srmalloy

Random zone dialog in Croatoa: [NPC] Sorceress of the Winds: Remember our casuse. Extra 's' in 'cause'.

One caution with Wormhole if you have predefined macros for positioning your target (like "powexec_location back:max Wormhole" to pull mobs behind you to be whaled on) is that using 'up:max' for the destination will sometimes leave the transported mobs standing in mid-air well above you if you do it outside (or in an instanced outdoor map). They don't aggro when this happens, though, so it's an unreliable (most of the time, they just fall to the ground) way to move mobs out of your way ('left:max', 'right:max', or 'cam:max' are better for this if you have the room to shift them where they won't aggro when you go past them).

She has three arcs blueside, actually, but while her missions are issued up to level 29, I'm pretty sure that you outlevel the start of the second and third arcs at level 25 -- I've only received 'The Magic Man' arc a few times (even back to live), and I don't think I've ever done 'Crown of Glory'. Something I'll have to rectify in Flashback.

I'll run at normal XP, picking up Matthew Habashy's arc and the first mission from Rick Davies and Azuria, then run Habashy's missions to get Sandra Costel, run her missions to get Aaron Thierry; once I've got his first mission and can't outlevel him before getting the mission awarding the 'Savior of Atlas Park' badge, I'll get the 2XP and run with it. Do Azuria's and Davies' missions at +2, then go back to them and either get the next mission or a new contact.

The explanation I remember from the original devs is that Granite Armor was a full-character replacement, like the Halloween costumes, which is why it looks the same regardless of the character's body choices. Because it replaces the character model, there's nothing to recolor, and it would take someone creating and rigging the lava and crystal forms in order to make them available as alternatives in power customization -- and I don't believe that the development tools exist to do this at the moment.

There are several contacts that hand out individual "collect samples from Lost" missions, and the "rescue the missing homeless people" mission, but beyond the implication that someone is studying the Lost, you don't get any indication regarding what threat the Lost are supposed to represent, and the only other information you get is vague foreshadowing if you are in Faultline listening to the dialog from the Lost there if you get near them. The lieutenants often wield energy weapons, but there's no indication where they come from -- having a mission like the "find the source of the Freaks' weapons" where you have mobs that scale from clubs to firearms to the Rikti energy weapons as you get deeper into the mission, ending with you finding several Rikti around a crate glowie that's full of Rikti weapons would start the linkages between them, with other missions to recover some of these energy weapons (with appropriate contact dialog indicating that they're Rikti in origin) setting up Castaneda's missions.

Were you able to attack him by targeting one of your lore pets to attack their target?

It's hard to time right, but I had one character who'd put off progress on that arc, and did both the "Investigate Lost and Rikti" and "Rescue Argot'Bur'Wot" missions at 29, where they got a mixture of Lost and Rikti in the missions. I have to admit that -- even though I'd run those missions dozens of times, having both Lost and Rikti in them gave a better feel to them. I don't know if it's possible to scale down the Rikti specifically for those two missions (and scale up the Lost if over 30) so that both groups spawn regardless of the mission level, but I think it would fit better into the narrative about them, instead of being entirely Rikti if you run them over 30.

And if you're jumping on someone else's mission, you don't even have to be 35 -- completing the mission gives you the unlock, and you get access to the patron pools when you train to 35 -- I had a character who joined the Black Scorpion arc at 27, and she got the patron pools in the pick list at 35.

The bigger the ranged attack, the more likely it is that the other EB will aggro, too; what I do is to make a Grant Invisibility buff at an empowerment station before I start, then use my origin throwaway power -- Throwing Knives, Taser Dart, Apprentice Charm, Mutagen, or Tranq Dart -- on the one in the front. Hitting them with it is okay, but missing is better -- it still aggros the one you threw the attack at, but it's enormously less likely to draw aggro from the other. Then I just backpedal out into the previous room and wait for them to come to me.

The only mission from his arc that I handle any differently than any other is when he sends me to rescue Suicide Girl Lady Jane, where I'll use Stealth and/or Invisibility to get past the spawn guarding her and clear out all the mobs around her and on the way to the chest, so that when I defeat the two mobs guarding her, she won't immediately aggro on some random spawn of ghosts, run over, and get herself killed. Then it's just dragging her to the chest.

That's funny, because there are only a limited number of places where the hostages appear, and it's not hard to take a route that passes through or by all of them. Or maybe that's just the way my memory works, so that I remember them easily; I did remember a 27-present loop for the holiday event from before the Snap, so...

One of the things that I've noticed with the most recent patch is that Reveal doesn't root you any more. Prior to the patch, if you were flying and clicked on Reveal, you'd come to a stop while the power animated, and then accelerate from a dead stop. Now, if you're zooming along through the sky and hit Reveal, you coast along during the animation, and then resume flying when you're done -- you never actually come to a stop. What I'd like to see, if it's possible to do this, is to have Translocation work the same way -- instead of coming to a full stop while the animation runs, and then having to start from motionless at the other end, you 'skid' as you activate Translocation, so you're still moving when you re-emerge. It's not going to have more than a trivial effect on your effective movement rate, but I think it would tie the powers together better.

Or, with Mystic Flight and a handy nuke, Translocate through the gap and nuke the room.

It does say, right at the top, that it's for issue 13, which means that it was years out of date even before the Snap.

Weirdly, the only character of mine that's been able to solo that one was my Demons/Nature Mastermind; neither tanks nor brutes were able to finish. I think it was because I could sit back behind my pets healing them after I parked them back in the next room and used the origin permatemp power to pull just the Honoree. But for the first mission I autocomplete, it's always the "Defeat 10 Circle of Thorns" mission you get from talking to the Perez Park security chief at level 5 or 6, when the CoT you'd be facing are 8-10 and in groups.

A random piece of cultural trivia -- firing someone on a Friday right when they show up to work is considered courteous in Korea; doing it out of the blue and sending them home spares them having to be at work with their failure hanging over them, and doing it on Friday gives them the weekend to put themselves back together. So the way NCsoft slagged Paragon Studios was respecting their 'face'... by their standards... no matter how crude and abrupt it was by Western standards.

I don't think it's because they're not pulling but more a combination of trying to pull too many and losing some of them when they aggro more (which loss gets blamed on the stealth auras) and, as you describe, people moving up the ramps to fight and stopping them before they get to the bowl, where the max visibility count causes the mobs on the ramps to be invisible from the bowl.

Level 6. You can pick your first pool power at level 4 and get either of them, but you can't pick the other power until your next power pick at level 6.

You mean like attacking dropping the stealth effect completely on you, the way it works now? Stealth only reduces the range at which you draw aggro (the -Perception effect) up until the point that you actually make an attack, at which point the effect goes away completely and doesn't come back until you're no longer in combat. And if you have one or more mobs' aggro, and you run into an AoE stealth field like Shadow Fall, nothing happens to the aggro you already collected, and you do not acquire stealth and become less noticeable.

It's a minor oversight, but the badge text for both of the accolades "Free Among the Dead" and "A Light in Dark Astoria" is "You've obtained this Accolade by earning every Exploration badge within Dark Astoria"; the latter should say "Echo: Dark Astoria".

And my memory immediately pinged back to this:

I started about a week after CoH went live, and I don't know if it was craziness with the RNG or not enough random missions in the list (it always seemed to me -- and more so after AE was released -- that it should be possible to create a virtually endless series of 'cabbage patch' radio missions to eliminate it), but after the ninth or tenth time you've recovered the Liquid Computer, it wears on you. It's like taking relics to Azuria to be filed under 'will call' for the Banished Pantheon or the Circle of Thorns.

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.