Luminara

Monkeying around had consequences?

I'd rather have, "I Beat Up GMs For Fun". *glances around to see if @GM Impervium is watching*

Ouroboros is already in the game as a solution to all of your requests. Having spent the last month running Flashback missions to build up my main's badge count, everything is already hilariously easy when exemplared. Scaling a Hellion with two ROFLsobad attacks up to level 50 wouldn't make it more challenging or fun, it would make it an even bigger joke because it would still only have those two crap attacks. Ouro the content you want to play if you've out-leveled it. It's really not hard.

I wouldn't live anywhere in the game. No deer. No bears. No foxes. No skunks or raccoons or opossums or phoebes or fence lizards or water snakes or anything else interesting and engaging. Nothing to talk to, nothing to pet, nothing to watch and experience a sense of wonder and happiness. I'll stay in my magical forest here in the Lumiverse.

Until two days ago, I was using a Stealth IO in Sprint on my Grav/TA and it stacked normally with both Infiltration (66' total Stealth radius) and Stealth (85' total Stealth radius), and nothing about either the IOs or Stealth in general has changed in those two days. You're either running a PBAoE toggle with a critter-affecting component, or you're forgetting to toggle on Stealth.

I'd go with Gravity. Wormhole brings the spawns to you and Stuns everything below bosses, so you can take full advantage of Kinetics' tool kit without (much) hazard of being mezzed. Top it off with Stone Mastery for Fissure (stack those Stuns and get some AoE damage in the bargain) and Seismic Smash (instant boss disabler). And at low levels, with Kinetics buffing your recharge, you can machine gun Propel.

Anything with Kinetics. Kinetics will buff your damage and recharge, it has an endurance refill power and a heal, so all you'd need is Tactics to bring your hit chance up to snuff. Stick to default difficulty and Kinetics can carry you through the entire game with no enhancements of any kind.

I'm willing to bet that it's a reference to C.H.U.D., and if it is, it would mean two things. The first would be something mundane and related to the city or government. The second would be darker and more ominous.

I lost it at Space Ass.

*envisions Daleks in an elevator, with the Muzak version of The Girl from Ipanema playing* WHAT IS THIS SOUND? EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN! EXPLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!

Batman is a vampire in DC's Gods and Monsters. No darkity dark, just punches and kicks... and some neck nibbling.

That occurs with all melee cones on all targets, regardless of cone length or target size. AoEs (all melee cones are AoEs, despite not always being categorized as such in power definitions, because they all have radii and that's what the engine looks at) use a different prediction algorithm than that used by single-target powers (which is why we don't see oddities like Rain of Fire's graphics curving to hit a moving target, or Fistful of Arrows' projectiles swerving to nail something moving to the side, whereas we do see Moonbeam arcing gracefully to catch up to a runner), and when rooting and movement are thrown into the mix, the engine sees the target as always being out of range and out of radius. Moving slightly ahead of the target permits the AoE to activate because it places both the player character and the target at points which can be considered static, from the engine's perspective, at the instant of power activation.

I don't manage. I'm just not adept at it, and there are things out there which need to beaten to a quivering pulp, so I don't really have the time to manage anything. I find it easier to glare until the situation corrects itself. Messy storage bins? *evil eye* Scattered salvage? *baleful look* Disorganized inspirations? *withering glance* Incomplete base? *menacing glower* Pants scattered everywhere? *brown chicken, brown cow* Wait... strike that last one.

I also tested manually targeting on the vault door. Same result. It's not the bind/macro (i use a bind for Shield Charge, macro for Lightning Rod), it's the (s)hit box.

No error message, but they deal no damage and there are no Missed notifications in the ToHit channel or any of the Pet channels, so neither Shield Charge nor Lightning Rod are considering a vault door to be a target (testing now on my Shield/Elec tank).

A romantic comedy five millennia in the making.

I wouldn't. That story's been done to death (pun intended). Every angle and variation imaginable has been explored, there's nothing fresh or interesting to draw from it at this point. But that doesn't mean the concept of vampirism itself is sucked dry (also intended). I have considered delving into that. For example, why do vampires feed on the blood of living creatures? If we strip away the mysticism and magic associated with that, what's the real motivation behind it? Hemoglobin isn't exactly the most nutrient-rich substance, even taking into account that it's a delivery route for nutrients. So why the "need" for blood? What if we give it a combined physical and psychological motivation? What if vampires suck blood not as food, but to counter the chill of death? Their bodies are room temperature, at best, and warming up in front of a fire takes forever to increase the body's core temperature. One can imagine, then, that being afflicted with vampirism means always feeling cold, miserable, and the sensation of hot blood running down the throat, pooling in the stomach, spreading throughout the body... feeling, even if only for a brief time, the lassitude of the native hypothermic state falling away, the sensation of being warm and comfortable. It would drive the entire story, wouldn't it, that overwhelming desire to recapture the essence of normalcy that was lost. That addiction to feeling alive. Dracula is old hat. Try a fresh approach.

That would fix that mission, but it doesn't deal with the other missions with poor design, oversights or deliberate cactus-up-the-ass situations which create arbitrary failures independent of player action.

The NPCs in this game shit their brains out of their ears when they encounter a single stair step. Even using external scripting tools, I can't imagine bots being any more competent at navigating through the complex terrain of the cities, in Co*. You can only buff stupid so much.

This is something I'm only now noticing, as I tended to play TA characters on the original servers, which was... shall we say, less than optimal for soloing certain content in the past, and ranged, with plenty of AoE, so any issues related to hit boxes were undetectable from that perspective. Playing through content on my main now, a Staff/Willpower brute, and being both melee and engaging in content which I used to avoid, I've noticed that two of my powers are essentially useless when I face extremely large enemies. Foes such as the Eye of the Leviathan, the Thorn Tree and, unexpectedly, bank vault doors, can't be hit with Eye of the Storm, and aren't in range of Rise to the Challenge's radius. I'm pressing my character's face against these enemies, and neither of those powers is affecting the target. They're not missing, there's just no target there as far as those powers are concerned. The target point in those hit boxes is at a height which puts them out of range for small radius PBAoEs. Consequently, builds reliant on small radius PBAoEs are at a disadvantage when facing enemies with these messed up hit boxes. Build-critical powers are effectively non-functional when facing over-sized foes with bad hit boxes. That's not balanced, as it deprives melee characters of damage mitigation tools and damage dealing/increasing powers while not subjecting ranged characters to the same restriction, and it's disorienting for the player, who see their powers fail to have any effect and no explicable reason for it.

The critter who put him/her in a time-out still has that power when spawned as a lieutenant. That's how Notoriety works. The rank is reduced, so HP, damage and things like control effect durations are lower, but the critter is still, from the perspective of powers available, a boss, despite conning as a lieutenant. Detention Field also reduces the target's Threat, which means the NPC would be taking the full aggro. Additionally, reducing Notoriety would also affect the NPC, reducing its HP correspondingly, which would make it easier for the critters to defeat. And, lastly, the critter most likely to be responsible for this festival of shit was probably an Ascendant, so it would have -Res attached to several of its attacks. Even if we're just looking at that one downscaled boss accompanied by a single minion, with the player out of action for ~15s, at -400% Threat and the NPC subject to -Res while hindered by reduced HP due to the lower Notoriety setting, it's unlikely that running at minimum difficulty would make any difference.

And that's a critical observation in this context. Failure can move a plot forward, failure can change the direction of a story, failure can provide incentive. If we had an extra mission to rescue Lady Grey from the renegade Vanguard after she's captured in the bait mission, or failing the "Prevent 30 Firbolg from escaping" mission ultimately led to Eochai spawning in the final Croatoa mission, or the PPD hostages in safeguards dying meant EBs/AVs spawned in the jail cells, those would be examples of proper storytelling and its use in mission failure. Even if we assume that the intent was for us to fail these missions, they're poorly done because they lack consequences. When we fail these missions, nothing happens. We move on to the same mission we play if we succeed. A mission being difficult can be positive, too, from the storytelling perspective. Succeeding against the odds is a key element in many hero/villain narratives. When players win the day despite having the deck stacked against them, they feel empowered, capable, exhilarated. Clumsy spawn placement and bad mission design aren't substitutes for good storytelling, though, because they don't engender the appropriate feeling of success. When spawns drop right on top of a hostage the instant we free it, give us no time to prepare and no opportunity to succeed, that's not a difficult situation, it's a deliberate attempt to ruin the player's day, to take a big, steaming dump on the player. Going back to the possibility that the intent was for the player to fail, there are already ways to create the situation in which that spawn appears right on top of that hostage, such as Teleportation, but instead, the designer chose, chose to immediately spawn the enemies in place, thereby denying the player even the briefest moment of respite in which he/she could turn the situation around. And, as noted above, failing doesn't alter the outcome in any way, we move right along to the same mission that would otherwise follow. People don't dislike these missions because they're "harder", they dislike them because they deliberately impose conditions which lead to failure without making use of any of the established methods of increasing difficulty (tougher foes, like EBs/AVs; higher level foes; ambushes; spawns Teleporting to the location), and they do so with no narrative purpose. That 30 Firbolg mission doesn't suck ball sweat because it's hard, but because it's a massive outdoor map with dozens of spawn locations and two enormous corridors to the escape point. It's bad because it takes half an hour to complete even at -1/x1 and actively wiping out every spawn rather than waiting at the escape point. That Lady Grey mission isn't irritating because it's hard, but because it was intentionally designed to be failed unless the player drops to minimum difficulty, and the way it was designed is only one step short of automatically killing Lady Grey when she's freed from her captors, without any corresponding change to the story arc as a result of either success or failure. Having hostages die from combat damage, despite being in a non-combat state, before you're finished defeating the spawn holding them doesn't make a mission hard, it makes a mission an annoyance that we'd prefer not to deal with. The Faultline arcs have several EB/AV encounters, including the final mission with three EBs/AVs. Those are hard, but they were also designed properly and enjoyable. The missions which essentially fail themselves, the ones we're discussing in this thread, aren't hard, or harder, because they were designed to be hard, they're just ineptly crafted or willful attempts to screw the player, and the failure itself serves no narrative purpose, it's just a kick in the groin. "Oh, you wanted to play our game? Well, fuck you very much."