This is a guest post by Acrimony.

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I used to have a work supervisor who was fond of logging into City of Heroes over lunch and saying "Baff, baff, baff, baff!" under his breath as his body-armored and caped id-creature would pound the ungodly snot out of onscreen baddies. Apparently this is some sort of universal desire among a certain type of MMORPG player; one which has been initially addressed for World of Warcraft by Maido, and subsequently taken over by Si63, in Comix.

Comix is an addon th at adds sound effects and visuals to certain in-game events. Although inspired by comic books’ highly visual handling of battle noises, it also draws from other sources such as the late-sixties Batman TV show and other video games. The main feature of Comix is playing additional sounds and popping words like "CRACK!" and "SHONK!" (I haven’t spotted "FLRBBBBB!" as of this writing) on screen for certain events like hit, critical hit, battle or demoralizing shout, death, resurrection requests and more — Comix will also shake the screen for a particularly good critical hit. One of Comix’s most low-key and endearing features is the "sproing" sound it plays when jumping. One of the loudest features is the Mortal Kombat/wrestling announcer-ish voice that says "finish him" once an enemy reaches low health; even louder is the voice that makes up new name for kill types if you dish out more damage than required to make the dead mob dead in the heroic but ultimately losing battle to thin out spawns (I started calling him Mr. Ludicrous Kill as he seemed to enjoy saying "ludicrous" a lot). If you can, try hooking Comix up on an AoE caster with a warrior in the group for maximum laughs, and overall screen clutter. Comix also tracks minor statistics like how many jumps a character has done, and the number of hug a character has given (both of which can easily be reset, which would presumably be useful if suddenly faced with a spacebar clown or Goldshire intervention).

Although Comix is fundamentally a gag addon, there are a few surprisingly useful features. The play sound on zone lets me know when to snap open the world map to check for area fog when exploring zones. The "finish him" sound that plays when a mob hits low life is a useful audio cue to unleash a finishing cast or move (however, the sound also fired off on targeted mobs that aren’t tagged to the character). Having Mr. Ludicrous Kill voice is kind of like having a personal cheerleader or yes man, which is somewhat annoying for someone who can’t take a compliment, but it also makes repetitive mob-smacking a little less solitary. The Q*bert-like word balloon of comic-book expletives on death are oddly cathartic. The ability to track a character’s number of jumps also gives spacebar clowns some much-needed measure of epeen.

Comix has a quite robust range of options to customize things like animation speed, frequency, crit threshold and screen shake intensity and enabling/disabling various sounds; although the sound effects added by Comix are also noticeably louder than the game is on my setup, and an addon-specific overall volume slider would be a terrific addition here. The best part of Comix’s options panel is that every item on it is explained by a tooltip, and most of them even make sense. Comix is a hefty addon that will slow down gameplay, so those on high-population servers might want to get a laugh in less populated zones and disable it for srsbsnss; and anyone hurting for memory or graphics processing power should probably just use a series of Post-Its instead. When landing decent crits the screen can get quite packed, so it’s probably advisable to play around with the settings or disable Comix altogether when high situational awareness is required. For those who care about such things, although most of the content in the add-on is G-rated, there is an obvious expletive in one of the sounds that plays on crit.

I’ve been playing with Comix for a few weeks and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet. It is nice to have an addon make the "Baff, baff, baff, baff!" sounds so I wouldn’t have to, if I were one of those types of players. However, I still have to make "vroom vroom" noises every time I summon my mount, because I am one of those other types of players.

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