I think there’s something wrong with that mission. When I did it with Red Saint it crashed the game as I entered it. When I logged back in I had the badge without killing a single Rikti.
I never have any debt. Because I don’t do pickup teams that hang their blasters out to dry…
The War Wall Defender mission has been bugged in the past (I’ve seen it fail when people simply zoned into the mission) and may still be bugged now. It rewards the badge whether the mission is a success or not, though (or at least it has for me).
I took my 50 storm/energy defender on a team of 7/8 on a few Invincible archvillain missions yesterday (Battle Maiden and Neuron) and it was pretty smooth sailing. I only had to use a few respites myself and one of the few deaths happened when a peacebringer was caught unawares by a Void.
My 39 peacebringer and 26 ice blaster have also had no problems running missions.
I despise the change to phase shift and dropped the entire concealment pool on the one character that had it. Of course, that character sits largely abandoned on Virtue since leaving the Guardians, anyway. :)
The person who created the sonic shield effect should be forced to have a real-life version of it put on him. I can think of no better punishment.
Overall, I think the issue is decent. The global reductions in defense and damage resistance haven’t affected any of my characters in significant ways. The high level game appears virtually unchanged from what I’ve seen so far.
Global handle is Creole Ned (shock). Most of my characters are on Triumph but I still have a few knocking around on Virtue.
Those sonic bubbles are absolutely intolerable. I’ve found that going to first person view is the only way I can cope with their effect.
Question - does turning down your max particle count in options help any?
–GF
Question - does turning down your max particle count in options help any?
–GF[/quote]
Nope. Some visuals are unaffected by the particle count and this is one of them.
Question - does turning down your max particle count in options help any?
–GF[/quote]
Nope. Some visuals are unaffected by the particle count and this is one of them.[/quote]
That’s odd…they KNEW there was a problem with these and I’d swear they’ve been tweaked for the CoV beta but I haven’t seen them on the live servers since they went in.
The scary thing is they did tone the effects down a bit since they were first put on Test. I think the first version actually shot lasers out of your computer monitor right at your eyeballs.
As for the difficulty level of I5 in general, we’ve decided that we can handle upping it a little. We’ve been blowing through missions with almost no trouble at all on Heroic with multiple character levels. Creole Ned and I and a few of our gaming buddies have heroes from the pre-tens all the way up to 50 and we’ve had very few, if any, problems with taking too much damage that we didn’t have pre-I5. The times we have had deaths during missions have been rendered almost completely inconsequential due to the new half debt system. All the doom and gloom “I5 NERFED THE GAME!!” people obviously have a different idea of fun than I do.
Plus, the Croatoa stuff’s pretty neat so far. The mission holder gets 3 different temporary powers from the first two contacts. There is one mission where you have to stop 30 Fir Bolg (pumpkinhead guys) from escaping through a portal that was really difficult at first. When we figured out how it worked, though, it was a pretty nice change of pace.
I got drafted onto the new Croatoa TF last night. It’s a real humdinger, especially mission 1. :) I won’t throw spoilers out there but you get some terrific rewards in the course of it, and some unique environments. After the uniquely designed Striga TF got such a good reception, they promised future TFs would follow its lead, and at least in some ways the Croatoa TF does a good job of it. :)
Just don’t do the Stop 30 Fir Bolg mission if you value your sanity…
Sonic bubbles on live server seem far less obnoxious to me than when I5 was on test (I think they “faded” the graphic effect a little). I couldn’t bear to look at them there either. :P
I’ve never seen pumpkins move so fast…
The best change for me so far in I5 is the in-mission ambushes. There’s nothing better in a mission as when the plan falls apart and you have to improvise. In-mission ambushes provide a lot of opportunity for that…
I used my free respec to add stimultant & self-heal to my energy blaster. I know it doesn’t sound Sexy, but it saved my bacon several times on the Croatoa TF (your defender can’t much help you when she/he’s getting knocked on her back constantly) even with it being Interruptible, esp. during ambushes and wave attacks.
I largely am pleased with the non-nerf additions to the game, including the wave attacks, ambushes and escort-ees and NPC heroes. I know that a couple of my herding tanker buds who simply lived to pull 300 villains into a pile and lather-rinse-repeat are disapppointed and probably will either quit the game or play other character types. I feel for them, but I think the game’s largely more fun as a chaotic, action-oriented game and teams seem to be much more lively to play on now.
I thought the changes would make a lot of players quit, but most of the feedback from within my SG and the teams have been on has been generally positive aside from some nasty technical problems introduced by the update (lag, frame rate, draw distance, lockups etc.). I hope they can straighten all that out. Controllers and tankers on my SG who thought they’d be crippled are finding that’s not the case, although some have found a need to change a couple powers or socket a bit differently to compensate for changes. The improved Exp is much appreciated.
Still, I definitely hope Update 6 is strictly content-focused. I’ve had enough “DOOOMMM”-inducing adjustments/nerfs, let’s just get a great content-filled update with new stuff, revamped TFs and some events. :) Let’s get an update that’s so chock full of good stuff and makes good use of neglected zones, and that’s soooo full of overall goodness it doesn’t give COH haters any ammunition at all. :D (Yeah, I’m naive, I know)
Well, I would guess I6 will be devoted mostly to the skills. You know, those things that they built all the universities with non-working doors for? I’m really hoping power customization makes it into the game soon. It would also be nice if they could fix all those nasty clipping issues brought about from the I4 costume additions. Of course, City of Villains is supposed to be released in the next couple of months, so if it’s good enough I probably won’t play CoH unless they have some special pricing plan for people with both games. I don’t expect them to, but it would be nice.
From reading the FAQ at the City of Villians site, I got the impression that one subscription would work for both games, though it’s not stated anywhere explicitly. Does anyone know for certain either way?
Nothing has been announced, but they’re thrown out the idea of an extra fee of 2-5$ to access both games. I don’t really know what to make of it yet though.
From reading the FAQ at the City of Villians site, I got the impression that one subscription would work for both games, though it’s not stated anywhere explicitly. Does anyone know for certain either way?[/quote]
I’m pretty sure there used to be a FAQ about monthly pricing that specifically said CoV was not included with your CoH subscription. I don’t see it anymore, maybe they changed their minds.
The press release for CoV’s Collector’s Edition describes it as a “standalone sequel” to CoH. That almost makes it sound like they will treat it as a separate game, billing-wise, even if you own CoH. Posts on the official forum have thus far indicated otherwise, though. No one really knows. Maybe even they don’t.
I like the in-mission ambushes and wave attacks in Issue 5, too, although I’ve seen a few that occurred after the mission was complete. RobotPants and I also had an attack wave in a Crey mission that had a Void Seeker in it (we were both playing our Kheldians at the time). Not sure if the devs would consider that “working as intended” or not.
Completed the 30 Fir Bolg mission on the second (?) attempt with a team of three - ice tanker, ice blaster and fire blaster. They key seems to be AoE attacks that can distract the entire conga line of pumpkinheads. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tweak the mission since a lot of people are having trouble with it.
From reading the FAQ on the CoV site, the impression I got is that you have one subscription that you could use for either game, choosing to only buy one of them if you’d like, but not getting some of the features you’d have if you bought both. For example, if you just get CoV, one of the new features is apparently building bases for your villians. If you own both CoV and CoH, it will grant you the ability to build bases for heros in CoH as well, but if you don’t own CoV, you don’t get the feature in CoH, and presumably there will be features that work the other way. And there will still be some features that don’t crossover at all, things you can do in CoV that you can’t do in CoH and vice versa. So that fits with the stand-alone claim, you don’t have to own one to play the other, nor is the experience identical between the two.
But yeah, that’s all just how I intrepreted the FAQ.