srmalloy

If you're standing in water (or the target is), the Pythagorean Theorem may be biting you in the ass, with range shown in the target window being horizontal range, and targeting placement range being to the bottom that your targeted mob is standing on. I have a fair number of macros defined for location powers that most of my characters use, where the macro is a popmenu with three choices — '1' is the normal power with the placement reticle, '2' is straight down at max distance (at your feet if you're on the ground; this one is useful for dropping rains on targets below you when flying), and '3' is placed at your current target. I haven't noticed any odd range quirks when using them.

Instant Snowstorm can be purchased from the Candy Keeper, and it drops randomly from 'nice' presents. It caps at ten charges.

I can't make it happen reliably enough to screenshot it successfully, but when activating the prestige Blackwand power, it will occasionally, instead of the normal 'drawing the Blackwand' animation, perform the "pulling out of the ground' animation that you normally see NPCs performing where they reach down and pull a rusty automobile exhaust pipe with muffler out of the ground. It will happen once, and then I won't see it happen again for days.

The 'instant karma' puts me in mind of a bit from Heinlein's novella "Lost Legacy":

Poison's association with green likely goes back to the Victorian period, starting with Scheele's Green, a vivid, long-lasting green dye that, unfortunately, had arsenic as a core component, and was used for wallpaper and clothing, where it would outgas arsenic into its surroundings. It was banned in 1895 and replaced by Paris Green, which was also toxic. During WWI, chlorine gas was green, but was largely ineffective, being phased out in favor of phosgene (colorless) and mustard (yellow) gas. So there were a number of associations between green and toxicity that influenced how it is commonly portrayed. For all of my characters with radiation powers, I use shades of blue to mimic the colors of Cherenkov radiation, often using colors picked for closeness to the shades in this palette:

And not a word about seeing "excéllent" rather than "excellent" in the text? (note the acute accent on the second 'e')

Have yourself a scary little Solstice: it's a long dark night Now's the time when horror's at its greatest height Have yourself a scary little Solstice: chaos all around Now's the time when terror's at its most profound Stars return as in older days, as foretold in crazy lore Great Old Ones gather near to us, giving fear to us once more If we're lucky this year we'll survive it and get through somehow Hand an elder sign upon the highest bough And have yourself a scary little Solstice -- H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society

This has been a pet peeve of mine since power customization was added, because of the continued popular misperception that radiation glow is green.

I could see tweaking the trial so that it spawns one fewer winter guardian than the number of teams -- so if you had two teams, it would be exactly as it is now, but if you had four teams, you'd get three winter guardians each time -- and with the additional guardians, it would be much harder to keep the bar from reaching 100% and ruining your shot at the Icebreaker badge.

Sure. And the next time you pop off an AoE attack at the guards around a hostage, and the hostage dies but the guards don't, and you immediately fail the mission, we'll all just point and laugh.

So your premise is that a character's offense powerset should be their defensive powerset? What about someone being able to "lift heavy thnigs" (sic) inherently implies being any harder to hurt?

The snowfall effect seems to be a visual notice that there is a Suspicious Gift box in the zone ready to spawn a Winter Lord, or that one has recently been opened

This can be an artifact of interruptible powers being rare in the game, with many powers that are interruptible for players not being interruptible for NPCs. Remember that aggro happens entirely on the server, so if your target notices you and has even .00001 second to respond, they can start an attack with a two-second animation, and it will still go off regardless of what your attack does to them. I've been running missions in DA where an Elder of Sorrow started their Mournful Blast (the one with the snipe-like animation) with my attack already on its way, hit and defeated them, and had their attack fire from the corpse. Similarly, I've been in stealth, fired an attack that defeated my target, and became the stealth drops when I attack, they have the fraction of a second to aggro and shoot back, even if they are defeated before their animation finishes.

Sometimes you do it deliberately — I was getting the 'Very Naughty' badge on a number of my characters by going to Praetoria and popping the Suspicious Gift boxes there, then running off and leaving the fallout for Emperor Cole's people to clean up.

Not a blaster, but I was curious, and with my Grav/Traps controller, six trip mines, three poison gas traps, and a time bomb were insufficient.

If you're interested in your own copies of the music, the HD. P. Lovecraft Historical Society sells two CDs of their Solstice carols.

You mean like, say... explicitly called out in the patch notes? The Winter Lord is no longer a random spawn from a Mysterious Gift. Instead, a large Suspicious Gift can appear which is guaranteed to spawn Winter Lord.

It's the most horrible time of the year, With the nights getting longer, the evil is stronger, And there's much to fear, It's the most horrible time of the year. It's the unhappiest season of all, When your knuckles are whitening From visions so frightening, you must not recall, It's the unhappiest season of all. Great Cthulhu is calling, And sanity's falling, And cultists are roaming the land. With the darkness descending, Your destiny's bending To forces you can't understand. It's the most horrible time of the year. There'll be ritual killing, and omens fulfilling, As Old Ones appear It's the most horrible time, Yes, the most horrible time, It's the most horrible time of the year. — H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society

I can see where the spreading of stealth to teammates could be detrimental — most hostage escort missions will get borked if the stalker has Grant Cover running in Hide and the escorting character gets too close.

The enhancement of knockback was removed from Power boost back during Live, so you're quite a few years too late to argue for it to be restored, and the power description is a typo that needs to be fixed.

The funny thing is, a 'proper' fix could have been implemented simply, and we would have never had the issue. Since your pets don't change level when you do -- if you're level 30, and ding to 31, your pets will still be 30 -- the code that handles status changes when you exemplar (whether this happens when you start a TF or ding during a TF; the check is applied after the exemplar level adjustment) would need something like "for each active pet, if pet level > character level then despawn pet". You're a level 30 MM exemplaring to 16 to run a Posi 2? Your pets despawn. You ding to 31 in the middle of the TF? You're still exemplared to 16, your pets are still 16, so they aren't affected.

This is a known issue. When you exemplar, your pets despawn to prevent the exploit of, say, a 50 spawning their pets, then exemping to run a Synapse TF and having level-50 pets steamrollering the TF. What is happening is that, when you ding, the game momentarily recognizes your new level, then exemps you back to the mission/TF limit. When this happens, the server notes that your effective level has been reduced by exemplar and orders your pets to despawn. The fix for this would involve something like checking the level of each pet when this happens, and only actually perform the despawn if the pet level is greater than the character's exemped level. But the current code is just a simple 'character exemps down, despawn all pets' action; this would need to be changed to pass the exemp level into the function so it can check the pets' level against the exemp level. That your pets despawn if you ding while exemped is a misfeature that needs to be fixed, but it's not technically a bug, because the code is doing what it was written to do.

Forgot one: Don't get hit.

There was a thought I had of the respec holding the 'old' build and allowing you to select a previous-build power to drop in during the respec, slots and all, as long as the power was available at that level (so you could do a respec quickly to have picked Fly at 6, with the rest of your power choices being the same, just pushed back one step), but doing that would require a really big rework of the respec code, so I'd kept it to myself.

Using Meteor does not put your character into combat, so your stealth doesn't suppress. Watch your power icons — Tombstone (the powerset's Snipe attack) doesn't grow the yellow 'in combat' ring to indicate that it's switched over to the in-combat fast snipers when you use Meteor.