ZorkNemesis

They're not supposed to show up in your contact list if I recall, as technically all three of them are TF contacts that didn't have a team size requirement. They do appear in the list of missions within the pillar though, that might be a factor.

If you are a hero, you must be at least a Vigilante to start paper missions. You obtain your paper by visiting a Broker (one in ever villain zone except for Mercy) who should be set as your waypoint the first time you enter a zone (just like Detectives). You can run mayhem missions as a Vigilante just fine, but contacts you get afterward won't speak to you until you go full evil. I believe you can still get the contact for rerunning Mayhem missions as a Vigilante thougj, as long as you get the Hero Slayer badge (25 Paragon City Heroes or Signature Heroes defeated, signature referring to Freedom Phalanx, Vindicators, and possibly others like Foreshadow and Mirror Spirit) Important: you cannot obtain the Invader or Force of Nature Accolades if you are a Vigilante. You must be Villain or Rogue for those to unlock, unless you already have their blueside variants (Task Force Commander and Geas of the Kind Ones). You still have to go Villain or Rogue for the accolades to be awarded, but you will automatically get them on swap if you have them.

This is probably intentional. Sleet and Freezing Rain do so little damage (0.33 per tick at level 50 before the -Res) that Containment would be near pointless. Not to mention neither of those powers are actually meant to be used for their damage (Gale is a counterpoint, I know, but Gale actually does less damage then Sleet/Freezing Rain even with Containment) while Ice Storm is more damage than it is a slow. It could also be an oversight as there are very few damaging powers in Controller secondaries at all, with most being pet or pseudo damage like Storm or Traps (Gale seems to be the only one that actually lists Containment damage in it's description). I'm still thinking intentional though given that Sleet and Freezing Rain aren't meant to be damage dealing powers but instead a crowd debuff. Incidentally, Ice Storm's containment damage isn't double. Ice Storm does 50/50 Lethal/Cold. The listed Containment damage is another 50 as Cold, so Containment Ice Storm is only doing 150% instead of 200%. However I don't actually have the power to try it myself (only viewed the power in a respec window, not actually having it).

Here's a couple. Old School Newbie - Assault Rifle/Devices Blaster. My very first costume and character dating back to at least Halloween 2004, possibly a bit earlier. You can kind of tell I was still a teenager at the time. The cape wasn't part of the original costume until level 20, back in the day when you have to earn your cape. Junkertown - Robots/Electric Mastermind. A scavenger with a knack for tinkering. His armor and rifle are mostly constructed from rusty scrap metal. He also built and replaced his own right arm which is where the electricity is generated, however the nature of the material it's built with tends to make it faulty at times. Dizzy Duelist - Staff/Bio Brute. A former contestant on the hit game show Paragon City Contenders, he was disqualified after it came to light that he was using illegal super serums to gain an edge. Despite this, he still managed to find some hero work. Very much inspired by American Gladiators. Also happened after seeing a lot of "spin to win" Brutes over on the Brute forums. Modern Samurai - Katana/Energy Scrapper. With a combination of cybernetics, nanotech, and a laser sword, she hits the streets with a new style of feudal era swordsmanship. Or maybe she's seen too many cyberpunk style movies, who knows?

To what extent do you mean "inside terrain"? Do you mean instances where the objective is simply clipping into a wall/floor/whatever, or do you want cases where the objective is somehow so far into the terrain it's unclickable? I assume the latter is requested, but is the former worth calling out, because I know a bunch of bad glowie spawns that don't line up with the floors, especially in caves where they spawn on uneven ground.

I'm a fan of Rogues personally. Villains who aren't all evil, they just simply take what they desire. A lot of my characters go the Rogue routes for the goodies or a sense of entitlement. My Widow fits this bill as I have it in my head that, while she serves Arachnos, the pay could be better and with the whole forcing herself into the Destined Ones list she can use that extra leverage to get what she deserves off the clock. Another Rogue of mine has shades of mad science, but mad science gets expensive. Maintaining an experimental power suit isn't cheap when Aeon and Crey are getting all the research money for their own projects. Gotta get that funding from somewhere.

Essentially it used to. Pretty much all of the actual temporary powers offered by P2W were originally random recipe drops you'd have to find (with Signature Summons being the exception as those were only available through the market or rewards program). They were somewhat rare compared to normal enhancements if I recall.

Not a typo, likely just a story error. In Shauna Stockwell's arc, the mission to Find Emily Rodriguez, if you check the description for the Anderson Construction Employees it mentions that they work for Dr. Aeon? I know Architect Entertainment is a part of Aeon Corp, but i'm not so sure a random construction firm in Kings Row would be too. I'm sure they just copy/pasted something from another mission arc, since this arc never made it to live and was probably still in beta at the time of the shutdown.

When you're a Devices Blaster on a mission where the mobs in the mission don't turn hostile until you click a nearby glowie.

I don't know exactly how to describe this, but it's weird. So what's been happening, since at least the May 4th patch (this is when I started noticing things happening) I've been experiencing sporadic instances where my connection freaks out in such a way that I cannot activate powers and while I can move i'm not actually moving, though if it happens during a power activation i'm stuck in place until it resolves. The game is still running as normal and enemies targeting/attacking me or pets following me stop at the spot these issues started and treat me as if i'm there. Should I die during this period I can also move around in a dead state. Basically I cannot send any inputs to the game, including movement, powers, advancing mission text, auto-exiting completed missions, going to the hospital, etc. After about 20 seconds of being unable to act I snap back to where it started and can use powers and move proper again as if nothing happened and any prompts advance as if I clicked them multiple times. When this happens I occasionally bring up the Netgraph to see what's going on if anything. The graphs don't show any yellow or red spikes, but I often see evenly spaced gaps appear as the event is going on. Once it clears up, the graph looks normal from then on however it reports something like 100+ packets duplicated in when it resolves. Here's one instance I recorded the graph as it happened (Netgraph 2). This is what it looked like before, the large green spikes are likely due to fighting large amounts of Rikti at once.: Here's what it looked like as it was happening And when it cleared up, this was the result. I see this usually several times during my play sessions but often without any consistent timing. Sometimes it's minutes between hiccups, sometimes an hour. This also isn't exclusive to being in-game as i've had it happen on the character select screen a couple times (it freezes when picking a character before clearing up 20-30 seconds later, sometimes loading the character costume missing textures at first). I also had it happen on the login screen itself today where it threw up the "cannot connect to server, check your connection/firewall settings) popup. Once this caused a full "Lost connection to mapserver" though logging back in threw up the "this account is already logged in" message. There's also been a couple instances where it locked up while changing zones and threw me back to the login screen without an error popup whatsoever. What's making me wonder however is that i've monitored other resources as things happen. My own networking shows no errors/hiccups and no other connections are being interrupted. No other online games I play do this sort of thing either on the same network, PC or otherwise. I'm thinking it's a problem with the client but verifying files didn't solve anything. It could also be a firewall thing though i'm hesitant to make adjustments without knowing how. I'm not too well versed on network diagnostics so troubleshooting this sort of thing isn't quite up my alley. But, i'm hoping maybe someone else knows what might be happening and if there's maybe something I can do or try to fix this. I was hoping it would be fixed in a patch following May 4th's, but that doesn't seem to be the case, and I also don't really see anyone else mentioning similar issues. If anyone's got advice for me i'm all ears, this is getting really frustrating to deal with; playing a click-heavy build becomes a case of waiting for death when the issue arises.

Force Field also has a fair amount of KB. Maybe less than Storm but Force Bolt and Repulsion Bomb are very potent KB powers, plus Repulsion Field KBing anything too close and Force Bubble outright pushing things away.

I definitely recall at least one case of the Paladin droning itself on Live servers. The path they take leads them to High Park, and i'm certain they went to where the Galaxy City gate was if they didn't get caught up in a corner. The one that spawns closest to the tram would path right by the Architect to get there, and it's very likely this behavior was never corrected after AE was added, presumably because people didn't care enough to take down the Paladin for the paltry 2 merits and no badge. In fact, having one of them path directly into a drone ensures that at least one construction site can spawn as each completed Paladin blocks its original spawn site from starting again as long as its alive I think.

The Fire Sword variant of Katana for Scrapper does not show up if you're using a female build, resulting in the time-honor tradition of swinging around an invisible weapon. It will show for male/huge builds however. This persists outside of the editor as well. EDIT: double checked, this applies to all ATs that can use a Katana, including Stalker (Ninja Blade) and Blaster (Ninja Training). Can't verify Sentinel's Epic pool at the moment, but seeing as how Blaster also produces an invisible Fire Sword, I would assume Sentinel does as well. Another error I noticed while checking, Female and Huge builds also have access to a duplicate Katana: "Fire and Ice Sword - Elemental" and "Flaming Sword" appear to be the same weapon, the sword made out of actual fire. The Male build does not have "Flaming Sword" in their options but does have "Fire and Ice Sword - Elemental." EDIT AGAIN: Pictures removed to create more upload space. This issue has been resubmitted via the Costume Errors megathread.

And because the mission is timed, you can't just opt to auto-complete it either. The workaround I use for this is to reset the mission by flagging a paper/tip mission and swapping between the two (or abandoning, that also works), while also lowering the difficulty to reduce the likelihood of a Spines Warden spawning. I believe the boss that's supposed to guard them is an Officer by default, so the lowest difficulty should make them safer to extract.

The Hollows [2202.7 32.0 -3175.6] These air vents aren't attached to the roof of the building they're on. Most other air vents in the immediate area I could find were.

Not so much an "I don't know what to play" character, but if I join a group that's underperforming I won't hesitate to go fetch my Thermal/Ice Defender. It's astonishing what one support AT can do to completely turn a team around. I've joined a couple teams that struggled with a couple AV fights or a monster (Goliath War Walker can actually be challenging with a poor setup) but as soon as my Defender made the scene it went from spinning tires to smooth sailing. This Defender is my go-to for what she can do. Fire shields are strong along with some heals if necessary, Forge is an excellent damage buff for the Blasters, Scrappers and Brutes, and Melt Armor can completely destroy tough groups while Heat Exhaustion will outright neuter a mob of my choosing. Throw in Ice Blast's slows and the butt-ton of damage procs I stacked in those powers and I also provide some major damage output while keeping foes mostly in place. Bitter Ice Blast and Freeze Ray both accept a bunch of different damage procs so they tend to demolish anything I throw them at.

So if we're looking at just DB and damage, Scrappers will have an edge in damage due to not needing to build up Fury to reach high levels of damage and occasional Scrapper crits for double damage are a significant bonus. When built and Fury is at decent levels the damage outputs tend to be close enough that it might not matter. Brutes do have a pretty good advantage however and that's taunt effects. Every attack a Brute delivers will taunt the target it hits meaning they are much less likely to flee in prolonged combat. While Willpower is one of the rare armors with a taunt aura for Scrapper too, Reflexes offers no such benefit for a Scrapper but the Brute version does have a taunt aura in Evasion at level 20 which will help keep aggroed mobs nearby. Brute's actual Taunt power is also AoE and works on up to 5 mobs, while Scrapper's Taunt is only 1 mob. DB tends to be a little light on damage at times and suffers the usual "everything resists lethal" problem at times so if you're concerned about mobs running away from you Brute may help that department if you decide on Reflexes over Willpower. Brutes also have a higher resistance cap if you're worried about that (90% vs Scrapper 75%). Both Reflexes and Willpower lean on defense over resistance though so this probably won't come into play, though I could imagine with some work you could maybe break 75% S/L with Willpower. My personal take: theming. I picture Scrappers as being nimble, having speed, finesse, and the precision to land deadly strikes. Meanwhile I see Brutes as the big guy who charges in and wrecks everything in their path. To me, Dual Blades leans more toward a Scrapper theme than a Brute theme, especially paired with Reflexes. DB on a Brute isn't out though, an unstoppable big mother hubbard brandishing two giant swords could also be terrifiying and maybe thanks to his Willpower he presses forward with no consideration for his own safety, maybe even too angry to die. Something to consider when you get around to your character creation, obviously you don't have to worry about that if you don't want.

Back on Live there were. Something along the lines of "Unusual Clockwork Activity detected in Kings Row" at construction start and then "The Paladin has been sighted in Kings Row" if construction finishes.

Evasive Maneuvers is basically the flight control benefit Afterburner used to have, but without the "Only Affect Self" status. It also provides some immobilize and knockback resistance (you don't go as far if you get knocked, less so than being in flight already offers) and you're also not as likely to be grounded by -Fly effects. The defense benefit is negligible, and really only applies out of combat, though it is a fairly strong bonus so it helps dodge attacks if you're just passing through hostile areas. Ultimately I feel it's up to you if you want to keep it or not. My reasoning for keeping it is simply because it still accepts Defense sets and can be used to mule a Luck of the Gambler if your normal powers lack space for one. It also takes universal travel, so if you don't already have it it can fit the Winter's Gift Slow Resist, or the Blessing of the Zephyr set for some more positional defense.

I mentioned this not long ago when my Beast MM's pets decided to take a nap in the bank vault. It seems that when it comes to bank vault doors that MM pets can't seem to path to where they would need to go to melee the door. Pets with ranged attacks will still shoot the door when they can see it, melee pets like Beasts and the Bruiser will stand there looking stupid unless you manually tell them to get closer.

The only one I can answer for sure is that range bonuses won't do anything useful. The Razzle Dazzle enhancement won't increase the radius at all, but will apply any other effects.

Meh, i'm more of a fan of putting the Gladiator's Fury proc in any damage aura when I can. When it goes off it makes everything in close proximity much easier to kill. Though if I have other powers that harbor GF better (Soul Drain being one of my favorite chocies) then yeah i'll throw ATO procs in there if I can spare slots.

A self-message channel certainly wouldn't hurt. It would be useful for macro confirmations and /t'ing yourself can get too noisy. Final Fantasy 11 has a feature like this already, where using /echo in a chat string displays a message to you only in the chat log, which is great because playing that game at a high level is basically amateur programming and having extra chat strings to help debug your macros is great.

I've seen this before, there's a particular open caves map that also does it if you walk into the correct corner. I posted about it a long while ago too.

Because Scrapper crits are baked into the powers, most auras won't trigger them. The only one I'm aware that does is Quills from Spines and that's part of the offensive set anyway so it gets a pass. I don't think there's any sort of imbalance to address as they all do what they do just fine. Many auras also serve to apply secondary effects; while Fire might not, Electric will drain endurance, dark and ice are supplemented by additional auras that fear/stun or slow targets, bio chews up resistances, stuff like that. The damage is very minor on the auras, even slotting it to max damage a Brute's aura won't do enough damage that it makes that significant a difference compared to the others (plus their normal Fury-charged AoEs should be clear-cutting foes anyway, the aura is more for taunting and secondary effects). Tankers having larger auras also plays into how they're meant to be the ones drawing fire and the larger aura means more things being taunted with Gauntlet effects. My only real problem with Scrapper auras is simply that most do not have a taunt aura attached like Tanker and Brute auras, causing foes to run away from the Scrapper if they live long enough, but at the same time Scrappers can mow down enemies so quickly that this really only becomes a problem if the Scrapper can't kill quick enough (which shouldn't be an issue unless the boss mobs resist your primary damage). There are ways to deal with that though, i'm personally a fan of putting knockdown procs into my AoEs (Avalanche and Overwhelming Force) so that when I sweep groups they all fall over and can't get away.