Sardan

My impression is that subscriptions may or may not be down but a LOT of players have been taking a break from CoH. Way less people on than 6 months ago. On the other hand, I've seen an upswing in "I'm back" posts like yours. I think we'll see a decent upswing starting with the upcoming double XP weekend.

If the group you're facing is very dangerous, then opening with Shield Charge is indeed a good way to go. However, if you can withstand their alpha it's better to jump into them and wait for a beat or two before using Shield Charge; it's less sexeh than teleporting in and knocking them all unawares onto their butts, but this allows Against All Odds to saturate and ramp up your damage.

No. The clue that closed beta ended was the sudden appearance of the open beta forums.

That sucks, Dumple. There are few players I'd trust with large inf transfers. I pretty much would restrict it to folks whose names are long-time familiar on the forums. As such, I'd never give someone like you or Fulmens grief for providing a service like this. Sorry to hear you took heat for basically being a nice guy.

First week of March you'll be able to.

That's an important point. For too long the situation for CoH has been that nVidia has been the only choice. It's good to have more options. Also, while it's impossible to quantify this, I wonder how many players the game has lost because they already had an ATI card and the game simply didn't look very good on their PC?

Just to be clear, new end-game content isn't just a possibility, it's one of the cornerstones of GR. If you go back and look at the San Diego Comicon PowerPoint presentation they gave, a new end game was listed as one of the major priorities. And no less than Positron is heading it up; the man stepped down as lead developer and is heading up the end game dev team.

As much fun as I expect Praetoria and side switching to be, the lasting value of GR is going to be the new end game, if they can pull it off.

I'd be cautious. A friend showed me his new system with two 10K drives, and the thing was howling like a banshee. Not sure what brand it was, but if they're all that loud that'd be a huge disincentive for me.

That's an assumption on your part. One could just as easily hypothesize that RMTers were wonderfully successful, which led to an influx of competing firms that collectively cranked out so much inf that prices came down. In that scenario prices would be fallling even as the amount of RMT-generated inf skyrocketed.

I make no assertion that that's the truth, just that it's a valid scenario. It's also easy to find real examples of this phenomenon e.g. oil prices high enough to encourage new production, which led to increased supply, which drove down prices. Falling prices do not automatically imply falling demand. It just means that supply is outstripping demand.

Recently I got my Mind/Fire to 50 and had a great time doing it. I recommend it.

While I haven't played an Ice Dom, I recently did an Ice/Kin controller. I enjoyed Ice overall but felt like it synergized better with Kin due to Arctic Air. That power rocks but requires you to jump in amidst the spawn. If I'm going to be there anyway I might as well benefit from Fulcrum Shift.

With my Mind/Fire Dom I wanted to play mostly at range so I skipped Combustion and it was all good.

If you go with Ice, you might want to consider going Ice/Earth, with the reasoning being that you're going to be in melee with AA anyway, so Earth Assault's lack of range isn't an issue.

That reasoning strikes me as more on point than the line of thought that the have-nots will always resent the haves.

HP won't do anything about it. A term like "high end gaming computer" is completely subjective. It's the equivalent of calling a car "sporty". The customer would only have an actionable complaint if the PC wasn't built with the specific components it was listed as having.

Really it seems like most of his system is fine. I'd measure the PSU and get a new one. It's almost certainly a standard size. If space for cables is tight, get a modular PSU because it allows you to not connect cables you don't need. And remember: Newegg is your friend.

Ugh. I was on board with the whole "things that are more difficult, hence more fun" theme until you reminded me of these. Ballistas are extremely challenging given their rank. And Sea Witch... now I just wait to outlevel her a bit before taking her on. Brutal.

Not to sound like too much of a downer, but have you actually looked at the screen shots for Ultra Mode? It affects shadows, reflections and water. It doesn't affect visual f/x or how detailed things like costumes and NPCs are. Don't get me wrong, I'm very much looking forward to it, but I don't think UM by itself will suddenly make this game look like a game designed for initial release in 2010. I'm happy to be proven wrong, of course.

I'm expecting a modest number of arcs, and maybe a TF or two if we're lucky. Probably driven off of the Coming Storm story that's been stalled for a very long time.

No offense, P_P, but I think you're reading way too much into it.

I recall that too. Looking forward to it.

One word of warning about making an SS/SD brute: your hair may go white when you see how expensive it is to hit the softcap compared to your tank. It's a combination of the tanker starting with higher defense and the less expensive markets overall on blueside. Don't get me wrong: it's well worth it. My brute is my favorite villain and is able to dish out far higher damage than an equivalent tanker yet is still highly survivable--but the first time I heard a player talking about how little he spent to softcap his tank I just about fell out of my chair.

EDIT: actually I need to at least partially retract this statement. While it is harder to softcap a brute, I'm not sure how expensive it really is if your main goal is just softcapping. Mine was very expensive because I wanted to really max him out, with high recharge (hello multiple LotG's), high regen/recovery, plus softcap to all 3 positionals. He has no purples but cost a ton, primarily due to the LotG's and the PVP 3% defense IO. I bought the latter for a few hundred mil and chastised myself for going overboard, but they're now regularly going for 2 billion.

We don't know the full details yet. It could be that when you don't move you have the equivalent of Superior Invisibility, and when you move perhaps it doesn't go away entirely but becomes a weaker stealth power.

Lest people get too jazzed about a doppleganger nemesis system, remember that that was not part of the announcement. That was a guess by the author of the article.

IIRC, literally minutes after they posted the screenshot of the Resistance character she was complaining that there wasn't more info. I expect more of the same, post-haste.

My take is it's the existing HEATs/VEATs. While I haven't seen a forum post from a redname about it, a player who attended Herocon said that the devs there were asked more than once about new ATs in GR and they explicitly said there were none.