Call Me Awesome

I'd certainly grab a thermal over an emp any day; prevention is vastly superior to healing. A thermal will remain a valuable teammate all the way to the endgame while an emp's value starts strong but falls off pretty rapidly in the late game.

Buff/debuff beats healing any day IMO. Yes, I know emps get some nice buffs, but the majority of the emp players I've run across tend to sit back and do nothing but play whack-a-mole with the team's HP bar.

Sorry about the tone of the message, but I've ended up on too many teams with a "pure" empath with no attacks, 2 travel powers and the full medicine pool. That seldom happens with any other set.

With the new boards the format has changed... use the phpBB/Zetaboards formatting in Mids, and the Fruit Salad color scheme seems the most readable on both hero & villain boards.

You can go back and edit your OP with the re-exported build... I'd advise also including the data chunk since the data link has been a bit problematic lately.

Well, I'm not up on current motherboard features since I generally only research when I'm in the market for an upgrade but that's an LGA 775 board for the previous generation Intel CPU's... your machine has an AMD CPU which would not fit. I can say that Asus makes a nice board though; but I don't see the point in buying an old socket mobo since you'll be buying a new CPU as well.

I'd hesitate to offer you specific parts advise since I haven't done any recent research into what's currently out there, bang for the buck and so forth.

Hold on there, it sounds like you've a bad fan on the mobo... new fans are lots cheaper than new motherboards. If your chipset fan is dying check out this chipset heat sink/fan for $7.

If you're looking at replacing the mobo then you'll need to replace a bunch of other stuff due to the age of your machine. You're looking at replacing the motherboard ($100 roughly), CPU ($100 - $200) and RAM ($50 - $100) at a minimum; and if you're looking for an Ultra Mode capable machine probably the video card as well ($100-$300). That may also require a new Power Supply ($80-$100) depending on how much oomph your current machine has.

Well, something's getting really hot, my money's on the vid card... is the fan on your video card functioning? 127C is way above what anything should be getting; most parts seem to fail around 100 C and operate best below 70 C.

Actually I'm not sure that Hami isn't autohit... in all the raids I tanked he never missed me once that I can recall. It was just BAM 935 damage.... BAM 935 damage.... BAM 935 damage regular as clockwork every 4 seconds.

I did try as an experiment once using up a half tray of purples without effect.

Yep, I knew that; and I knew the HP accolades were counting against me there. Still, roughly 200 Hami raids as main tank should've made more of a dent in that stupid badge

Well, a decent power supply runs in the $50-$100 range here in the US with premium units being more. It all depends on just how much power you need... the 8600 should be ok with a decent quality 400 watt unit. Units I've had good luck with are Asus, Corsair & PC Power & Cooling (bit pricey on that last). I'm sure there's lots of other quality units there, those are just ones I've personally used. Corsair is usually thought of as one of the best price/performance units... I've only had one in a system for 5 months so far but it's working perfectly.

You'll need to check out online merchants or brick & mortar stores in your area for prices. Since you're using an older video card that isn't as... greedy as new ones a 400 is probably plenty. If you decide to drop in a new high end card you may need a bit more but for what you have it ought to be ok.

I'm having to guess since I don't know what the rating on your current power supply is, but lots of PC manufacturers put pretty low end PS's in their non-gaming machines with just enough power to run the parts it ships with. If you've a 400 watt or bigger PS you're probably ok; a 350 may be marginal and anything lower is asking for trouble.

It's limited to your team, and it does have a maximum radius but it's quite large, 60' according to Mids. When you activate Group Fly everyone on your team and their pets within 60' of you are flying... and under a -25% tohit debuff which limits it's effectiveness. Your teammates have no option but to fly if they're in range which also causes the power to be unappreciated.

I ran a couple of ITF's post issue 13 before respec'ing into a soft cap build and I was indeed getting into massive negative defense numbers... maybe not -100% (but I was below that pre-issue 13) but at least into the -50% range. The -def the Romans toss out gets pretty brutal.

Yep, I know that, re-reading it I think I didn't snip it quite soon enough, I was just looking for the mechanics of it since I didn't have them off the top of my head. Sorry if I mis-quoted you.

Anyone know offhand the size of an 8600? I just yanked a failed 8800 out of my machine and slapped a ruler on it, it's 4.5" high x 9" long PRECISELY, with the aux power connecter on the end adding another half inch... based on the size limits for the PCIe x16 slot that the 8800 would NOT fit without some surgery on the case.

I just ran into a similar problem with my replacement card, a 275 GTX... it just BARELY went into my case with about 1/8" to spare. Admittedly it's longer than the 8800 that came out but I hadn't thought of a potential problem until I had to get the sucker into the case with literally no clearance. Pulled all the cards and the drive cage to get clearance to wedge the card in, then replaced everything once it was mounted. The back of the card just misses the drive bays by probably less than 1/8". Fortunately the rest of the case is roomy enough and has good ventilation.

You didn't mention the power supply; remember that most relatively recent gamer cards eat lots of juice... a 250-300 watt won't cut it. According to the card's specs it wants a minimum of a 350 watt.

Ideal slotting for CC would ED cap endurance and hold duration with anything leftover for procs... of which the Lockdown is an excellent choice. The power ticks every 5 seconds and has a chance for a MAG 1, 2 or 3 hold to occur each tic. Here's how Local Man explained the power in his Ill/Rad guide:

Because of the nature of the power you'll want to enhance the hold duration as much as possible... at ED cap it will last 15 seconds, or for three pulses which drastically increases the likelyhood that it will stack enough to mez the group you're working on. Thanks to the high endurance useage you'll also want to enhance the endurance reduction as much as possible as well. CC is definately a power that requires heavy slotting to be effective... until you get 5-6 slots into it you're going to be unimpressed.

The Lockdown proc will have a 20% chance to apply a MAG 2 hold on each mob in the area every 10 seconds which will also enhance the ability of CC to stack and hold the group. A damage proc in the power would likewise have a chance to deal damage every 10 seconds so that's another good thing to slot.

Whew, with all of this we're running into severe slot crunch here; 3 slots for endurance so you can run the power at all, 3 slots for hold duration so it can be more effective at stacking holds and then a slot or two for procs... slotting is getting tight.

What I did leveling up was to slot every End/Hold IO I could find into the cloud, the Ghost Widow End/Hold, the Paralytic End/Hold, the Neuronic Shutdown End/Hold and the Essence of Curare End/Hold, the Lockdown proc and the Lockdown Acc/Hold. All of these are very inexpensive. Once I hit 50 I changed the slotting by replacing one of the level 30 End/Hold IO's and the common hold IO with the (purple set) Unbreakable Constraint End/Hold and the Unbreakable Constraint damage proc.

I've also slotted the Gravitational Anchor purple chance to hold proc into Fire Cages... this is a fantastic proc to have on anything with an AOE immobilize. My typical strategy is to run in with Hot Feet/Choking Cloud running and hit Cinders. With the 90% chance of CC hitting everything with a MAG 1 or better hold that usually holds everything in the group. I hit Cages which typically (due to the Grav Anchor proc) holds a couple or three more... toss Char on anything that's been missed and allow Hot Feet and the monkeys to kill the group. Toss EF on any boss or likely LT... it's fairly rare that there's time on a team for RI.

Oh yeah, more often than not, particularly in the early days of raiding most everyone ended up debt capped by the end. I typically made a run through the Drek freak map after a raid to burn off the debt. Later on things got smoother and I started working on the damage badges tanking Hami... 2 years and a couple hundred raids still didn't get that epic damage badge; I'm barely 50% there.

You'd think 200 raids of taking 935 points of damage every 4 seconds would be enough. At least it allowed the emps on the team to work on their heal badges as well.

True, but it does limit you to fire blast & flares as well as your tier 1 secondary; it'll drastically cut down you damage output making it much more difficult to kill them before they kill you... the blaster's main defense.

The problem with that is that even a 1 second mez will kill Hot Feet/Choking Cloud and you'll have a lengthy wait until they're back again as I mentioned:

The base recharge of both of these powers (Hot Feet & Choking Cloud) is 20 seconds; because they're toggles with high end cost and also need slotting for their primary purposes most Fire/Rads won't have them slotted for recharge. The combination of those two powers is what gives a Fire/Rad a large chunk of it's effectiveness; Choking Cloud slotted to ED capped hold duration does an excellent job of stacking holds on mobs while Hot Feet deals the damage and Fire Cages holds them in place. With luck the monkeys are managing to attack the same group you're fighting

Loosing those two powers in a fight suddenly drastically reduces your effectiveness, and due to the recharge it will take considerable time to get them back up. Making sure they don't drop in the first place prevents that and keeps you moving at maximum speed. Oh, don't forget that a mez also drops RI & EF so you could suddenly be facing a large group of suddenly undebuffed mobs looking at you. Keeping those things from happening is more than enough reason for me to snag Psi for IW.