Grouchybeast

I rolled a Seismic Blast/Kinetics corr a couple of days ago, and was slightly surprised to find that Seismic Shift was untaken. Then I scored another good punny one by suggesting Freeze Radical for my duo partner's new Ice/Rad tank. The advantages of playing on a low population server!

I'm interested! I usually play on Reunion, but I don't mind rolling a character on another server. I can usually play on any day, but unfortunately I'm actually going to be away from home Thursday-Sunday for both of the next two weeks.

I'm very sorry for your loss. 💔

Portal Corps need to have giant portals because if they didn't, how could large invading forces pour through them to threaten the very survival of humanity? It's a question of style, really.

I always play in Atlas.

I think that would be covered by laws on deceptive advertising, though. People try silly lawsuits over that (like trying to sue because Froot Loops are not actually made of fruit) but the laws exist. Plus, depending on jurisdiction, there might be laws about using specific terms like 'organic'. In the UK, at least 95% of the contents of Untainted Organic Blood would have to come from organically farmed humans, or be certified as meeting organic standards, and if it wasn't then you're breaking the law. That specifically includes brand names using the word organic, too. Of course, vampires could bypass the courts and just murder the producers for lying to them, which is also a pretty effective deterrent.

2.4% sounds like the Pool A roll chance for a Rare recipe (2.44% according to the wiki). I don't know how up-to-date the HC Wiki drop rates are, and I couldn't find any note of drop rate changes in the SCoRE period, so the best value I could find for Very Rare recipes is the enemy defeat drop rate estimate from Live of 1 in 5000 to 1 in 1500, i.e. 0.02% - 0.067%. So very approximately, for every 100 Rare recipe drops at level 50, you should get 1 purple. For Uncommon recipes it's roughly 1 purple for every 1000 Uncommons. They really are Very rare.

Trademarks do solve a real problem, though. When you go to the store, you want to know that the pint bag of Cannula's Oh-So-PositiveTM that you buy really is freshly harvested human blood, and not from a company that ripped off that distinctive silver-and-black graveyard Cannula branding to sell you frozen horse blood flavoured with artificial essence of people, right?

Scourge?

Surely a Stalker is just someone who enjoys picking flowers?

You can do a lot with recolours, I find. For example, I have Clocktail, a Praetorian bartender clockwork, who uses her cocktail mixing (Water Blast) and drink cooling (Cold Domination) abilities. I also have Buffalo Lill, a mutant cow who controls plants (Nature Affinity) and drowns her enemies in milk (Water Blast).

Dooped, jerked hacked, and gone to the Americans!!!

This. Posi 1 is great. That amazing moment when you see people charging towards the City Hall steps and you know it's all about to go down in flames. I love it.

Supply has fallen, but so has demand, so there's been no real pressure on prices either way. Converter roulette constantly moves supply from less-desirable to more-desirable IOs, so the market stays liquid. The devs have tweaked the inf:drops ratio a couple of times, which has kept inflation in check. It all adds up to keep the market pretty level.

If I'm crafting for a particular niche, I do everything in stacks of ten. Bid for a stack of 10 of the recipes and all the salvage, then when I log in and find it's all filled, I craft all ten, put them on the market, and assuming the niche still looks viable, bid for more stacks of ten. It keeps things simple.

Maybe someone wanted to spread a little Christmas cheer to players who take the time to list Common salvage on the AH.

Every character that you log in gets a pop-up saying that Old Father Time needs your help, and where to find him.

My bad. I thought I had a vague memory of having a lowbie character open a present as they were passing through in a high level zone and getting clobbered by uber-purple snowbeasts. ETA: Apparently not my bad. Open presents with caution!

I think the spawn level is set by the zone they're in, not by the character opening the presents, isn't it? It's arc and TF ambushes that spawn at the character level.

No, I'm pretty sure @Luminara's just saying that she feeds the bodies of anyone she kills to the cats and the bear. Don't worry, the cats are fine.

In order to stop people min-maxing, this is also applied to support sets. Pinball Wizard + Empathy becomes the most hated and feared combo in the game.

You're right, End management really shouldn't be difficult now. SOs are such a massive buff to low-level characters, even though it was framed as a pure quality of life improvement. Now, low-level characters with SOs can end up with bigger bonuses than high-level characters exemped down to their level, because it throws out the whole balance of the scaling rules. I even thought about using SOs, which I've never done, since I only started playing the game after the Invention system came out. But like you, I don't usually bother slotting anything at low levels, except a few uniques. So I guess it wasn't a big enough buff to overcome my inertia. :)

For the past couple of days I randomly keep thinking about a control set that consists of variations on the character just walking up behind NPCs and whacking them on the back of the head with a heavy object, and laughing to myself. It would be the most fun control set ever. You could call it Cranial Control.

If I'm alting, I feel like it's down to me to tell the team leader clearly when I'm back. They shouldn't need to do extra work for my convenience. I always send a tell with "Hi, this is [previous character] back for the TF". If I didn't do that I wouldn't be surprised to miss out a slot. Sometimes I've come back with the new character, and they're given the slot to someone else in the meantime anyway. Again, fair enough, they're the ones juggling tells and putting the team together, so I don't feel I have any real standing to complain.

I would love to see more Goldside content. At the very least, stretching the zone level ranges to make levelling a character goldside smoother would be great.