BillyMailman

Level listings tend to be a mess. I think most of it's been cleaned up in-game, though, but I found a couple by just quickly skimming the list: Summer Blockbuster claims it's levels 15 to 50, but it's actually 15 to 29. Both versions of SSA 1.1 (Alastor's or Theoden's arcs) claim they're from levels 1 to 120. Might be worth double-checking the Christmas and Hallowe'en ones while you're looking at them, since they can't be viewed in-game right now, and could get missed.

Gather 'round, friends, and let me share with you the story of Pinnacle Server's best toon, the great Brawling Humiliator. Back on Pinnacle, Brawling Humiliator was a toon by @houtex. A War Mace/Willpower Brute. War Mace was chosen solely to draw it, and have Brawl use the mace. But that wasn't enough - the character was meant to humiliate the enemies, and that meant suffering utterly but still being better than them. So, the Brawling Humiliator levelled entirely from 1-50 on solo Street Sweeping. Near shutdown, when the devs were doing various invasions (Captain Mako Week, plus I think there was a Nemesis one?), BH was the toon us folks on Pinnacle wanted front-and-center, "tanking" everything. And he did! Hell, several of us put a lot of work into trying to figure out how to tune the Humiliator's build for the upcoming PPM proc changes, which sadly never came to be. And then Homecoming happened, and people came back. And all us old Pinnacle regulars remembered the Humiliator. And so, tribute alts started happening. @Bill Z Bubba made a whole thread about his, though it was Swipe-only, because it's Bill - gotta be a Claws/ Scrapper. I made a Spines/Dark Brute with no enemy-affecting click powers other than Brawl, named the Toggling Humiliator. Levelled him to 50 (and even unlocked incarnates via vet levels) entirely off solo street sweeping - if I'm on a team or in an instance, I turn XP off! That toon managed (with a handful of purple insps spaced out across the fight) to solo AV Infernal in the one Maria Jenkins mission. It took twenty minutes, but Brawl and toggles slowly whittled him down. And then the OG himself showed up! Brawling Humiliator lives on once again on Excel, and has been street sweeping ever since. I haven't talked to houtex in a bit, but the character is alive and kicking once more. If you go check that thread of Bill's, houtex even commented on it once we all found out he was back. He was astonished we'd remembered him, let alone made tributes to the insanity of his character, but of course we had - Brawl only, solo only, street sweeping only is a ludicrous combination. And he remembered some of his own best kills back on live. +3 Elite Boss Chimera with no help whatsoever, no other sources of damage, just Brawl. So yes, all a toon really needs is Brawl. You don't need teammates, you don't need all those toggles I took on my Brawler, you don't even need instanced maps to make it work. You just need Brawl, enemies to punch, and the ability to wait as your enemies slowly die a very humiliating death. And all us former Pinnacle folks will always remember it.

A variety of things worth adding, that are in the data files to this day: - The Devoured EAT's inherent still exists. In three parts. Basically boils down to a copy of Brute Fury. - The Hyper-Advanced Clockwork AT has some powers in the data. They got a self-rez inherent, alongside their main inherent, Android Form. Also, that seems to have been the name they settled on, "Hyper-Advanced Clockwork", to explain why player Praetorian Clockworks were, y'know, fully sentient. - You entirely missed the Primalist, which was basically entirely implemented, though I dunno how much (if any!) lore we ever got for them. The two parts of Primal Energy (1, 2) exist, as do the powersets of Feral Might and Primal Gifts. It was yet another shapeshifting AT, but with mostly the same powers per form, just that they'd mechanically change like how Bio/Staff/DP/etc. can change their powers with different toggles. As the Wiki points out, Posi confirmed at shutdown that the AT was scrapped mostly for being too complex - bits and pieces of it got repurposed into Beast Summoning, Savage Melee, and I think Bio Armour. So yeah, several of the scrapped EATs actually made it partially into the game, even if they never quite saw the light of day.

Yeah, what Maelwys said. The damage component partway down is marked correctly, but literally the very first overall effect says it damages the primary target, whether they're foe or friend or whatever. And then it also says it buffs them, too, even if they're an enemy. That's definitely not how the power actually works.

Hey, Uber. Found a power from Marine Affinity that's doing weird stuff that your code isn't parsing correctly. Rising Tide, from Marine Affinity says, in CoD, that the main target takes 20.8ish points of cold damage, and gets several buffs (see the second top-level effect group). Thing is, there's something in the actual power that makes it so that that damage is only taken by enemies. Heck, I don't have a Marine toon myself, so I'm not even sure that that damage is really taken by enemies, so... some new feature is likely getting used here, and isn't being parsed up properly.

CoD doesn't have such an option, no. The data's all there, but there's no page that displays it in reverse like that, just powers listing which enhancement sets they take. And honestly, I don't know that such a thing exists anywhere - neither the Wiki nor Mids have it, either.

Yeah, there's definitely somewhat of a communication disconnect here. Don't get me wrong, I didn't go in expecting to be able to solo lots of groups, or to be able to meaningfully do anything to the Minotaur. But like, you're using the word "raid" a lot, and this just ain't that. Raids have an end boss and some kind of goal - U'Kon Gr'ai, Hamidon, the Crystal Titan, the Hydra Head, Aspect of Rularuu etc., but the description of this content is that the Minotaur isn't some final boss you work up to. He's pretty clearly described not as the end goal, but instead as a nuisance that players want to get rid of (see, e.g., language like "allowing people to adventure and battle enemies within without danger.", and also just the fact that he doesn't have any unique drops like 4/5 of those other raid bosses I mentioned). The zone instead just doesn't have (at least from the description in the notes) any actual end goal boss with unique drops, no sense of "clearing the raid", etc. So the actual zone description reads more that it's a place to go farm for XP/inf, a la AE farming. An alternative to that, with actual mechanics and less AFK abuse of the Fire damage type. Something groups and leagues can use to farm cool rewards. That's fine, and honestly, we already have places like that. They're called Hazard Zones, and the existing implementation kinda sucks most of the time, but the idea's sound. A tougher zone, where street sweeping scales up for larger teams. And that's the expectation that kinda made me feel like I'd be able to accomplish something in the zone - Hazard zones aren't pure x8 groups, and a top-tier build at an appropriate level can in fact solo them, albeit with some difficulty. I can take my main into the max-level areas of the Storm Palace, Dark Astoria, or RWZ and get some work done, avoiding the enemy groups that would flatten me, and engaging the ones that I can handle. So that's sorta the expectation I had going into this, and the twisty corridors of unavoidable max-size fights really didn't align with that. The Malevolent Fogs definitely do need an HP reduction or something, yeah. Honestly, anything that's gonna outright con as "Pinata" feels wrong to have a second hit point anyway - the entire expectation of a pinata is that it's easy to break open once you land a good hit on it. Maybe lean into that, give 'em scaling defense or something? I dunno, it definitely felt very un-pinata to sit there hammering the thing for long enough that the Minotaur showed up, and still only have about 2/3 of its HP gone, all on a fairly well-built Blaster. Separate from all that, and coming back around on the stealth thing, I definitely was using Celerity:Stealth while trying to explore the place, but it consistently felt useless. There's anti-stealth enemies in most groups, but even without those, I felt like I was just required to spec into either Speed or Stealth pool to have any chance to poke around for secrets on my own, which stung a bit. Maybe the zone needs something to help out with that. An NPC at the entrance (maybe one of the gladiator things? Or someone back in the mansion) who can help players out by giving them a stealth effect that either only works while solo, or scales down by team/league size or something. It would give players a way to stay beneath the notice of the Labyrinth, but only if they're alone and inconspicuous. Maybe even have it include some degree of like, the Minotaur will see you, and he can still find you, but he's less likely to lock on? If it's implemented as a temp that passively does its thing and revokes itself if you do anything aggressive, you could probably also it have a time limit, so people have to keep coming back to the hub area to refresh it. That would then mean that the zone still puts pressure on a solo player. It should be possible to find some sort of balance where a solo (maybe even duo?) player can explore the zone, but you still gotta keep an eye out for which enemy group is where (Rikti Drones are Rikti Drones, after all), there's still a looming threat, and overall it doesn't meaningfully change the experience for a large league. Oh! And separate from this, I have a general complaint that the Gladiators are very unintuitive. Normal NPC behaviour is that they do stuff if you click on 'em. I genuinely thought they were bugged and accidentally unclickable, until I read the patch notes very carefully, and saw that "Standing next to one will prompt the Gladiator to respond.". The two I found, didn't seem to be doing anything useful other than normal NPC chat stuff when I got nearby, which I think just means I got the "Respond with hints/tips/lore dialog about the Labyrinth." result on their random table. The problem is, that there's no feedback whatsoever that I did anything useful. Like, talking when a player is nearby is just something random NPCs on the street kinda do, and given that I couldn't click the Gladiator at all, and got no message about rewards, it very much felt like something had gone wrong. I'm sure that if I'd gotten the drop, I'd have at least noticed it did something, though I'm not even sure if that'd work if I was in a large league and other people were fighting and I couldn't really identify why I got an inspiration. So yeah, the Gladiators probably also need some improvement on the feedback in-game, so you know that "Hey, you just did a good thing and got a thing for it; do that again whenever you see one of these!". Right now, it's very possible to do as I did, get the lore/info reward twice, and just not understand what's happening with them at all. And all that, even having read the patch notes.

I've screwed around in the labyrinth a bit, felt actively deterred from spending much time there, and have two big complaints: Active hostility towards solo play I entered the zone solo, having gotten the vibe from the description that this was a souped-up high-level hazard zone, effectively. A neat place to wander around, killing mobs, finding secrets, and getting rewards. Not someplace that would be great to explore solo, but at least somewhere where it would be possible. I didn't get that. Normal hazard zones have a mix of small and large spawns, and this place just doesn't - everything is scaled to x8, and with the up-ranking and things being 54+1, my main got wrecked every time I tried to actually fight. So, I thought to myself "Okay, clearly actually fighting is meant for groups. I should just try exploring this place". After all, there's supposed to be secrets all over. I can go poking around looking for those. Except no, that's not really possible, either. Most of this place is extremely tight corridors, meaning exploration's impossible solo without specifically speccing into either the Stealth pool or the Speed pool. So any toon that wants to explore this place solo, is restricted to specific pools to have any chance to explore. And also there are multiple enemy groups in here who can ignore stealth! But, despite all that, I persevered. I found one of the Malevolent Fog things! Neat! I'd explored, found a secret, and the secret was even a thing that'd grant an extra level shift, meaning I might not get utterly obliterated by enemies. Nifty! It then turned out to be a pretty darn tanky enemy, but whatever, I'm on my main - he can solo EBs no sweat, and AVs with some patience. But of course, now I'm not moving. And I'm the only player in the labyrinth. So about 3/4 of the way through the pinata, the Minotaur shows up. Its first attack put me at 1HP, and then it killed me easily with the follow-up. So, what am I to do? I've been reading the various dev posts since this got released (was on vacation and couldn't get in until today), and I've read that this whole place is meant to be chock-full of secrets, lore, stuff that rewards exploration. That's not something I want to engage in with a large PUG-heavy group - those tend to be focused on rewards. But, having read the mechanics, I've got a solution - I'll solo while there's a league in the zone! That's... not a great solution. Sure, it'll work - the extra level shifts should mean that the normal enemy groups aren't utterly obliterating me, and there'll be a 1/50 chance the Minotaur comes after me at any given moment, which'll rarely matter since I'll likely be long gone, and it won't keep hunting me. So I've got a way to actually have fun. But it means actively and deliberately entering a zone with an ongoing raid, using one of the 50 slots, and potentially impeding the raid league's ability to properly fill. Like, Homecoming added an entire instanced version of the RWZ Mothership Raid just to prevent this problem, and now it feels like it's actively encouraging me to grief a raid league by deliberately getting in their way. So okay, fine, I'll only come in here with a team. I normally run with a bunch of people, some of them have badge toons like I do, so we'll run this stuff together. I might not be able to go poking for secrets or hidden areas all on my own when I have some spare time, but I'll still get to herd cats lead other people around and figure stuff out. Which brings me to my second big problem: Not having a map is mean ...and probably mostly won't accomplish what I think you're going for. Don't get me wrong - I've read the explicit reasons you laid out in another thread about why the zone doesn't have a map. I just don't think they're nearly worth the current implementation. An open raid zone needs a map more than any other, so the team can stay together. Especially in tight, crazy corridors full of extremely difficult enemies - this is very much content where I (being the guy who's always leading stuff) need to be able to keep an eye on where people are. For hell's sake, I regularly team up with one of the most notorious scrapper mains this game has (when he's actually playing, at least. Miss you, Bill!), and he's somehow not actually meaningfully more prone to Scrapperlocking than the others. The map isn't just there for knowing where you are - it's there for knowing where everyone is, relative to each other. Seriously, go run a Blueside respec trial, then run the last mission of Yin's TF. Same map, same lack of a map, but one of them hard-disables the in-game map, while the other just displays black. The latter is infinitely more useful for knowing if someone's lagging behind, knowing if someone's wandered off a side path, knowing if someone's scrapperlocked into another group, etc. Sure, the in-zone temp power thing helps fix it when that happens, but fixing the problem after it happens isn't nearly as useful as stopping the problem from happening in the first place. And like, the lack of a map honestly feels like it's impeding exploration. I can't keep track of where I've been, when I've looped back to the same place, unless I use a lot of /loc and tracking things myself. That's doable, but tedious, and it feels bad when I know the game has an entire thing for this - exploring an open-world zone and having the map itself keep track of where I've been, give an indication of what's where relative to me, etc. Having the default in-game mechanic turned off in a zone that feels especially suited to it, sucks. And like, I get that, per that other thread detailing the reasons, specific locations don't matter to the raiding. Except I kinda think they do. If I'm going to be running this content with 5-7 other people, we're gonna want to be able to say things like "should we head into the Crey Facility area up ahead next, or do we wanna stick to the Cimeroran Tunnels to avoid <Enemy Group>?", and that's a pain in the butt to talk about when everyone's perpetually lost due to lack of any sort of help from the game. The maplessness in a non-linear zone feels like it's demanding that players put a lot of work to learn the place, but I can't see most of my regular group doing that. Like, we all have lives, jobs, etc. and can only play an hour or two a day, and figuring out this place is gonna take a lot of work. So okay, fine. I'll wait for other players to map the whole place out, post the maps, and then I'll use their maps to navigate. Hell, those maps'll prolly be available before the thing goes live. Except, why can't I just get those maps, in-game, the same as we've been doing with fan-created map enhancements for years? Like, even if the in-game map was pure black, just having it be an actual all-black image file would be fantastic, if it meant that A) I can see where the team is, and B) The community can create our own map replacement that actually explains the place. Actually, where I think I just don't have a good suggestion for the first big problem, I think I have two for this part. I'd really love to see the zone actually include a map (maybe even lock Reveal out of working in the zone, so we do in fact have to reveal the map bit-by-bit), but have the default map be largely stylized and not include detail. Show general regions, rather than specific paths. Avoids the problem of having "no logistical way to realistically draw/map 40+ floors". Or, if a stylized map can't be included, just make it all black and let us all sort it out. But at minimum, please give me back my ability to see when someone's wandered off. Overall There's this thing that happened with the DASF. It's a great SF in terms of pushing forward a story that was left unfinished, linking back to past stuff, using cool new mechanics, and the Hardmode stuff and the optional alternate-dimension stuff is really cool. But it's a lot, so after my regular group ran it a bunch at first for the badges, we've kinda just not bothered with it unless it's the weekly. Because, like, that thing's Synapse-level loooong. And sure, without hardmode, and skipping the optional bits as fast as possible, it's shorter, but it's still seven missions long, a pain to stealth in places, and honestly it kinda just feels lame to be skipping so much of it in the name of just completing it. Yeah, the rewards are good, but like, that just felt like it was rewarding the people who optimized the shit out of their builds. For a group that's sometimes below eight people, often has pretty suboptimal builds, and where everyone have jobs and lives and stuff (we all grew up a bit during the shutdown!), it's just kinda tediously long. So, it got slotted into the same category as the Shard TFs - we only really run it when it's weekly, and not even always then. And that's what this feels like it'll be, at least for us. This is content that, at least to me, seems to be requiring everyone to pay attention fully, learn the map by heart to not get lost, keep track of the group yourself so you don't get left behind, keep a constant vigil for the Minotaur until we're shifted up, just a lot of work, instead of actually getting to enjoy the game. Or else, we'll skim the surface of the content, and not really engage with it, because yeah, it's asking a lot. Don't get me wrong - I love the new content. The labyrinth is cool as hell, and I'm exactly the sort of nerd who wants to be in there on day 1 looking for secrets, lore, connections, all the nifty hidden stuff, just like I was in there on release day of the DASF reading every goddamn dialogue and loving it. But like, we've got maybe ninety minutes on the good days to get a team formed up and run something. And it feels like the direction new content's going in, is the opposite of where things were going at the end of live. Instead of smaller, manageable things (Yin vs. Sis P, new Posi vs. Old, etc.), the content's going entirely the other way. ...it's 1AM, I'm rambling trying to finish this off, and definitely repeating myself, so I'mma just stop here, post this, and hope at least something in there was useful feedback.

Hey, @UberGuy, dunno how active you are these days, but I figured I'd give you a heads-up that a new page just dropped on Beta, so you'll wanna get poking at that, see how badly it breaks CoD, pull the data into the Beta stuff on the site, etc. Also, once again, I will never adequately thank you enough for this awesome site. You are the best!

As someone who has a level 50 pure Praetorian, it's a bit rough to see my guy locked out of "Between Realities" and the new accolade power, only because of the one alignment tip badge, which is brand new. I kinda get it, with the name, that it'd be an odd title for a pure Praetorian, but it does sting a little, especially given that he's already permanently locked out of every other accolade power, and this one comes tauntingly close. Keeping a toon Praetorian all the way to 50 is such an under-supported thing, and I get that it'd be a lot of work to properly support it, but I'd like to ask if there's any way we can get thrown a bone on this one without changing it for Primals? I doubt Mark/Recall will help tremendously on iTrials (the only max-level content he can run, basically), but it'd still be nice to get 'em, since the requirement list is already 90% doable.

Yeah, this is definitely new behaviour, and not at all how the digest has been working for the past several years. Hopefully it can get reverted back, or changed to something like "last 14 days" instead.

I mean, I would argue that the specific error message we got is a bug. There's another message available that usually gets used for missions without a door (hunts, e.g.) - we should have gotten that one.

Running Ragana's arc through Ouro, the last mission came up, and I tried dropping Team Transporter to get to it, since it was a bit far away on the map. It came up with an error message that definitely shouldn't have been present, since the 'door' (Ragana herself) is on a map (Striga itself) that was definitely live - we were there! A Screenshot is below with the exact error message, and the specific mission showing. Also, separately-but-unrelated, Ragana's "Ready" message you click to enter the mission should probably have the "(Enter Mission)" thing that's standard when talking to the NPC sends you into the mission.

Second, separate bug: On both Chrome and Firefox, opening the Liquid Nitrogen pet power's page and sliding the Level thing, the two -350% maximum RunningSpeed bits adjust - the damage doesn't, showing the full level 50 damage for all levels. It's working for other powers, so not a globally busted thing, and switching to player ATs doesn't get the damage changing, either.

FYI, something's definitely off with the sleep grenade thing from Arsenal Control; there's a stacking type not showing up. I'm also confused by the Requires bit on the bonus sleep from Domination/Overpower, but that one seems more likely to actually just be how it works. Notably, that's 100% how Smoke Canister's confuse is supposed to work, and it's showing up the same there, so yeah. Same stacking thing is showing up over there, too.