srmalloy

What about giving their debuffs the same Scourge effect they get for damage? For most of a fight, it's not going to have any effect, and in teams mobs go down so quickly that there's little time for it to make much difference. You'd really only see it fighting the 'sack of HP' mobs like AVs and GMs that stay in the Scourge range longer.

Their music isn't that bad... 😉

In the same tone that declares a mission you can set to +0x1 and zip through in a couple of minutes, fighting only the single mob at the end, to be 'plainly abusive'. For my Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers, running that mission and the rest of the arc gets them about a veteran level per run at x4, scaling up to +4 as they get incarnate level boosts; it's a reasonable way to grind veteran levels, and I see on the forums that the arc is highly recommended for speed running to get the end rewards without worrying about XP in the process.

At least tweak the first group of missions so that you're discovering some coherent activity the Clockwork are working toward, rather than just being a pack of murder hobos breaking into labs and destroying everything you find.

It's a 'pointless maze' because it's the tenth, or fifteenth, or twentieth (or more) time that you've done it; it's no longer your character's first exposure to the altered ecosystem of Dark Astoria. The arc fills a specific purpose in the storyline of the zone. If the arc is so boring and abusive, you don't have to keep running it over and over again through the Pillar of Ice and Flame. If you want to bitch about something that's 'plainly abusive and way too boring', complain about the stack of 'defeat all Clockwork in [location]' missions that lead off the Synapse Task Force.

It's become pretty obsolete by this point, but the original premise was that, as a potential challenger for Lord Recluse, your character worked their way up the 'food chain' of villainy under the loose observation of Arachnos, lackeying to more and more powerful thugs as you gained levels, until you reached a point where you could choose to ally yourself with one of Recluse's more-or-less-trusted lieutenants. Because this was intended to be a defining choice for the character (originally, picking a patron was a one-and-done decision that couldn't be changed), the patron pools for an AT were deliberately built to be grossly similar to make the choice of patron a role-playing decision rather than a min-max 'flavor of the month' pick.

Or amend the punctuation -- "We're going to need your help more -- a lot more -- on this one..."

This is why anchor buffs/debuffs were changed to remain active until the mob they're anchored to despawns, so if they're defeated quickly, their effect remains for a while. This won't help you if you chose to put your anchors on mobs that don't leave bodies when defeated -- ghosts, Tsoo Ancestor Spirits, Rikti drones, BP masks, etc. -- but does give you more time if your teammates insist on whacking the anchors first.

I threw together a small popmenu to clean up the menu bars a bit on my Grav/Time/Primal Controller. What it does is take four macros -- 'Here', 'Zoom', 'Boom', and 'Pull', adds the basic Wormhole function, and puts them all in one menu. The four macros are different presets for Wormhole: Here -- drop the targeted mobs in front of my character Boom -- throw the targeted mobs as far away as possible (camera aim) Zoom -- throw the targeted mobs straight up as far as possible Pull -- Yank the targeted mobs as far behind my character as possible The last one is for pulling mobs out of a big spawn to teammates waiting behind my character, since Wormhole does not appear to generate aggro. The whole file is just the above commands and a basic 'powexecname' command, with hotkeys '1' through '5' for the options: // Menu "Wormhole" { Title Wormhole Option "Wormhole &1" "powexecname Wormhole" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation 0:10 Wormhole" Option "Zoom &3" "powexeclocation up:max Wormhole" Option "Boom &4" "powexeclocation cam:max Wormhole" Option "Pull &5" "powexeclocation back:max Wormhole" } Wormhole.mnu

The class trinity goes back to D&D, and was incorporated into Everquest, then WoW; it's a simple "this is your role in the team" division that was easy for people to grasp when they started playing a game. It became the "holy trinity" with WoW's success -- the designers of other MMOs wanted to make it as easy as possible to switch from WoW to their MMO, so they copied WoW's class system, and over time it got enshrined as the way MMOs 'had' to work. It has been tested over time, its problems are well-known, and there is a large number of developers looking at problems. It also makes encounter design easier, since you know what the classes bring to the fight. And it enhances replayability, since the same content plays differently for each role. On the downside, it restricts how players interact with the game, and too slavish an adherence can choke player choice, and some roles may not work well shifting between solo and group play. And even when there are options to diversify the role of a character or class, the expectation of "You're an X, so you have to be role Y" in the community may funnel players away from taking advantage of the character design options the game provides. Ultimately, it comes down to the question of whether a game design can be made attractive enough that its divergence from the 'holy trinity' isn't perceived as a bar to joining the game. And a lot of game development companies are loathe to do anything truly innovative out of fear of being perceived as too different, so we keep getting games that are trinity-based with some customization slapped onto the side.

Tails appear to be a problem with a lot of the model-replacement temp powers -- the earliest you see it is in Matthew Habashy's arc in AP when you get a Hellion/Girlfriend from Hell disguise to go into a Hellion safe house and find what they've collected; you'll retain any tail your character had prior to entering. The original devs addressed this with the Halloween temp costumes, but it seems to have been missed elsewhere.

Or Hellion Golf in AP before Enhancement Diversification -- six-slot Power Thrust for KB, add Power Boost, and punt Hellions across Atlas Park.

One possibility is that it builds up a reservoir of adrenalin as the power continues, then dumps it into your system when it turns off.

One of the options would be to make these a pool with the travel power having selectable FX for a rocket board or void skiff or carpet, and the other powers in the pool all be defined as coming from the 'vehicle', with varying effects based on the flight FX -- a blast that has a rocket or energy bolt or tiny whirlwind, some sort of force field effect, etc. The pool would still have the special effect of making the rest of your abilities 'only affects self'.

In a comparable lapse, I ran it with a character that triggered autofire Haste just as I clicked on the door. Heather had the visual animation for haste (the glow running down the arms to settle at the wrists) running over and over again throughout the mission, starting up again as the previous animation finished.

You never lose the enhancement value from an IO, whether it is attuned or not, although the magnitude of the value scales the further down below the IO level you exemp. So even if you exemp down to 1, your level 55 Damage IO will still increase the damage of the power it's slotted in (just not as much). Set bonuses are preserved for attuned set IOs down to the minimum level you can slot the set -- attuned Thunderstrike IOs retain set bonuses down to level 27, since the set is 30-50, but the enhancement values scale just like common IOs.

We have /juggle, /jugglefire, /juggleelectricity, and /jugglemagic. Would it be possible to take the existing snowball object and sub it into the animation for a /juggleice emote for all the cold-based characters?

Once you gain aggro on mobs up on the rim and start pulling them down, there are basically three ways to lose the aggro: 1) run away fast enough and far enough that they fall out of range, 2) try to pick up more aggro than you can keep causing the 'early' aggro'd mobs to stop following and replacing them with the 'later' mobs, and 3) having someone generate more aggro on them before you pull them all the way into the bowl. If you run into a stealth aura while dragging mobs to the bowl, you're already in combat, so the stealth doesn't affect you.

Not as badly as the old "yellow dawn" for screwing up on the original Hami raid, where one yellow mito would spawn for each character in the zone (I can only think of a couple attempts to recover from one)... but clearing a full-on spawn hell is a great achievement.

The example I cited above -- at [696.3 -42.0 -347.5] in King's Row, during Rikti invasions, a bomb will land inside the staircase leading up to the building, with only the antenna poking out. This bomb is untargetable, but when it goes off, it will damage characters standing nearby:

I'm not sure that there's going to be any way to fix this, but the 'take NPC to target' mission goal appears to work purely on a proximity basis, with no regard for map geometry. In the "Rescue Hacker from Tsoo" mission given by Thao Ku, the computer you have to take the hacker to is in the corner of a room that is folded back on itself (I'm sure players will recognize the map): The quirk is that you only have to bring the hacker to the base of the stairs, which makes him close enough to the computer for the mission complete to trigger, even though there's a solid wall between him and the computer, and you would realistically have to take him through the four stairs to get to the end room so he could use the computer. I've seen the same thing happen when the end room is similar to this one, but has the elevated half-floor with cubicles underneath; all you have to do is pull the hacker under the computer for the mission to complete. Adding a line-of-sight check to the proximity check might work, but I don't know if that's feasible to add.

Think about the other games that can be 'improved' the same way, like "Herpes of Might and Magic", "Company of Herpes", "Herpes of the Storm", "Herpes Chronicles", and others...

Is it all the mobs spawning at +1 to the mission level? That would be really unusual, but not impossible; in door missions, all of the mobs in a room will spawn at the same level, which can be ±1 to the mission level. So in a level 10 mission, you would expect to see level 9, 10, and 11 mobs. Having the entire map spawn at +1 repeatedly is sufficiently low-probability to warrant looking at, but I have seen single missions spawn almost entirely +1.

That's the same result I got when I did a respec with Mystic Flight on; I was switching the character to Fly, but left them floating in my base with Mystc Flight active while I did the respec, and was locked in the air afterwards. I just added it to the list of things not to do when respeccing.