srmalloy

And this is exacerbated by making SOs available all the way down to level 2, where you can buy level 5 SOs -- back when you had to start with TOs, then start upgrading to DOs around level 7, level 15 IOs were about as good as the DOs you could slot, and level 20 IOs were better than DOs, which would carry you up to level 22, where you could either go to SOs for the 22-27 range (or even to 32 if you could afford the upgrading) before switching to IOs, which wouldn't need replacing until you started slotting IO sets. Now, IOs below 25 are essentially worthless, because you're so much better off with SOs until 22 or 27 that the first two tiers of IOs are pretty much make-work deadweight for the crafting badges and progress for the 'free' workbench that most people just pay the 10M inf to get it.

"Making something difficult is no substitute for making it impossible."

This brings up an idea that I haven't seen suggested before as an expansion to Mastermind primaries -- evolving pets. Using the Outcasts as an example, you'd get the minion-tier Outcasts as your tier-1 pets, the lieutenant-tier Block/Brick/Shocker/Freezer as your tier-2 pets, and the boss-tier Lead Brick/etc. as your tier-3 pets. Then, further on in level, you'd lose the minion-tier Outcasts, and the lieutenant-tier Outcasts would push down and become your tier-1 pets, the boss-tier Outcasts would push down and become your tier-2 pets, and you'd get a new tier-3 pet who was an EB-tier Outcast (i.e., Frostfire) before being compressed into the Mastermind pet tiers. It would be a lot more complicated to configure, but it would give a feeling of progression rather than being static once you get your second pet upgrade power. I don't know if it's even viable to do with the current state of the code; I suspect that trying to make it work might be like sticking a fork in the spaghetti code, spinning it around a few times, then tossing it in the air to fall where it may.

No. As others pointed out, this would have you paying only the incremental cost of your SOs forever, so leveling a Damage SO from 5 to 30 would only cost you what the 30 does. If you're going to do something like this, deduct what you can sell the current SO for, which is considerably less than the price you pay for it -- checking just now, buying a level 50 Damage SO costs 60,000 inf, but when you sell it you only get 15,600 for it. You would be spending less money than if you burned unslotters to remove each of the SOs to replace them, then sold the old ones, but you're still paying the incremental cost of the upgrade plus, effectively, 3/4 of the cost of the SO you're replacing. Not as bad as the raw cost of replacing it outright, but you're not getting the 'free ride' you would with your suggestion.

In an amazing turnaround, for the first time I've seen it happen in the game (all the way back to May 2004, when I joined), yesterday I was doing a mission in the sewers where a Rikti Headman Gunman ported and wound up in that 'stand at attention, arms up and out, locked into position while you slide along the railing' pose when they came out on top of the chain edging a raised platform in the end room. It's nice to see that the game is an equal-opportunity jerk, even if the NPCs are generally too smart to get themselves stuck that way.

Now I'm pondering picking one of my characters with Mark and Recall and rerunning Castaneda's arc in Ouro just to see if, when I do the standard run of clearing the route to the chest before I rescue Lady Jane, set the mark, then come back, defeat her guards, have her go into her monologue, and trigger the recall, it yanks Lady Jane with me, potentially before she finishes her rant.

The button at the top right for the "General Discussion" subforum is labeled "Create new topic" (emphasis mine), so that was the terminology I used.

This. I have no objections to people making whatever topics they want, and I have no interest in asking a GM to delete the thread -- that I personally find them as risible as someone spraying liquid manure across my driveway doesn't mean that someone else won't find them entertaining -- I just want a way to make them disappear for me so I don't have half the first screen of topics taken up by (in my opinion) content with less value than "punch the monkey" ads.

It's been tried; the Paragon Studios devs tried to eradicate the flood of farm requests and offers in chat by applying filters to the chat traffic to hide references to farms; it just resulted in an ever-changing collection of euphemisms and code words used instead of the words that the filters wouldn't catch, like the "meow missions" that people who played the game during that period on Live may remember.

No, it would be an active "hide this topic' selection. For the other, you'd probably have to tag people with a clue-by-four to wake them up first.

"Why I'm Leaving", "Why I'm leaving too", "Why I'm Displeasing", "Why I'm heaving", "Why I'm believing", "Why I'm weaving", "Why I'm grieving", "Why I'm Reaving", "Why I'm Leavening", "Why I'm Thieving", "Why I'm Cleaving" -- ignoring individual users is useful when you get someone being an unrelenting jerk, but there should also be a way to ignore entire topics, so that when you decide you've had enough of a particular topic, and don't want to see it any more, you can hide it -- or, as in this case, when you get an ongoing stream of people who think it's cute or funny to post an ever-increasing number of inane rhyming-subject topics that just take up space in a subforum's topic list.

People who joined CoH a few issues in missed some of the player responses to some of the problems with the content. One of these was that the Positron Task Force was the Quarterhell of its time, and groups would often do it over a weekend -- running through around half the TF on Saturday (or Friday evening), then all log off and come back the next day to finish it. And that's still a mostly-hidden feature of being in Task Force mode -- that logging out doesn't crash you out of the task force; you have to actively quit -- so you can do a couple missions in the arc, switch to another character, run their missions, then come back to the first character and run a couple more missions in the arc, taking breaks whenever you want to, until you finish the arc.

Add another one: You've got 1000 character slots; why should you be fixated on doing them all on one character?

So the players who don't care about tracking where they've been on the minimap (I don't know, perhaps using their memory for that? 😁) have to use Reveal, wait for it to recharge, then use it again to get to the same state they used to be able to get to with a single use? Not to mention that the 'show me where I've been' effect is only useful for tracking your exploration of a map if you're in a mission solo, as the minimap shows the revealed map from everywhere your teammates have been, as well. If the HC staff were to make Reveal a two-stage effect, then I believe they should alter it so that the first use reveals the full map, and using it again on a revealed map reverts it to a 'fog of war' half-revealed state, so that it works the way it does now when you use it once (thereby not changing its immediate use), but has the 'revoke' effect if you use it again. And depending on what shortcuts the original devs made with regard to the 'fog of war' versions of maps, it might be necessary to take every single instanced map and create a 'fog of war' version to be used when someone goes that route.

And this is the problem I have with putting percentage numbers into the proc description -- the proc has no idea where it will be slotted. You can say that the proc will go off an average of X times per minute, but the chance of it going off in any given power is a function of the proc rate, the base recharge of the power, how much recharge reduction you have in the power, and the power's area of effect. With enough programming time put in, you could enable a function that would be active in the enhancement slotting screen where you could drag a proc over a power and (assuming the proc is slottable in that power) it would give you a popup showing the percentage chance per activation that the proc would fire based on the power's current slotting. On the one hand, this would give you information that would affect your decision whether or not to slot the proc. On the other hand, it's at least partially self-defeating in that, to drag the proc in the enhancement screen, you would already have to have the proc in your inventory, which means you would have to have either crafted or bought it, and the information you get from the mouseover is information you would want to know before you bought/crafted the IO. The gripping hand is that I don't see this as adding enough value to be worth the amount of programming time it would take to make it work.