General Idiot

Personally I distinctly remember getting lag spikes of the kind described here back on live. And given the discussion of large leagues I can't help but wonder if that barrier thing was part of what made incarnate trials lag so horribly when they first released too. BAF especially I remember having upwards of thirty seconds delay on some things because the server was just that far behind. The server having to stop and empty the SQL queue strikes me as one of those things that doesnt cause a noticable delay in a small test server, even the open betas. But then cause a significant one on a live server with many more players doing all sorts of other things that could also be causing barriers here and there. So it's possible this was an issue on live too and just not considered enough of a problem to invest time and resources into solving it for no direct return. Remember, our team here isn't beholden to a publisher expecting return on any money they spend. So they can spend time fixing stuff like this where in a more commercial environment there'd be a bean counter somewhere saying no.

I wonder, any chance of this also making its way to the Night Widow version of Eviscerate? Or is that animation more unique from the Claws version than it seems?

Looking more closely at Bayonet though you're not wrong there, it does substantially more damage than I thought at first because it has a damage over time effect as well. Presumably this is considered balanced as a secondary effect, the same as how fire powers usually do more damage because they have DoT while other sets get a slow or defense debuff or some such. All the crab melee powers have -def attached. I could see adding a bayonet equivalent for crabs with the same bleed effect but no -def perhaps. Notably the bane spider does have an 8 second recharge melee power and it does almost the same total damage as bayonet, though again some of that is a secondary damage over time effect that all the bane mace melee powers have. Personally if it were up to me I wouldn't add another melee attack, instead I'd add a third ranged attack to give crabs more than just the two single target ranged powers since they're meant to be the more ranged focused side while banes are melee.

Holy balls, it actually happened. Here i thought it'd been given up on long ago.

The kmeter bit is the bane spider's critical hit from hide, which they can also get on the two wolf spider melee attacks. There's no way for a crab spider to activate that extra damage as they lack the cloaking device power that enables it. But since it's the same power the effect is still there in the code even though it'll never trigger. If OP is including that extra damage in their math when asking for buffs to equivalent Crab powers, they shouldn't be. Without it included, Pummel and Slice do the exact same amount of damage in PvE. In PvP Pummel does slightly more but that's because animation times are a factor in PvP balance (they're not in PvE) and Pummel has a slower animation. Bayonet meanwhile has no direct equivalent in the Crab Spider powers (and there's certainly room to create one for the more melee focused crabs out there) but it does do slightly less damage than the closest thing in Arm Lash, which has a 10 second recharge to Bayonet's 8 and does correspondingly more damage. There's nothing terribly unbalanced here.

I thought lockouts were a stupid idea when the live devs first added one to Water Blast and my opinion has not changed in the however many years it's been since then, they're still a stupid idea now and only more so for each new set that comes with a mandatory 'no you don't get to use your fun gimmick for this completely arbitrary period' mechanic. If removing the lockout would make the powers unbalanced as is, then rebalance them so they're not.

For the snipe, an appropriate animation already exists in the form of Masterful Throw from the dominator martial assault secondary. I think that uses a shuriken projectile like most of the other attacks in that set but at least theoretically it should be possible to swap that out for a knife instead.

This is pretty much it. All five winter sets have a 6% fire/cold resist bonus, so if you're building defense and using those for their sizable defense bonuses you end up with 30% fire/cold resist from those alone even before considering anything else in your build. And then most of the purple sets have that same 6% bonus so if you're building recharge and thus using purples for the 10% recharge bonuses you again end up with probably that same 30% just by default. Compared to other resistances which tend to come in smaller 1.5% to 3% at most bonuses, it leads to builds often having disproportionate amounts of fire/cold resist no matter what you were actually building for.

In the case of Staff that's not the issue. For a short while after release way back on live it used to have entirely different sound effects that had way more weight to them than the current ones do. And the current ones are fine, I just liked the old ones better.

Something like the Gun Fu and Military Assault sets they have over on Rebirth would certainly be a welcome addition here, yes. Gun in hands, shoot people at range or kick them in the head when they come closer. Also it's very debatably contemporary but an assault set with a bow and maybe martial arts powers would be cool too. From a technical standpoint the issue is mostly mixing animations that expect a weapon in your hand with ones that don't. Can result in weapons clipping through the character, or spontaneously appearing and disappearing depending on which powers you use. It's not an insurmountable challenge as proven by the existence of those two sets on Rebirth but it's undoubtedy a bit of work to get running smoothly.

The only change I want for Staff is to have the original sound effects back. The current ones sound so wimpy in comparison and I've always wished they never got changed even if the live devs were probably right that originally it sounded too heavy for what it is.

Honestly I always thought the giant swirling vortex was a placeholder for FX the live devs never quite finished.

I'm imagining a character actually literally juggling their gun, their bow and their mace and making attacks with each one as they come back down before tossing them up again and that is the most hilarious mental image I've had in a while, so thanks for that.

Basically the whole account server that handles all of that was never designed to hold the number of character items people are leaving in it now that super packs don't cost real money. So every now and then it just dies for no reason and some people can't claim things for a while.

The textures used for upper and lower body are inherently symmetrical though. The game quite literally only has a texture for half the body and just mirrors it to render the other half. It's not a case of 'simply' making an asymmetrical texture because it's not the texture causing the limitation. Significant parts of the costume system would need to be rebuilt to make it even possible for those particular costume parts to be asymmetrical, long before it gets anywhere near anything relating to textures. Now that's not to say it's impossible because it's not. But you're seriously underestimating the work required. If you look over at Rebirth, they have asymmetrical costumes. But that was months if not years of work on the part of their devs and last I checked they're not even finished it yet.

Anything new in 2014 is still going to be well above the game's system requirements though. For reference since I'm not sure some people realise how low they actually are, those requirements are: CPU: Pentium 3 or Athlon equivalent CPU SPEED: 800 MHz RAM: 256 MB OS: Microsoft® Windows® XP/Vista/7 VIDEO CARD: 32MB Direct3D Card (GeForce 2+/Radeon 8500+/Intel 845G+) TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 32 MB 3D: Yes DIRECTX VERSION: 9.0 (included) SOUND CARD: Yes FREE DISK SPACE: 2 GB And yes, I realise they're honestly quite absurdly low almost 20 years later and the odds of a machine old enough to not be significantly above them actually being still actively used are low at best, but so far as I know they're still the minimum the devs try to keep supported. It's why we have things like the legacy 32 bit client, even though there haven't been any 32 bit processors available new anywhere for over a decade now.

OK but that's a very specific combination of three separate costume parts that don't even share a common theme so it's unlikely to ever see more than one such costume at a time. The sybil robes, on the other hand, a large chunk of the playerbase has wanted for ages and has several capes on that one piece alone. So the chances of seeing a couple dozen of them on screen would be much higher. That said, I'm not sure anyone's ever actually publicly tested it. Would be interesting to see what the actual performance impact is if one was to make a costume with all three of the pieces you mentioned and, on a minimum spec computer, go into an AE mission set to x8 with every mob wearing it to put the largest conceivable amount of capes on screen at once. Then compare framerates between that and the same mission but give the mobs a costume with one cape each. The only difficulty really would be finding someone who actually still has a minimum spec computer. I'm told they do exist but I haven't met one in years.

The problem with both that and the sybil robes is not that it doesn't work, it's that it has multiple capes on it. Giving those pieces to players would violate the 'one cape per player costume' rule they've always stuck to. Whether that rule is still valid in the context of much more powerful modern computers is a whole other discussion but for now, the Homecoming devs try to stick to the game's system requirements as they existed at the end of live. And adding a second cape (Or more, the sybil robe if I remember rightly has four of them?) to potentially dozens of player costumes on screen is taxing enough on the system that it would require raising them.

The only problem I see with this is that for those who already have all their incarnate powers empyrean merits no longer have much use. I wonder if it'd be too out of line to add an option to content that gives empyreans to receive reward merits instead? Wouldn't interfere with the apparent goal of preventing people easily farming infinite merits in AE but for those doing trials, task forces and story arcs past what they need for incarnate powers they wouldn't be getting rewards they have no use for.

Stalkers had Disrupt long before Entropic Aura got the recharge effect though. They've had it for as long as the set has existed, and been confusing people about why for just as long. Regardless, the request for psi resist in Kibetic Dampening is a good one.

I claimed Airwing and Singsong because altitis is a serious problem but not serious enough for me to stop.

This is true of all legacy weapons, they're sized for the male model only and weren't updated when they made the customisable ones. If I remember rightly it was intentional at the time as the live devs didn't want to upset people who liked the way the legacy models looked.

They're really not though. Mechanically they are I suppose but the VFX for Kheldians were just for them. They reuse animations on the player model like basically everything did up until issue 5 or so, but all the particle effects are unique.

This is still happening to me pretty consistently. I'm able to open packs when I first attempt to, but after claiming the contents I'm then unable to open any more for a period of at least 10 minutes typically. Should be pretty reproducable as this sequence of events almost always causes it for me even late at night when hardly anyone is online and server load should thus be minimal. - Buy 20 packs off the auction house (Which kind doesn't matter I think but I typically buy 10 each of Heroes & Villains and Rogues & Vigilantes) - Open all of them. - Claim all the ATOs, boosters, brainstorms, merits, unslotters, converters. I don't usually claim inspirations or temp powers until I need them for something later. - Put all of those on the auction house for whatever price you like, maybe convert some of the ATOs to ones that sell better first. - Claim the inf for anything that sells immediately. - Buy any number of additional packs. - Attempt to open those, nothing happens. Repeated attempts sometimes generate a 'please wait a moment' message in chat. - Logging out to character select after the aforementioned repeated attempts tends to generate that MultiTransactionFail error popup mentioned in the other thread Apparition linked.

That is honestly an impressive level of laziness, wow.