Golden_Avariel

I spent most of Double XP weekend on Protector soloing. I hung around IP a lot but, besides an excellent Lusca hunt, I never managed to scare up a team or luck into a Sister Psyche TF. Not that I was trying terribly hard to make my own team so no one's fault but my own. Most of my friends play Justice so I don't really know anyone around here.

Is there a good global for finding folks, especially for TF's? Jello Shooters seems to be the main channel, is it still active? Protector Vigilance seems to be the only recently advertised global, is it useful for this?

I've said it a dozen times but... we need to be able to use the Promote button in a task force. I have no idea why they disabled it to begin with.

But I suppose even then you'd still have to reinforce to people in the team that the leader (as opposed to whoever has the star) is the only one who can talk to the contact without express permission.

I'm sorry you had such problems but thanks for the heads-up.

[Edit] My new machine is Vista with a 9800 and I have the unrecoverable error too. It's a once every few days occurrence. I uninstalled a particular windows hotfix and ran all day yesterday just fine. Of course, that may be a coincidence. If I go the rest of the week then I'll believe it.

No problems with lag on either my fire/thermal controller or my fire/fire dominator. At least not in particular. Now, if you want to talk about how the Hold animation doesn't play correctly, then I'm with you on that.

Having said that, I've had two episodes of really bad lag in the last week - like people and npc's jumping from one side of the hall to the other or dead bodies flip-flopping on the floor. But it doesn't seem related to any particular powerset or character. The weird thing about this lag is that it doesn't really keep me from moving and attacking... it's more like major graphical glitches than lag since I'm not "rubberbanding" or freezing. One time there were two of us in the party with the problem, and once it was only me. Once it never did go away and I finally quit for the night, and once it went away after that particular carnie mission was over. *shrugs*

I use the wiki and decide which contacts I want to hit on my way up. It is working out very well for my level 32 mm. The hard part is getting the contacts you want from your brokers and some of the unlockables are hard to obtain at the levels you need them (for example, ghosts are very difficult at 10th or 11th level).

I figure my newly minted level 10 dominator will hit a different chain of contacts from my mercenary. I'm pretty sure that's how the game was designed. There is just too much content for any one character to see.

One thing to note on the villain side is that the starter contacts in Sharkhead and above introduce you to a particular chain of contacts. Look over an entire chain before deciding which you want to follow for that character's story.

I've really enjoyed most of the content on the villain side. Some is a little too dark for me but most of it is cool and a lot of it is very clever and funny.

And with AE, if you decide to kill the contact that jerked you around (I'm looking at you Darrin Wade), you can.

I've only recently gotten Invincibility on my new tanker but this past Saturday I was running him and we were hearing this mechanical noise while fighting enemies. It sounded a little like a sewer pump.

At first I thought it was the trolls we were fighting and filed a bug report. But when we got outside and were ambushed by tsoo they were making the noise too. Finally we each engaged a different random group on the street and found it was only me making the noise. Then I tried turning off various toggles and found it was Invincibility.

It was so annoying I played the next hour with that toggle turned off.

I'm 19th level so I'm certain I've played with this power in our previous session. I find it hard to believe I didn't notice the sound then. I'm hoping it is a bug with the latest patch, or perhaps a side-effect of using the minimal fx customization. I guess I need to change it back to default to see if it erases the noise.

Has anyone else noticed this?

What I'd like is a suppressotherfx option to turn off fellow player's effects. The big force bubbles (customized or not) give me something similar to motion sickness, especially in the purple caves (which give me headaches at the best of times).

If we could turn off all PC FX it would fix both our problems. Leave it on most of the time but off when someone particularly annoying comes along.

Does anyone know if one or both of the last two patches to test (24th and 28th) are live yet? Is there a way to tell for myself?

LOL re SerialBeggar's description of how target-next works. My wife would swear that is exactly right.

I can give you examples of how it works for me.

Yes - if I press escape and start Tabbing it starts with the nearest and works it's way out, always going in the same order. So far so good.

I come across a trio of enemies with my scrapper (this was yesterday). The middle is a lieutenant so I target him. I engage and eventually defeat him. I press tab and instead of going to either of the two standing right next to me swinging their maces, I get the warrior a good 70 feet down the hall ignoring me.

With the 10' melee circle, it is possible that the person I defeated was actually slightly further away than either of the other two. Since I never had this problem prior to i13 when the circle was expanded, that's what I think is actually happening. That would be WAI which is fine but you can see why I prefer using target-nearest as my default.

Next scenario...

I defeat the other two warriors. I haven't pressed escape. I close to throwing-knives range of the guy down the hall I had accidentally targeted earlier. I press tab and get the 2nd or 3rd warrior beyond the guy closest to me. It had been plenty of time for the previous target to fade away and clear my targeting box. I find if I press escape first it works fine, but until I do it seems to think the long dead guy, getting further and further away, is my target and it attempts to find the next one that far or further. I assume if there is no one further away than the faded body I'll get the closest person because the range cylces. That last point, I think, makes it seem random - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

At any rate that is my experience so I use target-nearest since that is the target I want 90% of the time anyway.... just not when there are spectral terrors around. I guess what I should do is simply move away from them since they are immobile.

Ran some missions last night where these were being summoned in almost every fight (Turg's excellent Ghost in the Machine arc). They were no real threat to my scrapper EXCEPT that every time I hit my "target nearest enemy" key I would get these stupid things. Trying to click on an enemy was equally difficult since they are so big so I was forced to tab through all the spectral terrors hovering over me before I could get a real enemy.

It isn't like I could DO anything to them. No power I had would even trigger while they were targeted. All they did was slow me down from trying to hit the people that really were threatening me.

So here's my question... why are unhittable enemy pets even targetable? Is there some player power I don't know about that does affect them? Like, can they be used by a kin for buffing or used as a debuff anchor (that would be sweet) or what? Or is it just a case that since some pets are hittable all pets are targetable?

This suggestion is cool. I'm assuming it would be similar to rikti and zombie invasions so the invaders use the GM logic. In that case being in the starter zones is fine.

I just realized tonight when I looked at my missions that it said "+1(x0)" or something similar. Once I realized what that meant I recall that all my characters were set to "+0(x0)" when issue 16 went live.

Now I'm wondering if being equivilant to no heroes (LOL) is why I'm seeing practically empty missions sometimes. I went ahead and re-visited the field analyst and there is no "I'm as good as 0 standard heroes". I chose the "1 standard hero" option and the mission difficulty changed to "+1(x1)". The missions tonight were full again but then it was a 7 man team so who knows. I'll try resetting it on my solo characters when I get a chance to see if I get more enemies.

Anyway, something everyone might want to keep in mind. Even if you want to stay at +0 levels you should at least take the trouble to pass by a field analyst/fateweaver and set your standard-hero/villain option to 1.

I still think an Animal MM would be an awesome addition. Never say impossible when it comes to this game. The Dev's have pulled off some pretty cool stuff that was considered impossible in the past.

Besides, we have some pretty weird looking pets and monsters now - the fly trap springs to mind. After all, a quadraped could just br a biped with short legs walking on his hands. Just saying.

Thanks Zombie, I wasn't sure what the accepted new notation was. It looks a lot better your way.

So... can anyone answer how the "bosses/no bosses" flag works, solo and not solo?

My assumption is that it allows bosses in normal spawns and makes sure the end boss really is a boss and not a lieutenant. What I don't really have any idea about is if that is the default for teams (2+ members) regardless of how you have it set, or if even teams follow the flag.

At the very LEAST, with the implications of super-side-kicking, we absolutely need the ability for the leader to pass the star to someone else while in a TF like we can in every other team situation.

So option (a) count us as a 3 person team because my virtual size of 3 is more than the real size of 2. That is what I assumed it was but I could easily see any of the other options working as well.

Thanks Ender.

Has anyone come up with settings that correspond to the old system?

I'm thinking (assuming a lot) that they would look something like...
1 - +0/1/no bosses/no av
2 - +0/+1 or +2 over real team size is/bosses/no av
3 - +1/1/bosses/no av)
4 - +1/+1 or +2 over real team size/bosses/no av
5 = +2/1/bosses/av

I understand everything except the "I think I'm as good or better than x standard heroes."

What real effect does that have? In particular - does it fix "practically empty map" syndrom or does it make the spawns I do get bigger or some unknown combination of that? Does it do anything when not solo? If so does the number count as a ceiling or an addition?

For example, if I have myself set to 3 standard heroes and I'm teamed with one other person does it have (a) Count the team as 1 person bigger (3 vs 2) (b) Count the team as 2 persons bigger (3 is +2 over 1), (c) Count each of us as 3 heroes and spawn for 6, or (d) Count the team as 2 persons because it isn't used at all when not solo.

Hmm... guess I have a similar question about the "prefer fighting bosses when alone" flag. Does it have any effect in a team? Is this referring to allowing more bosses to spawn in groups or does it refer to the end-boss or both? I don't mind encountering bosses in the mission but I like my end-boss to be tougher than anything else on the map which hasn't always been the case in the past.

I normally run in 2 to 4-man teams, frequently only 2 or 3. I've been setting my noteriety to +1, 1 standard hero, prefer bosses but not AV's... but some missions seem to have vast areas with no spawns and I'm thinking about increasing my "standard hero" rating. Other than that (and it isn't a problem in every mission), I like the missions I'm getting with those settings on most of my characters (some like +2 levels).

Final question - I assume the noteriety of the mission holder is still the one being used to spawn the mission on-entry?

Thanks in advance and sorry if these were answered elsewhere. I did try to look first.