Luminara

I lack the creativity that all of you display with the costume editor. Words are my medium, not graphics, so my characters tend to be comparatively plain. I use the Roman Sandals far too frequently, for example (but do not apologize. they're damn nice boots). Nevertheless, I did have a concept that I just couldn't stop thinking about. It gnawed at the back of my mind for months. I created, and deleted, several characters in an attempt to silence it. I kept one, an Ice/Stone brute, and revised the costume over and over again, but it just never worked. So, around the the release of Page 3, I took it back to the beginning, started with a clean canvas and a question: What defines the biome of the taiga? Beginning the process from there, I identified key aspects of the taiga. Mountains. Glaciers. Flowing rivers and streams. Stone and trees and mosses and evergreen plants. Something vast, towering, wild and inexplicably beautiful. A living mountain. This hair style makes a perfect snow-capped peak bringing water down to keep the forests thriving, the face pattern giving the impression of a solid mass of ice and snow on a mountain side. The animal fur top pattern helped me replicate the natural growth of a forest on a mountainside. We have evergreen plants growing at the foot of the mountain, areas of bare stone and tall tree trunks, like the great redwoods of the North American boreal forest (which lies in the taiga biome). The character is at the height slider maximum, so she's biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig. But it gets even better. With the Stone Armor toggles set to Crystal (minimal), I now have glaciers and frozen areas in the lowlands. Above, meteors tumble through empty space, waiting for gravity to draw them in, evocative of the Tunguska region (which experienced a comet airburst in 1908). Mud Pots makes a glorious hot spring, bubbling with deep-earth volcanic activity, rich with minerals giving the water that lovely color. I finished it off with the Earth Mastery APP, adding in that one little something which made it feel complete. Moss-covered stone. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Spirit of the Taiga.

It's certainly made me want to gnaw off my own limb to escape. 😛

Oh, hey, that does look right now.

Moon base, soldier shoot butt.

IOs didn't alter archetype roles. Powers did that. Powers in primaries, secondaries and pools. The base game itself created the potential for players to cast aside archetype distinctions and play any way they wanted. And bland, flavorless mush is what we had before IOs. Standardized slotting, standardized power selections, standardized play, the only distinction between anyone was costumes. You complain about homogeny, and simultaneously complain because you're not being homogenized, and blame IOs for everything when IOs didn't do anything but give players the courage to explore the potential inherent in the game. If you want to be shoved into a box, labeled and expected to perform one function, like a printing press or a grain thresher, you picked the wrong game. Co* never forced that on players. The only reason we even have archetypes is because Cryptic didn't want to give players ways to completely gimp themselves, do something inane like take all Defense/Resistance powers and travel powers and no attacks. The original version of CoH had no archetypes, and the development team realized it wasn't going to work, so they took the free-form power selection and re-organized it into archetypes so players would have an assured way to progress. What you consider inviolable rules, they were never anything but suggestions.

Why would we need three trainers in AP? Do this in a zone without a trainer. Boomtown. Eden. Crey's Folly.

❤️

The very notion that out of control inflation was a factor in creating differentiation between archetypes is ludicrous. There were no IOs for the first three years, there was no inflation at all because there was no player economy, and players were bending and ignoring archetype definitions the entire time. The core mechanics of the game permit every archetype to perform in the role of every other archetype. This has been the case since launch. The Invention system may have allowed more players to (finally) recognize that, but it didn't create it nor will restricting IO availability prevent it. Over-availability. What a ridiculous thing to say. IOs were added to the game so everyone could use them, not to reward elitists and snowflakes. The entire idea behind the Invention system was to give players, all players, a way to improve beyond the level cap without raising the level cap, and suggesting that this freedom be curtailed and given only to a select few is abhorrent.

5 slots in Entangling Arrow for a "cheap" purple set. Attacks frankenslotted because the prices on Apocalypse and Ragnarok were so high that 5 of either of those required several months of farming a scanner mission at +2/x6. Only having a -KB enhancement on my main because it dropped for another character. Yeah. I remember.

Dragging this out of the dumpster to report that the Minerals graphics disappear when suppressclosefx is active. The veiny, pulsating lines graphic for Rooted also goes away. The other toggles' graphics remain visible on this character, using Minimal and/or Minimal Crystal.

Nothing but the purple patch and -Res affect proc damage. The Recharge Reduction applied by Alpha abilities isn't global +Recharge, it's Recharge Reduction added directly to each power. Exactly as though you slotted Recharge Reduction into powers. Consequently, it does affect proc rate in the same way slotting Recharge Reduction would. Mids' does still calculate PPM properly (as of 3.2.17), and display an average damage output by default (you can change that in the second tab of the Configuration window). As to why you might not see any change in the average damage displayed by Mids', if the power you're examining has a long base recharge time, Recharge Reduction enhancements won't necessarily reduce the proc rate. If the recharge time is very long, it will likely never show a reduction in proc rate. Proc rates are natively higher in single-target powers than in AoE powers, as well, so single-target powers will show less proc rate reduction than AoE powers when Recharge Reduction is applied.

The Council of Thirteen.

You've already posted about playing Co* with your wife, you doof burger. 😛

I hope your wife chases you around with a rolling pin. One of those nifty granite ones.

Regardless of your opinion of me, I am intelligent enough to know that engaging in a pissing contest in this thread would just lead to it being locked, a slap on the wrist for one or both of us and even more unpleasantness in the future. Go antagonize someone else, I'm not biting that worm. Focusing on the 2% is looking at the little picture and ignoring the big picture. I ran to my mission. I cleared the map. I fought a +1 boss. So now let's factor the rate for players don't do that, who game the system. -1/x0/NoBoss/NoAV, Reveal, ghost to the end with Super Speed, insta-gib three minions or one minion and one lieutenant and maybe click a glowie. How long does that take? 90 seconds? Let's factor for the zero travel time that you posited, since it didn't apply to my run. And we can't forget that they almost certainly have SSHDs (this is not up for debate. i have one and i bought it when i was earning less than $6000/year (no, there isn't a zero missing, i really do live well below the poverty level. slightly higher now, but still below the line). if i have one, there's no reasonable argument to be made that the average player doesn't), so load times are a few seconds. Ultimately, these players can complete missions in ~2 minutes, back to back. That's 30 missions every hour. SS to the end, stab stab stab, click, Exit Mission, select mission, TP, rinse, repeat. 68 minutes to reach the 50% statistical likelihood that one drops, culminating in an 11.34 hour average, instead of 28, for 10 prismatics. Solo, zero risk. That is realistic. We know players can do this because they were doing it on the original servers, they're doing it on these servers. They talk about doing it on the forums. They share their builds. *Fs aren't the only thing people "speed run". Hell, I do it when it's an enemy group I'm just sick of dealing with, like Freakshow. A petless mastermind can pull off ~2 minute runs back to back. I'd also like to emphasize that last sentence of the second to last paragraph. Solo, zero risk. That's why it's a 2% chance. It's not fantastic, but since it can be done rapidly and without a chance of being defeated, it's a fair compromise between Hard Mode rewards and zilch. It's more than zilch, which, if this were still under the purview of Cryptic or Paragon, is exactly what it would be. Or they would've gone through every mission in the game and made them all Defeat All. HC went a different way. 2% limits the casual player, a little, but it limits him/her less than 0%, or being forced to play a specific way or through specific content, and it's not such a drastic limitation that experienced players can't leverage the system to accumulate them in a reasonable time (11.34 hours is barely more than an hour a day), without spending inf* or running Hard Modes.

It's a 2% chance every time a mission is completed, not a restriction which prevents a prismatic from dropping more frequently than once in every fifty missions. That's not how the math for determining averages works, and it's not how drop chances work in this game. After 34 missions (thank you, @Yomo Kimyata, for the starting point for this math), the likelihood that at least one has dropped reaches .98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98= 0.5031373679776309%, which we can round down to 50%. @Yomo Kimyata dropped that information, as well as the layman's explanation, in the post just above yours, more than half an hour before you launched this miserably failure of an attack on my intelligence. You also didn't punctuate don't. Or capitalize your sentences. And you're missing a comma in the first and last sentences. Next time you want to start a battle of wits with me, come armed.

Oh, good, we're up to the wild conspiracy theories part of the thread. I was worried it was going to stay at the boring "framrers sux" "no u sxu" part forever.

I've acquired four doing nothing but tips and scanner missions, on four different characters. A drop each day, less than an hour of play time. The one shown in that screenshot, I just selected that tip and ran it to see if I could get a screenshot of a prismatic dropping on a sub-50 character. 1 mission, base difficulty, five minutes, prismatic from casual play. Looks like you're wrong again. At least you're consistent.

Checked the hero alignment mission, all of the objectives are correctly enabled. Only the vigilante mission is borked.

10% market fees say what? 720,000,000 * 0.9 = 648,000,000 Oh, look, a wild 72,000,000 inf* sink just appeared! Quick, someone take a picture! And the inf* being spent for those stacks of prismatics, that's not being created out of thin air either. That's pre-existing inf* that people have had sitting in storage, tucked away in bids on non-existent items in the market. The inf* they're throwing at the AH now is just changing hands. The people with less inf* get more, inflation has a lower chance of taking hold since so much inf* is being destroyed, win-win for everyone. Or are you really going to try to argue that people are emergency farming billions of inf* in a few hours to buy stacks of prismatics? I hope not, because no-one's going to buy that bullshit, even if they're willing to pay early adopter prices for prismatics, especially after you pointed out that they can't farm that much, that quickly. Kind of shot yourself in the foot there, didn't you.

Encourage RMT. Devs have already laid down the law on that. Not happening.

An optional currency used to purchase purely cosmetic NPC costumes was added as a payoff for playing Hard Mode content, and you equate that with gatekeeping and pushing less skilled players away? You tried to microwave your head to fry the government tracking chip, didn't you.

It's what special bunnies are made of. Like chocolate. Think Peeps, but made of aether. And naked.