Carnifax

Pretty well I think. I don't think the entire fate of NCWest is in the hands of GR at all. But I do think NCSoft expect teams & products to return dividends, and if GR doesn't do as well as they are projecting then the development team well may be cut down a bit (or simply reassigned to other products of course). I'm not in the least saying "NCSoft never gave Auto Assault or Tabula Rasa a chance", I'm saying they've shown that they will make tough business decisions if a product doesn't give an expected return

Also, based on what happened with NCSoft Europe and people like Rockjaw sometimes the decisions that have come down from on high have surprised people who you'd expect to be "in the know". In other words much as I respect BaBs as a Developer (and love his posts) I know that in no way would he have details of the high level business & product decisions that NCSoft may make in relation to products he is working on based on returns from that product. (in other words *IF* GR doesn't do as well as expected and NCSoft do announce a cut back on the development team then that development team may well find out when we do).

Note that none of this is particularly DOOM material. I'm just saying that (a) NCSoft have shown in the past they they will make hard decisions if a product doesn't deliver expected results and (b) Devs / Mods working on such products may not have details of the inner workings of business decisions made at the higher levels (which is basically what BaBs himself says 5 posts up).

I'm in work I'm afraid, so no IO building here (anyway I don't IO up to the same levels you do Donna, I'd end up way too confused).

Ice Storm & FR do go really well together (and Frost Breath is the heaviest hitting AOE in the epics too, so worth getting on a Plant / Storm) but the real star of Ice Mastery is Hibernate, specifically because you can dump out Seeds, an AOE Immob, FR Ice Storm and LS and then Hibernate up to recover all that End you just spent easily and safely.

Hibernating when things go tits-up, clicking Hurricane and then dropping Hibernate is an excellent combo as well to keep you alive.

I suppose it would be fair to base statements like that on NCSofts track record with things like Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault, as well as the gutting of NCSoft Europe and the fates of most of the NCSoft EU Mod team. If something isn't delivering the numbers expected NCSoft have shown they are quite happy to shutdown or wind down operations.

I'm not saying that means CoH would be closed down if Going Rogue doesn't do well, but if it doesn't do well then I wouldn't want to be one of the 35 or so new Devs hired about 12-18 months ago (who I assume have been mostly working on GR for the last year or so).

Tornado and LS don't have a Afraid or Avoid effect, they do Knockback only. So a -kb immob is handy for them. Freezing Rain does have Avoid, so any immob is good for that (FR does also do Knockdown but if things are Seeded then all that's doing is hurting the damage your confused mobs are doing to each other).

If the OP was talking about Cold rather than Storm I'd recommend a Cold/Dark alright (or a Grav/Cold) to maximise Sleets effectiveness, but for maximising LS and Tornado a -kb AOE immob would be dead handy.

Of course I knew none of this 4 years ago when lil newbie me went for probably the least synergisic combo Storm could have (maybe Mind pips it), Illusion/Storm. No maximising anything there really, other than "make Chaos". Even with a lack of synergy it's an awesome combo though.

Not quite what I meant

More the fact you can stand back and root and hold things in place, reposition them if needed and stack lots and lots of debuffs and mez on them. No toggles to worry about. No PBAOEs, no buffing of your allies needed. You focus on laying down layers of mez & debuff.

^ This.

Grav/TA is a very interesting and tactic style of play, especially solo or on smaller teams. You actually feel like a proper controller, overseeing the battle and locking down and controlling enemies (compared to my other two high level controllers anyway, an Illusion/Storm: "Woo. Chaos" and a Fire/Rad: "Raar, smash and burn") The first 20 or so levels are a bit painful though.

I think Gloom is left out of the second bunch of results, to be fairer to Scrappers (and so Castle won't notice it )

But there are WINE implementions of .NET. Linky. I haven't tried them myself though so I've no idea (a) If they work with Mids and (b) If you could get them running on an Apple Mac OS.

They do? Urrgh (although this urrgh could be more to to with my inability to fathom it and to miss the older more normal menu systems). Pretty moot as well since I use OpenOffice, The Gimp and jEdit on every machine regardless of OS.

And on topic, isn't Mac OS Linux / Unix based now and if so could you use something like WINE to handle Mids? I'm guessing the answer is no but I've no idea about Macs so I figured I'd ask.

Plant I think without a doubt, if you've got Fire Controllers coming out your ears already. It's got a spam-worthy AOE Immob which prevents knockback and Creepers and Freezing Rain sounds downright vicious. As does Seeds, Freezing Rain (the -recharge is probably more than offset by the -Defense & Resistance), AOE Immob, Creepers and Lightning Storm (Tornado causes stuns which might make it slightly less desirable when you want everything to kill its mates with Seeds).

On the other side Flashfire, Cages, Tornado, LS, FR and manic imps sounds pretty horrible too but personally I'd lean towards Plant/Storm (for PvE, I've no clue about PvP).

I'd probably also take Hurricane on a Plant/Stormie for when Seeds isn't up. It's a fab power once you get the hang of it (I like it with TP. It's like being the lovechild of Storm and Nightcrawler but it could work well with Hover/Fly as well).

Burn is a funny one since it was such an infamous power in its heyday that I think its still unlikely to be changed for Scrappers so they get a better version. For Brutes it's technically correct but sorta flawed since it should indeed be using the Tank version, but because of the way Fury works it fails to benefit from Fury for it's duration.

Blizzard is another sorta unexplainable one (along with Ice Storm). No idea why Defenders got Blaster versions of these, it's not like it was done back in Issue 5/6. At this stage though there'd be uproar if the Defender version was reduced to expected values I reckon.

It used to be a great place for it alright. But nowadays with the new Diff settings I think something like picking on Talos Paper Missions might be better, just for the end of mission chance for a B drop (is it B?). Plus Paper Missions tend to be nice for corner herding (of course alternatively you can get horrible Cave maps).

Although Banished are nice to fight, weak vs Lethal (strong vs Dark and Smashing though), happy to get into melee with you and I'm not sure if you can get Banished paper missions. Warriors are a decent alternative (Warriors tend to be my whipping boys in the 20s).

That's like saying Earth Control shouldn't have Fossilize because it's got Stone Cage surely?

Thematic powers with different effects are a good thing in Epics IMO. It's only when the effects duplicate that they mightn't be suitable (even then the opportunity to stack mezzes etc means they can still be very useful)

I thought Web Cocoon was a hold, not an immob?

A bazillion Catgirls on Virtue and Union disagree with you

Although nearly the same thing happened to me. I was talking about Burn across the 3 melee ATs that get it and basically said "It's one shared pseudopet, and chances are the devs are never going to go back and revisit how they implemented them"

The next day the Scrapper and Tank changes to Shield Charge were announced
Not quite as bad but close

Indeed, as long as I get there in the end, creaking and puffing away.

(Riiiight, best I stop now. None of you deserve that image in your heads, there ain't enough mind bleach in the world)

Can you animate away the long standing Oil Slick bug as well please. And the Cathedral of Pain, you could animate that back into working order while you're at it

Nice job on the walk animation. Not something I particularly care about one way or the other, but I know lots of people do, so nice that they can now do so.

MMs with Blaster pools would be pretty darn nice! Much better than the dross they get now.

Brutes getting Tank (or Scrapper) pools makes me sad though.

You're really that into rabbit droppings? Well whatever.

I know what you mean Rabbit. I'm currently finishing off The Witcher (I forgot about it before and now the hideous loading times are much better and its been revamped I started playing it again) as a warm up to Dragon Age : Origins. Worried about the performance though.

Flash Arrow (like Smoke) ain't stackable.

But personally I've always been a fan of making TA the Stacking Debuffs set. PGA & Acid Arrows for example could be allowed to stack. You could have a fair bit of overlapping debuffs then (with Hasten also running)/

When you're close to some clickable entities they can override your default menus. For example if I'm by a Ticket Vendor in the AE and click Recipies I get the Ticket Vendor menu instead. So I wonder if this is a bug related to being close to the AE Search Window.

Or since you logged in to find it in this state what did you log in from? Were you playing a Villain who logged out and switched to Hero side or was it a first-time log in from starting CoH?