Levelling any quicker, crafting?

[Xanthippe]

Thinking about revisiting CoX.  I never got past the early 30s due to lost interest due to slow xp gain/levelling.  Haven't played since a little after CoV launch.

Has the levelling curve steepened at all?

Is crafting in?

[eldaec]

No, and it depends on your definition of crafting.

See the LOL, Crafting thread for more details of the stuff they are patching in shortly.

[Shrike]

Crafting (inventions... ) is on test. It'll probably be a few weeks at the least before it goes live.

Level grind is same as it ever was, at least villain-side, where I spend most of my time. My necro/dark MM is presently slogging through the 30s and it's...well...tedious. Teams help a lot in mitigating the grind, but at my play times they can be hard to find, much less a halfway competent team. Though, I have to admit, PuGs seem to be better than in the past, not that that's saying all THAT much.

There's fun to be had, but if you're planning on going it alone I don't think you'll be around long. A good SG/VG can make all the difference.

[Nebu]

Patch next Tues for the 3 year anniversary.  I'm not sure if the invention system will make it in by then.  I've been playing quite a bit lately and seem to hit a wall around 34.  Not many new powers and the grind really starts to set in.  I've been playing with a RL friend, so that has helped. 

[Alkiera]

Patch next Tues for the 3 year anniversary.  I'm not sure if the invention system will make it in by then.  I've been playing quite a bit lately and seem to hit a wall around 34.  Not many new powers and the grind really starts to set in.  I've been playing with a RL friend, so that has helped. 

I made it further, to 45ish on my main (a scrapper) between coh launch and cov beta.  As you say, there was the tedium of very slow leveling/lack of character changes, and to me, missions that were all the same, except the ones with AVs that I couldn't do solo.  The final straw was the continuous nerfs to scrappers, esp. /Invuln.  By the end, I'd forget to turn my toggles on, and not be able to tell the difference... so I stopped turning them on.  More END for me!

At one point I had a buddy who played a sonic/sonic defender join me as a sidekick, which made for some fun fights.  (My BS/Invuln scrapper becomes an ungodly killing machine with sonic buffs and debuffed enemies)  BuildUp+Headsplitter one-shotting even cons is such a beautiful thing.  I used to be able to do that without the sonic sidekick, but after being nerfed in pretty much every patch it was getting tough.  The sidekick brought the fun back.

Every now and then I'm tempted to go back for a bit.  Not sure how long I'd stay, tho...

--
Alkiera

[Nebu]

I understand.  I resub about every 3 months, make a flashy new costume, and level to 20 or 30.  Then I begin to feel the sameness of things and slowly decrease my playtime to nothingness.  This game can be really fun at times, especially when you're kicking the crap out of large groups.  After a while it's the same office building, the same warehouse, and those outside missions that make me want to slam my head against the wall.  I'll likely stay to check out the inventions and spruce up the super group fortress a bit... then it's back to DAoC like an old girlfriend. 

[Der Helm]

Same for me, only difference being that I never got into DaoC.

[Llava]

I finally quit recently as well.  My time playing it had reduced almost to zero.  I was still grouping with my friends twice a week for a couple hours, but I've been playing so long that the gameplay finally got really stale.  This is partly due to age, but largely I blame it on performance.  Over time the system requirements for the game have risen well beyond what my computer can handle at a level of graphics I deem acceptable (a level equal to the game's release).  On a lot of maps, I'm capping out at 7 frames per second, usually hovering between 3 and 5.  It's just not fun trying to play through that.

[Glazius]

On a lot of maps, I'm capping out at 7 frames per second, usually hovering between 3 and 5.  It's just not fun trying to play through that.

I9 has something that might help with this - you can shut off particle effects that are coming too close to the camera. I don't know if that would help or not, though, and it probably won't fix a problem that has to do with just a lot of people moving around at the same time.

I've lost a couple of regulars to the graphics upgrade/slowdown as well - my graphics card can handle CoH but it choked and died trying to manage LOTRO.

Another lesson from WoW I suppose.

--GF

[Sky]

LotRO didn't seem that tough on the gpu, I thought it looked more like WoW than anything. I was really turned off by it's shabby graphics compared to EQ2's models (not artistically/stylistically, but EQ2 is generations ahead technologically).

But my old 9800pro was great in CoV, a bit of slowdown occasionally but very playable.

[Nebu]

My 6800 chugs a bit against large groups with lots of effects.  I'm not sure if it's my graphics card or my connection.  It almost plays like lag. 

As for the game, burnout has struck me again.  I've been subbed a month and leveled 4 toons to 25-35 level.  This seems to be the level range where I tire of the game.  If I play my scrapper, I end up quitting because of all the To-Hit debuffs (I love going through 2 attack cycles and never landing one attack).  If I play Blasters/Corrupters it's the speed debuffs and end taps that drive me nuts.  Of course, Masterminds suffer the brilliant AI issues... I recall my pets 10,000 times and yet they still run down the hall and whack something before coming back.  Couple this to the long grind and the fact that you get very few interesting powers after level 35 and it's a done deal. 

It's a very good game.  I just need to play for a month and take a few months off before I go back.  I think I need therapy. 

[Shrike]

My AXP3k/6800 chugs more than a bit itself, but it's old and tired (needs a reformat--which isn't going to happen anytime soon). I get by, but I need to fix the sound on my AM2 box and simply retire this one to WoW and things like jDOOM.

My MMs don't have much trouble with pet management. If you are, I'd get Sandolphan's binds and work out some control tactics using those. My necro/dark MM has very little problem with rogue pets due to tight control via binds. My robotics/traps MM has the occasional battle drone go off the reservation; detonator fixes his wagon but good.

I'm suffering from severe WoW burnout lately. I spend most of my time in CoV these days. I switch characters constantly. A little ELM/ELA brute here, some MM mayhem there, corruptor PuG fun somedays, and top it off with my plant/thorns dom or my mind/psi dom. That seems to be keeping my interest lately. The deep 30s grind gets very tiresome, though. 40s are better (storylines), but the overwhelming amount of Arachnos and Longbow enemies takes some of the fun out of those.

[Numtini]

My experience is that COX is heavily processor dependent. I have a quite good video card (X850xt) and 2gig memory and I was getting slowdowns, pretty sever ones, in large fights. I upgraded to a dual core CPU and added the tag to the shortcut to use both processors and COX became smooth as glass with most of the sliders turned up high.

My experience is that LOTRO has some pretty odd choices and if you turn down a few things, it looks fine, but the defaults even the "suggest for my system" ones are pretty wonky. Stuff like the 3d portraits in the party window. Eats up power and worse than useless as the non-3d ones show your class.