at an angle of 45º. At the same time turn your head and eyes toward the person or flag you are saluting. Hold the salute until returned by the person, saluted, then drop your hand smartly to your side (without smacking the side of your skirt[/leg/pants])."

The easiest way I remembered was to put the tip of the index finger at the outside of the eyebrow. If you're wearing glasses, then it's the top corner of the glasses. I'm not sure about different kinds of headgear, because when we saluted in soft-caps, we always still put our finger to our eyebrow, but there *are* some kinds of hats where you put your finger up to the bill. (I don't think the Army has any of those, or if they do, I never got to wear one.)

Still, the in-game emote has the hand clear up in the middle of the forehead. Which to do so, they had to raise the upper arm so it's not parallel to the ground. (Not to mention the fact that they're looking way too far above the horizon line..) All of this makes me want to face-palm. ;)

I found this article I thought was really interesting this morning. It's about a scientific conference that was held in Azeroth, the World of Warcraft. Since Cobie thought it would appeal to all, I'm posting it here as well.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5883/1592c

I think it would be of at least passing interest to everyone who has any online presence and/or plays MMOs.

Then again, not even a conference in Vegas ends the way ours did. With fireworks bursting and confetti still drifting all around the dancing mob of wedding guests, Catullus announced the final event: a massive attack on Sentinel Hill, an Alliance stronghold. As we surged over the hills around the unsuspecting fort, everyone yelled, "For Science!"

I have to admit, I kept thinking that as novel as the Undead City might be, Faultline and Pocket D have much better conference hosting facilities.

I never mind joining PuG`s and I never did with TF`s. But this time my experience was kinda... unsatisfying.

Do you take the Ouroboros Portal, Pocket D VIP Pass, and the vet reward SG porter out of your trays?

I was once on a mixed LGTF or ITF and a teammate, after they or a different teammate fired up Ouro, clicked on it. Since they were one of our major damage dealers, that rather sucked for all of us. (Not sure more for him or for us. If we still finished the TF, more for him. Else, more for the rest of us!)

I encountered CoH last year when I went to attend my brother's wedding in March. I saw him play this and I was immediately hooked. While I was there, I made a toon using his account (a fire/dark corruptor for what it's worth) and solo'd it to 22.

Seeing my love for the game, my brother decided to gift me an account and I started playing eagerly last October. Since then, I have learned a lot more about the game, created (and also deleted) several toons because of my raging alt-aholism and figured out that I love playing trollers and fenders more than any other ATs. My first lvl 50 (I have 3 now) was a Dark/Dark fender. I love her only a wee bit less than my earth/storm fender.

But this post isn't about them. This is about my first toon; the first one I ever created on my new account. At that time, my goal for the toon was "I want to do a truckload of damage and blow up $#!+" My brother's favourite toon was his BS/regen scrapper but I didn't like the idea of melee combat, so he suggested I go with a blaster. And thus was born BuzzMaestro: an energy/electric blaster.

Once again, I played solo with him on Heroic all the way to lvl 16 or so, when my brother suggested I try a team. The Synapse TF was my first team, and I met a great person who explained a lot more about the game to me than I knew.

BuzzMaestro gradually worked his way up the levels despite my newfound love for my other toons, and now sits at lvl 44.

And here's my problem now. I don't find him fun to play any more. I had taken energy blast as my primary set because I thought it sounded "cool", not knowing the annoyance knockback constantly produces. But more than the KB, I think what I don't like is that I don't really feel powerful for a lvl 44 toon. When I team up and play, I feel that my blaster is not doing any serious damage. The damage from energy blasts is not that impressive, and a red con often takes 3-5 hits to bite the dust. It feels like a dead weight drag, playing this toon.

I have deleted many toons in the past that I didn't enjoy playing, but pretty much all of them were deleted by lvl 12-16. Not only is this toon lvl 44 with many hours of play in him and about 120 mil INF, but this was my first toon and I don't want to delete him for that reason.

Have any of you been in this position? What did you do?
(Somebody suggested I just PL him to 50 and leave him, but I don't PL or farm, and I don't see myself having fun till he hits 50 doing missions.)

Updated to add: The secondary part of my post has to do with the mediocre damage done by energy blasters. Is there any way to squeeze some more "juice" out of mine? I've got all the damage and accuracy slots in place. Or was energy/elec/elec just a bad combo I have to live with now?

So, I could have sworn there was a post at one point where people listed their global names so we could match up LJ names to CoX global names.   I spent a few minutes wandering tags and didn't find it.  Is it just wishful thinking on my part, or could someone point me to it?  There's a couple of you that I have fun teaming with and would like to add to my friends list.

And, if there isn't one, let's start one, 'cause I am having trouble keeping track of people...!!!!

divinemissb aka @Psionique

Today my prizes came for taking second place in the PERC "City of Commercials" contest!  (I'd gotten other stuff earlier, until investigation revealed that my prizes had gone to the THIRD place winner, and I had gotten HIS stuff - Ex Libris immediately rectified the problem.)

My t-shirt is awesome (will be wearing that to work tomorrow, all hail Casual Friday), but the TRUE prize for me, the one that made it all worth it, is the poster I got.  Signed by several of the "Freem Fifteen", I believe they're called, I've been able to decipher the signatures of War Witch, Back Alley Brawler, Dark Watcher, Niviene, Ex Libris, Lighthouse, poshyb, Positron, Hero 1, Blue Steel and JLove (aka SexyJay).  There are a couple other names that are legible but I'm not sure who they are, and there are some that look like angular Rorschach ink blots.  But it's MINE!!!

This sucker is getting framed and then pride of place on the wall by my desk at home.  

I'm posting this is because I know how many of the LJers helped me get my CoX commercial done on time and were willing to run around and help me do stuff.  So I wanted to thank all of you again for helping me! :)

Michelle
aka
Samurai_ko