Do you wanna ROCK?!

Out of the wilds of urban New Hampshire comes the hard-rocking hero of the new millennium. With Scorpions and Metallica blasting from the rolled-down windows of his packed Gremlin, the Radon Rocker is here to show Paragon City what a little Old School Detroit Rock City can do...

His battle cry? "Time to rock out w my sock out!"






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Some Screenshots

See below...






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Peltier Justice hits 50!

Achieved the final end goal hunting Neuron in his technical warrens. Solid team, lots of fun. I'll probably still play Pelt for a while, as I'm now fighting AVs I have never seen before... Lots of solid end-game content left, but I'll likely start developing a new hero on Triumph to continue the Incredible Squad recruitment drive. Happy days... : )


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GG: Deep Under Cover

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Hardware Ho!

Yep, my new components arrived today. Plan is to do the teardown and installation Friday so I have time to dig into the upgrade and not put Tight Night in jeopardy.

I'm planning on getting the rig up and running with driver updates, etc. prior to doing any overclocking. I splurged on an aftermarket cooler for the processor after reading that the new e4500's come with a much smaller aluminum heat sink than previous e4000 series processors. The aftermarket cooler comes highly rated, and straddles the performance line between Eric's Zalman 9500 cooler and the stock Intel cooler. I'm hopeful based on the reviews and commentary on NewEgg.

Anyway, Rob should be inheriting my old motherboard, RAM, Processor, DVD and DVD-R drives along with a new GeForce 8600 GT card. Post-upgrade, his system should be running at comparable performance levels to my current PC. Given he tends to run CoH at lower resolutions than I do, he should be able to max out most of the in-game settings (200% world detail, etc.) without lagging his system. I was able to pull it off prior to getting my widescreen LCD, so it's very do-able.

Part of my desire to upgrade is driven by a look toward the future. CoH is a great game and we all have a good time getting together and playing it. However, Eric has recently been expressing some dissatisfaction with the way the game is heading. With other competition on the horizon and the ever-present potential for folks to want to try new stuff, it's highly possible we may transition to another MMO in the future. Given that possibility, I figured getting Rob and I up to a roughly comparable level to Eric's current rig gives us options if we ever decide to branch out a bit.

Personally, I dig the content and the low time requirement to hop in and play. Teams are generally easy to find and build, and most characters solo well. With the recent game additions and my increased access to higher level content and story arcs, I'm exploring more of the content in the game now. All that coupled with the enjoyment I get out of our Thursday sessions give me absolutely no impetus to try anything else. Particularly WoW. It's the elephant in the room, but somehow I don't want to commit to something that may be overwhelming and too deep for me... I tend to obsess somewhat about online gaming, and that may be too immersive a game for me. Particularly given my impending job change and increased family activities now that nice weather is here. Plus, who wants to be just another face in the crowd? I *like* playing a super-hero game. It's very different and a whole different vibe from the cliched "Elf, Dwarf, Healer, Mage, Tank" paradigm that a ton of other MMO's rely on.

Anyway, I no longer have BLOG access at work (it's been flagged as a "social networking" site and is now blocked as non-work content), so I figured I'd shoot out an update while dinner was cooking.

See you all on Thursday.
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Mantlet's Bane...

Idea for the character occurred after reading Rob's back-story on Obake. Since Malacoda is already meddling on the plane, I thought a tie to Mantlet that was more direct was in order. Since the paradimensional portal was an obvious plot device to link the two parallel dimensions (Freedom and Triumph), it was worked into the backstory. I originally started as a Fire/Thorns Dominator for concept reasons (demonic armor and all). The look of the thorns was amazing with the armor, but the powerset combo was not all that great. Fire is not a great control set, and the thorns was OK, but offered little secondary mitigation (the special effect was a -Def on the target hit). For a character with no resistance/defense, active control and damage mitigation turned out to be key. So, I scrapped that incarnation of Mantlet's Bane and formed a new one based on Ice/Ice.

This set is working MUCH better. The slows from the primary/secondary stack, and the tier 1 blast for the Ice secondary is the best of all the sets. Ice Sword Circle offers some early AoE for teams, and Hasten is allowing me to build Domination frequently. Overall, it's playing much more smoothly than the last powerset combo.

Ultimately, I would have wanted to go with a Mind/Psi Dominator just because that's Mantlet's weak spot. Problem is that it's a late maturing set with the lowest damage potential, so I opted to go with elemental damage, which is another (albiet less) weak spot for the Invulnerability Tank primary.

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