srmalloy

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.

There are two different terms used in power descriptions that appear to mean the same thing: PBAoE and 'Close (AoE)'. Both of these describe a power that activates in a radius centered on the caster, but the usage seems to be disjoint. Looking at my Radiation/Mental Blaster, she has: Drain Psyche PBAoE 10 ft Radius Buff/Debuff World of Confusion PBAoE 8 ft Radius DoT, Confuse Atomic Blast PBAoE 25 ft Radius Dmg, Mez, Debuff Irradiate Close(AoE) 20 ft Radius DoT, Debuff Psychic Shockwave Close(AoE) 15 ft Radius Dmg, Debuff From the power descriptions, the radius is not the determinant as to whether a power is categorized as PBAoE or a 'Close(AoE)'; neither is whether the power does straight-up damage or a DoT, and all the powers that do damage take Melee AoE Damage enhancement sets. It appears that the labeling of the powers is an archaism from the early days of CoH that has been supplanted in function, and I would suggest that all "Close(AoE)" powers be relabeled as PBAoE to standardize the nomenclature.

I remember the devs back during Live going on record in the forums that the team bonus was scaled specifically for this - that you would see a net increase in the XP rate because of the team being able to defeat individual mobs faster, so if you have a farm where there is one hitter and seven sitters, there is a significant drop in the XP rate because the one character actually defeating mobs isn't doing it any faster than they would solo, but the XP gets shared out to all the sitters, even with the team-size bonus.

I occasionally see the same thing in Kings Row where a group of Skulls will be beating on a car until it explodes, wiping out the entire group. Morons.

Something I've noticed with the appearance of Winter Lord spawns near the police drones -- notably with the present spawn location WSW of the AE building in Kings Row -- is that the police drones appear to have a "nearest first" targeting algorithm, so they'll often spend their time whacking the Frostlings spawned by the Suspicious Gift, with the Winter Lord hurling attacks at them being ignored because it's further away. Could the targeting priority for the 'guardian' NPCs (police drones, Arachnos guard drones) be adjusted to prioritize targets by rank, so that they'll preferentially go after GMs, AVs, and EBs before minions (i.e., the biggest threats first)?

It's a low-chance event, and doesn't affect anything but requiring extra clicks, but when you are 'talking' to an NPC, if you just click rapidly at a point in the dialog window to move the conversation along because you've seen it all so many times before -- for example, with Hua Tov in entry room of the third mission of Heather Townsend's arc -- you can confuse the server and get run through the dialog a second time.