srmalloy

The OED, however, reports that decimate also has come "rhetorically or loosely" to mean, "To destroy or remove a large proportion of; to subject to severe loss, slaughter, or mortality."

"Your name's not Hulk? That's going to cause some confusion; mind if we call you Hulk just to keep things straight?"

Just open a few of the gift packages to collect some charges of the Instant Snowstorm temp power, and you can have snow everywhere, even inside your base.

No; there's no winter event. Ignore the snow, the packages scattered around the zones, the animated snowmen, and all the rest; they're just figments of your imagination. 😉

It was part of the overreaction on the part of the devs, reworking Regen after their internal testing showed that a Claws/Regen Scrapper could solo +8 spawns without difficulty, despite the playerbase calling bullshit. It was only after the rework was in place that the devs admitted that they'd discovered that their internal test server didn't have the 'purple patch' incorporated, which meant that the scrapper they were testing with was hitting about 10x as often for 10x as much damage as it should have been... but the changes remained. One of them was turning Instant Healing from a toggle into a click power with a recharge time so high that it could not possibly be made perma, because of all the Regen characters that had been built around getting enough end reduction to be able to afford the punishing end cost of IH, which the devs had originally thought would keep characters from running it continuously.

That wasn't clear in the OP, and part of debugging a problem is to ensure that all possible extraneous influences are eliminated.

The reasoning behind locking CC titles to a new costume slot is to let the winner keep the costume to show off without eating a regular costume slot, or deleting or altering it inadvertently. Other titles, not associated with costumes, would need to be examined to see whether they apply to the character or the player -- titles associated with the player, like, IIRC, Bug Hunter, should be account-wide.

Particularly with a character who won one of these titles might be using a more drab costume, leading people to wonder how they managed to win the title with that costume. Or edited the costume significantly after the contest. Either making the title account-wide, since the award is essentially going to the player that created the costume, or, in what I expect would be a nasty piece of coding, award them an extra costume slot with the winning costume in it and locked so it can't be changed, and tie the title to having that costume active.

Just as a check to make sure something isn't overlooked, do the damage numbers you see in the combat pane and floating over your target reflect gross damage or net damage (i.e., after the target's resistance is subtracted?

I'm disappointed with the change to ESD Arrow, with it taking away an AoE hold and replacing it with a stun, given the game's horrible handling of stunned mobs -- back on Live, I've watched a stunned Outcast stagger off at a dead run, leap up onto the roof of a building, and disappear. Stun is not a reliable mez until the game aborts any movement for a stunned character and replaces it with the slow stagger PCs are limited to. But I moved a slot from ESD Arrow to Ice Arrow so that was five-slotted, and replaced the Lockdown in ESD Arrow with two Absolute Amazement and a pair of procs, and it seems to be reasonable. Oil Slick Arrow works like the Defender Trick Arrow version, so if you've gotten used to lighting your slicks, it's not a pain. Adding a macro to target the oil slick and fire Explosive Arrow at it makes lighting it easy, and in big fights someone usually has it lit before I can. Once they fix the bug that causes a targeted Oil Slick Arrow to fail to spawn a functioning oil slick (you can hear it, but it doesn't show up, and it doesn't affect mobs) it will be a steady part of my rotation.

The same problem with the Oil Slick from Oil Slick Arrow not appearing happens when I use the "powexeclocation target Oil Slick Arrow" macro on targets that are on raised catwalks -- when I used it targeting a Warhulk on one of the elevated walkways on the big warehouse building in Crey's Folly SW of the entrance from Brickstown, the sound effects of the oil slick were audible, but the oil slick itself was not present. Using the power as a location power -- click the power, place the targeting circle on the catwalk -- worked normally.

The crane in Peregrine Island on the pier at (647.4, 93.0, -114.0) sometimes has two cables and hooks pendant from the crane arm, one of which is perpetually bouncing out at an angle, rather than hanging straight down.

My only characters with Latin-derived names are a Dark/Dark corruptor named 'Tenebrica', and a Fire/Time corruptor named 'Machinator Magicus', the latter name deriving from Kirk Mitchell's Procurator series, where 'machinator' was the term for what we would call an engineer, with the character being a dimension traveler from a world like Poul Andersen's Operation Chaos universe, where magic was the technology.

In an extreme quirk of coincidence, some years ago, when I had gone down to the local blood bank to donate, I was asked if I'd ever used another SSN. I said 'no', and they said that there was another person with my name working at the hospital where I did. The next day, when I went in to work I checked the patient file, and not only was there someone else with the same first and last name as mine (different middle initial, though), but we shared a birthdate -- month, day, and year.

Well, let's sift through my characters and pick some: "Теневой Огонь" (Tenevoy Ogon', 'Shadow Fire', fire/dark corruptor), "Лучник" (Luchnik, 'Archer', arch/ta blaster), "Обморожение" (Obmorozheniye, 'Frostbite', ice/ice dominator), "Ядерный Огонь" (Yaderniy Ogon', 'Nuclear Fire', fire/rad controller), "Термоядерный" (Termoyaderniy, 'Thermonuclear', fire/rad sentinel), "Пожарная Сорняк" (Pozharnaya Sornyak, 'Fire Weed', fire/plant blaster), "Голубая Молния" (Golubaya Molniya, 'Blue Lightning', elec/elec defender), "Ядерная Зима" (Yadernaya Zima, 'Nuclear Winter', ice/rad corruptor). All with names that are essentially just descriptions of their powers, yet, having been filtered through a foreign language, acquire more weight.

To corrupt them effectively, you need to start them young. Good work.

Certainly not as a traditional pizza, but cut into rings and grilled on the fire along with a pork butt, which is then shredded, the pineapple chopped, and both scattered across a circle of pizza dough with barbecue sauce and baked, and it's wonderful. But it just doesn't go well as a topping with a plain tomato sauce and mozzarella.

No Way in [suitably amplified] Hell.

Observer bias, yes. You don't notice all the times when things happen the way you expect them to, but the weird outliers jump out in your face. Something that might be worthwhile to do is to go into the source code, extract the function for the RNG, and set it up as a standalone program and run a few million numbers to look at the distribution to see if the RNG itself has an issue. Some RNG functions have odd biases built into them because the developers don't think about the data they're working with. RNGs produce a binary number (32- or 64-bit, typically), and one of common way of getting a random number in a range is to mod the random number by the range (i.e., X mod 10 + 1 to get 1-10). But this introduces bias; mod 10 means the bottom four bits of the random number are all that determine the result, so you have 0-15, producing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 when you apply the mod function -- 0-5 appear twice as often as 6-9. This effect gets smaller as the range goes up -- a 1-1000 range (10 bits, 0-1023) only doubles up on 2.4% of the range, compared to 60% for 1-10. I would hope, though, that the original CoH developers accounted for things like this; RNGs in games have been around for a long time, and solutions to this problem should be routine.

When you're sending email, the game complains and won't let you send it if the email doesn't have text in both the subject and the body; this is worthwhile, so you can tell the recipient why you're sending it. When you're sending email to yourself, though, it's redundant to say why -- you're usually not going to be sending messages, except for things like base passcode macros you want to have available to all your alts; it's normally an attachment or inf -- recipes, enhancements, salvage, or merits. It's not a big thing, but if the email function didn't require a message body when you were sending email to yourself, it would make it a little more convenient -- for example, if you're sending empyrean merits, you open mail, click 'New', drag the merit into the mail, and it populates your global name and the subject, but you still have to tab or click into the message body and type something; not having to do this (or having the game automatically put something like a period into the body when you're sending mail to yourself) would simplify the process a little.

I was doing the PI Fake Nemesis crawl with my Arch/TA Blaster, and I found what appear to be a couple of odd bugs. First, the two piers on the southeast side of PI are porous to Oil Slick Arrow, but only if you target it. I have a macro to drop Oil Slick Arrow on my current target -- "powexeclocation target Oil Slick Arrow" -- and for most of my loop it was working as I expected; I'd drop the Oil Slick Arrow on a Fake Nemesis, then use a second macro that, with two taps, would target the slick and hit it with Blazing Arrow. However, for targets on the two southeast piers (and the ships berthed between them), if I fired Oil Slick Arrow using a mob as a target, I could hear the oil slick bubbling away, but there was no visual for the slick, no pseudo-pet to target, and the mobs that would be in the area of effect wouldn't notice. If I waited, and shot Oil Slick Arrow again, but used the power icon and targeting circle to place it manually, it works perfectly. And it only does this on the piers on the southeast side of PI; doing this -- on 'solid ground' -- the slick always appears. Second, when you click on the Oil Slick Arrow icon, your character goes through the animation for shooting the arrow, even if the power is still recharging or you are out of range of the target location. This one is more annoying than breaking anything. Third, and I don't know whether this is a bug or WAI for blasters if they don't have a fire power in their primary, I was seeing the Fakes running out of the flaming oil slick, so I thought I'd slap down a slow to keep them there, and placed my Oil Slick Arrow to get the oil slick, then targeted it and fired Glue Arrow at the oil slick so they would cover the same area... and the oil slick caught fire. Is Glue Arrow intended to light oil slicks, or is this a bug? Update: I noticed that I have the Positron's Blast proc slotted in Glue Arrow, so this may be causing it, although the 100% ignite rate is amusing. Finally, the patch notes state that Glue Arrow in Tactical Arrow was changed to be location-based, but the mouseover text still describes it as "Ranged (targeted AoE)", and when I try to use it, it won't activate unless I have a hostile mob targeted, and the AoE centers on the targeted mob. The description and behavior is correct if the change to make it location-based was reverted before issue 27 was rolled out, and the change wasn't reflected in the patch notes.

I was hugely surprised this evening; I'd taken my Arch/TA Blaster out to Peregrine Island to do the Fake Nemesis loop, and was becoming annoyed that the Fakes were running out of my flaming oil slicks, so I tried dropping the oil slick, then targeting it and dropping a Glue Arrow on it. And the oil slick lit. I don't know if this is WAI or a bug, but if hitting your Oil Slick with a glue arrow not only gets the glue patch but lights your oil slick to boot, it's a bonus. Update: It appears that it's the Positron's Blast proc in the power that was igniting the oil slick. After more than 30 times with it, Glue Arrow finally failed to ignite the oil slick, and checking my combat log showed that the proc didn't go off that time.

I have it five-slotted with Bombardment on my Arch/TA Blaster, simply because I had a set of LotG in it before, and I moved the Def/+Rech to the new Gymnastics, with the rest of the set going into SG storage, leaving it with space to take the set, from someone else's build on the subforum. Looking back at the Sentinel+ file for my TA/Arch Defender from live, he had Oil Slick Arrow frankenslotted for damage and recharge (with the more limited availability of merits/funds, slotting was a little more haphazard): <slot boost="0" level="45">Crafted_Recharge</slot> <slot boost="0" level="33">Crafted_Touch_of_Lady_Grey -- Chance for Negative Energy Damage</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Crafted_Air_Burst -- Dam/Rech</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Crafted_Detonation -- Dam/Rech</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Crafted_Positrons_Blast -- Dam/Rech</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Crafted_Tempered_Readiness -- Dam/Slow</slot>

Isn't that Cheetara? (insert rimshot here)

If you use an angle in degrees, remember that it is relative to how you are facing when the command executes, not an absolute direction (i.e., '0' is not North). I went through some annoyance learning this with the numpad binds for MM pets and wanting to be clever and spacing the pet summons out around me.