srmalloy

It only becomes an issue when you have a large number of player and NPC objects, such as during a Rikti Mothership raid, but the algorithm that determines what mobs you see has an annoying quirk to it -- it prioritizes displaying nearby mobs to the exclusion of all else. Where this becomes an issue is when a ranged character has a mob targeted, and mobs appear between the character and their target; this can cause the target to fade out and vanish, causing you to lose target, even if the target reappears a second later. What I would suggest as a way of dealing with this is for a character's current target to always be in the list of visible/targetable mobs to be drawn unless it exceeds the normal visible range limit. This would keep a character's target in view and prevent random target switching until it moves out of range (ort teleports), goes down, or the character switches targets. Because only one mob can be affected by this for a character, it should not have a significant impact on rendering, but I don't know if it could be handled by just adding the mob pointer to the list of objects to be displayed.

This is sometimes an indication that the team leader has come to CoH from one of the "Holy Trinity" MMOs (the ones slavishly following WoW's Tank/DPS/Heal straitjacket), and haven't learned that CoH doesn't have the same baked-in requirement for any given AT or powerset. These are the ones I see posting solicitations for team members, but want a tell with AT, level, and powerset. Some of the most entertaining runs I've had playing the game have been with either accidentally or deliberately 'bent' teams, where the mix of ATs we got would be horribly unusable in a "Holy Trinity" MMO.

Fundamental problem: as I understand it, most maps are well above the 'bottom' of the volume of the instance, and there is no 'floor' in the spaces between map segments (the maps being made up of pre-built sections that are linked together -- when you get a black wall across a corridor in a map, it's a geometry error where the two segments are not properly aligned); if you could pass through 'outside' walls, you'd fall to the bottom of the instance, which you don't want to have players do. This would create seemingly arbitrary restrictions on which doors and walls you could pass through, or require that all of the office and lab maps be redone to create the areas behind previously obdurate barriers. And, as Dragon Crush mentions, being able to get outside the map gives you a major advantage in observing the layout and contents of the map.

For the people who don't want to read the other thread, here's a visual guide: You go up the walkway toward the chalet, which takes you to the lower level, as pictured above. When you get there, go right around the central pillar, but go past the ramp on the right. Just after the ramp is a walkway to your right that ends at a rock with a concealed doorway (the rock is visible behind the rightmost tree in the foreground); click on the doorway, and you'll be taken to the Winter Forest map. All of the NPCs that were there during the Winter Event are gone, but the TUNNEL portal, supergroup portal, and crafting tables are still there.

I never understood MoG; it seemed to me that, with it's "drop to 10% HP, get 90% resistance to everything but Psi" mechanics, it was functionally equivalent to "activate this power to take 10x damage from Psi"

Or the wolf herding mission on the map that's the NE corner of Boomtown, where if you were too close to the dumpster when the Devices Blaster zoomed in to let the trip mines go off, you'd get a pop-up window from the game engine with the error "Too many effects to render."

The SOs start at level 5; you can buy them with a level 1 character, although you can't slot them until level 2. Your wording can be read as not being able to buy them until level 5.

Back before the monkeys got their Psi attack, and the Zookeeper badge was 10,000 monkeys.

If you're not concerned about 'wasting' shards, getting a T1 Cardiac Alpha is at least a neutral choice to avoid the debuffs you get in content like the Apex/Tin Mage TFs for having an empty Alpha slot while you decide how you want to slot out the incarnate abilities (it would be nice to have some way of recycling incarnate boosts back into components, though), although I agree that if you're not having End issues, Musculature is often the better choice for a DPS-oriented character.

If you're going to create completely revamped TFs, that's perfectly valid, but it's outside the scope of the original question, which was "which hero would be more appropriate for each of the existing 'basic' TFs than the ones we have?"

I think this is entirely wrong; Penny is friends with the Clockwork, and with the Clockwork King (from what I can tell); it would take a really big betrayal on the King's part for her to be rounding up heroes to quash him and his minions.

The character I had on Live was an AR/EM Blaster that I'd built to test Emmert's (*spit*) claim that "Range is a Blaster's defense". It worked pretty well until the update that gave all the mobs that didn't already have a ranged attack a ranged attack, and tweaked all of the ranged attacks so that many of them outranged a snipe with Boost Range active. It was still entertaining (and I recreated the character on HC with some differences) to be able to stand on the platform near Imperious in Cimerora and, with the help of someone who could actually see them, snipe/LRM the mobs in the courtyard on the north side of the valley.

The all-MM ITF that I participated in back on Live was a gas. Of course, with eight sets of pets that were all obstacles to travel, sometimes the tactics got a little crazy until we got it sorted out to let the melee pets go in first. But the steamroller visuals were amazing, if laggy.

Two words: Forward Observer. With sufficient range enhancement, and Boost Range on top of that, targeting through a teammate lets you snipe targets that are otherwise invisible due to range. And you're far enough away that the spawn you're sniping just stands there until the second mob goes down.

The first one you'd find is in AP between the legs of the statue NW of City Hall; it's on a raised plinth with a pool ringing the statue. The contact Peter Wong (the second in the old Science contacts string) is standing just east of the plinth with an exploration badge about five feet east of him. In KR, it's on the raised area SE of Blue Steel. In Steel Canyon, it's on the south side of the big statue in the middle of the zone; Positron is standing on the N side of the statue. In Skyway, it's NW of the platform Synapse is standing on, in the park east of the north tram station. In Talos Island, it's in the patch of lawn behind Luminary just NE of the tram station. In IP, it's under the NW corner of the north tram station. In FF, it's in the courtyard at the north end of the zone, just west of the university and just north of the Midnighter Club (East of the bigger plaza with the fountain in the middle where you can find Numina and Infernal).

And a third in the middle of the hall leading to the AE facility over on the blue side of Pocket D.

Go to Atlas base portal Use any of the transport-base passcodes Pick the Pocket D teleporter You're in Pocket D As long as someone hasn't gotten creative enough about pulling the Vahzilok or Hellions to get them past the police drones and up onto the plaza, you don't even have the modest gauntlet of Clockwork and Skulls to get past to get to the base portal.

I remember way back on Live with my first character run through that arc that I was shooting up the Shivans that were aggroing to the meteor to keep them off Mender Lazarus while he beat on it. I don't recall when he stopped attacking it at all.

Or the Hell's Angles.

Perhaps creating a small number of animations, and then making them selectable and colorable in Power Customization at the tailors'.

IIRC, this is working as designed; one of the charactistics of Iron Judgement to balance its 'free-form' AoE is that a mob that has been recently affected by the damage jump won't be affected by another Ion Judgment.

It's been fairly concretely established that the auction house is unlikely to ever work in bases. Because of the way the auction house works, its entire database needs to be loaded into the data structures for the instance -- whether an instance of a zone, a mission instance, or a base instance -- for it to work. That database gets loaded when the instance spawns, and from there only receives updates. For a zone instance, this happens when the servers are restarted, and when a new zone instance spawns due to population, so it only needs to happen once until the zone instance restarts. For a base instance, this happens when the base zone is instantiated -- i.e., when someone transports to their base. Separately for each base that has someone in it, and that database gets thrown away when the base becomes empty, and the instance is removed. Unless there is someone continuously in a base (possibly for a base like the cosmic transport hub), the server would have to copy the full auction house database into the memory for the instance when the base instance is created. This would functionally cripple the performance of the server, with the entire auction house database getting loaded each time someone travels to a base, whether or not they actually use it while they're there. It was bad enough when /ah was introduced, and every zone needed to have a copy of the auction database instead of just the zones with a Wentworth's or black market; making it accessible in bases means that the server will have to load hundreds of separate copies, usually for a base that only has one person in it.

It's not as flexible as it might be, but go read Advanced Buff Bar Filtering -- you can have more granular control over the status bar, group window, and pet window buff displays.

It's a really low-priority issue, but with the i27 change to make Ouroboros accessible from level 1, the list of zones at the Ouroboros portal at the back of Ouroboros lists the level range for Ouroboros as "15-50", and it should be '1-50' now.

The repeatable missions in the Shadow Shard lose out badly simply because the zones are so badly laid out for traveling if you're not going to rely on Mission Teleporter/ATT to quickly move you to the mission door. The Kora fruit missions used to be popular when you got a large inspiration from each bush that you harvested, but they declined significantly in popularity when that was changed to medium inspirations. If that were changed to mostly award medium inspirations, with a small chance to get either a small or large inspiration, their popularity could increase. But the Shadow Shard "Go here, examine these monuments" missions never really had anything that would make for a draw past getting an introduction in the next contact in the chain, given the inconvenient nature of the zones.