InvaderStych

Yup. My cert was over 20 years ago at this point, but by the time I got around to doing the swap it was out of warranty anyway. 🤣 Pretty much everything has a "not user accessible" battery at this point. I can only think of a couple phones with an old-school battery cover. Historically I've found HP stuff to be a bit inconsistent. Some of their model lines are ... not great ... while others have been rock solid. 🤷‍♂️

I've been using the same HP Spectre x360 (15") since early 2018 and it has been solid as a tank and reliable as a Swiss watch the entire time, mostly, see below. Including a great deal of work travel 2018-2020 where I used it often in less than ideal conditions like rainy golf courses on event production jobs, or the time it fell out of its Pelican case at the airport while leaving Africa at the end of a month-long gig there. I do use it for occasional light gaming (Homecoming, Civ VI, Stellaris), but that it best done with an external monitor that is not 4K. It gets solar-surface hot when running games on the in-built 4K screen. For my previous work it would often run Wirecast/OBS setups or serve as a download station to backup camera cards to travel drives. Dual Thunderbolt was clutch for that. It can connect to an external GPU via T-Bolt 3, but I never got around to trying that setup. Keyboard being comfortable for my freakishly long-fingered/large hands was one of the parameters, and the model I have has the nicest laptop keyboard I have ever used. Including a full 10key to the right. Did the "build to order" route on their website - so a bit more expensive than going pre-configured or outlet, but given the durability I feel I definitely got my money's worth. If I had to do it over again I would skip the "fold over into a tablet" feature: It is a touch too heavy to use like a tablet comfortably, and the pen interface isn't on-par for handwriting with a more modern e-ink device like a Remarkable or similar. Only issues: One instance where the automatic screen orientation stopped working due to a bios update that shipped with errors and was immediately fixed with a re-released update without said errors. I eventually had to replace the battery, I suspect due to the drop in the Monrovia Airport as a year or so after the drop it started to swell on that corner. Easy job and aftermarket batteries are dirt cheap. Considering the fall it took I call this a win. Screen is Corning Gorilla - the way it landed would have shattered a lesser screen. Ditto for the body itself, magnesium alloy. Plastic would have shattered as well.

Love me some Psi Melee, but Insight and Boggle are common complaints with the set. Boggle is not just a confuse, it applies a "Boggled" status to the target as well. Each attack in Psi Melee that does not consume Insight has a % chance to trigger Insight. TKB has the highest chance. Using Boggle will increase the % chance for each attack on the Boggled target. Might have mentioned this in @Without_Pause's thread previously, but here are my thoughts: Slightly increase the % chance to trigger Insight on each applicable attack. Increase the "Boggled" value by the same differential. Give Concentration the ability to clear the Lockout when it is used without making any other changes to Concentration. Give Boggle a treatment similar to the revised Touch of Fear - Have it apply Confuse to the primary target, and Boggled status to all targets in within the tAoE range (10' around primary target would be nice), and reduce its casting time by a fraction or so. Slightly reduce the lockout duration. Result shouldn't move the set too much in relationship to other sets, but it would smooth out some of the rough edges while also making Boggle a worthy choice that would be useful for more than just for specific play-styles that lean into the Confuse aspect.

Interesting. Had not considered that possibility. I was too busy trying to think of which Mutant they might be facing off against as characters from the various X series are slowly being folded into the DisneyVerse. The T-shirt is probably the tell, but I don't recognize the Dolores River reference. The look isn't quite right for anyone I could think of though. 🤷‍♂️ I suppose I should start catching up on these things at some point. 🤣

This. Do this. Most importantly it looks super-cool and feels epic to play. Secondarily, Shield Charge meshes great with Mass Lev, and the +dmg from AAO is icing on the hawtness cake.

Always good to have the precise numbers. Pretty sure I am a few seconds off a full duration double-stack on my Psi/SD, but not by much. Haven't played her in a while and she's overdue for a rebuild since I want to incorporate part of the Warp set as well as the Flight Protection unique that were both released a while back.

True Grit really only needs 2 slots from a heal set to basically cap its +HP effect once they are boosted. I use Preventative Med for the 2 slot S/L resistance bonus. (Heal + Heal/End does the trick). The other slots are great for 2 pieces of Gladiators (Resistance and the +3% global) alongside 2 pieces of Unbreakable (Resistance and the +MaxHP global). The +7.5% HP from the Unbreakable piece is another +100 hp at 50 on top of the +250 provided by the power itself when slotted this way. Use Shield Walls in your defense shields if you can afford them, 4 pieces minimum for the e/neg resistance bonuses. In one of them add the global piece as a 5th slot. Deflection is good with 4 pcs of Shield Wall, a Ribosome Exposure and the Steadfast global. Don't forget that Deflection provides Defense and Resistance. Charge is a good place to 6 slot Sup Scrapper's Strike: (not Crit Strikes) as the crit bonus piece is a global, and the 5th/6th slot bonuses (recharge and resistance respectively) are useful on a /SD build. Active Defense stacks just fine with a single Recharge IO; especially if the build includes Hasten, which it absolutely should. Hasten/AD is easy to manage with a set of movement key binds so that you don't have to worry about which one to have on auto.

Sounds like a punk band, aren't they opening for Dangling Participle?

"Beware the voice without a face."

The true elephant in the room is that Ramen was taken away as a reaction. The people demand Ramen!

Heh. Well we have a long tradition of "borrowing" from UK Television over here in the States. And I do mean, long. U.S. TV Classic Sanford and Son, for example, was based on the UK show Steptoe and Son. Would not be surprised if the tradition goes further back than that though. Heh. As late 90s network TV series go it was actually pretty solid. Maybe a bad example. 🙂 I certainly remember watching it with the lady-friend of the time. I remember wanting to know more about The Centre and less "Monster of the Week." Late 90s was sort of a touchstone for TV series in that way. Lots of shows trying to go for long-form (multi-season) story arcs, but the audience wasn't quite ready for it at the time. Millennium was one of my favorites of that era (probably a toss up between that and DS9, which started a bit earlier), and it was widely critiqued for being too continuous and requiring the viewer to watch every episode to keep up with the story. Of course now ... totally different landscape. ... but please, for the love of all that is sane, if anyone working in production/development reads this, DO NOT REBOOT MILLENNIUM. There is only one Lance Henriksen.

Hippotraktor - Manifest the Mountain

Caught this trailer over the weekend. They could make a series where D'Onofrio's Fisk sat in a chair and read Dostoevsky aloud, or discussed the flight speed of various birds and I'd watch it. Twice.

Hilarious. Generally I prefer Quiet Gosling paired with Winding-Refn, but this looks like some harmless action fun. Will watch, eventually. Semi-related, I noticed the other day that there is a Quantum Leap re-boot out in the wild at the moment, and now we've got a Fall Guy movie. What's next? A Pretender re-boot? 🤣

So say we all.

You are correct: relative level should have an indirect impact on target behavior, I was thinking earlier that I should have been more specific. 🙂 It was stated earlier in this thread that if someone was experiencing problems with runners it was because they were "playing at 50+ set at +4, x8 which is not normal gameplay." That assertion is patently false. Setting aside that it is an accusation of someone having "wrongbadfun" because they play differently than the poster making that statement - something said poster has a long and embarrassing habit of doing, let's look more closely ... In that relative level will reduce the effectiveness of debuffs as well as reduce incoming damage from the targets perspective, the effect of these inputs should be lessened against targets with a higher relative level. The exact opposite of the statement referenced above. I play at a variety of elevated notoriety settings, and can't say that I've seen much of a difference from one setting to the next. Faction definitely has more impact on it though - Resistance (Praetorians) spawn in scattered groups in most missions and will remain at range most of the time. One instance in which it might seem like targets are running out to range more frequently at a higher relative level is that it simply takes longer to bring them down. But that's not a behavior change, it is a side effect of the conditions of the encounter. I've mentioned before that a target that runs out to range and turns to fire is not problematic, and should be part of a decently written set of behaviors. Why should all the targets cluster around the murder-ball only to be taken down en masse? Doesn't make sense. These targets are easily redirected by a normal taunt, aura or otherwise. Problematic runners are when the target in question simply just bugs out (idk, maybe the game tries to divide by zero or something) and sprints halfway across a mission map, or endlessly runs across a zone. A taunt aura doesn't do anything to fix those, my /SD scrapper can attest to this. Maybe a direct use of Taunt/Confront might reset the behavior - I've never tried. These are oddities/outliers, but frequent enough to be an annoyance. I am fairly certain that is not programmed behavior though, it happens when something has gone amiss. To the topic at hand: A firm "no thanks" to adding a taunt aura to SR. As many have stated, not every scrapper armor needs (nor should get) one. I, like many folks, prefer to be able to chose to roll a scrapper with or without one depending on what I'm looking for out of that particular toon. 🍻

Notoriety settings have nothing to do with mob behavior. All that setting governs is relative level and the number of individuals in a mob.

Agreed.

Laputa - Nightmare ~ either open the transcript or turn on CC for interesting tidbits about Korean music structure and its usage in this track ~

On the subject of missing forum reactions ... ... The consistently active Return of the Son of Jukebox Thread needs this, stat. PlzKThxBai.

Closest I've ever gotten was while leading a team through the Dark Astoria arcs and started talking back to Mot's interstitial dialog in my character's "voice" in team chat uSiNG thE sAMe tEXT StYLe. Does that count? 🤣

I can't tell you the backstory, but what I can tell you is that is a movie that isn't actually about what it looks like it is about nor is it actually about the plot points that happen along the way. There's a depth underneath the madness that I did not expect to find. I went into it expecting a post-apocalyptic surrealist fever dream and nothing more. Turns out I got that and quite a bit more. It takes a while to get there, but once there the trip becomes worth taking.

Mostly just the zombies, iirc it's around 30-50% resist for the Banished kind. Actually, idk about the ToT zombies though, but full on immunity to a specific damage type is exceedingly rare.

You're slacking. The Derps to Non-Derps ratio in the world clearly demonstrates this. Get Back To Work.