How I have missed the sound of my sword slicing into the flesh of mine enemies!

[thewayne]

NEW SOUND CARD!

NEW VIDEO CARD!

I CAN PLAY CITY OF HEROES AGAIN!

Two weeks ago when I was in Phoenix, I took back the GeForce4 that I'd bought and got credit, which I used to buy a Radeon 9200SE. Definitely not top of the line, but it has 128meg of memory. I had some initial problems: I installed it, then tried to install the latest drivers from the factory web site. They wouldn't install. So I finally loaded the CD that came with the card, and now all is well.

So that left sound. I don't know what happened, but the on-board sound stopped working, I learned this a few weeks ago when I fired up iTunes to listen to some moozik whilst doing the dishes. Today I decided that my frustration was worth $30, so I bought a new Soundblaster Audigy. Went in just fine. Unfortunately I couldn't find any card screws, so I pulled out my modem riser card (like that's going to see a lot of use!) and used that screw.

And tonight I got to play City of Heroes!

I just did a little running around, killed a bunch of street toughs, did one mission that was very rewarding as most of the bad guys were my level or one higher. I still have a lot of debt to work off on that character, though. (In CoH, you don't die. You're knocked out and either use an Awaken inspiration to wake you up if it's safe from villains, or you are teleported to the hospital and wake up there. But every time you're defeated, you gain Debt. You don't lose EP, what the debt basicly does is add on to the EP required to get to the next level. You have to work the debt off, by beating on baddies, before you actually begin advancing with EP again. And you don't lose stuff when you're defeated. It's not a bad methodology, beats having to run back to your body and re-equipping everything like a lot of games require.)

Comments

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

In CoH, you don't have equipment, so nothing to damage or get repaired. Even gun-bunnies like my blaster built off of my old Champions characters. Nothing to get repaired. You do have Enhancements, which increase the effectiveness of your powers, and they have levels associated with them. You can't equip them onto your character if they're more than X levels above you, and they stop providing benefit when you're Y levels above them.

The Awaken inspiration leaves you stunned for many seconds, I don't know exactly how long. You can slowly walk away, but you're a sitting duck to get beat on again. And after you recover from being stunned, you have very few hit points and little endurance, so you can't leap back into the fray. Most of the time after you Awaken, you end up Resting. A Rest immobilizes you and moderately quickly brings you back to full HP/End, but Rest is very slow recharging. Whereas if you go to the hospital, you awaken with full HP/End, but then you have to get back to the fight, which can take a while.

Alternatively, there's a power for Defenders that lets them resurrect heroes. They're up almost instantly, maybe a 5 second delay, with full HP/End, but the power is VERY slow recharging. We're talking a couple of minutes.

So what you'll see when a party starts getting wiped out, is the Defenders and Controllers (character arch-types) will run away back to the entrance (bad guys stop following after a certain distance.... USUALLY). They then use Teleport Friend to recover the bodies of those who couldn't run away and slowly Rez them.

It's kind of funny, if you're clever, you can stack the bodies that you recover in all sorts of silly ways and make lewd comments while they're immobile. :-)

Your HP goes up every level, you can't really enhance them, though you can enhance defenses in certain ways. Your endurance remains a constant, but you can use Enhancements to reduce enduracne costs and certain powers enhance your endurance recovery.

I think they've done a heck of a job balancing the game. You can play solo (CAREFULLY!) or you can play in groups. I like it.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

Very interesting to see/compare the differences between CoH and WoW. I'm enough of a gamegeek that mechanics interest me almost as much as the game itself. We'll have to compare notes the next time we're in the same town... otherwise LJ will squawk about entries getting too long! LOL