Hyperstrike

Assault might be a good idea...MOAR DAKKA!

Bonfire is there mainly as a "Get the **** away from me" power. And I don't really have the slots to do anything with it like you suggested (without compromising my defense).

The same goes for Aim. It's slotted that way for the defense boost.

No. Actually you DON'T.

Badge-Hunter won't show the link to the SourceForge page until you do. Not sure why...

But you can go directly to the SF page if you happen to have the link.
Or Google it.

This is the link to the Vidiot Map Packs on SourceForge.

Nonono.

It's pronounced

"Get off my lawn"

The last time I actually flew was back around 2001-2002.

All I remember is one GenCon we actually had several of our people detained long enough due to the original liquids scare that had JUST happened that they missed their flights.

I could probably get away with the travel stuff. But I figure it's just as easy to pick that stuff up on the far end. This way I don't have to hassle with it at all.

I sometimes have funny allergic reactions to stuff like that. So I go after basic "it gets you clean, now shut up" stuff rather than the foofy "It makes you smell good and feel nice and gets you ponies!" stuff.

Jealousy of the Scrapper? New ATIO maybe?

Why, specifically? All that's really affected is Accuracy and Recharge. And neither significantly reduces the recharge times of the two powers

Blaze:
TS/ATIO: 3.57/3.15

Blazing Bold:
TS/ATIO: 4.28/3.85

And with all the Thunderstrikes and Posi Blasts, I'm sitting on +48% Acc before IO enhancement.

Damage in both cases are capped and End isn't an issue.


I had thought about that and decided to go with the Slow Resist instead.

I'll continue to think on it.

Note: All the Thunderstrikes are SBIO. As are the two Numinas in Health.
Everything else is standard IO.

So. Any suggestions for improving this build?

Also, not noted here. The Alpha is a Cardiac Total Core Revamp. So Endurance isn't really an issue unless I decide to jump into melee range.

Thanks for doing the math for me Morgan. The ST formula is fairly straightforward but I was having trouble wrapping my head around the AoE one.

Okay. I don't feel too bad about that. And, as I never touched the SBEs.

Okay, currently I'm rocking 2 (non SBIO) Eradication 20% procs in my two AoE attacks (Spring Attack and Foot Stomp).

Just on IOs alone I have 72% recharge in both these powers.
With my Spiritual Radial T4, I have 104%.
I have non-perma Hasten and a single 7.5% global recharge bonus from my Taunt set.

So, with Hasten up what do my chances of proc'ing look like? Floored?
Would I just be better off replacing the proc with a Dam/Rech for a 7% "always on" damage boost and calling it a day?



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In tents and papooses?

COOLER MASTER CM Storm Series Trooper (SGC-5000-KKN1) Black Steel / Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case

Both the i5 and i7 class chips support VT-X (Virtualization acceleration).

Not a lot of PCI-E 3 cards out now. Other than the 680 and the AMD 7### series.

Default speed for all the RAM is 1333.
With the price difference between good 1333 and good 1600 being negligible, going with the slightly higher-spec memory is kinda a no-brainer.


Yeah. Especially for a main system drive you do NOT want to be booting from USB.

The Corsair drive has a better reputation.
OCZ drives are nice and all. I own two of them myself and don't have problems.
But they have a reputation for being sorta hit-or-miss flaky.

Unless you're looking to build a silent system, GPU cooling outside the default isn't really necessary.

If you're not going to be overclocking, just about anything Socket 1155 compatible should be fine.

If you're looking at self-contained liquid cooling, I recommend the H80 or H100 from Corsair. BUT DO RESEARCH AND MAKE SURE YOUR CASE CAN MOUNT IT!


I really recommend NOT building one of those "portable" cases. Yeah. They're nice and all. But they can be an absolute ***** to install and they tend to run VERY hot.

As to LED fans and stuff. I normally yank that crap out and replace it with regular non-LED fans. I'm just not a fan (heh heh) of "t3h b1ing".

Honestly though. Give the Carbide 400R a good look again. It's a nice, understated case. And it pretty much can take anything you could throw in it. Or possibly the black version of its big brother. The 500.

ADDENDUM

As to "IDE". No.
Any hard drive you buy nowadays is going to be SATA. Most of these boards don't even HAVE a legacy IDE port.
And SATA optical drives are both plentiful and available in all sorts of price ranges.

Yes you CAN play at 1920x1080. But the text in the chatboxes is going to be blurry.

I've got a 50" that does 1920x1080 but if I want to NOT strain my eyes, I play at 1280x720.

Remember, this is a "TV". Even with higher resolution, at that size, the pixels are coarser than you would find in a monitor-class screen.


Instructions Per Clock (cycle). Basically it's a measure of processing efficiency. Due to several issues with Ivy Bridge, it's a slightly more efficient processor than the previous generation of Sandy Bridge processors.



The K-class are multiplier-unlocked so that you can overclock them readily.

2 things determine a CPU's clock speed.

Bus speed and multiplier.

Most CPUs from Intel are multiplier-locked. This means that any overclocking is achieved by bumping up the bus speed. However, this affects other components besides just the CPU. And, because the bus is set in higher increments than the multiplier, there's not a lot of fine control. Also, as faster bus speeds come online, bus overclocking becomes less and less viable as even "small" increments in bus speed result in huge, possibly unsustainable overclocks.

Think of it as using one of those huge 3-foot red pipe wrenches to try to tighten tiny nuts.

The K processors are multiplier-unlocked. So instead of simply having a single, avenue to overclocking (that's becoming less viable all the time), it has a second value that can be modified, in much finer increments that don't directly affect other components.

So if you have an i5 2500K chip. You figure 100Mhz (with a multiple data rate) bus x a multiplier of 34 (3.4Ghz base speed with the ability to burst to 3.8Ghz)

Now, fiddling with the bus and bumping to, say 125Mhz would result in a mult-34 chip going from 3.4 Ghz to 4.25Ghz. Possible. Probable. Maybe even sustainable. But how are your other components (RAM, video card, drive controllers) going to handle the FSB?

Now, with a K chip you can bump the multiplier. To say 35.
This results in a 3.5Ghz chip.
Bumping to 42 would result in a 4.2Ghz chip. Again, possible and probably sustainable. And this time, you're NOT having to overclock all your other components to achieve it.

Was just seeing that the Z77's had actually hit (though the Ivy Bridge chips haven't yet). Yes.

The 560 will likely run ultra mode with FSAA and AF turned up modestly.
The 680 would likely allow you to crank them to max.
With the upcoming mainstream release of FXAA (basically shader-based antialiasing), you can actually leave off (or turn down) regular AA methods and crank up FXAA and see identical quality (and a performance boost).

Using hacks in previous drivers to turn it on, I was able to turn off regular AA and turn up FXAA on my 560. Image quality was unaffected and I saw a framerate increase (even at 1920x1080). However, because it WAS a hack, it wasn't a stable change to my drivers at the time and I'd eventually get weird artifacting. This should change once FXAA hits mainstream in the 300-series drivers.


Honestly, if you're playing on a single monitor at the resolutions we've talked about, SLI is going to do jack and **** for you. In CoH you're going to see exactly ZERO difference. In other games, you'll maybe see higher framerates, but you'll already be running around 60fps for most things anyhow. The video card would be a complete non-issue.



Honestly, it probably won't be all that much cheaper.
Were I you, especially if you're buying in a September-January time frame, look at the Ivy Bridge replacements and go for the 3770K (which is the replacement for the 2600K and is, clock-speed-wise, identical to the 2700K.

Honestly no.
Even knowing the minimum power requirements for your system (and the fact that Ivy Bridge should be more power efficient with the die-shrink (they're using a smaller manufacturing process now)), I still prefer to build some overhead into your PSU. This leads to less stress on the component and an ostensibly longer lifespan.

Yeah. I didn't want to start posting using a build that had sorta jumped the rails from the expected.

Do NOT go by 3dMark.

As a "numbers generator", it's the best there is at what it does.

But, like a certain Canadian, what it does isn't very nice.

3dMark numbers have about jack and **** to do with performance in most of your games (and ESPECIALLY OpenGL-based City of Heroes).

Okay if you're playing on a TV of that size, you're playing at 1280x720 (720p IIRC) to get clear text. Basically any mid-to-upper range video card is going to deliver insane framerate even with nearly everything turned on/maxed out.



Sorry if I sound like I'm busting your balls here. But this is NOT a helpful answer. Nebulous answers like "as much as possible" "as little as possible" or "pretend I'm broke" don't help anything. I can point you at a $500 Dell system and call it a day. But if you're really looking for specific things in a different price range that provides you with zero help.



Okay, US makes it easy enough. Shipping costs are fairly uniform, unless you're talking Alaska or Hawaii. Outside of those two, your shipping costs would only fluctuate a couple bucks.



We are NOT amused!

*SMITE!*

Okay, current "best bang for the buck" is the i2500K.

HOWEVER, Intel's Ivy Bridge just hit the street (and should be trickling in to retailers now). The new i5 3750K looks to be in roughly the same league with a slight IPC advantage in certain apps and a similar price point.



Going to take this as a "no".


You may still want to take a stab at the K-class processors anyhow. The price difference is a WHOPPING $10 in most cases. For a chip that can easily accomplish light overclocking without exotic cooling? That's pretty much no-brainer territory.


As noted above, pretty much any card you get is going to tear this up.


Going to quote you with what's actually available now.

i5 2500K and a Sandy Bridge Z68 motherboard.

If you're buying around year's end, basically replace with an equivallent

i5 3750K and a Z77 board.

Also, the mid-range nVidia 6** series should be out by then too.
Going to recommend you a 560 Ti for right now.


10) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? etc.

But you do need something with a hotswap bay.

Also, SLI on your TV won't give you a hell of a lot. You're already going to be running ridiculous framerates due to the "low" resolution.


As noted, near-maxed Ultra shouldn't be an issue.

If you're going to be doing video processing of any sort, I may bump the recommendation to an i7 2600K (which will become a recommendation for an i7 3770K at the end of the year).

It won't actually have 6-8 cores. But it hyperthreads, simulating 8 cores by keeping the instruction pipeline fuller. Going with a hex-core would mean stepping back to a 1366-based platform and they're effectively a dead-end.




Okay.


So no concrete power supplies? DARN!


Case: Corsair Carbide 400R
You may have noted an aborted attempt at doing a liquid-cooled system HOWTO from me. Part of the reason I didn't follow up (though I may with at least a breakdown of what went wrong) is that the case itself wasn't really designed for supporting a radiator system. On top of that the owner purchased one of the Socket 2011 boards with memory slots on the back side of the CPU as well as the front and got regular memory instead of the low-profile stuff.

This forced me into what I hatefully refer to as "ghetto mod mode".
I was able to get the system together but it was NOWHERE as pretty as what I'd wanted, and the owner wound up swapping the RAM for the low-profile stuff after delivery so he could mount the radiator in a non-ghetto manner.

If you're going to go with something like a self-contained liquid system, the Carbide 400R is a nice case and will fit numerous radiator kits (including all those currently offered by Corsair themselves).

Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V LX
This is the "budget" version of the board. There are multiple "upscale" versions to pick from but sticking with budget for now.

This board will take current i7 and i5 class processors and is prepped for the new Ivy Bridge processors when they drop shortly.

CPU:
If you were buying now:
i7 2700K

If you were buying near the end of the year:
i7 3770K (No link yet)

RAM:
Budget: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600
MoMoney: 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 Low Profile

I'm not a huge fan of heatsinks sticking up off my memory. And heat spreaders on RAM aren't really dissipating that much extra heat.

Went for the regular Vengeance stuff because that was the price point.
Went for the low-profile stuff at 16GB because it was the same price as the regular stuff.

GPU:
Current "Budget": EVGA 012-P3-2078-KR GeForce GTX 560 Ti - 448 Cores
Future "Budget": Look for the nVidia 6** class later down the road.
MoMoney: EVGA 02G-P4-2680-KR GeForce GTX 680

The 560 Ti-448 is essentially a 570 with some cores turned off (they didn't pass muster). I went after the version with a small factory overclock because the stock version was only $10 less.

The 680 is, currently, the most powerful card on the market, and should actually increase in capability slightly as the driver updates get it more dialed in.

PSU: Thermaltake SMART M Series SP-750M 750W

Both the video cards quoted here require a minimum of 550W and around 35-40W on the +12V rail. This card gives that and then some as headway. Since you don't want to be running it at or even near max throughput for extended periods. It also has 4 6-pin PCI-E connectors in case you later decide to go SLI (which you shouldn't need to).


HDD:
Note: Most of the manufacturers are putting out 2.5" drives, not 3.5".
And while the case supports 2.5", you were talking drive swapping for multi-boot (as opposed to Virtual machines).

I'd suggest something like this: ICY DOCK MB994SP-4S

SSD: Corsair Force GT

Secondary HDD or alternate to SSD: Western Digital 1GB Caviar Black

Altogether, for the budget-minded build you're looking at just under $1200.
Though, with most of the recommended components being similar, the "higher end" build comes in just under $1500.

Note: I'm building with what I consider a decent budget for a gaming system. Not a budget gaming system. I can actually cut the price down a few hundred bucks by dropping back to a regular 560 Ti, forgetting about the drive bay, going with a smaller hard drive and "settling" for an i5 2500K.

It doesn't help too much.

There are even a few situations where the screen intentionally fogs down to black.

The Tub Ci fight is one.
The David Hazen journal recovery (where you go down to the flooded level in the dark (and that usually hides the glowie underwater).

You can play with the contrast all you like. But there's almost no contrast in the scene whatsoever. Just small shadings of "off black".

Well. Most people might understand what he was actually trying to say.

So for all intents and purposes, he's communicated effectively. If not in the grammatically approved fashion.

Remember to take into account level shifts.