It’s more like a comprehensive chat/news center. You can do voice chat or leave short Twitter-like messages. It’s not as neat and tidy as a forum but it is useful for conversations.
Try the auction house if you haven’t yet. (Fastest way is to type /ah into the chat window.) You can search for enhancements there, and they are sorted by origin and stat. So if you want to boost damage, you look up Enhancements, Normal, Science origin, then Damage. Typically for each type you’ll see two dual origin enhancement options (which NPC vendors also sell) and one single origin. The single origin gives a bigger boost (I think double) but is hard to find and often very expensive. My main has a Science origin and I’m constantly peeking at what’s on there. You also specify a level range, and I believe you can equip stuff up to 3 levels above your character level.
I still use stores if the AH doesn’t have what I need. Stores aren’t great because they only have enhancements for levels that are factors of 5, and they usually cost more than what the AH has, but if they’re the only place that has the boost to fill your slot (heh) then it’s better than nothing.
Brainiac and I haven’t been in much - he has tendonitis and his physical therapist has said “less mousing” And my gaming PC is in his office, so…
But Chronos, don’t worry about teaming with someone with a higher or lower level. One of the WONDERFUL things about City of Heroes is that you’ll sidekick up to a higher level mission (or they will Exemplar down if its yours.)
Is the auction house the same thing as Wentworth’s Consignments? I haven’t been worried enough about it to check yet, but if I happen to find something that I can use, that’s different.
EDIT: Yeah, I know about Exemplars/Sidekicks. The barrier to team-ups with you’uns isn’t our level difference; it’s that we never seem to be on at the same time. I’m not big on teaming up with strangers-- The closest I’ve come is when I see someone tangling with something when I’m on my way past to somewhere else, I’ll toss a few immobilizes their way, and likewise occasionally someone tosses some DPS onto something I’m fighting.
Yeah, and I just saw a lady trying to pull her purse away from thin air. There was nobody I could target, but apparently my aura aggroed the nonexistant gangster enough for her to get away.
I’ve bumped a bunch of Guests up to Members and I adjusted the permissions so that anyone can donate and anyone not a Guest can pull things out. Take what you need!
I’ve tried to sort things so that most inspiration bins have medium insps, and one has large insps. Likewise, the salvage bins are mostly whites, with two having yellows.
By the way, if you have orange salvage or recipes you don’t need, check their price on the auction house (type command /ah). I recently sold an orange pvp recipe for 3.5 million influence. Even the cheap ones sell for 100 thousand, which is nice.
Ah, yes, the fun times of waiting until level 14 to get your travel power.
Unless things have changed, CoH doesn’t respawn when someone is nearby. You need to keep moving while patrolling.
I’m on in bits and drabs a lot. If I expect to be on for more than a half hour, I usually ask if anyone in the supergroup wants to team up. For me duoing is the sweet spot of more fun than solo, but not as hectic as a bigger team.
For what it’s worth, I did find enough ground-level clockworks to finish that quest yesterday. Including one three levels above me that was spawn-camping me when I logged in. Thankfully only one: I can handle almost anything, if there’s only one of them. Gravity powers seem to be really good at that.
I’m not sure about that-- At the really low levels, I was struggling to kill things faster than they could re-spawn, close enough that they’d be in instant-aggro range.
I know for a fact it’s not the case. I have to be careful where I idle because enemies will spawn right on top of me. And like you, on some of my characters I struggle to kill things faster than they respawn.
Speaking of respawns, I had Tarmonpesae do some street sweeping around Keyes Island to get the last few bars to 20. Had a few mobs not give me credit for taking them down, they simply got up again and ran back to their spawn point! Others I had been working on suddenly regenerated and ran back to their spawn point as well.
I know they added some areas that are more prone to that when they added some of the new low-level arcs, because those arcs have hunts for those specific mobs in a small area. I think both Hellions and Skulls have places in Atlas where they spawn faster than most low-level characters can clear them.
In fact, it was Hellions in Atlas that were the specific example I was thinking of. I suppose it makes sense: When you’ve got a bunch of newbies on at once, all getting assigned one of a small number of newbie quests, you need to keep enough of a supply handy that they can all get their quotas in.
Similarly, I was running a mission in Skyway when I ran into a Supa Troll. It was a reasonably tough fight, but I eventually got it down to about 10%… at which point it managed to break free of all of my immobilizes, run away, heal up, and come back with two more Supas, which was way more than I could handle. I assumed that he was part of the mission, and so put off going back there until I had several more levels, only to find that he was just a random encounter and I wasn’t even getting XP for the real mission monsters.
There are some missions that have ambushes as part of them. If someone who is level 20 gets ambushed in Kings Row, you’ll have a bunch of way too high for most of the people hanging out there bad guys running through. Hopefully, the person whose mission is is around to clean up the ambush, but sometimes they take off. It seems to be something that has been more or less fixed - i.e. it happens less than it used to.
But sticking to the appropriate parts of town (the Vidiot maps are good for this) can keep running into mobs you can’t handle to a minimum.
One of the nice things to do back in the day was to hang out in Steel Canyon as a level 40 and clean up the level 30-plus 5th Column ambush groups that would spawn from some missions.
I obsessively hit Tab as I’m moving through areas, because I want to spot enemies that are way above my level before I get close enough for them to aggro on me.
A small quality of life tip: I bind the tilde key (`) to target the nearest enemy, and then use that in fights to make sure that I’m hitting nearby enemies rather than semi-random ones when selecting targets. To do this, open up the chat window and type in:
/bind tilde “target_enemy_near”
You can also create a bind that swaps between Sprint and Fly, so that you can turn off Sprint while you’re flying. I use F for that.
/bind F “powexec_name Fly$$powexec_name Sprint”
I am very sad that I’m not playing right now. And even more sad that I’m going to be traveling for four weeks with no access. But when I get back in mid-August, you’ll see me online!
You can use target binds to search for pretty much anything, in fact. I reassign the R key (since I hate accidentally going into autorun) as a general search key, then change the bind to whatever I’m looking for.
/bind r “targetcustomnext base”
This will cycle through enemies, allies, glowies, doors, all sorts of things. It’s handy if you don’t know the name of what you’re looking for.
/bind r “targetcustomnext Lead alive”
This will cycle through everything with “Lead” in its name–which is to say, Outcast bosses. You can swap in other strings depending on what mobs you’re hunting, like “Sorcerer” or “Damned”.
/bind r “targetcustomnext enemy alive$$targetcustomnext Quantum alive”$$“targetcustomnext Void alive”
The Kheldians’ best friend, this setup targets the Quantum Gunners and Void Slayers. When you chain the commands like this, they prioritize the last first, so this one will find Voids first. If there are no Voids, it will find Quantums, and if there are none of those, it will settle down and target regular enemies.
/bind r “targetcustomnext Chest”
This one targets anything with “Chest” in the name. It’s great for finding glowies in big open maps, like the Wheel of Destruction finale and many of the Portal Corps missions. Once you find the first of whatever you’re looking for, you know what name to look for, and you can customize the command for the mission.
Don’t glowies show up on the minimap? I’m sure I’ve found a few that way. But it is cool to know that you can put that sort of scripting in keybinds, and I’ll probably find some use for that.
Oh, another question: Do slow effects stack? As a Time controller, I have a single-target slow, and also a toggleable slow aura. Is there any point to using the former on something already affected by the latter? I’m curious about both the speed reduction itself, and the increased susceptibility to Immobilize powers.