srmalloy

It's not a bug that has any effect on gameplay, other than causing players to snicker, so fixing it should go into the bin of "when there are no other bugs to be fixed" (as if that would ever occur), but if you defeat one of the crystalline DE (Quartz et al), which blow up in a cascade of crystal fragments, the shadow of their defeated body remains on the ground. If I had to say why it happens, I'd guess that when one of these mobs is defeated, the game makes the defeated body invisible (but still casting a shadow, like invisible characters), and triggers the 'cascade of crystal bits' animation.

I have seen issues with the 'last spawn' markers and wandering mobs; in most cases the spawn marker shows up where the mob(s) were at the time the 'mark last spawn' code triggers, and won't update that marker until you get a sight line on the location of the marker, while a second marker appears at the location of the mob(s) when you actually sight them.

The thing of it is, street sweeping was a way of life back on live, because running around at 1x XP, you would inevitably find yourself, at some point in your career, find that you'd run out all of your current contacts, and the ones they forwarded to you just tell you "come back when you're level X", so you needed to join a team to run someone else's missions or grind task forces. The police radio missions helped some, but there were some points where it just wasn't enough. As more content was added, the problem eased, but it never went away completely, but Homecoming put all of that in the past, so that you may only see people street sweeping if they want to get the last fraction of a bar to ding, so they can train right away, instead of dinging 10% of the way into a mission.

And PvP Online, which started an 11-strip storyline where the characters in the comic were playing City of Heroes, and the POV moved into the game after the first strip in the series.

A bit of fourth-wall breaking in the "Find Amanda Gates" mission from Mercedes Sheldon: [NPC] Juicer Freak: Excelsior, don't fail me now! It would not have been funny if I wasn't on the Excelsior server at the time.

Specifically for the patron pools, you have to be a villain/rogue and talk to Arbiter Rein in Grandville to start a patron arc; if you're a vigilante, you can join someone else who's doing an arc, but can't start one yourself.

And 'from the same contact' is important -- at the lower levels, there are two contacts for each origin in each level range block, and if you have the same mission, but from the other contact, you don't get the option. For example, both Carla Brunelli in Skyway City and Athena Currie will give out the same missions, including the Clockwork Captive arc, but if you have the arc from Athena and your friend has it from Carla, you have to finish the missions separately (at least, that's how I remember it working on Live; letting you jointly complete the identical mission from the 'other' contact would be a useful upgrade).

Hermes is also the patron god of magic in the pantheon, which accounts for the references.

Not entirely for the same reward, although I concede that once you've pushed it to +4/x8, anything more is just bragging rights and personal satisfaction. Getting increased rewards for each of the challenge settings would add some incentive to play them.

Well, at least they found and eradicated the accidentally-included Fallout 76 code that was handing out bottle caps as mission rewards... 😄

Actually, yes. That's one of the things that get saved with demorecord, and how Samuraiko (IIRC) was able to assemble her Unity Rally video -- she ran a character into each of the AP instances with demorecord on, then went back to the saved files to extract the character data (costumes and sliders), and placed each character in AP to record the pullback shot.

And, as I discovered experimentally with other gaps, it only takes a tiny gap to thread a Teleport or Translocation bullseye through to allow you to port to the other side.

Taunt is autohit in PvE; it takes Accuracy because it's not autohit in PvP. I believe Flash Arrow is the same.

I noticed that Conductive Aura, in the Electric Control powerset for Dominators, takes Accuracy and Heal enhancements, but not Accurate Healing sets: With the Endurance Modification sets having been expanded to include sets with Accuracy (and sets with Damage), you can increase the accuracy of the power slotting Endurance Mod sets, but not Accurate Healing sets. This feels a bit like the regeneration aspect of the power is getting a bit of a short shrift in comparison -- and allowing Accurate Healing sets isn't going to swing the power into being something out of control.

...and anyone else with the code. Not that doing this for a personal SG is much of a risk, but with a more 'regular' SG, allowing knowledge of the code to get out opens the door to anyone on the server being able to join the SG whether you want them or not, and if you haven't been careful about the settings for base storage, rob you blind. I don't see that the 'extra effort' in creating a new character, starting them in the tutorial or straight to the first zone, making a note of their name, switching to an alt with invite, inviting them, then switching back is particularly onerous for something you do once per character -- a minute or less. Particularly if, when you switch, you're also mailing them a starting cash supply.

It does have the limitation of needing to be slotted in a tray where you have a key command to trigger it; slotting it in a tray where you have to use a mouse click defeats the purpose.

Ideally, the code would look at the set's level range and the conversion type, and make a list of all appropriate sets that overlapped the level range -- essentially giving the conversion the same 'any level' possibility that putting an IO into the AH does. So if you had an attuned IO in a 10-30 set, it could convert into other 10-30 sets, 20-50 sets, or 30-50 sets, as long as they matched the type of conversion (i.e., category or rarity).

In Kings Row, the traditional gathering point has been just north of the intersection down the stairs from Blue Steel -- moving back into the intersection itself gets people ganked by the dropship on the E/W run over the plaza. However, I've noticed that the plaza in front of the tram may actually be better, as you don't have the problem of the spawns falling over the side as they move NE. Steel Canyon used to be out in front of Positron, but with the change that has him and Valkyrie coming out after mobs that get too close, that's become more complicated. Founder's Falls was the plaza south of Infernal, but again, him getting involved if the fight gets too close makes that less attractive. Skyway was always in or around the park where Synapse stands. Brickstown and Independence Port, I don't remember where people gathered.

The ones I've kept are: /macro Here "powexeclocation 0:10 Wormhole" /macro Zoom "powexeclocation up:Max Wormhole" /macro Boom "powexeclocation cam:max Wormhole" /macro Pull "powexeclocation back:max Wormhole" The first one yanks all or part of a spawn to a position right in front of you; the second puts them straight up over you, where they fall (or don't, depending) all around you. The third tosses them wherever you have your camera facing, and the last one yanks them well behind you, so you can move out in front of your group and yank mobs back to them for destruction. With the new parameter that's been added, though, I want to see how well 'cursor' works: /macro Hurl "powexeclocation cursor:max Wormhole"

...says the person who doesn't think about what a hot mess English grammar is. Take the example of the Tanker inherent above: "Each time a Tanker attacks, he enrages the target, and those around him," -- simple mindless find-and-replace would make it "Each time a Tanker attacks, they enrages the target, and those around them,". Replacing "him" with "them" works, but replacing "he" with "they" doesn't; "he enrages" has to be changed to "they enrage". So all of the text would need to be checked manually to make sure it read properly after the find-and-replace. So while replacing the pronouns to make people more comfortable by removing the putative sexism of the male pronoun default is a sensible change (or even, with sufficient resources, making the male/female/neither choice at the start of character creation and having the inherent text reflect the chosen gender), I agree with GM Kal that imputing any degree of criticality to fixing it, in the face of the other demands on the devs, is excessive.

There's one mission -- I forget off the top of my head which arc it belongs to -- where you have to 'rescue' three artifacts and protect any one of them (from ambushes that show up once you defeat the initial mobs around them). The problem with the mission is that it is always in a more or less linear warehouse map, and the ambushes start at the door -- so you clear the first artifact, defend it against the ambushes, then go deeper to the second one, and the ambushers stop to destroy the first artifact (repeat for the third). It would be better if the artifacts disappeared when you have successfully defended them, but I don't know if the mission coding can handle that.

I've learned to just grit my teeth and bash through when I discover that I'm on a team with a controller/dominator whose knee-jerk reaction to approaching a new spawn is to hit it with an AoE immobilize, leaving half the spawn locked down outside of my best melee AoE. The whole concept of "let the tank/brute pull them in, then lock them down" is foreign to the 'rush through everything as fast as possible' mindset.

With the capability of NPC mobs, being controlled by the server, to react instantly and launch return fire as soon as you trigger aggro, I've never seen the point in PvE movement suppression except to get people used to it being part of PvP, where between network lag and human reaction times, jousting was a viable tactic. Movement suppression just reminds me of the way that Paragon Studios' statement went from "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make PvE changes for purely PvP reasons" to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons", and then they stopped commenting about it. And, yes, we might as well keep calling it Stealth.

...so we can jack over the people running zone MSRs. Yes, the instanced MSR exists, but essentially destroying the zone MSR as a thing jerks over everyone who currently joins a zone MSR with a character below level 35 (and whether such characters should be 'allowed' in MSRs has already been thrashed out in another thread, so let's skip rehashing that argument here). There is already a trigger for a Rikti invasion -- completing an LGTF -- so setting up a continuous 'invasion' in the RWZ can be considered redundant. Additionally, the mobs in the north end of the RWZ go up to 54, and if you're establishing part of the zone as a continuous invasion, then you'd need to either put everything spawning in that part of the zone under the invasion code, making everything even-level (making them useless for people who want the challenge of +4 mobs for street sweeping), or leave the spawns as they are and make the 'continuous invasion' effectively closed off to characters below level 50.

Ideally, what would be done is to add a second check to the sidekick code so that, when the "sidekick termination" trigger goes off, it checks "did the character level go down?", and iff (if and only if) the second check returns true does the pet reaper code get called.