PumBumbler

The differential in resolution is about 1.3x or 77ish percent however you want to look at. Really depends on what level of eye candy you have off or on too.

The biggest impact AFAIR is antialiasing (mode), followed by DOF I think. After that its a matter of small things that add up, including all the high rez textures, bloom and particle counts, water rendering etc.

Pretty hard to say if anything is out of whack unless you're doing an Apples to Apples comparison.

What resolution? The lower the resolution the higher the frame rate, generally speaking.

Sounds about right. Not at my CoX machine right now, but I run a 3.0 Q6600 rig with a GTX280 @ 2560 x 1600 with all eye candy on and see about 25 fps on average. 8GB RAM, was on Vista 64 now on Win7 64.

Note that CoX cannot/doesn't take advantage of SLI so having a 295 is more like having a single GPU in CoX performance.

Which picture were you referring (refurring?) to?

I negrepped you for putting up a link that inspires hope and positivity. Salaciousness, bimbos, forum PvPing and NSFW links are the only thing that should be posted here.

On the face of it, proliferation has the theoretical idea of expanding sets to get people the toys that they want. Unfortunately, the flip side of it is that people start comparing individual powers and the devs are forced to normalize those powers to make them comparable, without proper justification to power differentiation amongst a whole set.

This also has the added incentive from a developer perspective since normalization of powers makes it easier to balance those powers for other purposes, like PvP. Whilst this is a good thing to make gameplay more predictable, it has the hidden effect of making the different sets more similar than different.

An example would be troller powers, confuse and deceive were normalized in time to become equivalent, although it could be justified that they should have different activation times (as they were previous) since they are attached to different power sets (mind and illusion). It is harder to consider the overall powers sets in their totality when there is pressure to make the individual powers across the sets act similarly.

That means that some great powers from one set won't get ported across to another due to problematic build issues (ie. being overpowered). While there are justifiable reasons to do so, pulling out some signature powers and substituting them with power that 'fit' more in line with the AT they are being ported to runs the risk of making proliferation more of a dress up a powerset exercise as something new.

IE, imagine fulcrum shift on a /kin MM. Reducing the buff would really reduce the demand that people have for proliferation of /kin to MMs. Speed boost already stopped affecting recharge on pets...hence my extreme reservation about powerset proliferation.

Either getting buffs or gulping some insps first before starting the herd really helps. Having 1 level of mez protection would be *nice* but wouldn't break the game. If you do it wrong no amount of mez protection is going to save you. Dead is dead.

Herding with a troller is far different than herding with a tank, it's not very easy to last toe to toe, so you've got to use the environment and your teammates as ways to help you out. Doesn't break the team aspect of the game either, it just makes your team work better when done right.

To clarify, the new players were referred to me by a global friend asking for some assistance on forming a TF (I do *a lot* of TFs). The new players were AE farmed before I got to them. I didn't ask the specifics, but if you want me to ask them, I suppose I can go back and see if they are still playing. My global friend knew I could fill up the task force quickly with experienced hands.

In today's CoX, level 30 and even the 40s can be achieved in a couple of days by most teams/farms/PLs, for good and bad. From what I remember I think these folks were 40-42ish.

I chose KHTF since it was a short TF, as I had a hami raid to attend in an hour. Since I had a personal target time of less than 30 minutes to finish the TF and get into the Hive (max 1 hour or the Hive would have filled up and I'd be SOL), my choices were Eden (9), Hess (21), ITF (25), 5TF (21) and KHTF (20). Outside choices would be Manti (42), Numina (45), and Cavern (12). Didn't bother with Ouros TFs. The bracketed numbers are the average number of minutes that my teams can finish the TF in.

Task Forces that required too much ghosting wouldn't be fun for new folks/non stealthers, and ones that had too much going on, ie defeat alls or defeat X would mean that the team would probably be moving too fast for their skill level. Slowing down would have breached my time constraints. ITF was out then.

Eden was too short to have much fun for them, Hess (didn't know it was bugged at that time) and 5TF requires significant explaining about the whys and wherefores in order to do it under 25 min, so that was out.

LGTF (24)/STF (41) needs 45+ so it was no go anyhow, regardless of complexity. Cavern was too boring (single mish, not much to do).

KHTF was the best choice, since they got to face down 10 AVs in the first mission, and didn't require that they move from mob to mob so I could watch them. The second mission I could ghost and vet tp them to the end mob, and the third defeat all mission was a small map. The final escort was normally easy anyhow, and not everyone needed to be present to rescue Katie's Spirit.

I wanted to show them content outside of AEs...they wanted to know what a TF was like, and 'real' content. And yes, having new folk see buggy things does bolster the initial complaint because they shouldn't be Beta testers, nor should I, on the Live servers.

PS. It is also why I was miffed, since we had to abandon the TF as opposed to waiting for resolution, since sitting around for 20 minutes without support coming (not that I blame support for not coming before then) meant that 5 of the 8 team members had to leave to get into the Hive, which made them feel like jerks for abandoning the TF for their Hami commitments.

Lower toons = fewer insp slots too.

I'd like to see base access as well, but I don't think the devs would do it since it would make all the AHs look like they are empty.

Ugh. Don't get me started on that. Powerset proliferation has been the hidden genericization of CoX.

You can pretty much zerg *everything* in this game as it stands now. Even rikti ship raids. I've used my Ice/Storm to herd rikti on ship raids. Adding a touch of mez protection wouldn't make it easier, just a bit less annoying. Doing things wrong with a squishy wouldn't make me any less insta dead if mez protection was added or not.

I don't see how this bit about mez protection suddenly obviates the need for tactics and good teamwork/gameplay.

I don't have a problem with squishies playing support or ranged, but you imply that that is their only and intended function. Blappers and Offenders would argue otherwise. If you want players to be put into silos of functionality, you better be prepared to tell the scrankers as well.

Not all ATs and power sets have an Achilles Heel. There are quite a few viable builds that are quite self contained, which isn't necessarily the point of adding a point or two of mez protection.

You seem to take the idea that adding a low level of mez protection will somehow removing *all* challenge from the game. Although I agree with you that the game can be made (much) more challenging, and that there is a general trend to softening the game, I see low level mez as smoothing out some of the kinks in the game.

If we were to follow your idea that the game should be made more 'hardcore', the one shot rule should be restored, defensive toggle dropping should be taken back and hardcore debt caps put back in as well.

As well, content and gameplay options are always welcome, but powers are a different department, so implying that changing something like mez would take away from the game isn't necessarily going to compete for resources.

I agree that they should be tough, but in a thematic game sense, as an arm of the U.N., their availability and extreme level of power kind of obviates the need for heroes. I've always wondered why there are no vanguard support soldiers during the zone invasions, given the fact that vanguard soldiers stand outside the zone entrances.

Yah, that was the official line, but there were a lot more powers that received the nerf bat along with the Holds, Disorients and sleeps.

Ice storm from controller epics is none of those, yet it received the same nerfing. Frostbite as well.

Kind of hard to prove either way since the old forums are ded, and most of those posts were zapped in the various house cleanings in that time anyhow.

The WWs you can stand on the other side of the wall (the back room) and still click on the WW employees. It should block your view of the front room and that's where most of the people stand.

Yep, being attacked over a dozen times serially by the same group of people in a ten minute span is the epitome of expected and normal behaviour.

It was back in the day when trollers ruled the land in i4. Then the great troller nerf hit in i5, and every single AoE pretty much got reduced to 1/4 in effectiveness. New AV resistances to debuffs also gutted many trollers.

Having a fully Hami'd out Ice/Storm with nearly 100% AoEs meant that it was either dumping fifty 50++ - 52+ Hamis in the trash bin or extracting them out 10 at a time during each respec, hence 5 respecs.

Heh, way to turn the rhetoric to 11.

Having a finer gradation of mez protection would also mean that AV class mobs could at least have a better sense of being affected by mez as opposed to the hack job that is PTOD.

Also it could change the ridiculous manner of pvp mezzing now where all protection is changed to resists.

As well, it gives fighting chance to debuffer sets as opposed to instant toggle drops...like storm and rads.

If you look at the end game additions to CoX, it was pretty much the malta and rularuu and rikti that were mez happy, making it a pain to deal with if you didn't have mez protection. Of course you can counter that with break frees and acrobatics, but it is still a pain to deal with. Vanguard, well, I think they're overpowered for a group that is supposed to be attached to the UN (Oddly enough, I think controllers are the best AT in general to solo Vanguard).

If you look at Reichsmann in the 5th anniversary TF, having his stun whack scrappers and tankers just seems like an extreme escalation just to make sure the non mezzable ATs get their share of risk, which doesn't seem to make anyone happy. At that point, 2 BFs aren't enough to drop out of stun for a squishy.

The only deviation from that pattern of escalating incoming mez are the Cimeroans, which for the most part don't hit for mez but generally are mez resistant (EBs and Bosses).

As a open question, how do you think LGtf (rikti) compares to ITF (cims) in popularity, and if one is considered more fun than the other, why? Personally, I think it is because of the incoming mez that makes the LGtf less fun than the ITF, whether I'm on a squishy or not.

Another end game addition, the Rikti ship raid, has a plethora of 54s, including Rikti Magi, who can pretty much mez and kill any squishy within a hit or two. Adding a little bit of mez protection would allow for squishies to be a little bit more survivable in those circumstances.

Note that none of those are solo circumstances, and none of them are game breaking if you added mez protection or not. It's pretty much a QoL issue, like toggle drops, as far as I can see it. I never thought the OP was asking for mez protection akin to a tanker or scrapper, just something that makes game play a little smoother and less annoying.

Common knowledge on Justice so I just assumed it was reported/bugged/forumed.

Looks like HVAS and Shivans are bugged during exemp.

Ouros portal seems not to work for a lot of people during exemp as well (may have something to do with when you got the ouros portal power/reward).

Usually kb and ku powers make the lag even worse than usual. Every issue that has updated the ITF has seemed to make things worse rather than better as far as lag is concerned (in the 3rd and 4th missions).

There would have to be specific exemptions like the work bench, probably ouros and transport type vet/temp powers, and also pets (perma pets).

Either that or they would have to make a suppressed power area like the B studio that required a separate entrance.

FWIW, I've never had a problem with lag in the AH due to powers but I don't have a machine that is below the current recommended spec.