mechahamham

My testing for Dual Pistols: I took my level 33 DP/Time Manip blaster to Brickstown and found a Crey Vigilant to shoot both on Excel and on Brainstorm. The copy of the character on Brainstorm is a fresh copy, so the two have absolutely the same build and any extraneous buffs. I didn't use any powers but the three listed. The Vigilant was an even-con level 33 in both cases. Excelsior: You activated the Executioner's Shot power. HIT Vigilant! Your Executioner's Shot power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 78.80. You hit Vigilant with your Executioner's Shot for 135.23 points of Lethal damage. You hit Vigilant with your Executioner's Shot for 57.95 points of Fire damage. You hit Vigilant with your Executioner's Shot for 15.39 points of Fire damage over time. You activated the Dual Wield power. You hit Vigilant with your Executioner's Shot for 15.39 points of Fire damage over time. HIT Vigilant! Your Dual Wield power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 65.24. You hit Vigilant with your Dual Wield for 71.29 points of Lethal damage. You hit Vigilant with your Dual Wield for 30.55 points of Fire damage. You hit Vigilant with your Dual Wield for 8.71 points of Fire damage over time. You gain 218 influence. (Vigilant was defeated) total 334.51 damage Brainstorm: You activated the Executioner's Shot power. HIT Vigilant! Your Executioner's Shot power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 94.73. You hit Vigilant with your Executioner's Shot for 193.19 points of Fire damage. You hit Vigilant with your Executioner's Shot for 15.39 points of Fire damage over time. You activated the Dual Wield power. HIT Vigilant! Your Dual Wield power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 50.71. You hit Vigilant with your Dual Wield for 101.84 points of Fire damage. You activated the Pistols power. HIT Vigilant! Your Pistols power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 7.88. You hit Vigilant with your Pistols for 70.4 points of Fire damage. You gain 218 influence. (Vigilant was defeated) total 380.92 damage So, yeah. He died before I could get Pistols to hit him on Excelsior and lasted until Pistols hit him on Brainstorm despite being the same enemy at the same level. It's gonna be kinda hard to get an apples to apples comparison that way. I did more total damage on Brainstorm because he didn't die as quickly. The damage amounts, so far as I can tell, are exactly the same. Under the new Brainstorm build, they're all the Ammo damage type rather than Ammo + Lethal, which is true to the patch notes. So against enemies that are vulnerable to that damage type, it's certainly going to be a buff, but in the majority of cases, it's only going to be a very minor change.

I've personally had MM pets contribute to NPCs getting stuck before. I had a nightmare experience with Amy Jonsson a while back in which my MM pets nudged her into the terrain on KHTF. It felt like it was 100% my fault for trying to maneuver her around like she was one of my pets and not treating her with the same kid gloves I do other NPC followers.

No. That's not the case. I'm not trying to imply anything. Your statement where you disavow any kind of negative feelings toward the dev team lines up with others I've seen who are trying to avoid the wrath of the 'Homecoming team is Flawless' types. I'm calling the latter out as a problem. I'm not calling anything you said as a problem. You shouldn't have to make that kind of qualifier to your statements. As for the costume discussion, I'm adding my own feelings, wants, and observations for the costume creator system into the discussion since they seem adjacent. I'm not trying to coopt your statements or classify them. It seems like you're assuming I'm attacking you or trying to take advantage of your statements. I'm not. You say I'm putting words in your mouth. What are you doing to my statements here? Please don't assume malice where none exists. I'm fully aware of the developers' limitations, lack of personnel, and lack of tooling. I read that same developer response you saw. If you'll go back to that thread, you'll see that I was a part of it and lamented the issues they were facing.

I've always thought the Animus Arcana from Night Ward would make for great lore pets.

A while back, I seriously tried to roll a defender that relied on the Fighting pool for his damage. He took the entire pool, and tried to use the synergy between them to replace blast powers. I expected the damage to be lacking. What I did not expect was for it to be almost completely ineffective. Sure, I did the occasional stun, knock, and end drain, but still couldn't really use the fighting pool to solo +0/x1 IMO, the majority of problems with the Fighting pool attacks are not their cost, or even their utility, but their damage output. If you left the end cost the same and doubled the damage output, they'd still be pretty underpowered. Right now, when I take Boxing or Kick on any character, it's 100% as an 'investment' for the sake of taking Tough and Weave later. The ONLY time I bother using them is if I'm fighting Harbinger, or another enemy with ridiculous slows, and that's the only power I have left up. If I want melee damage or utility from the power pools, I will take Air Superiority for its almost guaranteed knockdown instead.

An opportunity missed by the Paragon dev team for the Winter Event was that they never included any frozen furniture items that were blue-colored Longbow agents on the Frozen Agincourt map. The reason that this is worth adding NOW is that permanently frozen enemies would have a huge reuse value: "I am eeenveeencible!" *click* *click* *click* Imagine visiting future Christmas maps where enemies are frozen in place as storytelling elements. Other places where they could be used are in AE maps. Imagine a time-travel story arc where the player character was stuck in a moment in time while the usual panicking citizen NPCs were frozen to the ground instead of running around. Imagine a SG base belonging to an ice- or time- powered villain who kept frozen heroes as trophies. Difficulty: Very Easy-Easy-Medium. We've got LOTS of statues and mannequins in the game already that are clearly using models made in the costume creator. One only need to copy the data for those furniture objects to new furniture objects made of blue-colored Longbow or other enemy groups, possibly with the older ice-armor effects. They don't need to be animated at all, but if they are, the 'Lost converts to Civillian NPC' effect can be used to 'thaw' them. That might be more difficult. For bonus points, add a frozen Arachnos team that was trying to infiltrate the base before Lady Winter showed up.

This hints at something that's become a bit of a problem. It goes something like: "Group Y has given me something I really want. Therefore Group Y are good people." That's okay in and of itself, but then goes on, "I will tolerate NO CRITICISM OF GROUP Y! THEY ARE FLAWLESS! IF YOU DISAGREE, YOU ARE THE ENEMY!" No. None of us are flawless, and organizations tend to compound the flaws of their members. Homecoming has done a WONDERFUL job championing the game we love and adding new content to it despite being an entirely volunteer organization, but mistakes still get made. Problems still exist. Because it's a volunteer organization, because the game is in OUR hands now, we ALL have to work to make it better. That means testing, reporting bugs, helping new players, and providing constructive criticism where appropriate. If someone says 'x feature is neglected. I feel the developers are missing an opportunity to make the game better,' and the response is, 'How dare you criticize these wonderful people who've given us back the game that was taken away from us?!?!', that doesn't do a damn thing to actually make the game better, and it's not hard to find MANY examples of similar lines here on the forums, and I hear something similar at least two or three times a week in-game. Now, on to the costume items: Once upon a time, I remember reading from the Paragon devs (Maybe even from SexyJay or NobleSavage?) that requests for female costume parts outweighed requests for male costume parts by a huge amount, so the margin of 'stereotypically' feminine costume pieces doesn't really surprise me. Over time, I've personally found my desire to make male characters at all has dropped to near zero. I want my characters to look cute or sexy or punk, but primarily I want them to look feminine. Even with that extra margin of feminine costume pieces, I'm still unable to create what is, for me, a convincing 'frills and lace' style magical girl costume. Think something along the lines of: , which crosses well over into the ream of 'Elegant Gothic Lolita' fashion. (I think this person is cosplaying a character from the Touhou games, but wouldn't swear to it.) We were getting there. We were getting more and more costume pieces that would allow one to create costumes that approached this style before a certain Korean company locked our art team out of their offices. Now, similar work is VERY difficult for the reasons stated in the OP. And, despite all that, the Paragon dev team was VERY resistant to feminine costume pieces for male characters and only slightly less so to masculine pieces for female characters. Importantly, a costume like the above WOULD NOT be to everyone's tastes, and that's absolutely okay. Some people would prefer more utilitarian costumes. Some would prefer less sexualized or even less sexually differentiated costumes, and again, that's okay. I'd like for all of us to be happy. I'd be over the moon if we could stick a character with male geometry into said magical girl costume. I'd like it if we could get there, but I'm realistic in that it would not only be a ton of work, but a ton of work for one or many volunteers using obsolete tools. And 'ton' is an understatement in the very least.

Every time I hear this, both from WB and from analysts, it sounds to me like "Why can't our hastily written sitcom with middling special effects pull down the same money as a well-crafted blockbuster? Why does Disney get to have all the money?!" Disney is having to ask themselves this same question over and over again now that those who were doing the crafting are no longer doing so. NF does one thing really well: Monetize existing properties. If that's all WB is going for, then NF can probably do it better. Sadly, this probably means we're going to end up with more stuff like Arrow-verse TV shows rather than Gunn-style Superman and Suicide Squad. James Gunn made us all weep for a cartoon racoon. He somehow made Captain Polkadot vs. Starro work... and work REALLY WELL on the big screen. Hell, he had me personally convinced that Chris Pratt was a great actor. If NF cuts him loose, it will be a liturgical, critical, and financial mistake.

Importantly, BNY is a 'hostage' type follow and not an 'ally' follow and without exception, hostages cannot see through stealth of any kind. Some allies can't either, but it's a 100% thing with hostages. If you have something like Shadow Fall, Steamy Mist or the like that does AOE stealth as some MMs (and many others) do, he loses sight of you after just a few steps and says his 'Typical mortal...' line. (This is a real pain in the tuckus for Stalkers.) I think it was Solace, but one of the GMs told me that their biggest source of tickets related to the Rescue BNY mission was from people who didn't realize they had to turn their stealth off to get the little gnome to follow you. As for the falling through and getting stuck on the geometry I wish I could offer more help to you. My personal strategy with ANY NPC follower is to take lines as straight as possible and avoid any obvious vertex on the terrain. Always go over a change in the terrain as perpendicular as possible: Make a ---|--> motion across ledges and the like.

After doing quite a bit of thinking about it since it's release, I'm of the opinion that the badge leaderboard functionality and the tracking and progress functionality need to be divorced. One need not even make a new kiosk, although there certainly could be one created. Just keep the red-screen computer for the progress functionality and have the leaderboard functionality accessed by clicking on the base of the hologram display. A hint could even be included on the display given by the computer to click the hologram base to view or submit one's character for the leaderboard. I think I remember reading that the kiosk was powered by a Lua script that ran SQL queries? Please correct me if I'm wrong. If they're split off into separate entities, then the tracker/progress script has the potential to use Lua's collectgarbage functionality to reduce its memory usage after players leave Pocket D. Likewise, I remember reading that the script polls every player who enters Pocket D. If the leaderboard ONLY polls players who actually click on the hologram or its base, then neither the tracker nor the leaderboard have to poll every last player who drops into Pocket D.

I've had reasonable luck with Lutris in the past and can recommend it. I don't currently use it because CoH doesn't *have* to have it, and it's really the only thing I'm using WINE for at the moment.

CoH on Linux at my house runs on Endeavour (which is basically a fancy Arch installer) and Mint, which is based on Ubuntu and by extension, Debian. WINE from the Arch repos with no extra configuration will very happily run both the HC Launcher and cityofheroes.exe. I *think* we had to install WINE from WineHQ's PPAs to get it to run correctly on Mint, but again required no configuration beyond that very trustworthy PPA addition.

Ideally I'd like a vendor in the lodge itself, or in the private areas below, one at the bottom of the slopes where I posted the OP image, one in the Tiki lounge, and then one in the RMFC area. I'd take one ANYWHERE on the slope and be happy, tbh. The vendors don't have to be standing behind the bars, but the bartender stations with cash registers are SCREAMING for vendors. It seems odd when there are no vendors in sight. It's doubly odd when there's a bartender NPCs talking to you, like the one in my chat box, but then you can't actually do anything with them. (I dislike visiting Pollux because walking past 20 Spines/Fire brutes that I KNOW are just there for the sake of agriculture kinda takes me out of the game.)

In particular, can one of these two NPCs at the bottom of the ski slope sell inspirations? It seems like Chilli is one of the vendors for the temp powers available during the Spring event, or sends you to the NPC that does that. Even if he can't be made to sell inspirations and buy dropped enhancements, his coworker right next to him should.

I updated my Wine to version 10.20 this evening. Both the HC Launcher and the game itself load and play correctly, but Wine is, for some reason, not displaying icons or other graphics related to the game correctly. This is a minor, entirely cosmetic issue, but one worth mentioning, IMO. To be clear, this doesn't seem to be a CoH problem, but a minor Wine problem. I'm looking for information about similar happenings, but haven't found any yet.