srmalloy

It's also potentially the most painful, although it takes a combination of things you can't predict for it to be. When you cure one of the Lost, the other Lost in the same spawn will aggro on the newly-restored civilian, with all the mobs in the spawn with the same weapon firing together (if they have different weapons, the attacks are spread out due to different animation times). In the specific case where they all have shotguns, they all fire at the same time, and the game stacks up the shotgun blast sound effect for each shooter, which can be painfully sharp and loud with a big spawn. Incidentally, while it's a cheesy move for a hero, under the right circumstances, you can use the civilians to tank the Kraken -- curing one of the Lost near the Kraken will cause him to aggro on the civilian, diverting his attention until the civvie runs off.

They may have been overlevel when they finished; there are other arcs -- Stephanie Peebles in Striga is one, where if you're too high a level when you complete the last mission, you don't get the temp power normally awarded.

Without looking at the code, I'd guess that the ragdolling was a client-side function; if so, and limiting it could be done easily, then a "limit ragdolling" toggle could be dropped into the game options, so the people who want to see whole-body Linda Blair ripoffs can keep seeing them, while the ones who don't can dial it back.

Something I've noticed with defeated mobs is that they seem to, with a disturbing frequency, continue to ragdoll while lying on the ground, sometimes so much that they continue to ragdoll 'until the police transporter picks them up' (i.e., the body fades away). In many cases, this creates some disturbing visuals -- I've watched an Outcast lying on the ground do two complete 360° rotations of his upper body, and often see mobs' bodies folding up like a jacknife. Is it possible to put a timer on the ragdoll effect so that, once a mob's body hits the ground, it ceases to ragdoll after a second or two?

I have an Ice/Plant Blaster that is uncomfortable to play; she's got control out the wazoo, but it's like playing a Controller without Containment or the prospect of getting a pet at 32 to make up for the lack of intrinsic damage.

If you're doing a MO run and you don't know what the mechanics are, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing an MO run. The team leader, at least, should be familiar enough with the TF to make sure that the team can cover the requirements. As for handing out mission-limited temp powers, there are already several contacts who hand out temp powers for specific missions -- the flashbang grenades you get in KR to use against the Skulls, or the EMP Glove and Wave Scrambler you are given to test against the Clockwork -- that are taken back when you turn in the mission. Those are given only to the mission holder, though, so without a code change, to be able to revoke the temp powers from the entire team, either only the leader would get it, or the temp power would need to be issued on a real-time expiration basis to keep it limited to the TF.

I read your post, and had the 'Pink Panther' theme start playing in the back of my mind... "Pedant, pedant... pedant... pedant, pedant, pedant... pedant, pedaaaant..." Nearly had some coffee go down the wrong way. 😄

Something I did the other day just to see if it would work. Which it does, but it has to be almost the most inefficient use of powers available: DP Blaster shooting Cryo ammo to put out a fire.

I don't know where in the code it would go, but if you made a counter that incrememented every time they completed one of their own (non-AE) missions, and reset the counter on defeat, you could drive badges off the value of the counter as a way to encourage players to actually go out into Paragon City and complete missions. You would want to make TFs count as your missions regardless of who the leader was, which is probably an additional condition in the mission-completion code for incrementing the counter, so that you didn't discourage doing TFs for this.

I have Mids installed, but the "Click this DataLink" links fall over and die. When clicking on them, I get the expected "Open mids_build.mxd" prompt with Mids Reborn as the default choice, but when I accept this, I get the error "The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that is unavailable", with a file browse pointing to the folder where the install file was located. Selecting 'Browse' and picking the install file produces the error "The file xxxxxxx is not a valid installation package for the product MidsReborn" and then goes through three separate window closures to exit the attempt at import. Initially, I thought the problem might be that the installation file was "MRB Setup.msi", while the file dialog was looking for "MRB_setup.msi", but that shouldn't make a difference once the file was selected. Attempting to repair the installation failed; with 'MRB Setup.msi' not producing a UAC prompt requesting permission, and therefore failing for lack of rights. Uninstalling completely worked, then downloading a new copy of the MSI file and installing (default location) worked, and the program will open builds from my hard drive normally, as well as the 'copy and paste this text' block from builds in the forums, but still produced the same failure to recognize the installer as a valid install package when I try to click on the "Click this DataLink" links. Working a hunch, I uninstalled Mids Reborn once more and reinstalled it, selecting "Only for me" instead of 'for everyone" during the installation, and after starting up following installation, I clicked on a "Click on this DataLink" link in the forums, and the build opened correctly in Mids. Somewhere in the install for all users on the computer (not really needed, since I'm the only user), it fails to establish the proper setup to open the forum data links. It looks as if a workaround -- if you have more than one person using the computer with Mids Reborn -- is to make separate individual installs for each user, but I have not verified this.

The patron pools were also designed to be grossly similar to each other within an archetype, the intention being -- since it was originally a one-and-done choice for a character, with no way to change the pool you'd picked -- that the choice would be made for thematic or character-concept reasons, rather than a FotM pick of the 'best' pool.

Well, the brute-force way is to keep the separate thread and 'shard' drops, except make a 'shard' drop award a thread instead, and increase the chance of getting a 'shard' drop by a factor of five to match the relative value. This would mean that it's possible to occasionally get two threads at once as a drop, but it's a smaller code change than any other solution. Whether the devs go for replacing shards across the board -- and the shard-based recipes would still have to remain in the game because there will be people out there with shards in their inventory -- is out of my purview.

I disagree; the white text-input bar against the background of the account and password boxes is almost invisible; changing it to a color that contrasts better so that you can see which box has the focus would be a significant QoL improvement.

It's required for Sky Raiders during Numina; it's a popular location to get the badges for defeating Sky Raider Sky Skiffs and Enginerrs' force field generators for their respective badges, as well as Freakshow tanks and Super Stunners and Lost bosses, simply because the spawns guarantee easier hunting than other zones. I don't see many people there going after the DE emanators there, simply because the DE around the outside of TV in IP spawn in easier-to-deal-with numbers.

Well, yes, but the point was taking a primary powerset with a secondary effect you can tie into the secondary powerset and recoloring it to be visually coordinated, rather than just lamenting the lack of a primary powerset that does exactly what you want it to right out of the box.

That's what I did -- it takes four shards or 20 threads to make a common incarnate component, one Notice of the Well or eight Empyrean merits to make a rare incarnate component, and 30 Empyrean merits or a Favor of the Well to make a Very Rare incarnate component, with a Favor requiring two Notices and 32 shards to create. So a shard is worth five threads, and a Notice is worth eight Empyreans. In my previous post, though, I misremembered the cost of a Favor as 30 shards; the correct number would make the thread-based Favor require two Notices and 160 threads.

I have to admit that having one of the primary debuffs require hocking a lunger at your target is visually disturbing, but I've gone with it.

I made a Dark/Plant Blaster where I recolored all of the Dark Blast powers to green and black, treating the -ToHit effect as toxins in biological attacks messing with the target's coordination in order to get a coherent theme for the character, naming her Toksichniy Podlesok (Токсичный Подлесок, 'Toxic Undergrowth'). Same idea.

It requires eight Empyrean merits to make a Rare incarnate component, so that gives you an equivalent value. It seems to me, though, that a simpler solution would be to eliminate only shards -- bumping the chance of a thread drop by whatever percentage the 1-to-5 conversion rate from shards to threads would indicate is appropriate -- and leave the Notice of the Well awards as they are. Then you add two new conversion formulae to the incarnate window -- a straight-across conversion of a Notice into a Rare incarnate component of the player's choice, and a conversion of two Notices plus 150 threads to make a Very Rare incarnate component of the user's choice. The old shard-based recipes would remain for characters who still have shards. This eliminates having to change the code that awards Notices for TFs; the functionality for the two new conversions is entirely new code, aavoiding having to go into the old code to change things.

I'm pretty sure that the 'hair baked into the hat' design was set before beta to control clipping between the hat and the character's hair, since all the hats seem to be positioned properly for a bald head, whether or not the hat incorporates hair -- there are a lot of hair styles that would either require moving the hat upward or would clip nastily through the hat regardless of its position.

As I understand it, there are two 'diveable' locations -- the Cimerora cave end room with the crossed walkways, as you say, and a pool on the north side of Grandville outside the walls. Neither one provides anything useful you can do with them, but they're there.

Ahh, but then you don't have the flashy but pointless idle animation of flipping the 'chucks around your body that every single martial arts movie where one gets used seems to have to include. And that's ignoring the fact that nunchaku are a crap weapon; if you hit something with a stick, you have the momentum of the stick and your hand and arm behind it. Split it in half with a flexible joint in the middle, and when you hit something with it, the part that hits your target hits with half the impact and bounces away; you can't put your strength behind it the way you can with a single stick. And you have to be careful not to hit yourself as you swing it.

There was a study some years ago - done in jest, but the results are real - of tinfoil hats that showed (for all you conspiracy theorists) that tinfoil hats actually increased signal reception in two bands reserved by the federal government

There are a number of similar buildings across the zones -- Kings Row and Steel Canyon come to mind immediately. The only reason that the one in Peregrine Island is the de facto center for mass ToT activity is that, with a 50 leading each team in the league, anyone can join without having to worry about leveling out of the zone range and having to go elsewhere. It's not special, just enormously more convenient than having to make sure all the league's team leaders are in the zone range and change them when they level out of it -- an artifact of the constraints on level and ToTing by zone.

Much more noticeable... as long as they're spread out; in the kaleidoscope of other effects on a team interspersed with NPC mobs? Not so much. I've got screenshots where you can barely tell the heroes from the NPCs in the glare of all the SFX; adding more visual tinsel to the characters isn't going to make it easier to spot the mezzed ones. The suggestion of making the HP bar in the team window change color is going to be much easier to make out during a fight.