General Idiot

The issue with shield on Sentinels is none of the animations for using ranged powers with a shield actually exist. On the melee sets, every single power animation, even the ones that look exactly the same, when used with a shield is a different unique animation from the one used without the shield. All the movement animations and the basic combat stance and such could be reused but aside from the powers that already exist in melee AT epic pools, new animations would need to be created for potentially every other ranged primary power, plus some of the support powers in Sentinel epic pools that aren't already in melee ones. Not saying it's impossible for sentinels to get shields, just that it's vastly more work than just proliferating the set because as it stands, if you just straight ported it over it'd try to call animations that don't exist. And that's before considering what adjustments would need to be made to the set itself - Against All Odds would definitely need changed, if nothing else.

I also want a way to obtain super packs through gameplay. Personally rather than sticking them on the hardest badges in the game (Though a gauranteed reward of one for such badges is certainly an additional possibility) I'd tie them to something less super difficult and/or time consuming but make it something higher level so there's a time investment to encourage not just making infinite alts and grabbing packs, and add an enforced cooldown on getting them like Catalysts have. If nothing else I'd make it all master badges rather than just the ones you define as harder than the others. Or alternately, add them as a reward choice for taskforces where you can pick the normal merit reward OR a random super pack, possibly only for TFs above a certain length, level and/or difficulty and subject to the same once every 20 hours rule that other rewards are. (Not serious suggestion for laughs, make the winter ones only available from the Shadow Shard TFs and watch people tear their hair out over it.) Just give them something other than 'drop 10 million inf on the auction house' cause having that as the only way of obtaining them is kinda boring. ...also unrelated but Vanden that avatar is mesmerising.

And that's fine too, play the game how you want to play it, Personally I like being able to just press one button without having to worry about what my current target is. Since I posted it last year I've also taken to using a similar bind for Vengeance on the characters who have it, which is possibly even more useful with how quickly most people mash their self rez button the moment they die.

Yeah, that happens to me a lot as well but that's more likely just lag more than anything. What sets this apart for me is no matter when I do it, how well the rest of the game is or isn't running at the time, it's always the second lot of packs I buy that makes me wait minutes at a time for them to open while the first lot works fine.

Before anyone says it, no I'm pretty sure this isn't actual network lag on my end. Recently I've found a weirdly consistent lag when opening super packs. I log in, collect my sold auctions and buy a bunch of packs to open. The first time, they open fine. But if I then sell stuff from those and buy a second lot with the proceeds, that second lot will consistently take ages to respond when I try to open them. They open eventually, but sometimes only after upwards of ten minutes waiting for it. And it's always the second lot I open, the first is always fine. If not for that consistency I'd blame it on my poor connection and move on, but it's too consistent to be just my connection. It feels more like whatever subsystem handles the packs is getting overloaded somehow, especially when the entire rest of the game runs fine with no lag in the meantime and I can keep playing normally while waiting. To reproduce, assuming it's actually a bug or some problem with the server and not some weirdness on my specific setup: - Buy a stack of super packs (How many seems to be irrelevent in my experience, but usually I buy 10 at a time) - Open all of then, they should open normally or maybe a couple of seconds delay if you're lagging a bit. - Collect all the rewards from your character items, place them all on the auction house. Specifically I tend to place ATOs for reasonable prices to sell overnight, and everything else (boosters, converters, unslotters etc) goes up for 1 inf to sell immediately for whatever the standing bids are at. I don't know if the auctioning in between is relevent or not, it might also be worth testing just waiting five minutes or so. - Buy another stack of super packs. - Try to open the second stack, they should take an unreasonably long time to open. - Repeated attempts to open the second stack should produce a 'Please wait a moment' message in the chat window, followed some time later by the results of several packs at once being spammed in chat while only one actually comes up in the proper window. Has anyone else observed similar behavior?

Not impossible, just more work than it sounds. The aggro cap is part of the enemy AI, not something attached to players. That particular code doesn't reference the player's archetype at all so making it different for Tankers only requires adding whole new functionality to do that, not just changing a value somewhere. They could make the aggro cap higher for everyone globally which I think might be what other servers have done, but really that only moves the problem rather than fixing it. Edit: beaten by moments. If Thunderspy does have it for tanks only that's pretty cool and I'd be kind of curious to know how they did it.

Personally I'd love customisable arrows in general. The modern looking arrows work for some but I'd love an option to be firing more fantasy looking wooden or even energy arrows for some characters. My archery blaster for example I always imagined as firing something like the light arrows from Zelda but there's no options for it.

The KB->KD enhancements do actually add a second effect of a 0.67 mag knock. They also apply an enormous negative enhancement to the existing effect, such that no amount of other slotting in the power will make even the strongest KB powers trigger anything off the existing effect. I suspect it's done that way so that they don't have to code in different adjustments for every power that does knockback since so many of them have wildly different magnitudes. A similar enhancement to replace one effect with another could theoretically be done for any attribute that accepts enhancements, I think. But there's a whole can of game balance worms there that I doubt the devs particularly want to open.

See also: A great many enemies that make the beep boop robot noises from the Council and Fifth Column hoverbots when struck despite not at all being robots.

As I understand it the reason the pack can't be disabled isn't strictly a problem of errors if you attack without it - the powers just animate from a default point, usually the character's feet. But removing the pack from a character that's supposed to have it causes the player model to do odd things, the part of the back it's meant to attach to deforms because the animations are expecting the pack and not having it. In theory one could simply make a duplicate crab pack costume piece and just set all the textures on it to be 100% transparent, so it's there but invisible. And that would possibly stop it breaking anything, at which point it's more a conceptual issue of are they allowed to remove the pack and do the developers want to allow it. Which should be a yes on both counts if you ask me, but I'm not a developer and with how spaghetti this game's code is there's every chance it might be a whole lot more complicated than that.

While the idea of a badge for rescuing those random NPCs on the street is a good one, 'Rescuer' already exists as a badge. You get it for rescuing Penny Yin's dad in one of the Faultline story arcs. See: https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Rescuer_Badge Instead, they could perhaps reuse one of the old AE rescue objective badges that got removed - Do Gooder, Safekeeper, Savior or To The Rescue. Though I think some of those may have been reused already for other things?

All I want is to have the Arachnos maces usable for War Mace too. Bane Spiders already use most of the same powers. Keep the requirement of taking Mace Mastery to unlock them if they must. Also, no redraw between War Mace and Mace Mastery powers if you use the same weapon model for both, like Assault Rifle and I think also Beam Rifle do with Munitions Mastery on blasters. And while we're at it, Carnival of Light maces for Bane Spiders and Mace Mastery. They're already designed to shoot lasers, in the hands of NPCs they actually do even.

Not really. The Sybil robe already exists and works fine on the female player model, technically speaking. You can even get it on a costume in Paragon Chat with a bit of database trickery. The one cape per costume rule I was talking about is a thing from the early days of the game, back when people used to remove all capes and even things with added geometry like boots and shoulder pads from their costumes to run Hamidon raids because with fifty plus players on screen it honestly did significantly improve the framerate. That's obviously not necessary now but the rule was kept in place by the devs explicitly to keep the game's minimum system requirement from inflating more than necessary as new things were added. Consider for a moment that many people still have to turn their graphics settings down to run things like mothership raids or the aforementioned Hamidon with a playable framerate. Enough that it's generally recommended to do so. And remember that animated cape rigs are much more graphically demanding than static costume pieces, and also that CoH is not and has never been a hugely well optimised game. Add four capes to every player in that mothership raid and watch the potato PCs fry under the strain. The rule exists for a reason and some players on very old machines absolutely would require an upgrade to continue playing if it were relaxed. Either that or they'd have to add something to dynamically scale the number of capes (and other animated pieces like wings) allowed on screen to the graphics settings. Which with the Sybil robe especially could lead to some pretty awkward wardrobe malfunctions on minimum settings. For reference, the official minimum requirements for the live game at shutdown were still an 800mhz Pentium III, 512mb ram and a GeForce 2. To my knowledge the devs here haven't updated those so it's still, outdated or not, reasonable to expect the game to run on that hardware. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone actually is, either.

I don't personally think we need to stick so hard and fast to that rule myself. But it is the rule the devs on live always had, and the devs here appear to be keeping. All I know is every time raising the system requirements is considered, a handful of people still using ancient computers with 32-bit Windows XP come out of the woodwork to argue in favor of not doing so.

The problem with the Sybil outfit is, I think, mostly that is has multiple cape rigs on it for all the flowing parts. The normal one has three or four, and Sister Solaris's one has something absurd like six. Both very much in violation of the 'one animated part per costume' rule that's always been held to. It's a system requirements thing, some people still play this game on ancient computers and adding a half dozen capes to each costume when there's potentially fifty or a hundred such costumes on screen at once is pretty resource heavy.

For radio or paper missions I generally assume the LFG message was broadcast over the same police radio or encoded in the same newspaper the missions themselves come from. Or that my character is just responding to the same message the others are and chooses to team up with this other bunch of random people there when they arrive. It's not that much of a leap to make, in my opinion.

It should at least be added for the power's that are direct copies of various dark powers that already have it, particularly for archetypes where soul mastery is the only dark epic pool available so characters can maintain a consistent look between their primary, secondary and epic powers if they want to. As for adding it to the more unique ones like soul storm, that's less important to me though I could see them taking the graphics from dark control's hold, the multiple little spirits that circle around the target. Especially if that animation could be extended so they continue doing so for the duration, like the standard soul storm VFX do.

Personally I prefer the new fixed animations. The old ones always felt broken to me, with there being half the power's animation cut out so you just pop from idle to firing with no intervening movement between. And some of them used to do strange things when flying too. If you were moving when you fired it, it didn't animate at all. Also, that comparison where you delay the power a moment. Do that again without delaying it, using the new animations here. I think you'll find the damage still goes through even if the enemy hibernates before it actually hits - unless something's changed, hit/miss/unaffected are all checked at the start of the animation regardless of when the damage actually lands.

Given it was one of the sets the original devs were working on before shutdown, I would assume there are plans to finish it eventually. A couple of other servers already have, and their versions show the problem with finishing it. Wind Control as it was left exists only as power definitions, with no proper visual effects attached. So either new effects need to be made, or old effects need to be reused. Most of the new sets here were made the latter way but given Wind Control isn't one of them, I suspect our devs are waiting until they have the time and/or ability to make proper effects for it. And I don't know offhand if anyone has figured out making completely new visual effects yet. That's speculation on my part but it seems the likely explanation for why we haven't got it yet.

Level 50 clockwork already exist, they show up briefly in Lady Grey's taskforce.

Yeah, being able to choose uniform or normal for each slot rather than being locked at one uniform and 9 normal slots would be amazing. But if I recall correctly the uniforms are kind of hacked together at best so that might be more of a technical limitation than anything. I know the crab backpack is, the character's back deforms really weirdly in certain situations if you just take it off. Or so I'm told at least.

Widows being able to use other claws, and soldiers being able to use more rifles would both be awesome. Also more maces for bane spiders. And on a related note in the other direction - shared redraw between War Mace and Mace Mastery if you pick the same mace for both, so alternating powers between the two doesn't make you draw the same weapon you already had out. I think Beam Rifle already has something similar with Munitions Mastery on blasters.

Yeah, but it'd be nice to have something for levelling past when you stop getting things for it. Even if it's something not directly rewarding, like the level up inspirations lasting longer or it firing team inspirations instead of just normal ones. Personally I think something like that could work, maybe not that specifically but something that isn't getting actual stuff, just a bigger bonus on levelup than you get while you're still also getting stuff for it.

Regarding ST and AoE being on different enhancement schedules and players not standing for nerfing every AoE in the game, you could always do it the other way around and put ST damage enhancement on Schedule C or even D, so it's a buff to single target powers rather than a nerf to AoEs. Of course, that'd just make the problem of damage enhancement being so much more valuable than anything else even worse, without also buffing enemies at the same time and then it'd be hard to really call it a buff if the net result is still AoEs being less useful.

I have a texture mod I made of this exact thing myself, that I replaced one of the normal shorts pieces with. I'd love it to be made into an actual thing though. And speaking of Disco while we're on the topic of new costume pieces, I'd love a sleeveless version of the Disco top. Tried to make that one too but my rudimentary editing skills weren't good enough.