Johnny

That's okay. Saving teammates when they zig instead of zag is what I do.

Before proceeding, let me clarify between "Rularuu the Ravager" and "Soldiers of Rularuu" (per those links). I believe these two observations of yours are key, with the reasonable interpretation that: 1- Rularuu the Ravager is the god-like being that consumes dimensions. 2- By infusing his being into the Shadow Shard (i.e., the slice of faux Earth dimension), this essentially populated the dimension with physical matter, the various Soldiers of Rularuu, and the Aspects of Rularuu (plural), not to be confused with the Aspect of Rularuu (singular). 3- And the purpose of the infusing was for Rularuu the Ravager to prevent its own destruction in nothingness. I further speculate: 4- The Soldiers of Rularuu, being of the nature of Rularuu the Ravager, tend towards chaos, and their collective desire to consume the Earth dimension. 5- Through manipulations by the Circle of Thorns, some aspect of Rularuu the Ravager was re-awakened, in effect creating a lurking threat that the Ravager could one day be restored. 6- Various criminal organizations have sought to harness, or ally themselves with the awakened form of Rularuu the Ravager (i.e., Crey, Nemesis, and Malta). 7- And should Rularuu the Ravager ever succeed in restoring itself, this would involve reconstituting itself from all the Shadow Shard matter, per (2), plus any immigrants like Sara Moore and her people. 8- The inevitable consequence of Rularuu the Ravager restoring itself would be the annihilation of Earth dimension, though perhaps Praetorian Earth could go unnoticed. Addtional comments: Skimming the wiki for Shadow Shard task force info and related articles, there's much explanation of what things are, but not what they represent, nor their meaningful relationships. For example, the task force introductions, especially for Sara Moore, read like fan fiction with an extraordinary amount of info dumping. Contrast this with Fallout: New Vegas (a game written within the same era as CoH), which has a fleshed out ecosystem of peoples and places to visit, not to mention individual backstories and points-of-view that provide immersion. Considering that humans began colonizing the Shadow Shard in the 1960's, I would have expected more business ventures, such as resource extraction, food harvesting, protection services, and human infrastructure to support all of that, essentially human townships, like mining towns, that sort of thing.

To offer an interpretation, this suggests that the plan to create a faux slice of Earth dimension worked. Through the sheer activity of Rularuu conceptualizing the slice and deciding that it should be real, he constructed his own prison. For an equivalent argument, consider the Secret Wars series (Marvel Comics, 1980s). After Doctor Doom has successfully stolen the Beyonder's power, and killed all of the heroes that were allied against him, Klaw (being controlled by the essence of the Beyonder) described an imaginary scenario whereby the heroes actually survived. Though a nonsense imaginary story, Doom conceptualization immediately willed imagination into reality, retroactively enabling the heroes to be in a position to attack, mere moments later. As soon as time travellers are involved, the direct connection between cause and effect ceases to exist. As an example of this phenomenon, I cite the series finale episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, All Good Things..., wherein Picard was responsible for creating a spatial phenomenon that manifested itself as a projection that increased in size, though backwards in time. Thus, back in the time of primordial Earth, it had grown large enough to prevent the formation of life on Earth. How was this phenomenon created? It is a paradox because the original cause ceased to exist due to the nature of the phenomenon's relationship to time.

Interesting tidbit, but just looks like a fairly routine business decision. Probably things were slow due to the pandemic, so someone decided that now was a good time to start switching over the branding, and get the paperwork done. With govt. offices closed, or running at reduced capacity, this might have actually delayed application processing (if not produced outright errors, such as lost on someone's inbox).

My main is a Grav/FF controller, but there's no way that I could have put as much thought into the FF set as Philotic has in those other threads. For the Deflection and Insulation Shields, it was a godsend when these were made into AoEs. Originally, you had to cast on individual team members, and then remember to refresh those casts between mobs. I was pretty good at refreshing these shields, but I understood that many players would forget, leading to the unpleasant experience of being nagged for shields. With people nagging you to apply shields, I would not surprised if this dissuaded people from taking FF. I actually never went in for the knockback powers, except Force Bolt because it provided precise targetting for anything that my grav fields missed, or for knocking a mob away from a teammate. With a balanced team, there shouldn't be a regular need for Detention Field. I keep it handy for when a boss needs to be isolated from the other mobs (i.e., divide-and-conquer). Don't just fire it off, though. You need a macro that tells people what you've done, along with how long until that enemy is free. As a comparison from the Grav set, Dimension Shift is similar to Detention Field, except that it is AoE. Again, there shouldn't be a regular need for Dimension Shift, but it's useful when someone aggro'd a second large mob (that is now closing in and about to wipe the team). Just make sure you have a macro that declares what you've done, and how much time until the effect wears off.

I'd say people are correct to not consider Taunts and aggro management as control mechanics. These are tanking mechanics that influence how mobs choose their targets (which affects your tactics), whereas control mechanics inhibit mob effectiveness (improving the overall team survivability).

I'd rank Immobilize just under Hold, because: 1- When solo, you can keep mob(s) out-of-sight around corners, which renders it equivalent to a hold with lower end cost. 2- When grouped, you can take the alpha by AoE'ing a mob when its nearby mobs are out-of-sight, where most of them can't hit you (but your teammates can destroy them...yet not realize what you're doing).

I asked my doctor how much longer this pandemic would last. He replied: How should I know? I'm not a politician.

If someone had ripped the cover off the dictionary, then you'd need to look up what it was called.

As a tank, I suppose that you mean like the following: 1. You have a large mob and most of the team with you. 2. But someone got their left confused with their right, and is dying somewhere. 3. You select that person, and then Teleport Foe by targetting through them, bringing their adversary to you. If you type /assist, then you target the person's target, and then you can teleport foe (though apparently no longer through walls). I think I'd prefer to just use Recall Friend to bring the teammate back into the group. Mind you, it would be *awesome* if a version of Recall Friend *also* brought that person's aggro'd mobs with them.

The odd thing about that telephone is it replaces the older style telephone booth, which was fully enclosed, but they still provide the toilet paper. I suppose that it's a urinal-style telephone.

Tweaks to the Teleport pool work for me. I only have three toons, but all three have Recall Friend. As a tank, if I teleport into a mob, does that actually mean that I'm immune to the alpha? That should be amusing. Nice to have less end reduction on Team Teleport, but in practice, you need to pace the ports because otherwise you risk losing people due to latency (and I suppose for those that are slow to accept the port). For Teleport Foe, the issue wasn't range, but slotting for accuracy.

Praetoria, Ouroboros, maybe kinda the Shadow Shard as far as dimensional travel goes. It would be awesome to have a Homecoming Crisis Of Multiple Toons, whereby everyone's individual army of toons was condensed into a single toon, putting an end to ALTitis, for all time. <grin>

For anyone that likes to dress up as a superhero for comic conventions, make sure you're wearing a visible Homecoming badge that is legible in photos.

This youtube video explains it well, specifically at the 24:40 point: Death of a Game: City of Heroes To keep it simple for TLDR, it boils down to: NCSoft was mainly a South Korean company CoH only amounted to 2-4% of company revenue Their other games were fantasy MMOs, popular in the South Korean market But CoH was not significantly popular in South Korea, despite marketing attempts And it was expensive to operate the California offices for the sake of the NA market Despite earning *some* revenue, there was an opportunity cost in terms of manpower So it probably made sense to move manpower to better support their other titles