Currently, I'm downloading the game onto my laptop. Why? Because I'm an idiot, clearly.
Disregard the rest of this if you want. I'm frustrated, and it's a rant.
I picked up a virus last week. Or let's just call it "malware" because I'm not even sure what it was. And I wasn't even doing anything bad! Okay, I was watching a TV show on one of those "funny" sites, but it was The Big Bang Theory, for gods' sake. But, anyway. Apparently, when I cleaned it out, my anti-bad-stuff program, Ad-Aware, took a couple of Windows files with it. (Thanks so much, Ad-Aware!) Now, I'm getting a dll error everytime I boot up my computer, and a fun random crash that freezes my entire computer every once in awhile. I played, what, 10 hours yesterday? And I got two of those crashes. That's not unbearable, but it's not good. Windows System Restore, the easy solution, won't work, because of what I can only assume are the missing Windows files. Windows came with my computer, so I can't use my Windows disk to repair Windows. I have what calls itself a "System Restore" disk that is supposed to reload all the programs that came pre-loaded on the computer, but will erase everything on the hard drive. I resigned myself to that and backed up what I could (pictures, music, etc.) onto my lap top. But, the Restore CD didn't work. My computer refused to do anything with it.
So, it looks like I'm stuck with a computer that will probably crash at least once each time I try to run the game. I'm pretty sure CoH is not going to run well on my lap top, but I'll try it anyway, just to feel like I'm doing something where I'm pretty sure I've run out of options. And if you see me in the game, and I randomly disappear, I crashed. I'll be back in about 10 minutes.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Updates and Expansions
I've been playing a lot over the past two weeks or so. I blame the Winter Lords. Two merits per kill, and a kill takes maybe two minutes. Mo has about 150 merits just from that, blaster-Jez had enough for her -KB IO, plus about 80 merits left over. Fyre had a few, and so did Tresa. Tresa and blaster-Jez also got the Toy Collector badge. I had enough candy canes for 6 of the Winter's Gift unique IO, plus assorted auras, badges, snow beasts and snow balls. Of course, now that the Winter Event is over, Paragon City seems bare and quiet.
Mo (Maurelle Ferrishyn, emp/sonic defender) got from 33 to 37. It's been awhile since I did any real dedicated emp'ing, and it's still just as mind-numbingly boring and yet difficult as ever. I had a chance to take her on an ITF yesterday, but I didn't because I'm not sure how good my twitch-heal-reflex would be with all the burst damage from the Romans. I do want to try it, but maybe not until I've had a little more practice again. Or with a PuG that I don't care if they die or not. One or the other.
Blaster-Jez, who I haven't mentioned here until today, is level 34 as of last night. It is the same character as my DB/WP... who got to 50 like two or three months ago, but I don't think I've mentioned that here... Mostly, I created her because I wanted an archery blaster. I had one way back when, before the archery buffs that came with i9 or i10. She was archery/energy, but since I have an energy/energy blaster (Raven Hex, level 37, who may or may not be getting deleted sometime soon, because I just don't like all the KB in energy, as much as I try to work around it), I didn't want to duplicate needlessly, so I thought I'd try Devices.
With the Devices secondary, it's like playing something completely different from a blaster. None of the other blaster secondaries, or really anything else in the game except the CoV equivalent, plays anything like it. I am officially amused. Maybe too amused, judging from some of the trip mine fields I've made. And level 35 is Time Bomb, which may be a bad sign for that.
Vagz and I teamed blaster-Jez and blaster-Will up a few times, once with Keen's psi blaster, Neverminder (whose name I still love). It was rough going at first, but we're definitely getting the hang of it. And RP-wise, they get along just fine. They have pretty similar personalities, so unless something weird happens, there shouldn't be any conflicts. And half-way through that sentence, I stopped because I realized I jinxed myself. "Something weird" always happens. We'll have to see, I guess.
The shield duo is... okay. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad. The shield set is... okay. There's nothing particularly outstanding about it. If I was starting a scrapper from scratch again, I don't think I'd pick it. There's nothing it does remarkably well, and there are other sets that do about everything it does better. It's got some visibly flashy stuff, like Shield Charge, but I've always been more into substance over style. I'd take WP over Shield any day. Broadsword is fine, but I've already done Katana, and it's basically the same set with a few minor differences between speed and damage. BS does a little more damage, Katana's a little faster. Otherwise, same powers, different swords.
RP-wise... well, Tresa's a little hard to play. She's incredibly level, as far as her temperament goes. She's very intelligent (way more than I am, so any dumb mistakes she makes should always be attributed to the player), very logical. She has... well, I hate to say she has no sense of humor. I mean, I really hate to say it. But she's definitely not the type to make jokes or really get jokes. There will be no humorous, borderline sarcastic comments coming from her.... unless I slip. She's very goal-oriented. She's a techno-mage who ended up in this dimension by mistake. A dimension which, by her standards, is incredibly technologically backward, with a really odd political-social-economic standards. She hates that she made a mistake at all, much less that it had such big consequences for her, and with that along with the responsibilities she has in her world, she's practically obsessed with getting back home. Less obsessed now that she's made another mistake and found that the process she began to get back to her world will take approximately thirty years. It's taken some of the immediacy out of it for her, but she's still working on that particular process, and searching for another way back.
Sometimes it seems like you have to work on character and the details about that character, like the world they come from, family, personality, everything. But with Tresa, once I had a very vague idea, everything about her was just right there. I would have made her... a little less rigid if I could have, but that's not how she is. She's brave, and smart, and tough, all of which I can appreciate, but she's still... kind of boring.
Speaking of characters that are difficult to RP... try an older-than-time fallen Angel with partial, occasional amnesia who's running around the Rogue Isles with a totally clueless clone. Okay, first, what the hell was I thinking with that character? I don't know! She's over two years old in the game, but most of her RP details were theoretical, rather than actually played. The "amnesia" part was meant to make her easier to play, actually. If there's something I don't know that she would, she just "forgot." Cheating? Absolutely. I didn't expect it to come up very often, though. But it was meant for that, and to explain why she didn't talk like a grade-schooler in the church Christmas nativity play, and instead more or less like everyone else. I try to keep her from slang, though, and give her a little bit of problem with modern concepts. The few times that I RPed her before her new duo (which is her, dark/pain corrupter, and Vagz's Retrieval rad/pain corrupter, who is a Crey Paragon Protector clone with a very familiar face), she didn't have to talk a whole lot, or even interact much. Now, she's sort of baby-sitting the clueless clone, and she's fallen into the role of sort of wise, Zen-like teacher. Sorta. Instead of giving Retrieval answers, she likes to ask him questions and get him to give the answers himself. She's trying to get him to think for himself. It's hard to tell at this point whether it's working or not, but it seems like it might be. She has a soft spot, such as it is, for humans, which is what got her kicked out of Hell... but not what got her kicked out of Heaven in the first place. She's more of a developing character than Tresa is. Her basic background is laid out, but her personality is more fluid. Which really is part of her character.... sorta.
Other than all that, I've been remodeling the base, again. We finally earned the super-group healing badge that opens up plans for the Auto Doc, or the arcane version, the Tree of Wonders. I wanted to add that. It buys recipes, salvage, and inspirations, and sells small blues and greens. (Which I found in a pinch, you can just buy three of one or the other, and turn them into what you need. Like break-frees.... stupid psi spiders and their stuns... ) But when I went to put it out, suddenly all the power in the base went out. Oops? To make a very long process into a short story, I had to craft the next size in energy... things, and buy the next step up in control... things. And add rooms for them. And buy the next bigger plot size to fit those rooms in. But, now we have... more rooms. And, the Tree of Wonders next to the rez ring (in a new room), and a total of eight teleporters, with 16 total destinations. Four of which are in a new room. I can picture the Atlas recruitment slogan already. "Eight teleporters to 16 zones, a rez ring, a Tree of Wonders, vault storage, invention table, buff creation table, and more!" Uh, no. But, hey, but if anyone has any alts they want to add... especially alts that will heal in SG mode, because that next healing badge for the upgraded Tree of Wonders is far, FAR away... we have space! ... uh, anyway.
With all of that, is it any wonder that I'm enjoying letting Jez make things go boom just a little too much?
Mo (Maurelle Ferrishyn, emp/sonic defender) got from 33 to 37. It's been awhile since I did any real dedicated emp'ing, and it's still just as mind-numbingly boring and yet difficult as ever. I had a chance to take her on an ITF yesterday, but I didn't because I'm not sure how good my twitch-heal-reflex would be with all the burst damage from the Romans. I do want to try it, but maybe not until I've had a little more practice again. Or with a PuG that I don't care if they die or not. One or the other.
Blaster-Jez, who I haven't mentioned here until today, is level 34 as of last night. It is the same character as my DB/WP... who got to 50 like two or three months ago, but I don't think I've mentioned that here... Mostly, I created her because I wanted an archery blaster. I had one way back when, before the archery buffs that came with i9 or i10. She was archery/energy, but since I have an energy/energy blaster (Raven Hex, level 37, who may or may not be getting deleted sometime soon, because I just don't like all the KB in energy, as much as I try to work around it), I didn't want to duplicate needlessly, so I thought I'd try Devices.
With the Devices secondary, it's like playing something completely different from a blaster. None of the other blaster secondaries, or really anything else in the game except the CoV equivalent, plays anything like it. I am officially amused. Maybe too amused, judging from some of the trip mine fields I've made. And level 35 is Time Bomb, which may be a bad sign for that.
Vagz and I teamed blaster-Jez and blaster-Will up a few times, once with Keen's psi blaster, Neverminder (whose name I still love). It was rough going at first, but we're definitely getting the hang of it. And RP-wise, they get along just fine. They have pretty similar personalities, so unless something weird happens, there shouldn't be any conflicts. And half-way through that sentence, I stopped because I realized I jinxed myself. "Something weird" always happens. We'll have to see, I guess.
The shield duo is... okay. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad. The shield set is... okay. There's nothing particularly outstanding about it. If I was starting a scrapper from scratch again, I don't think I'd pick it. There's nothing it does remarkably well, and there are other sets that do about everything it does better. It's got some visibly flashy stuff, like Shield Charge, but I've always been more into substance over style. I'd take WP over Shield any day. Broadsword is fine, but I've already done Katana, and it's basically the same set with a few minor differences between speed and damage. BS does a little more damage, Katana's a little faster. Otherwise, same powers, different swords.
RP-wise... well, Tresa's a little hard to play. She's incredibly level, as far as her temperament goes. She's very intelligent (way more than I am, so any dumb mistakes she makes should always be attributed to the player), very logical. She has... well, I hate to say she has no sense of humor. I mean, I really hate to say it. But she's definitely not the type to make jokes or really get jokes. There will be no humorous, borderline sarcastic comments coming from her.... unless I slip. She's very goal-oriented. She's a techno-mage who ended up in this dimension by mistake. A dimension which, by her standards, is incredibly technologically backward, with a really odd political-social-economic standards. She hates that she made a mistake at all, much less that it had such big consequences for her, and with that along with the responsibilities she has in her world, she's practically obsessed with getting back home. Less obsessed now that she's made another mistake and found that the process she began to get back to her world will take approximately thirty years. It's taken some of the immediacy out of it for her, but she's still working on that particular process, and searching for another way back.
Sometimes it seems like you have to work on character and the details about that character, like the world they come from, family, personality, everything. But with Tresa, once I had a very vague idea, everything about her was just right there. I would have made her... a little less rigid if I could have, but that's not how she is. She's brave, and smart, and tough, all of which I can appreciate, but she's still... kind of boring.
Speaking of characters that are difficult to RP... try an older-than-time fallen Angel with partial, occasional amnesia who's running around the Rogue Isles with a totally clueless clone. Okay, first, what the hell was I thinking with that character? I don't know! She's over two years old in the game, but most of her RP details were theoretical, rather than actually played. The "amnesia" part was meant to make her easier to play, actually. If there's something I don't know that she would, she just "forgot." Cheating? Absolutely. I didn't expect it to come up very often, though. But it was meant for that, and to explain why she didn't talk like a grade-schooler in the church Christmas nativity play, and instead more or less like everyone else. I try to keep her from slang, though, and give her a little bit of problem with modern concepts. The few times that I RPed her before her new duo (which is her, dark/pain corrupter, and Vagz's Retrieval rad/pain corrupter, who is a Crey Paragon Protector clone with a very familiar face), she didn't have to talk a whole lot, or even interact much. Now, she's sort of baby-sitting the clueless clone, and she's fallen into the role of sort of wise, Zen-like teacher. Sorta. Instead of giving Retrieval answers, she likes to ask him questions and get him to give the answers himself. She's trying to get him to think for himself. It's hard to tell at this point whether it's working or not, but it seems like it might be. She has a soft spot, such as it is, for humans, which is what got her kicked out of Hell... but not what got her kicked out of Heaven in the first place. She's more of a developing character than Tresa is. Her basic background is laid out, but her personality is more fluid. Which really is part of her character.... sorta.
Other than all that, I've been remodeling the base, again. We finally earned the super-group healing badge that opens up plans for the Auto Doc, or the arcane version, the Tree of Wonders. I wanted to add that. It buys recipes, salvage, and inspirations, and sells small blues and greens. (Which I found in a pinch, you can just buy three of one or the other, and turn them into what you need. Like break-frees.... stupid psi spiders and their stuns... ) But when I went to put it out, suddenly all the power in the base went out. Oops? To make a very long process into a short story, I had to craft the next size in energy... things, and buy the next step up in control... things. And add rooms for them. And buy the next bigger plot size to fit those rooms in. But, now we have... more rooms. And, the Tree of Wonders next to the rez ring (in a new room), and a total of eight teleporters, with 16 total destinations. Four of which are in a new room. I can picture the Atlas recruitment slogan already. "Eight teleporters to 16 zones, a rez ring, a Tree of Wonders, vault storage, invention table, buff creation table, and more!" Uh, no. But, hey, but if anyone has any alts they want to add... especially alts that will heal in SG mode, because that next healing badge for the upgraded Tree of Wonders is far, FAR away... we have space! ... uh, anyway.
With all of that, is it any wonder that I'm enjoying letting Jez make things go boom just a little too much?
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Another Video
I feel motivated to go do... something. I'm just not sure what.
"Like a big bear, man!"
"Like a big bear, man!"
Monday, December 8, 2008
Issue 13 Impressions, So Far
When I was in college, my best friend and I would write "hate notes" to each other on our bad days. The whole note would be filled with things we hated. "I hate the ice outside the cafeteria. I hate having to go all the way across campus for a meteorology class. I hate meteorology class," etc. They were actually very therapeutic, for the chance to vent, and, after the first twenty or so I-hates, good for a laugh.
I don't want my i13 impressions to sound like an I-hate note. Because I don't hate all of it. Really, I don't. I remember i9, and how I hated inventions and salvage and recipes. I've, uh, adjusted to all that.
Right now, I hate merits. I think I'll adjust, though. It's a whole new system. On one hand, I'm not going to get a recipe off of a twenty-minute Katie (or the disaster of an hour and a half Katie this past Friday night) that sells for a few million influence. On the other hand, though, I'm not going to end up with a Crap of the Hunter recipe after an LGTF. I see the pluses and the minuses of the new system, but right now, it does seem like the minuses outweigh the pluses.
I do hate whatever it is they did to chat. Getting blank or one letter tells is one thing, but what I really hate, is how the chat bar has changed. It's "sluggish," and difficult to deal with if you're typing quickly. I dislike that they broke the colors in the speech bubbles, though that seems very minor to me.
They fixed the SG costume thing, so now each costume and its SG color settings are saved. That does make me happy. And more costumes. More costumes are always good. Jez got her "woman in black" suit, so that makes me happy.
The leveling pact is... weird. Vagz and I pacted our new shield characters, and we seem to get delayed XP. We leveled coming out of mission doors several times, and more than once I got a sudden large grant of XP.
Oh, right! The base changes. The prestige refund is wonderful, and the less strict placement rules for base items is nice. Except, whatever it is that broke being able to raise things on the walls. That's just... weird. But, thanks to those other two things, the Night-Watch has even more teleporters, and a new teleport room that is definitely my favorite room in the base.
The shield power set seems... okay for now. I don't feel like I can judge it yet. Tresa (more about her some other time) is level 22, and currently has 3 powers from the scrapper shields set. It seems adequate, from the limited experiences I've had so far. I guess that means it doesn't suck, at least, or I would have noticed that. The powers in the set just seem odd to me. Against All Odds and Shield Charge seem like they're from some other set, and just got thrown into Shield Defense. Like, maybe there was a Shield Offense at some point, and the set was eliminated, but they saved those two powers and just threw them into the defense set. We'll have to see how it actually works, though, and I don't feel like I'll be able to have a good judgement of that for another ten levels or so.
I want to roll (UGH) a pain dom corrupter, but I don't have the character slots, or really even the time with all the other things I want to do in the game. It was fun on Test. But, with the thousands of other pain dom characters running around, it's probably rather pointless to do to run on PuGs, anyway. So, maybe I'll get to it, maybe I won't. I have more than enough to do with the BS/Shield, playing with the revamped Kheld (Constant Star is level 34, and I like the Kheld changes very much), the revamped Invulnerability (limited testing so far, and Cass finally got her respec and all her IOs, so it's hard to tell where the actual improvements have come from, but she seems MUCH better), and working to earn MOAR MERITS.
I don't want my i13 impressions to sound like an I-hate note. Because I don't hate all of it. Really, I don't. I remember i9, and how I hated inventions and salvage and recipes. I've, uh, adjusted to all that.
Right now, I hate merits. I think I'll adjust, though. It's a whole new system. On one hand, I'm not going to get a recipe off of a twenty-minute Katie (or the disaster of an hour and a half Katie this past Friday night) that sells for a few million influence. On the other hand, though, I'm not going to end up with a Crap of the Hunter recipe after an LGTF. I see the pluses and the minuses of the new system, but right now, it does seem like the minuses outweigh the pluses.
I do hate whatever it is they did to chat. Getting blank or one letter tells is one thing, but what I really hate, is how the chat bar has changed. It's "sluggish," and difficult to deal with if you're typing quickly. I dislike that they broke the colors in the speech bubbles, though that seems very minor to me.
They fixed the SG costume thing, so now each costume and its SG color settings are saved. That does make me happy. And more costumes. More costumes are always good. Jez got her "woman in black" suit, so that makes me happy.
The leveling pact is... weird. Vagz and I pacted our new shield characters, and we seem to get delayed XP. We leveled coming out of mission doors several times, and more than once I got a sudden large grant of XP.
Oh, right! The base changes. The prestige refund is wonderful, and the less strict placement rules for base items is nice. Except, whatever it is that broke being able to raise things on the walls. That's just... weird. But, thanks to those other two things, the Night-Watch has even more teleporters, and a new teleport room that is definitely my favorite room in the base.
The shield power set seems... okay for now. I don't feel like I can judge it yet. Tresa (more about her some other time) is level 22, and currently has 3 powers from the scrapper shields set. It seems adequate, from the limited experiences I've had so far. I guess that means it doesn't suck, at least, or I would have noticed that. The powers in the set just seem odd to me. Against All Odds and Shield Charge seem like they're from some other set, and just got thrown into Shield Defense. Like, maybe there was a Shield Offense at some point, and the set was eliminated, but they saved those two powers and just threw them into the defense set. We'll have to see how it actually works, though, and I don't feel like I'll be able to have a good judgement of that for another ten levels or so.
I want to roll (UGH) a pain dom corrupter, but I don't have the character slots, or really even the time with all the other things I want to do in the game. It was fun on Test. But, with the thousands of other pain dom characters running around, it's probably rather pointless to do to run on PuGs, anyway. So, maybe I'll get to it, maybe I won't. I have more than enough to do with the BS/Shield, playing with the revamped Kheld (Constant Star is level 34, and I like the Kheld changes very much), the revamped Invulnerability (limited testing so far, and Cass finally got her respec and all her IOs, so it's hard to tell where the actual improvements have come from, but she seems MUCH better), and working to earn MOAR MERITS.
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