Psychoti

First off, for the caltrops issue. /bind shift+lbutton powexec_name caltrops
Now when you hold shift and left-click a spot you will automatically cast your caltrops there. I use it for Sleet, Rain of Fire, etc.

For the rest, check your video card. Seriously. I recently upgraded to a new PC, but my old one (which ran the game on bare minimum settings) didn't have as much trouble in Praetoria or Incarnate content just trying to run. It sounds like a serious hardware issue or maybe just your drivers.

Try 3 Gun Bane spiders. No, not Crabs... well, Crabs if you really want to. 3 Banes with Guns are an awesome sight to behold and teams will love to have you along for the 90% damage boost alone, not to mention the sweet, sweet +DEF you three will bring.

I don't like excessive knockback when I play. I just flat-out don't. Too many people have no clue how or when to use it. Those that do know tend to think that they are never wrong, either. For example, that Tank is using Burn. Is it helping in any way to knock mobs out of the Burn with a force bolt? That mob is no longer going to be getting aggro'd by the burn patch or the blazing aura.

Now, if the mobs are knocked out of the Burn with an AoE that kills or mostly kills them, fantastic. That's doing it the right way.

Y'know, I made a level 1 farm not long ago with a similar concept. I made it so I could level up my Claws/Fire, Claws/Elec, and eventually my ?/Dark brute. I find that it's great for the early levels until you can move on to something else, or if you're like me and just want to get to 20 so you can switch sides (and you hate Praetoria so very, very much).

I like to farm, it's fun for me in the same sense that I used to *love* playing Diablo 2 and roll with the 'Gamble' NPC to see what goodies I could get. It's just fun for me. That said, I honestly don't give a crap if people 1-star my farms.

What gets me is that I rarely have more than a single farm published as I like to keep my story arcs - that I actually spend time and thought on - published and on a rotation but people feel it is necessary to downrate my actual storyarcs because I also have a farm published.

Don't be a jerk, folks.

I liked my WM/Fire for the most part, but the redraw drove me nuts eventually and deleted her at 50 w/ a rare alpha. It was just that annoying to me. It was very effective, don't get me wrong... but the redraw was just really, really annoying.

SS/Fire is good for most content *if* you don't plan on being main tank for AVs as they will absolutely shred you quite often. If you're IO'd out and have some good S/L defense then you will have few problems until you reach Praetorian content, and then you just need to carry some purples with ya and you'll do fine.

No RP/Light RP. I will occasionally do/say things in character. I do have one or two characters (on other servers now) that I RP with sometimes.

One thing that drives me nuts is when some people feel driven to RP all the time even when nobody else on the team is RPing. That's not so bad in and of itself except when they are chatterboxes and annoying.

You know the ones I mean. They typically add text to several of their powers (if not all of them) so your chat box looks like this:

TeamLead: Okay, after we finish this group off we'll have to move fast to avoid ambushes, so I want everybody to listen up
RP: Pew pew pew!
RP: Say hello to my little friend!
RP: Pew pew pew!
RP: Pew pew pew!
RP: Say hello to my little friend!
RP: FALCON PAWNCH
RP: Pew pew pew!
RP: Say hello to my little friend!
TeamLead: Tank, pull the AV to the north wall, Brute, please catch the ambushes as they come in. Everybody DPS the ambushes as they come and switch back to the AV as soon as they die. Now you can't stand just anywhere or you'll trigger more ambushes
RP: Pew pew pew!
RP: Say hello to my little friend!

And so on and so forth.

"Shadowy Presence invisibility power that may well save your life!"

What? Since when? It takes 5 seconds to activate and if anyone bumps into you it goes away. On a ten-minute recharge.

Edit: Yeah, what Zombie Man said. Shadowy Presence is worthless, but the rest of the deal is sweeeeeeet

If you don't mind waiting a bit then you could make a /Sonic Mastermind for i21... I think it's i21, anyway.

I've used Sonic Resonance and Sonic Blast a lot both together and separate. They are both fun, and they do go well together. However, I'm going to go against the grain here and say that if you want to be more active with AOE attacks you may want to look at Dual Pistols, Archery, or Assault Rifle. Each are good. Will the redraw drive you nuts? Probably not anymore with the AOE buffage. Being able to throw down good damage nukes every 20 seconds is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you go Corruptor and Scourge the jerks.

I'm of the opinion that the queuing system will take care of most of the headaches in this regard. People tired of getting in queues will migrate to other servers.

That said I am just waiting for a server community to unite and designate itself as "THE F2P Home". I know someone will do it eventually, we have a heck of a lot of great and charitable people in our gaming community.

I have to admit that I'm fond of Black Scorpion's arc as it reminds me of one of my favorite Iron Man arcs. Mako's was okay. Scirocco's is indeed good.

I clicked Black Scorpion instead of Mako the other night, was a little irked. I hadn't done Mako's past the patron pools before and wanted to give it a shot. Finished BS's patron pool part in about 20 minutes. (Claws/Elec brute)

I am very, very excited about getting /Poison. I have always loved that powerset but have never really enjoyed playing a Mastermind. Just not the right AT for me.

I can't wait, it sounds like a heck of a lot of fun. I'm trying to plan a new Fire/Poison Corr (probably, may go with Ice) and a new War Mace scrapper.

I'd love to see Poison on Defenders too at some point.

Bah.

I found the problem. Earlier in the week I had set my Internet Explorer to use a fake proxy (so that it would never, ever connect to the internet again. I hate IE).

It never occurred to me that the NCLauncher would *require* IE to be able to connect to the update server. That's ridiculous.

Nevertheless, undoing the fake proxy allowed me to use the updater again.

I can still get into the game, but not sure why I'm getting this. I'm tempted to just uninstall and and reinstall the launcher but I'm afraid I'll lose game access completely if I do so. I can still access the plaync.com website as well.

I went through the announcements to see if I'd missed something... not sure what's going on. It's not a firewall issue, I turned it off completely and still had this occur.

If I still played my FF defender I'd likely just use 2 slots and invention IOs. For my cold defenders that I do still play I'm not going to bother respecin', and I think they 're sitting at 3 slots. Not positive.

I'm really stuck. I plan on going ?/Kin/Mace.

I like Archery, Assault Rifle, and Dual Pistols. I do. I like them all. I have a blaster, corr, and/or defender with each of them. My issue is what it will be like mixing them with Kin, specifically Fulcrum Shift.

Assault Rifle will require me to hop back a little ways before using Full Auto. That may get annoying. Other than that I like it a lot, web envelope will keep the enemies in place for a nice ignite too.

Archery's nuke takes a little time before the damage occurs and that occasionally drives me nuts. Other than that, yippee for Archery! It even has Aim for times when I don't want to miss or when I'm not damage-capped.

Dual Pistols lets me stay in the thick of things and deliver the pain with a fun nuke. The downside is the third weapon bug... I get it all the time on my Traps/DP and it drives me nuts whenever I want to make a new costume (which is at least 3-4 times a week). I would roll DP with no problem except for that.

In your experiences, which do you find most fun? I do like being in the thick of things.

The sad thing is I know some people that will quote this in game and call it true because " a red name said it".

I still think it's darned funny, though.

I certainly hope that they will add Incarnate access to the store in the future, it would be interesting if they marked them all separately. For instance, if you wanted to stay Premium and not go VIP but wanted your Incarnate access too you would have to pay for each ability separately, maybe. 400PP each? I dunno. I think it would be a nice addition.

I notice you didn't include the HEATs and VEATs in that 'unlockable' status. If one doesn't want to maintain a current subscription will they be able to purchase access to Khelds or SoA via RMT?

There is a ridiculous amount of currency in the game, it's true.

I bought a computer from Walmart.com that's an iBUYPOWER. I got it on special for $400 (normally 650, I think) and I'm very happy with it. I went from absolute minimum settings(10-20fps) to ultra mode (not full ultra mode, I still have no use for shadows and they do drop the frame rate a little) going at 40-70fps. It's literally like night and day.