Luminara

Did you ever play Left 4 Dead? I did. Played the ever-loving hell out of it. Hundreds and hundreds of hours. After a few months of running around, shooting zombies in the face, trying to get Bill to say, "RELOADING!", I noticed something. The lighting. The path to the safe house always followed the lighting. There was usually a short side path you could take, but it always led back to the lit path. The developers used the lighting to guide players forward, without guiding them forward. It was a subtle, but remarkably effective, way to convey information. No-one thought about where to go, they didn't have to, they instinctively followed the lighting. Audio design is like that. When it's done properly, it's capable of conveying information to players without requiring their immediate and direct attention. With audio effects done the right way, players hear cues and clues and never stop to think about what to do next, they just know. Audio effects in a game should be considered and deliberate, used as an information delivery tool. It's not music, and when it's treated as though it is music, it loses all effectiveness at being an information delivery tool. That's why there's a separate music channel in games, so players can still receive vital information through the effects channel. The original implementation of power effects in CoH was amateur design. Continual toggle noise and excessively loud click sounds overwhelmed the senses and made it impossible to discern cues like objective sounds, or audio clues like what attack an enemy was about to use. Those cues and clues might as well not have been there at all, because they were drown out by the cacophonic assault from the effects channel. And neither Cryptic nor Paragon nerfed sounds, they fixed a horrible design oversight by fading loops and toning down clicks so players could hear critical information. Considering that we can't see what's going on half the time because of the same design flaw applied to particles and graphical effects ("MOAR! MOAR, DO YOU HEAR ME?! I WANT THAT SCREEN TO BURN OUT THREE SECONDS AFTER THE GAME FINISHES LOADING!" - J. Emmert), having information delivered through the effects channel is vital to the game's playability. The game is better with fewer audio effects hammering at the player's ears and mind and blocking out useful information. If you know anything about game design, you should recognize that. If you don't know anything about game design, you just learned something, and maybe that can assuage some of your bitterness. Or, at least, give you a reason to pause and reflect before you jump at the chance to insult people who do understand game design, as no-one who does would agree that blowing out players' eardrums with audio effects which mask important prompts is ever a good idea, much less good design.

Sprint isn't suppressed in combat. Sprint isn't suppressed out of combat. Sprint isn't suppressed when you're passing an exploration badge, or jumping through the donut in Faultline, or near a War Wall, or idling in Peregrine Island, or at any other time or for any other reason. There are no suppression flags on the power, it can't suppress without that. Additionally, I monitor Run Speed on almost all of my characters, and keep Sprint active during combat on any character with a net Recovery greater than 3.0 Endurance/second, and Sprint's Run Speed has never suppressed on any of those characters. I logged into my Ill/TA with Fly and tested. This character is level 50+ and is at 87.99 mph Fly Speed, capped at 87.95 mph. If there's even the tiniest suppression occurring, this would be the character to see it, since she's only 0.04 mph above the cap. Toggling Athletic Run on and off next to the AP P2W vendor, there's no Fly Speed suppression occurring. Flying around AP, toggling Athletic Run on and off, no Fly Speed suppression. Attacking Hellions, the only suppression is the normal reduction to Hover speed (38.99 mph on this character) when using an attack. Turning off Athletic Run while Fly Speed is suppressed isn't causing my Fly Speed to increase or the degree of suppression to reduce, the character is still at Hover speed. My tests don't support your statements.

Twelve pages, not one person paraphrased the Ready Player One quote I was expecting. People come to Co* for all the things they can do. They stay for all the things they can be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_Doctor

I'm not playing musical chairs with browsers, or OS', or platforms, like I did in the 90's. The wars can continue without my participation. Now, can I get back to leveling my headless-with-glowing-eyes Psi/Nin scrapper? I'm losing empowerment buff time AND I HAVEN'T CONFUSED ANYTHING IN THREE MINUTES! THIS IS SRS BSNSS! Also also, ur face is hot garbage. 😛

Okay, links removed and files directly uploaded.

I ran the URLs through a shortener, they're itsy bitsy now. Nothing else I can do. Page cache, maybe, or tinyurl blocked?

Apparently. Fixed.

There isn't much grass in my forest. A lot of Japanese honeysuckle, which I'm ripping out of the ground when it pushes into the valley (but not outside of the valley, because that's hummingbird food). If the test garden does well this year (not enough light in previous years (i really hate cutting down my trees)), I'll scale it over the next few years, using old tires to make terraced raised beds, and start digging a root cellar on the south side of the valley. I also have a lot of wild blackberry and black raspberry pushing into the valley, but those are at least native to the area. While I'm waiting on the test garden, I do some hiking through the forest, on and off of my land, and I always find interesting things. This is a hummingbird moth. Looks like a bumblebee, but no, it's a moth. I've only seen one other, and it was a lovely green and orange. Pink azalea growing wild right on the western edge of my property. Had no idea they were there until this year. And the plethora of green around it, that's wild blueberry. I have two huge wild blueberry bushes down in the valley, and it looks like they're finally going to produce some berries this year. Sunlight does help. That's a pink lady's slipper. It's a species of orchid which grows wild out here. I've known they were there for several years, but this is the first time I've seen them in bloom. Cardinal flower. I have three growing right in my stream, next to one another. They won't bloom until July, but when they do, the flowers are the most velvety, beautiful red, like Santa's coat. This is why I say it's always Christmas in the Lumiverse. This is a species of moss. It thrives under the dense canopy of the mixed deciduous and fir forest in which I'm living. It's evergreen, so even in the middle of winter, there's color on the ground. Downy rattlesnake plantain. It's another orchid which grows wild, and it's all around my cabin. Another evergreen plant, so even in mid-winter, it's there. I haven't seen them bloom yet, but deer tend to omnomnom them before they do, and being close to the cabin might keep the deer away long enough for some to pop. Wintermint. It's not minty, or in the mint family. It's another evergreen which thrives in acidic soil and low sunlight conditions. It grows everywhere out here, and late fall/early winter, puts out a central stalk with a couple of brilliant red berries. In a couple of months, the touch-me-nots (also known as jewelweed) will be in bloom. They grow in every inch of soil not taken by something else, so the entire valley will turn bright orange when they blossom. Four hummingbirds take up residence in the valley every year, feasting on honeysuckle, touch-me-not and cardinal flower. I'm not a flower person, but things like these, things I didn't even know existed until I moved out here, make every goddamn day worth waking up for. There's so much to discover, learn about and experience in person. @PeregrineFalcon is right, get the hell out of the house and go explore the world around you. You never know what you'll find, and you won't realize how much it means to you until you see it. Oh... it's tick season, and the little fuckers are hungry, so DEET yourself. You don't want to get Lyme disease.

Whatever the majority would be happy with. I'm not digging a moat around this idea to prevent anyone else from touching it, I think it would be best to let everyone interested make their own suggestions and the group come to unified conclusions. It was the mechanics that caught my eye and made me think of it, the rest is up to you and everyone else. Shades, Freakshow, Zombie Crey Tanks from Outer Space, Unseelie Court, it's all good.

I wouldn't set the damage over time to be so fast or strong that they'd die quickly, because that would make buff/debuff secondaries with no heal next to impossible to play with the set. That's not the way I envisioned this when it popped into my head. If I were the one fiddling with the power definitions, I'd set the DoT to give the henches a lifespan of at least four minutes without healing before they reached 0 HP, and I'd make the Opportunity mechanic equal the DoT. So, using 1017 HP as a reference number, if they lost 4.23 HP/s, they'd recover 4.23 HP/s under normal combat conditions (17 HP heal attached to a 4s recharge attack), giving them potentially infinite lifespan during combat (presuming the mastermind's ability to mitigate combat damage), and outside of combat, they'd have a lifespan of 4 minutes before they'd expire without mastermind intervention. It's just a flavorful way to utilize two complementary mechanics for the creation of a new and unique mastermind primary, not pressure to race into every spawn before the henches die. Or a punishment for not being in combat (RPing in AP, for example).

If the pseudo-pet is a distinct entity, such as the powers you listed, they inherit whatever buffs are active on the caster, and as of my testing several years ago, even toggles like Assault and Tactics affect them for their full duration. If the pseudo-pet is a patch/puddle/invisible entity/power within a power/whatever, some do and some don't. Glue Arrow, for example, used to, but I haven't tested it since it was changed to use the Redirect mechanic (there are no buffs which affect it, so it's low priority for me). And some pseudo-pets only retain the buff transfer briefly if the buff is a toggle, whereas others will continue to be affected by toggles until they despawn (haven't determined any hard rule for this one, seems to be a combination of pseudo-pet lifetime, buff lifetime and developer discretion). Easiest way to determine whether anything will or won't is to check City of Data. If you see this, , in the icons at the right side of the Create Entity entry, then your buffs are inherited by the pseudo-pet.

Of course they could be healed. The whole concept would be a dead end if they couldn't. The Opportunity mechanic would only be capable of keeping them from dying from the built-in damage over time, they're still going to be taking damage from combat and need buffs/debuffs/heals.

Entirely dependent on the henches. We wouldn't want direct copies of Necromancy if we went with shades, for instance, but I'm sure we could come up with something interesting if we put our heads together. A cone power could be animated with the bats from the aura, but given the attributes from Tenebrous Tentacles, and named Summon Colony, and there we go, we have our T5 for shades. The henches are the bread and butter of every mastermind set. Let's nail those down, then fill out the primary.

Thinking about it some more, this would also work with Freakshow, as there are known complications, including degradation of health over time, resulting from implants and drug use. A Freakstermind would be relatively easy to implement. The KB and Stuns in Freakshow attacks would supplement the mini-heal instead of an attached -ToHit. Another applicable possibility would be diseased henches. The illness eats away at them, and they transmit it through different vectors (touch, air (Cone of Whatever)), trading the -ToHit for DoTs and -End/-Recovery/-Regen/Rchg to represent the illness, while feeding off of their victims' health to stave off death (and this illness could fit any of the origins). The Coralax models would work well for this, as would the Vahzilok models. A lot of ways this could work without being supernatural.

Since this Praetor Duncan mission is sooooooooooooooooooo tedious, and Duncan has the AI of a turnip (bitch can't follow an un-Stealthed character moving without Sprint, and some genius decided to use the Founder's Falls safeguard map? i'm one ramp away from smacking someone), my brain started strolling down some odd paths. I don't know exactly what I was thinking at that moment, but it occurred to me that mastermind henches which slowly "faded away", needing combat in order to remain "alive", could be an interesting concept for the game. And I realized we can already do this. Crey Geneticists have that Reanimate power which resurrects fallen spawn members, but also slowly ticks away their HP. Sentinels have that lol-heal in Opportunity. Throw those two into a blender and stick a little umbrella on it. Now we have henches which, from the moment they're summoned, begin to "die", but as long as they're attacking enemies, they're healing themselves, omnomnoming on life force or kidneys or sex hormones or however you want to imagine it, keeping themselves alive. We take the Haunts from Darkness Control, give them these two mechanics and slap that down as the first hench summon (with a third hench, obviously, and minus the Self Destruct entry). Either the lieutenant Ghosts from Necromancy or the essences from Warshade Dark Extraction would fit thematically for the second henches (also minus Self Destruct), and a succubus would work for the third. All of them tick down their HP, like Reanimated Crey, but also "steal" HP with the Opportunity mechanic (WITHOUT needing to fill up a bar, just attach the heal to their attacks). I think both of the hench improvement powers should add -ToHit to their attacks, or include some other means of increasing their survivability so they're not in need of constant healing. Nothing extravagant, just a bit to balance out the constant HP depletion in concert with the mini-heals so they aren't one-shot fodder. Now we toss in three crappy attacks for the Mastermind and a thematically appropriate T7 and we have a new mastermind primary with an interesting twist, using nothing that isn't already in the game (mechanics, models, animations, powers). Okay, back to the ramp torture.

This is his part of the leaked sex tape.

Oh... so I probably didn't need to "leak" that sex tape in a vainglorious attempt to garner fame and adulation.

There aren't any Fortunatas in Super Mario, you n00b.

There's also, "I'm not a mod, BUT". I wonder if Modbutt is taken on Everlasting...

The best friend I ever had told me, "If you don't cross the line, you never know where the line is". Embracing that is the most terrifying thing I've ever done, it took me twenty years to take the first step in finding out where the line is. I've cast off the restraints of obedience, broken the cage of compliance. I live by my own rules now, and if I cross a line, then I'll know where it is.

OMG, why aren't any of you people reading?!?!?!?!?!?!? You're just inventing problems that would be solved (for one person) by Teletaunt!!! All you have to do to play the way you play now is waste spend a pool power selection that you would've used on something else pick up Provoke or Teleport Target or something (because forcing everyone else use pool powers is okay, as long as it's not the OP)! YOU'RE NOT READING!

@Snarky in drag, you heard it here! I bet he looks fabulous in a sundress. Someone follow him and take pictures!