Chronos

You probably already know about all of these, but... 1: In the second mission to hunt 10 Freaks, the Freaks apparently all need to be in Brickstown, but the mission doesn't specify this. Either the requirement or the mission listing should be fixed, so they're consistent. 2: Killing Marcus rewards 5 Hero alignment points and 1 Villain alignment point. I suspect that nothing is supposed to give 5 alignment points at once, and I'm sure that nothing is supposed to give both Hero and Villain points at the same time. 3: In the last-last mission, Flambeaux and Grym are both missing description text.

There are at least two other exploration badges with multiple sites that need to be visited. There's one for all three transit stations in Praetoria, and there's one with a whole bunch of sites in the river in Praetoria (that one is especially annoying, because you can't see the markers). For all three of these badges, the first time you visit one of the markers, you see nothing but your counter going up, and if you visit the same site again, nothing at all happens. Underground Praetoria also has a few badges in more than one place, but for those, any one location works.

I ended up going with a normal (non-giant) boss for this mission. There's still about a dozen things that aren't quite right in the arc, but I think it's as good as I can get it, within the AE limits. The arc is #55072, Two Earths Devoured. If you're going to try it, I recommend bringing a team: It's designed to be a task force.

One of the industrial maps is the Hellforge, in Sharkhead Isle. There are a couple of others, though.

I don't know how hard this would be, but I'd like to be able to splice together pieces of other maps. Probably not directly (that'd be a monster of 3D editing), but by floors. Like, you know the second mission of Tin Mage, where you start in the Vanguard base, teleport to a portal room in Portal Corp, and then fight your way out to the courtyard? I have a mission where it'd be perfect to start at the portal room and fight your way to the courtyard (but without the Vanguard base part).

The [Call Reinforcements] power on Soldiers of Arachnos appears to take the wrong sort of enhancements. First, it can take normal (non-set) defense debuff enhancements, even though (according to the detailed info) none of the resulting Arachnobot Disruptors' powers do defense debuff. And it also doesn't take enhancements that it should take: Most of the arachnobots' attacks cause endurance drain, and they have an attack that holds and one that immobilizes, but they can't take endurance mod, hold, nor immobilize enhancements (either normal or set).

I figure that I don't have to bring the level quite all the way up to the monster-- It's designed to be a hard fight for a full team, so it's OK if it's a little above the players' level. A gradual level increase, though, hadn't occurred to me. Doesn't the "customs don't grant any XP" thing only start when you draw from more than two powersets? You can still have a primary and a secondary, like player-built characters? And do I read your sig right that you've got multiple Praetorian arcs? I'll have to check those out. Last I saw (a few years ago), there wasn't really any Praetorian content on AE, which is part of what prompted me to start this one (it's meant to be a Praetorian task force).

OK, so I know that you can't always get what you want in the editor, but I want to see how close I can get. What I want is a Devouring Earth giant monster (preferably Strophoria, the fungus), in a level 30ish mission. The problem is that Strophoria only goes down to level 37. So far, the options I know of are: Use a level 37 Strophoria anyway, and make it one hell of a fight for level 30s. Bump up the level of my arc. Bump up the level of just that one mission of the arc. Replace the giant monster with a normal fungus-monster boss, with normal fungus-monster abilities. Create my own custom character with big-boss powers, but with an appearance constrained by the costume creator (which doesn't have a fungus-cap head). Are there any other options? Any way to use a fungus model, but customize the powers? Or make a customized character GM-sized? Or put a negative level shift on a GM? Or, well, anything else anyone can think of?

That's not what I was asking. I already know that they're a support class, and I'm already 24 and at my mandatory respec, and I'm already choosing crab (both for the pets, and because the arms feel sort of emblematic of Arachnos to me). The question is, given all of that, why would I choose any of the crab attacks?

I feel like I'm missing something here... Crab is supposed to be the ranged specialization, right? But it looks like all of the Crab ranged attacks are inferior to the basic unspecialized Huntsman ranged attacks. To start off: [Channelgun] is the same damage, secondary effect, end cost, range, and recharge as [Single Shot]... The only differences are that Channelgun has a longer activation time (1.33 seconds vs. 0.90 seconds), slightly lower accuracy (1.00 instead of 1.05), and a different damage type. I mean, I guess that energy is slightly better than lethal, but that hardly seems worth it. Moving on, [Longfang] and [Burst] are likewise identical (in every way, including damage type), except that Longfang has a 2 second activation time, to Burst's 1 second. [Suppression] has a slightly higher damage per cast than [Heavy Burst], and the cone is wider, but it also has a longer activation AND recharge time, and a much higher end cost. And of course, [Venom Grenade] and [Frag Grenade] are the same for both. Even if I want to take Crab for the armor and spiderlings, why would I ever choose the crab attacks over the huntsman ones? I've heard there's something about huntsman redraw actually adding to activation time, unlike all other redraws in the game, but even if that's true, couldn't you get around that by just customizing them to no-redraw? Or even if that doesn't work, by just only using the Huntsman powers so it never needs to redraw?

I just got this bug on the Trilogy mission, too. I also note that the minimap doesn't appear to match the terrain, either, which might be related: Maybe the forcefield walls are in the wrong place?

I wanted to chime in with another option for keybinding. On most of my alts, I like keeping my number keys bound to the powers on tray 1, instead of to the default of current tray, so if I'm temporarily on another tray using Secondary Mutation or Reveal or something, and suddenly see an enemy, my reflexive hitting of the number keys will still work. But having gotten into that habit, it means that the usual Kheld technique of changing tray when changing forms won't work. So what I've done instead, is I've bound all of my number keys to attempt to execute the power on tray 1 and the power on the server tray. Only one power will work in a multi-power command, but that's OK, because only one of those two powers can work, in any given form. If I'm in humanoid form, my keys end up executing from tray 1, as normal, and if I'm in squid or lobster form, then my tray 1 powers will be grayed out, and so the number keys will execute the powers available in my form instead.

OK, here's the alphabetized version summons.mnu. If you already set up the previous one, then you should be able to just replace the file with this one and re-start the game. Otherwise follow the directions in the first post.

Some of these, I'm not sure where they come from, either, and some of them, I'm pretty sure can't even be earned any more. I just included everything I could find. I'll re-order it alphabetically... some time or other.

I find that on any character I play a lot, I end up accumulating a TON of temporary powers. Summons, in particular, are very useful, and there are a lot of them, but they don't usually need to be used at an instant's notice, which makes them well-suited for a popmenu. So I made a popmenu ro access them all with a single icon. To use this: First, download the attached file summons.mnuinto your CoH/data/texts/English/menus folder (or the appropriate other language). Then, if your game is running, completely restart the game. Once in game, type /macro_image Temporary_Summon Summons popmenu summons This will put an icon in your bar that looks like the icon for most of the temporary summon powers, and if you click it, you'll get a list of all of them, with any that aren't available (you don't have them or they're on cooldown) grayed out. Just click any that isn't grayed out, and you'll cast that summon five feet in front of you. The full list: Amy's Ward Build Snow Beast Clockwork Connection Knight Errant Shivan Shard Longbow Mech Vanguard HVAS Backup Radio Signature Summon (Melee Damage) Signature Summon (Ranged Damage) Signature Summon (Support) Signature Summon (Tank) Rikti Drone Vial of Bees Loa Bone Coral Amulet Creeper Seed Demon Box Summoning Amulet Warwolf Whistle Arachnos Backup Radio Artificial Demon Seeds Soul Crystal Summon: Tsoo Sorcerer I apologize that the list is kind of in random order right now, because that's the order in which I dug up all of the powers. Any suggestions for a more logical order would be appreciated (Alphabetically? By power level? By level at which you earn them? I dunno). I also don't guarantee that it's completely bug-free; if you find any bugs, let me know (ideally, with a fix!).

70% of the US is white, true. But it's a lot lower in US cities, especially cities that attract a large amount of immigration from around the world (and beyond). Meanwhile, what percentage of the human characters in CoH are white? I'd be surprised if it was less than 90%. There's a real discrepancy here. And I'm not saying to "trick people into creating non-white characters", any more than people are currently "tricked" into playing whatever random outfit comes up. You could still change your skin color the same way you can now, if it matters to you, and if it doesn't matter to you, then why shouldn't it be random? If anything, it's the situation right now that is "tricking people" into playing a particular color.

When I'm creating a new character, I usually don't give much thought to skin color, unless it's an inhuman color like blue or green. And so I usually just end up leaving the skin color at the default, which is a shade of European. And I suspect that there are a lot of other folks who do the same thing, which ends up resulting in a very heavily white population for Paragon City, which should, lore-wise, be even more diverse than real-world cities. What if, when we created a new character, the skin color was randomized from among the range of natural human skin colors, just like how a new character starts with a randomly-chosen costume set? Players could still choose to change it to anything they want, of course, but it'd mean a lot more variety among those who don't change it. Is this something that the devs would be able to implement?

...And, on thinking about it further, my requirements aren't quite what I thought they were. The story doesn't actually need the map to be outside; what It needs is for it to be a natural setting. Which means that I could put it in a cave instead, which means that I have front, middle, and back zones, which means that it's possible to put the escort in the front and the boss in the back after all. So all I need now is to find a cave map with a small enough "front" zone that the NPC is impossible to miss, and then maybe have a bunch of patrols that spawn as soon as the escort is rescued, to disincentivize rescuing her and abandoning her.

OK, what I want: Player meets an NPC (preferably right near the entrance). Player and NPC together go find a boss. Beat the boss, and the mission is finished. If the NPC dies before then, the mission fails. All of this takes place on an outdoor map. I know that I can't quite do exactly that, but I want as close an approximation as I can get. I've gotten as far as that the NPC must be an "escort", not an "ally", to impose the fail condition. But I keep running into problems after that. First, outdoor maps don't have a "front", so the NPC isn't usually near the entrance. OK, I can live with that. Second, though, what do I use as the destination? If I make the boss itself the destination, then there's the possibility (especially on an outdoor map) that the player will meet and defeat the boss before meeting the NPC. I tried to fix that by making the boss only appear after the NPC was rescued, but then it gives me a circular dependency error (because the escort has to come after the boss exists, and the boss can't exist until after the escort). So then I tried making an object to be the destination, and have the boss spawn after the player finishes escorting the NPC there. But if the object is a collectible or destructible, then there's the possibility of the player finding and dealing with it before finding the NPC. So I tried making it a defendable object with [Empty] attacking it. But with nothing attacking it, it won't let me make the Defend an Object a required objective, and it won't let me use a non-required objective as a trigger for anything. Plus, there are problems with spawning the boss. If I make the objective "defeat a boss", then it can spawn anywhere on the map, making the part where I lead the NPC to the object a wild goose chase. If I make it an ambush, then it spawns nearby, but apparently ambushes aren't ever required objectives, so the player doesn't have to fight. I'm beginning to think I'm going to need to just re-write this part of the story entirely... Any help?

It's true that Traps isn't good for the same things as other sets. That's a feature, not a bug. Sure, when I'm moving fast, I'm not using much besides Caltrops, Seeker Drones, and Force Field Generator... but on a hard, slow fight, you can set up one heck of a killzone. Especially if the villain is one who monologues before attacking. It's the kind of set that can turn a fight from impossible to winnable. Web Grenade: It's not entirely useless. When I set up a Zone of Pain, I don't want enemies just running out of it. Still, if it were skippable, I probably would. Caltrops: Great. No change needed. Triage Beacon: OK, it's kind of weak as heals go, but then, Traps isn't really a healing-focused set. Probably OK as-is, though making it mobile might not be a bad idea. Acid Mortar: Fine as-is. My only complaint is that it (and Seeker Drones) can't take pet enhancements. I mean, they even show up in the pet window and everything. This would remove a lot of the pressure on masterminds without an instant-army power. Force Field Generator: I've never had any problems with it keeping up, but then, my trapper uses Ninja Run/Sprint in lieu of a travel power. Seeker Drones: Same as Acid Mortar. Fine as-is, but should take pet enhancements. Poison Trap: It seems like its triggering radius is too short-- An enemy needs to be right on top of it for it to go off. I'd increase the trigger radius to match the cloud radius. Otherwise fine: A great situational tool for AVs with high regen. Trip Mines: See introductory comments. They're a large part of what makes Traps what it is. Maybe reduce the interrupt time to make them at least a little useable in the thick of combat... Or maybe make them work like snipes, where you can use them in combat for lower damage? But don't change them too much. Detonator: If my pets die, I die. It's not worth the cost, unless it's enough to completely end a fight all by itself, and in that case, it'd be overpowered. Probably should be replaced entirely.