Luminara

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?

Bruh.

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=temporary_powers.temporary_powers.midnight_visage That Midnight Visage. It's using the old rules, so it's disabled if any other stealth power is active.

Idon'tknowwhatyou'repostingabugreportabout,itlooksfinetome.

Problems logging into Reddit should be addressed to Reddit, not here. Problems logging into Co* should be addressed to the appropriate forum, where people capable of diagnosing the issue are looking, not in whichever thread you stumble into. Problems with your banana pancakes should be addressed to IHOP.

Those words don't make sense together.

Have they tried turning off Fly?

Only by finishing it.

I'm kind of attached to the Zombie top. It feels right for the character, which is somewhat important to me when it's a piece I haven't used before. Bare feet are the only thing that works for the boots, too. Not necessarily, but I already tried all of the jackets, robes, shirts, boleros and skirts, and they all seemed more civilized than I what I was trying to achieve. Just grime.

I usually muddle through this myself, but I'm enthusiastic about this character and want everything to click now, not in a few months. The concept is a feral woman with dissociative identity disorder who manifests her other personalities as members of her pack. Think Split mixed with Unleashed, and super powers thrown in (Ill/Savage dominator). I already have the name, [The] Pack (can't believe that was available on Everlasting...), and a rough costume that I've been tweaking for the last week. This is what I've achieved so far. Zombie top, Plant legs and boots, everything colored to make her look dirty and clothed in old, blood-soaked rags (i need to make the cloth textures browner, i know). Vampire face for the little blood dribbles. Collar and chain, monstrous hands for the pointy fingers (long nails). I'm aiming for feral, but not animalistic. It doesn't feel like it's quite there yet.

Whether or not she's drawing with all of her crayons isn't something any of us, D, K or myself, are or were qualified to diagnose or address. None of us have degrees in psychiatry, we're not trained counselors, we aren't employed at a mental health facility. Moreover, we were gracious, generous and attentive, even at the end. That was why K wanted that meeting to happen, so she could find an amicable way to resolve the problems and relax the tension. We went out of our ways to meet her needs and try to make her stay on the farm enjoyable. Nor would any of us have concluded that she was nuts without getting to know her and having that specified to us. We're all people who try to see the best in others, and encourage exactly that, and we all thought the problems and conflict would settle once she felt at home around us. There just wasn't anything different we could've done. All of what came to pass falls on the intern's shoulders, not ours. And as far as her mental state or health, whether it's a treatable problem or she really is a drama queen who got in over her head... I don't care. I don't, and I'm not sorry for that. I would have cared weeks ago, before she tormented an elderly man to the point of weeping, tried to turn his friends against him and called the police in a desperate attempt to squat in his house, but any sympathy I might've had is gone. Nor do I believe she should be absolved of responsibility for her actions, if she is mentally ill, as her pattern of behavior was focused on shifting the blame, finding a way to make everything someone else's fault. She'll have to face the fact that she's responsible for her actions and the outcomes of those actions, regardless. And all of this is irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned. She's gone. She's never returning. I didn't post about what happened in hopes of garnering sympathy or playing a drama queen myself, I would've posted weeks ago if that were the case, not an after-action report. Nor was I trying to cover my ass by telling everyone my "side", as no-one here would have ever known about any of this if I hadn't posted. Some really weird shit happened and I couldn't process it without sharing it, that was all. I honestly don't care if she's bonkers, or an entitled, lazy mooch, or a pink-spotted zebra in disguise, or whatever the reality of her situation turns out to be, because I'll never see or hear from her again. That's as much positivity as I can muster for her, complete disregard. On that point, I have nothing but absolute agreement. Whether this is a mental or personality disorder, or just bad behavior that she turned into a lifestyle, it would've been caught and dealt with a lot sooner with a better approach to mental health care.

That's right, it is important. Limitations, such as being locked into a pool when we select a power, are what allow developers to create content which is accessible to the widest range of builds, and therefore, players. It's a fundamental aspect of balance, and not the balance between archetypes, or the balance between individual powers, but the balance that makes the game playable for everyone. Restricting everyone to four power pools, and every power in those pools counting toward that restriction, is part of that balance in this game.

This week's forum war is over who's allowed to stand in a 2' square spot in Pocket D? God, I hope they put something on the beta server soon so we can have some good fights.

Badly. They're both 2 PPM. Energy Manipulator does an 8s mag 2 Stun, Triumphant Insult does a 3s mag 1 Stun (won't even Stun a minion).

One of my regular odd jobs is working at a small farm. The man who owns it, D, only grows vegetables and some fruits, and it's not a corporate-scale operation, it's just him, a couple of acres in which he plants whatever he feels like growing, and his wife, who used to help until she succumbed to the effects of Alzheimer's. He hired me to help out a couple of days a week, three or so years ago, and I've been working there every Monday and Tuesday since. It's usually relatively easy work, maybe cut some firewood and split it with a log splitter, or dig and fertilize some ground, or fix something that's broken, or weed a bed, or just ride around on the tractor, leisurely doing some bush hogging on the open areas. There's one other person who works there, on Tuesdays, and we'll call her K. K and I get along very well, we both enjoy working there and we both really like D and his wife (despite her mind ranging all over her time stream, she's still a sweet, wonderful woman). D is an interesting man. He joined the Marines because he thought he was going to be drafted, served his tour of duty and started organic farming when he was discharged. He grew up with a stammer, so he's always been uncomfortable around strangers (once he knows someone, he's relaxed enough to speak without stammering). With the stress of caring for his wife, his temper has become shorter, and he can be impatient, but those are moments, not the definition of his character. He's kind, generous, thoughtful, appreciative... he's the kind of person I refer to when I talk about good people in the world. As K and I have both said, he's rough around the edges, but there's a diamond underneath. After a couple of years of trying to keep up with the farm and care for his wife, D (who is in his 70's, and still works like a machine) finally decided to look for more help. He entered an online program which placed people who were interested in organic farming with farmers who used organic methods and products and were interested in teaching, and could offer room and board. An internship arrangement. It's been hit and miss, this program. Most of the participants we've had haven't shown any real interest in farming, they were just taking advantage of the free room and board and trading a few hours of light work. But that's been fine, really, it provided D with the extra hands he needed, and the interns were never problematic. A couple of them have been fascinating people with rich lives and delightful personalities, and a real interest in what we were doing, how we were doing it and why, people who we all missed when they moved on. This latest one, though... She arrived about two months ago, and when I met her, five days after she started living in D's house, she was overflowing with complaints. She referred to D as "toxic", insisted that he wasn't giving her "safe space", he wasn't respecting her or her boundaries, he wasn't "honoring" her the way she "honored" herself. When I pressed her for an explanation of what made her so uncomfortable, she couldn't give an answer, despite going on for four fucking hours, non-stop, about how bad the situation was. Nothing concrete was mentioned, she just kept going on about how uncomfortable D made her. I know he wasn't making passes at her or touching her inappropriately. He cried every day when he put his wife in a special care facility for a week just to see if it would be better for her... that kind of man doesn't think with his gonads or act on their behalf. He's absolutely devoted to his wife. And, again, he's damn old, too old to be chasing tail. By the end of that day, I had a niggling suspicion that we were dealing with... Can I get a drumroll, and some horns? A Drama Queen. The next day, the intern repeated everything she said to me, word for word, when she was gnawing K's ear off. My suspicion deepened, but I don't stick my nose in other peoples' business, so I kept my mouth shut. The next week, she's locked herself in her bedroom and refuses to come out. She's observing the holidays. She didn't mention this to D, she wrote a note and left it in the kitchen. And, for some reason, D knocking on her door and asking about it was a traumatic experience, an example of D's "toxicity" and violation of her "safe space", as she describes it the following week. D didn't push the issue or try to cajole her out, or even bother to ask why she couldn't be sociable during a holiday season, he just let it go and we all got on with the work ahead. Week 3 is when I get all of this, from her. She describes a terrible feeling of imposition, of disrespect for her, of being treated badly, and when I ask for more information, it boils down to her just not wanting to talk to D and blowing it all out of proportion when he knocked. At this point, I'm not listening any more, I'm just nodding my head and trying to move the conversation in a different direction, one that doesn't feed into what I'm becoming more and more convinced is a contrived conflict, a completely created controversy for the sake of garnering sympathy. What were her goals, why was she interested in learning about organic farming, what does she do in her free time, where did she come from, you know, casual conversation. And it gets weirder. She wants to live on a house boat... and grow enough food to live on. On the boat. She's a vegetarian, she says she breaks out in a rash if she eats animal protein... and she asks for a Cobb salad when we stop at a nearby convenience store. With Bleu cheese dressing. She needs a filter for the water... that's filtered... before it enters the house... because it's not city water, so she doesn't know for certain that it's "clean". She's asking me if I can put her in touch with some people who can give her some paid work... but when I give her a list of names of people who would happily pay her to do some work, such as the local general store where I work on Fridays, which always needs someone to work the register (hard to find reliable people in a rural area like this), or my friend L, who has a dozen houses he rents out and posts on AirBnB and could use some help keeping clean (something she suggested herself), she declines because she doesn't have transportation (not even a bicycle) and doesn't want to walk (L's house is half a mile away from D's farm, a ten minute walk, and he'd happily pick her up and take her with him wherever he went if she didn't want to talk). The more she talks, the more I realize she's utterly clueless about life and lacks any sort of focus. She's been sheltered her whole life. From what I could gather, what money she has comes from her brother, because this program doesn't pay anything and room and board were all D was obligated to give, so she has to have come from a family with some wealth, or her brother makes enough to support her in addition to himself and his family. She's also moved a lot, and it's always a sudden, last minute decision, she's had to just "get out of there", for reasons (which were never fully disclosed, always nebulous), and it's always because the roommates/housemates/other people living there were "toxic". The flags are all over the place now. They're red and fluttering wildly, like blood spurting from a severed artery, and there are so many of them. Week 4 gets off to a rousing start. As soon as I arrive at the farm, the intern is asking me to teach her how to drive. Or, more accurately, convince me to talk D into letting her use his car to learn how to drive. Even more accurately, how to drive again, because apparently, she does know how to drive, but hasn't driven in so long that she doesn't remember how things like pedals and wheels work. You're hearing those air raid sirens, too, right? Yeah, those are some loud motherfuckers. Damn near blew my ears when I heard them. Since I'm taking D's farm truck down the road to do some cutting and splitting for the firewood pile, I agree to let her drive that, with D's permission. He trusts me, and she's mollified, and we finish the work without a lot of drama for a change. Before I leave, she hounds me for my phone number so she can ask driving questions. Imbecile that I am, I give it to her... and become embroiled in more weirdness. She's now texting me about this ongoing bruhaha with D over whether or not she can use his car for driving lessons, upset because he won't take her out for driving lessons, pestering me at 9 p.m. for driving lessons, asking questions about car rentals (what the fuck do i know about renting a car?! i'm not Hertz!). Almost every day this week, a flood of texts pour in, so much that I almost block her number. Week 5, after many, many long texts that I don't want to read or respond to, I go to D and ask him if I can use his car for a driving lesson. He agrees immediately. He's so quick to agree that, in retrospect, I find myself wondering if the intern ever broached the subject with D at all. All of her complaining about how stingy he was with his car (HIS FUCKING CAR! NOT HERS!), and I didn't even have to explain anything, I just asked and he consented. Shady. But the driving lesson goes well and she's satisfied. Three days later, I'm at the general store (this is a real, old-timey general store, not a convenience store. there's a back room with plumbing supplies, electrical supplies, farming and gardening tools, you name it, and food and supplies in the front (no livestock feed, though, everyone goes to big chain stores for that now)), replacing some tiles, and D comes in. He's buying mouse traps and peanut butter. The intern has a mouse problem. The rest of the house doesn't have a mouse problem. I mention that mice go where it's warm and where they can find food, and that I had a mouse problem when I lived as a hermit in a bedroom in the city, eating and keeping trash in there. And that's exactly how the intern is living, she closes and locks the door to her bedroom and stays in there at all times when she's not required to do some work to fulfill her program duties, going shopping with D and his wife, or making a potty trip. She insisted that D buy a padlock for her to lock her bedroom the first week she was there, and she Later, that night, I get a text that's so long I'm surprised Verizon's network didn't spontaneously collapse. I mean, I know I tend toward loquaciousness, but this was on another level. D mentioned to the intern, in passing, what I'd said, and that set her on the war path. As I read through it, everything that I'd suspected, everything that had left me feeling off about the situation, coalesced. She was trying to manipulate me, convince me to side with her and take a stand against D. I wasn't suspicious any more, I was certain. It all snapped into place. All of the moving around she'd done, it wasn't because she was interested in learning about different things, or because she'd finished her stays and went on to the next residence or program, or even because she couldn't decide what she was doing with her life, it was because she'd pulled this same shit everywhere she'd gone and had to bail with utmost haste when it came back around. She'd made a living out of being a drama queen, going from place to place, stirring up trouble and playing people against one another, and running away when the aftermath settled on her shoulders. I'd even hazard to say that the reason her brother was supporting her was to keep her as far away from the family as possible, just to keep her from creating more problems with them. "None of my business. Let's keep it that way, please." was my response. Which, of course, prompted another long, but not quite as long, text filled with explanation and pity-me sentiment. You know the kind, you've seen it all over the Internet, someone antagonizes someone else enough times for a moderator to step in and the aggressor vomits up a page of whining and polishes that plastic halo on a stick. Yeah, that. I didn't reply, and she never texted me again. BUT WAIT, BEAR'S MORE! (that one still makes me laugh so hard that my lung hurts) Yeah, I thought it was over, too. She never tried to drag me into that act of her stage production again, but no play ends with one act. The next Tuesday, we're harvesting for the weekly order (D sells online through a local co-op), and I'm polite. I'm nice (yes, i can be nice. fuck you). She asks questions and ranges from talking about living in a mobile tiny house to living on a house boat, then wanting a farm where she can park her boat (i'm lost, too, so don't fret), and I'm conversant and open, though confused by how she bounces from one plan to another. I answer her questions and try to help her focus. For example, I point out that getting permission to park something doesn't do her any good if she doesn't have something to park there. I tell her that a shed on a trailer, which is how she wants to do a mobile tiny house, would cost three times as much as simply buying a used camper and putting a little work into it. The beginning of the problem is not a failure to get along, it's her mouth never closing long enough for her ears to function. Five times, she asks me what she's supposed to be harvesting. Five times, I tell her, "Two orders of broccoli, one pound each, so two pounds of broccoli." The sixth time she asks, I tell her and repeat it several times, then ask her to repeat it back to me so I know she remembers. Fifteen minutes later, when I'm weighing and packaging what I harvested, she comes to me and tells me that I spoke to her "like a slave-owner speaks to a slave". Oh, yeah, I forgot, she's African-American. I typed everything up to this point and it didn't occur to me to mention that, so that should indicate how far removed from a racist I am. Skin color just isn't something I think about. I grew up poor, in multi-cultural neighborhoods and trailer parks, people are just people to me. So this bombshell left me speechless for a full minute. I addressed her as a co-worker who was frustrated with her for being so goddamn bad at a simple task, and she threw down the racism card. But still, in an effort to minimize conflict, I didn't call her out on inventing that bullshit on the spot to manipulate me, I just told her that wasn't how I said it and she was misinterpreting it. The next week was blissfully free of whining and conniving. She listened when I answered questions. She wrote down what needed to be harvested and referred to that instead of asking multiple times. She spoke about her plans with more focus and more directed energy. It was like working with a different person. The intern was doing well, and I thought all of this was finally at an end. Oh, how wrong I was. Last night, K texted me. The situation at D's house had reached the point that D had called her, crying on the phone, because he didn't know what to do with this intern. He was miserable. He'd offered to pay for the intern's travel expenses to her next destination, she'd countered by trying to talk his step-son into giving her a camper (not selling, giving) and insisted that D let her live in that, on his farm, for free. And if she couldn't get the camper, she was going to, and this is one of the most bat-shit banana balls things she said, buy a small greenhouse kit off of Amazon and live in that. On his farm. For free. Indefinitely. Not a tent, a greenhouse kit. Come hell or high water, she'd made up her mind that his home and his farm were hers and she wasn't leaving, even if she had to cook and suffocate herself to make it happen. K asked me what I thought. I suggested that she wouldn't like to hear my thoughts, but she pushed, and I laid it all out on her. Turned out, K had twigged to what was going on just as I had, and agreed with everything I said. She decided that we should all "sit down and work out a reasonable solution" the next day, which was today, after the weekly harvest was finished. That's exactly what happened. The four of us went into D's house and sat down, and for the next ten minutes, K talked, the intern deflected, D talked, the intern deflected... And then she laid the blame for everything on D's shoulders, saying that it was because he was "uncomfortable around Africans". If she hadn't done that to me just one week before, both K and I might have considered it possible that D was a closet racist who only showed his true colors when we weren't around. That can happen, and I'm open-minded enough to realize that. But saying it twice gave her away. That's what she does when she's backed herself into a corner and can't get out, she accuses people of being racists to manipulate them. When the bullshit and lies and contrived reasons for drama that she's piled up finally topple over and land on her, she tries to dig her way out with that. I blew the fuck up. Completely lost my shit, right then and there. At full volume, I called her out, told her off and warned her she was leaving one way or another. And I meant it. I'd told K the night before that I'd drag her out of D's house by her ears if she wasn't gone when D specified, and I didn't give a flying fuck about the consequences. I goddamn well would've done it, too... But the intern tried one last tactic. She called 911, told them she was barricaded in her bedroom and afraid because D had a shotgun. And it backfired spectacularly. See, in a rural place like this, everyone knows everyone. And all of the officers who responded to the call... all of them knew D. They've known him for 30 years, they know what kind of person he is. They saw right through all of the bullshit instantly, cuffed her, collected her belongings for her, stuck her in the back of a trooper's car and assured D that his troubles were over. She'll be spending a few nights in a cell, then be remanded to a care facility and assigned a social worker to investigate her mental stability and determine whether she's fit for trial (abuse of and endangering elderly folk doesn't go over in a small county filled with elderly folk). She'll never be back to the farm. Curtain down, exit stage left, Drama Empress. I still can't fathom what the intern expected to accomplish, though. She was never going to be able to live in that house by having D carted off by the cops. Only an idiot or a child could possibly expect it to work. And even if, by some miracle, it had worked, she was still fucked because there was no way I would've allowed her to stay there while D wasn't around. D is fine, as is his wife. I returned to the farm as soon as K told me about the final act, which occurred just after I left, and made sure they weren't harmed or in a state over the incident. He was already more relaxed than he'd been in weeks, smiling more readily and not stammering. There were hugs and expressions of affection exchanged and life is already better for him. He'll recover from this, and I'll sleep well tonight knowing that one of the best friends and mentors I've ever known is safe and comfortable in his own home again. We won't be participating in that intern program again this year, either.

/e spaghettiball next time.

NF's range is 60'. It has a 15' spread at 43' and a 21' spread at 60'. You can fit a house in that square footage, you can certainly hit 10 targets. As I said, I did it for years on the original servers.

Magic tricycle.

So they can't be exploited for extra rewards with zero risk. While they can still be affected by PBAoEs, location AoEs and pets/pseudo-pets, those are unlikely to one-shot them, so they have at least a chance to put up a token struggle before being put back down again.