srmalloy

There's a particular building seen in lots of different zones — a 'C'-shaped two-story building with stairs on each arm of the 'C' going up to a second-floor walkway around the inside, and more than a dozen doors between the two floors. If you've done the 'Outbreak' tutorial, it's the building where you find the Rikti Drone practice targets. In Peregrine Island, there's one between the AE building and the hospital. A league can rotate through the various doors and keep two or three spawning tricks pretty much continuously; it's the building layout with the most tightly clustered doors you can find blueside. The Peregrine Island 'hotel' is the most preferred location for this, because, as a level 50 zone, everyone can just whale on the trick spawns without having to worry about outleveling the zone (and having to go elsewhere to Tot) or turning off XP.

He'll be a Brown Beret by morning...

I'm reminded of a mission where my AR/EM teamed with a bunch of randos, and we were doing a Vahz mission; we'd found a room/corridor with what looked like two intermingled spawns, and we were trying to figure a way to get just one. So I stepped up and volunteered to pull with my shiny new Sniper Rifle attack. I lined up on an Abomination, Build Up, fired, and it went down. None of the others noticed. Build Up had recharged, so I did it again. Abomination goes down, nobody's paying attention. Three members of the team wanted me to keep shooting to see how many I'd have to drop before they paid attention, but a Scrapper said "Screw this, I'm not waiting", charged the Vahz, and gave us our own little Leroy Jenkins moment as both spawns aggro'd, and with our low-teens minimal resistance, we got chewed up. I backed away shooting, getting three more before the melee characters went down, and I backpedaled to the elevator, where I waited for the 3/4 of the team caught in the melee to come back from the hospital.

The helicopter mission door is just like all the other mission doors (and things like the Ouroboros portal); there is a spawn point 'outside' the door where your character appears, and if you're standing there when another character exits, you'll be pushed away. This is fine for normal doors because you exit facing away from the door, so you get pushed farther from the door. The problem is that for the helicopters, the 'door' faces into the cargo compartment of the helicopter, so that when you exit if you can't move before anyone else exits, you'll be pushed away from the door — which is further into the helicopter. Turning the 'door' around so that it's facing out of the helicopter would change it so that people exiting after you would push you out of the helicopter, and would be free to move further away no matter how many people spawned behind you.

Getting a replacement sound isn't the problem;it's identifying all the different footstep sfx for the different terrain types (i.e., for characters, there are different sounds for footsteps on pavement and footsteps on wood, just to list two).

I'd be happy with just getting a mod that replaced all of the 'clang clang clang' footsteps on the various terrain types with thumping ones; it's like the Paragon Studios devs never heard of the concept of padded nonskid foot covers for the bots so they're not announcing themselves to everyone in earshot.

Ahh, but that's because they're spawning behind you as you're facing into the cargo compartment; reversing the spawn would put the first characters to spawn at the rear door, where they would get pushed out by subsequent arrivals, just as with TT to a regular mission door, where you exit the door and get pushed away from it by subsequent arrivals.

Or even just turned around, so we're facing out of the helicopter, not into it, when we spawn. And as a minor bit, change the position of the 'drop point' for Team Transport when the destination is a helicopter; I'm certain people are familiar with getting a TT to the third mission of the Yin TF and winding up standing on the tail boom of the helicopter on the freighter with the helicooter's main rotor spinning through them.

And the occasional bit of humor; I used to have a screenshot of my En/En Blaster in Perez Park during the first winter event, defeating a mob and getting the message "You receive 1337 experience"; I know it was unintended, but seeing a game message telling me I'd received "leet experience" tickled my funny bone.

And don't forget the additional complication that they screwed a significant part of the group over -- when Hami was defeated, he spawned Hami Buds, and the character that defeated one would get a Hami-O; this gave Blasters with AoE attacks an unfair advantage enabling them to get sometimes three or four HOs from a raid, while Defenders and Controllers often got none. I had a Fire/Rad Controller that was in nine Hami raids before she got a Hami-O.

Each different foot costume piece has its own sole pattern, one of the little bits of detail in game design. The soles will generally either have a fixed color, or will take their color from the secondary color for the costume piece.

I'm pretty sure that Domination doesn't activate automatically when its bar fills. 😉Having Hide for Stalkers be an inherent that's a toggle shouldn't be conceptually difficult for the class; if someone wants to play their Stalker without Hide, they don't have to use it.

And sometimes for badging; having one or more sets of a bridger and a lowbie sitting on the ferry in PI while an Inv/SS Tanker was up at the north end of the zone taunting Rikti Monkeys into a heap and Foot Stomping them down, back when the monkeys didn't have their psi blast, and the badge requirement was 10,000... I suspect that things like that are why there's a range limit on getting badge credit for defeats (and it's not too hard for a Blaster to get attacks extended past that limit).

And no one was thinking about the pimp mastermind when people were campaigning for female Thugs back on Live... 😉

You're looking at it from the wrong direction. Make it a toggle, and change its mechanics from just a big boost to healing to an effect like how Spectral Wounds works, but reversed — when you get hit, you take whatever damage gets past any resistance you have, and it queues a delayed effect that 'instantly' heals you for an enhanceable fraction of that damage. So, for example, you might get hit for 250 points of damage, and a second or two later, heal 100 points from that. But because it only affects each incoming hit once, it becomes comparable to resistance and defense, each of which only affect an incoming attack once.

Positioning problems are endemic; since launch, I've been unable to get a character to sit in a booth, and the alignment of a character after a 'sit' command is only loosely determined by the position of their feet.

I'm unclear as to what you're asking for. Logging out to the character selection screen already doesn't log you out from the game. Or are you asking for the ability to double-box with a single account using a client designed entirely around your playing a single character at a time? Or being able to double-box with two instances of the client by logging into a single account twice, so you can run two different characters without having to create a second account?

The problem with that is that the SG portal is right outside that gate; it would need to be moved if you don't want to either leave the police drones there (at which point, Shivans coming through that gate is a non-problem) or force characters to run a gauntlet of Shivans to get to the rest of the zone. A better location would be the big lock gate in the west wall in the southwest of Perez, which matches to the similar gate in the east wall of (echo) Galaxy City where the Land Locked badge is. This does have the drawback of requiring more zone geometry changes to show the breached gate. I think a better alternative would be to set up a 'command center' near that gate, with a contact that either hands out repeatable missions or a TF (or both), with a teleporter that takes you to instanced maps where you're fighting against Shivans that are trying to/have broken through the gate in GC, and you're working to push them back so the gate can be resealed. Repeatable missions could be configured to use the GM code so minions are even-level regardless of character level, letting characters of any level run them for XP. The missions can be described as taking place in the (nebulous in game terms) space between the war walls of GC and Perez.

It takes a bit of work, but any blaster primary can be tricked out with EM; the three-piece bonus for Blaster's Wrath is a range bonus (7.5%\10%for Superior), the two-piece bonus for Bombardment is 5%, and tier 3/4 Cardiac gives you another 20%. That gives you 35% to range before Boost Range, which is perma with a Recharge in it's default slot. Ice, which doesn't get a snipe, doesn't benefit as much, though.

I built my first character back on Live, an AR/EM Blaster, as an attempt to validate Jack Emmert's claim that "range was a Blaster's defense". It mostly worked, up until the devs went back and handed every mob in the game that didn't already have one a ranged attack and tweaked the ones that did, and now there are dozens of mob types whose 'secondary' ranged attack outranges Sniper Rifle with Boost Range active -- many of them shooting pistols. Between that character and my Psi/EM Blaster, both of whom I recreated from Live, I discovered that there is an annoying knuckle in the game statistics. Past a certain distance -- I think it's 212 feet, but I'd have to refer back to my post here about it to get the correct distance -- you still get XP and drops for defeating mobs, but they don't count toward defeats for badges. I discovered this when I noticed my defeat count for Council Walkers wasn't increasing in Boomtown.

Faultline. Worse by far. At least you can get to the important parts of Terra Volta with SS; a wrong move in Faultline and you can be saddled with playing /stuck roulette.

And before the 'kinder, gentler' rework of The Hollows, hunting green Madness Mages in the south end was a good way to farm Luck Charms.

So... Yesterday?

That was why I couldn't take Paragon Chat for more than a few minutes at a time; it had all the structure of the game, but it was dead; none of the life that the NPCs brought to the zones. It felt like the poorly-reanimated corpse of the game.

I still remember going up to the 'back door' of City Hall during a Posi 1 run back on Live and trying to click on it, in the vain hope that, either because of a bug, or a deliberate decision by the devs, the same ability to 'go in the back way' to City Hall would work during the TF. It never did, but there would be enormous hilarity if it had.