Luminara

Narrator: @lemming created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping the triple dare and going right for the throat.

Just don't let 'em on the forums. I am definitely not rated PG.

*queues the weird porn music*

Big mistake. Big. HUGE. I have to go shopping now.

I read that with Nick Nolte's voice in my head, like a voice-over for a noir film.

Yellow. Don't eat it. That's where the huskies go. Brown and black, too, in smoggy places. And on Venus. Don't eat that, either. Red, on Pluto and some asteroids. Don't put that in your mouth! What's wrong with you?! Just put it down and step away. STEP AWAY.

If that's already enabled (says Stop all e-mail notifications), then what likely happened is the e-mail went straight to your spam folder.

Death Mages have Twilight Grasp, Dark Pit and Chill of the Night. At */x8, spawns can have up to three Death Mages. Three Death Mages debuffing your ToHit, healing the entire spawn and stacking Stuns on you. Ice Thorn Casters stack Slows. CoT aren't just damage at 45+. This. We don't need everything in the game to be ZOMGSOHARD, we need exactly what we have, different groups offering different challenges. And an enemy group with a boss who can heal the entire spawn, neuter a character's ToHit, and mez squishies, working in concert with minions who floor recharge times, is challenging enough for plenty of people.

Great minds stink alike?

Vanity pets zoning.

No, it's actually decent now that it has a Domination proc.

They dealt it.

If you see it, it's not controlled. Or wind.

I wonder how many names we have that other people had on the original servers. All of this bickering over inactive accounts, power-leveled this and that, name hoarding, not getting "your" name... how many of us have names that were used by others on the original servers? How many of us have more characters than we can actively play, even if we rotate through them with some regularity? I haven't seen anyone raise a hand and say, "I'll give up my favorite name if the original user wants it back." Maybe the name release policy should be more aggressive. Maybe it should hit active players more strongly than inactive players, since it's the active players who are most determined to hold on to names, come hell or high water. Or maybe there shouldn't be a policy at all, maybe the responsibility for solving this should rest on our shoulders, not the HC team's, since we're as much a part of the problem as the inactive players. And maybe all of this is meaningless, since they're just names. Intangible strings of alphanumeric characters attached to texture-mapped polygonal digital avatars that make pretty lights and noises. They aren't food. They aren't land. They aren't chiffon-lace silk panties, so maybe getting your panties in a bunch over it is pointless. The world's going to keep spinning, no matter what happens, no matter who has which name.

Best editor ever. Lighting that accurately reflects what we experience in the game. The ability to see pet powers, so we don't have to exit the editor, summon pets, see what their powers look like and go back in to make changes. Better belt conformance to the body (increasing the waist slider makes numerous belts clip, whereas other belts are just a hot mess, like that gunslinger belt that hovers around the body like a hula hoop). Tighter texture and color matching between model parts (ever notice that zombie gloves and zombie chest leaves a distinct seam where the glove is, with the texture slightly misaligned and color not quite matching the skin color of the arms? yeah, that). Flesh tones in the costume part color index. Fingers. Toes. Nipples. If I ever finish any, I'll let you know.

To answer @Snarky's question, you'll never hit 95% Damage or Endurance Reduction or Recharge or anything else in any individual power when you're exemplared that low, no matter how you slot. Set bonuses, temporary powers (amplifiers and empowerment buffs) and pool powers are where you should be looking. My advice: slot low level sets in the powers you'll have access to, and purples/ATOs in unavailable powers. I know, you're thinking that having the purple sets in the low level powers will mean they're better enhanced, but in actuality, at level 10, they're not. For example, on my latest 50, I have 5/6 Decimation slotted in Call Swarm (89.2% Damage), and 5/6 Apocalypse (89.9% Damage) slotted in Call Hawk. Exemplared to level 10, Call Swarm drops to 22.6% and Call Hawk drops to 22.8%. You do want the purple and ATO procs/uniques in the low level powers, if you can squeeze them in, since you'll be able to directly benefit from those, but otherwise, slot sets which are appropriate for the exemplared level, sets which will give active bonuses at that level, in the powers that you'll be using. Treat the purple sets and ATOs like mules, you're just using them for set bonuses, and you can get those bonuses by slotting them in disabled powers. You'll have more active set bonuses that way, and that'll be what gets you where you want to be. Not from cramming in 50+5 IOs, but from piling on set bonuses. PvP sets are good in low level powers, better overall bonuses than standard sets. A lot of uniques and procs work below their minimum slotting level, too, so grab some of those (tested Miracle and Numina's, both work at level 10 (in Health)). Grab all of the amplifiers, Secondary Mutation and whichever empowerment buffs you want (Increase Attack Speed and Increase Recovery are worth ten thousand times their salvage cost). Assault for more +Damage. Build Up or Aim, if they're available. Et cetera. I'd skip Hasten, you shouldn't need it since you'll be at 100-125% global +Recharge with purple sets, ATOs, Increase Attack Speed and Offense Amplifier.

Scroll up and read the post just above yours.

If I saw a chicken with cutlery and napkins, I'd "sacrifice", too.

All enhancement values are reduced when exemplared. Level 10 IO, level 50 IO, +3 SO, HO, DO, ATO, Winter, anything in a slot is treated generically by the exemplar code. There's no bypassing it, and attempting to do so by slotting an enhancement at the level at which the character is exemplared results in even lower total enhanced value than simply leaving your higher level enhancements in place. And you can't slot an SO that isn't your real level when you exemplar, anyway. No back doors, no loopholes.

Level 7-46 characters can't slot level 50 PvP IOs.

Scrapper secondary and tanker primary toggles were mutually exclusive. Turn on the status protection toggle, whichever damage mitigation toggle you had active was toggled off. Turn on a damage mitigation toggle, you lose your status protection. Melee characters were expected to figure out what kind of damage different attacks did and switch toggles on the fly. That didn't work, of course, since spawns could contain critters with a variety of damage types, and combat was too rapid to juggle toggles (which still had long activation times, so switching toggles also meant being locked out of attacking until the toggle's animation was complete). Everything mezzed. Everything. There was so much mez that even tankers could be mezzed through their status protection when they were teamed with one other person. Mez was over-used to such a degree that Cryptic had to comb through every critter attack and tone it down, and change spawn definitions to limit the number of strong mez critters. Because of those two aspects, teaming was vital. Scrappers and tankers needed controllers and defenders to give them the extra damage mitigation and status protection they needed to survive. Controllers and defenders needed blasters, scrappers and tankers to deal damage for them. Blasters needed everyone. No inherents. Scrappers could crit with some attacks, not all. No Beginner's Luck, either. Or origin-specific starter attacks. No Day Jobs. No patrol XP. The only temporary powers were the ones granted in missions, and most of them expired when the mission or arc ended, or had real world timers. Most of the timers that last for X time in-game were real world timers, too, which discouraged logging out and going to bed if you had something on a timer. No Real Numbers. No information on anything. The only thing known about powers was what was in the brief description. That applied to enemy powers, too, there was no City of Data or Power Analyzer, all anyone had to go on was speculation and rudimentary testing. That led to the creation of BI, the Brawl Index, a rough estimation of how much damage different attacks dealt by comparing them to Brawl. It was inaccurate, because it didn't account for (then unknown) archetype scalars and modifiers, but it was all anyone had at the time. Melee-range powers with KD now, those used to be KB. Cryptic felt that having a lot of KB in melee attacks would give the game the most super-heroic vibe, so they were liberal with it. They were so attached to it, they increased the magnitude in most of the powers, so attacks would knock critters farther away. Endurance costs were higher across the board. Level 20 was a Big Deal because it meant you could finally pick up Stamina (pool T4 powers didn't unlock until level 20, and Fitness was a power pool at that time) and weren't stopping constantly. Defense stacked by type and vector. If an enemy with Smite attacked you and you had 13% Smashing Defense and 7% Negative Energy Defense, you had a total 20% Defense to that attack roll. That'd be over-powered now, but at that time, critters had a 75% base hit chance, not the 50% they have now, so that approach to Defense stacking was necessary. Fear powers made targets run away. They always came back as soon as the Fear expired, but it was ultimately more effective than a comparably slotted Hold or Stun, in terms of damage mitigation, even though it was also more annoying. Critter AI was more stable. Taunt actually worked, and even if you weren't using Taunt, Challenge, Provoke or something similar, they'd stick to a player character like glue unless the character was out of range or Taunted off. Around Issue 16, something went haywire, or the script/code was altered, and critters panicking and running away when they were debuffed, couldn't hit a target or combat lasted more than 3 seconds, that's when that started happening. There were Cone enhancements, Endurance Drain enhancements, and a couple of others I forget, which were folded into existing enhancements which did the same thing. Speaking of enhancements, Power 10. Ten of the enhancement types were flagged to drop more frequently (Endurance Reduction had the highest drop rate), and until you completely unlocked a contact (ran almost all of the missions), those ten were the only enhancement types you were offered. Finding and getting to a store that sold non-Power 10 enhancements was a priority, if you could afford to buy enhancements. And a lot of us were still using DOs in powers well into the 30's, for no reason other than because that's what dropped and drops were the only way we could get them, unless we could get friends to trade with us. And HOs enhanced attributes by 50%, not 33%. A Cytoskeleton Exposure enhanced Endurance Reduction, ToHit and Defense by 50%/50%/50%. Six-slotting any power with HOs was ridiculously strong. And you got a HO for every bud you defeated, not one per player when the main mass was destroyed. Some players would leave with a full tray of HOs (we only had 10 enhancement tray slots then, not 70), while others wouldn't get any. Yeah, different enhancement schedules didn't come until later, after Cryptic felt like they were starting to lose control of balance... which was only occurring because they kept changing things, like removing toggle mutual exclusivity, reducing base critter hit chances and altering how Defense stacked, buffing powers, etc. Stuff that wasn't over the top suddenly went there, leading to a categorization of enhancement types into schedules, each schedule having a different base value, and HOs being specifically targeted. Status protection inspirations didn't exist. When they were added, they had to be use pro-actively, before you were mezzed. They couldn't be clicked when you were mezzed. There were a lot of missions, scattered amongst standard contacts, which couldn't be completed without one or more other players. They had simultaneous click objectives that required a team to complete. Real bitch when you were soloing and ran into one of these. And we couldn't drop or auto-complete missions, either, we either had to go find people to help, or just ignore them until we could find a team. Three story arc limit. If you tried to get a mission from a contact and were already at that limit, the contact wouldn't speak to you. And since just checking the story arc, not actually accepting the first mission, locked you into the arc, it was common for players to have one or two out-leveled contacts with story arcs active, effectively locking them out of content unless they ran the out-leveled arcs. You had to perform numerous non-arc missions before a contact would offer you a story arc. And you had to run back to the contact every time, the call button wasn't unlocked until the contact's rep bar was nearly filled. No Exit Mission button. You could exit by clicking Mission Complete in the nav window, but it wasn't intuitive and a lot of people ran back to the mission entrance. The tutorial was mandatory. You didn't set foot into Atlas Park or Galaxy City until you'd been through Outbreak. And if you finished Outbreak without defeating 100 Contaminated, you were permanently locked out of the Isolator badge. Critters could be "tagged", any damage dealt by any player would lock all others out of gaining XP, influence or drops. People would tag critters solo and let high level players defeat them as a means of power-leveling, so Cryptic changed that to XP and inf* being awarded for the amount of damage dealt. Bored defenders and controllers filled AP and GC, following lowbies around and buffing them or debuffing enemies. Tankers and scrappers would do the same thing with Taunts. Task Forces were a commitment. They took hours, sometimes all day. Teams would stop in the middle of a TF and call it a night, then pick it up the next day. If two or three people quit, the TF would have to be abandoned and restarted, because they didn't scale with team size. Ambushes did scale to team size. An army of ambushers could spawn for a full team, or, after the difficulty adjustment field agents were added, a solo players set to maximum difficulty. You'd see a bunch of level 50 critters standing around, surrounded by dead lowbies at a tram station, which didn't have police drones. People would come off of the tram and be instantly pancaked, or run in only to discover a world of pain waiting, and since they didn't despawn, the only thing anyone could do was call it out and hope a 50 would come clean it up, or switch to a 50 yourself and do it. No Elite Bosses. You'd be cruising along, doing well enough against the bosses, then slam face-first into an AV that flattened you with one hit, because there was also no anti-one-shot code. Toggles had ongoing sound effects. On a full team, it was the equivalent of setting a kindergarten class loose in a kitchen filled with pots, pans, foghorns, whistles and steam organs. Navigating the city required memorization of which trams went where, which zone exits led where and how they all interconnected. Since contacts sent you all over the city for missions, figuring out the fastest route was always important. No police scanner missions, no banks to protect, no tips. If you weren't on a story arc, performing missions to unlock a story arc, or teamed, you were street sweeping because you had nothing else. Those little spinning coins over contacts, they didn't exist. Neither did a lot of map waypoints. For the stuff that did have a waypoint, you could use the nav bar, and for the rest, you had to remember where they were or stumble across them. No Vidiotmaps, either. /loc was your friend. No Mids'. Pencil and paper or wing it. Lots of servers, only a few character slots per server. Since there wasn't much to do after hitting 50, other than attend Hami raids, farm or PL friends, everyone made alts, and once you alt, you can't stop, so people spread out across different servers pretty rapidly as they filled their character slots. Controller and defender Slow values were mistakenly swapped before launch, and it wasn't caught until well after, which led to the impression that Slows were controls. When Cryptic finally got around to addressing the problem, they just increased the defender scalar to the correct value and left controllers with the same scalar. Six-slotted Hurdle was faster than Fly. Almost no-one knew about that because they took Swift instead of Hurdle when they opened up the Fitness pool. Slotting Freezing Rain with Damage SOs increased the -Res. Lieutenants in the 5th Column and Council turned into boss Warwolves. /e alakazamreact was a persistent animation when it was added, it turned you into a pumpkin and you stayed that way until you pressed a movement key. Foce of Nature.

Why does a GM-level super need a disguise? What, Batman died and gained as much power as Thanos with his gauntlet, went ape-shit and started... terrorizing a farming community?

Apprentice Charm and Taser Dart (magic and tech origin ranged attacks) will ignite it. Fragmentation Grenade and Rune of Purification Day Job powers will ignite it. The following temporary powers will ignite it: Angelfire Device Bracers of Astrape Divining Rod EMP Glove Electromagnetic Grenade Empowered <section> of the Wheel Energy Ring Toss Gold Bricker Sonic Cannon Golden Rings Hand Grenade High Explosive Magical Burst Plasmatic Taser (available at P2W) Resistance HE Grenade Rikti Rifle Rune of Warding Shivan Beam/Bolt/Bomb/Haze/Smash/Strike Soul Trap Stun Blast Stun Grenade (available at P2W) Tesla Gauntlet Zeus' Lightning Bolt. Any pet with Energy or Fire damage will ignite it (including Backup Radio summons, available at P2W). Enemy critters with AoE Energy or Fire attacks will ignite it (sometimes critters will attack it with single-target attacks, even though it has a billion -Threat). Energy and Fire procs in any AoE or cone which is frequently used are almost guaranteed to ignite it before OSTarget despawns (how i did it on the original servers, how i do it with my TA/* and */TA characters now). Incarnate abilities with Energy or Fire damage, including Interface proc effects, will ignite it. Mace Mastery, Mu Mastery and Primal Forces Mastery all have Energy and Fire damage powers. After maining TA/Dark for years, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't just easy to ignite OSA, it requires an act of will to fail to do so. Volcanic Gasses, hello?