Luminara

One of the balancing factors in this game is power availability. Auto powers add a constant small improvement to a character, for example, one which cannot ordinarily be removed by NPCs. Click powers are stronger than auto or toggle powers, so their availability more controlled. They have endurance costs, they have recharge times, they have ranges, and they have other limitations, such as not being able to set multiple click powers to auto-fire. They're stronger, so they're not guaranteed to be available at all times. In fact, they're expected to be unavailable at some times. That's the purpose of recharge times, ranges, endurance costs, and not having multiple powers set to auto. Another aspect of balance is how we utilize our options to respond to risk. When we're locked in combat, cycling through our attack chain, we have to make decisions, such as whether to continue attacking and ride out the risk of being defeated, or pause and activate a power to prevent what we believe to be imminent failure. Do we want to use this heal, or are the benefits of a damage mitigation buff superior? What about a damage buff, would it provide the edge we need to reduce the number of enemies around us in time for our HP pool to begin filling up again? That momentary pause, that choice of how to respond to the risk, is one of many aspects that cumulatively give the brainless idiots we beat to a pulp the faintest hint of a chance of defeating us. Without that, without players having to make any choice beyond, "Pause the attack chain for 0.92s after this attack, pause again for 1.32s after the seventh cycle", the NPCs, which are already crippled by limited scripting, by the game not using something like a cover system, by players having the capability to drop patches/rains around corners simply by angling the camera, by projectiles following enemies around corners and across hundreds of feet, would present even less risk than they do now. Being limited to setting a single click power to auto-fire is, for balance, no different from being limited to one *PP damage mitigation toggle, or one Miracle +Recovery, or four power pools. Restrictions like these aren't there to inconvenience the player, they're there to prevent the game from becoming unbalanced. Choice is one of the ways Cryptic designed balance into the game, while simultaneously retaining as much as they could of the flexibility of the original freeform power selection model they devised in the alpha. We're given enormous freedom in how we build our characters, but not unlimited, because balancing content requires some basic expectations of character strength and growth. One of those expectations is that there are limits to automating combat, and that includes automating click powers.

I said the game wasn't balanced around players having the option to set multiple powers to auto-fire. Convenience is not the measure of that balance, and someone of your "years of professional software development experience, decades on forums for numerous games" (see below) should be cognizant of that.

The game isn't balanced around players having the ability to set up multiple auto-click powers. If the limitation were relaxed, powers would be adjusted to compensate. Not being able to do something like set Hasten, Domination, Clarion, Rebirth and Link Minds all on auto is why powers like those can be as strong as they are. Balance matters to this development team as much as it did to the previous teams, so I don't foresee them throwing it all in the toilet by allowing multiple powers to be auto-fired.

Hate it. Hate it. More frequent screen spam obscuring the view of what's in front of my character (because the nearly constant flow of salvage and recipe and enhancement notifications apparently weren't enough), and now I have to stop in the middle of combat and exit the mission if I get a tip that I want, so it won't be overwritten by a tip I don't want to run. Hate it.

Feh. I was hoping for a tray full of boobs.

You're back! We missed you!

Always nice to see someone from the Foil Hat Society stopping by to tell us about the plotting and scheming of our evil overlords. It's a shame they never stop by the open beta server or forums so they actually know what those plots and schemes are... you'd almost think they make this shit up on the fly just to have a conspiracy to theorize about.

Pineapple pizza? Pineapple? Pineapple contains an enzyme (bromelain) which dissolves human flesh. @Yomo Kimyata's trying to kill me. As the duly appointed representative of the ruling body of the Lumiverse, I issue a proclamation of war against Yomopolis. 🔪

It's not a threat, it's an empty promise. I'll die with nary a lemon delivered to my fruithole, mark my words.

Pared down to the essentials, you want to take the third starter zone away from the players who use it to stave off burnout, make the development team spend time redesigning the zones and reworking the NPCs so you don't have to use the Flashback system, and create an instant 20 option with no plans for starter inf*/merits/enhancements/anything to either make said instant 20's playable or prevent AH chaos.

I LIKE LEMONS! 😄

Mids' isn't worth downloading at this point. The resource usage has shot up (Edge webview? really? they couldn't use something that wasn't a fucking resource hog?), they introduce two bugs for every one they fix and they haven't updated the database in five years. Added stuff, yes, but not actually updated. Rooted still toggles off Sprint in Mids', a bunch of sentinel *PPs are still using guessed-at stats, they made mutual exclusivity so aggressive that it takes ten times as much work to make an alternate or leveling build if it has ATOs... it's a goddamn mess and every time I've updated, I've had to comb through the entire database and fix all of the shit they've ignored or just plain fucked up. And they tried to lock the database so it couldn't be fixed... yeah, that got my hackles up. Fuck that. Edit the database yourself and skip the updates.

The only furniture I've ever seen in cave maps is the occasional altar or chest.

They stare at you, like this.

That would enable scripted AFK farming, so it's unlikely that it would be added to the game. If it's not visible, meaning within the camera's field of view, it can't be targeted. That's not an oversight, it's part of the basic targeting system, and that targeting system is shared by NPCs. It's what allows players to approach enemies without being attacked if those enemies are facing away, without a stealth power. Changing it would permit entire spawns to target and attack characters from maximum visual distance, even if they weren't facing those characters. That's why player characters have a zoom option, and why NPCs don't. That would enable scripted AFK farming, so it's unlikely that it would be added to the game. /targetdistance 1 adds a numerical range output to the Target window. Meaning, it tells you exactly how far away the target is.

They're drag and drop, so you can arrange them however you like.

I'll grab the free one and see if I can drive it insane. I'm lonely.

You forgot tiger blood. It's not winning if there's no tiger blood.

Other than the lack of spelling mistakes and apostrophe misuse, those would probably pass for an average player's bio. Too long to fit in the editor, though.

*has flashbacks of walking everywhere in WoW for two weeks because the Run key binding wasn't obvious*

Merit prices aren't intended to mimic player-set inf* prices on the AH, they're reflective of arc/*F/Trial/GM rewards and average earning potential. Nor could merit prices ever be changed to match pricing on the AH because that pricing is set by players and subject to high volatility. Merit pricing is a control on the market, not a reflection of market values, and the costs were specifically set to ensure that players can't create inflationary spirals. ATO pricing on the AH is a sum of the cost of purchasing Hero/Villain packs, the expected of salability and whatever profit the lister hopes to generate, not merit prices. Winter enhancements follow the same pricing structure, but Winter packs are 2.5x the cost, so players list the enhancements for accordingly higher prices. Of particular importance, lowering merit prices on ATOs would reduce the amount of inf* destroyed by encouraging players to purchase ATOs with merits instead of on the AH, further reduce the amount of inf* destroyed by removing the market fees from the purchasing equation. The less inf* removed from the economy, the greater the chance for inflationary effects to take hold. If for no other reason, the developers aren't going to do it because of that. Merit costs are what they are for reasons, and AH costs are what they are for other reasons, and while there are indirect links between them, they're not directly comparable. Nor should they be. Pricing on the AH being generally lower than merit costs is indicative of a healthy economy, not a problem.

Most of the ~300 DVDs and BluRays I own have unskippable anti-piracy nag ads before the menu will even come up, so I'm not the least bit surprised that Hollywood has decided to make entire films nag ads about other shit. Nor am I surprised that people don't want to sit through them, especially when they're riddled with bad writing, poorly timed attempts at comedy and endless reboots and rehashes of stories. Fuck 'em. The whole industry can eat a bag of dicks. Or would that be cannibalism?