srmalloy

Reminds me of a fight I still laugh about, remembering, from SWTOR when my Smuggler defeated a Sith using a Dirty Kick attack, prompting the snarky comment, "Ancient weapons and hokey religions are no match for a durasteel-toed boot in the nards."

Hmmm. I'd need to go through the backgrounds of a number of my characters and aggregate everything together and see what I'd need to do to flesh things out to make enough material to make a playable area out of. Back early in Live, I was surprised to see "для" in chat. Experimenting, I found that CoH supported the use of some sections of the Unicode characterset (not all of it; that's huge), and I started making characters with Russian backgrounds, doing Google searches to dig up genuine Russian research institutions {like the I. M. Sechenov Institute for Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry) setting up a history where the Soviet Union had its own state-sponsored superteams like Народная Армия, with villain groups like Красная Угроза opposing them. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the support for the state superteams in the chaos of the breakup; some of their members tried to continue, others were snapped up by the newly-fragmented countries as they attempted to create their own superteams, and organizations like the Братсво sought to hire or otherwise acquire supers for their own activities. I remember some random details -- in my character-background period, Soviet researchers never managed to establish fully-stable portals to other dimensions, as Portal Corp did, the repeated failures attempting to make the БРИГАДИР program work without having the control unit become sapient... But there's not enough there to make a coherent area background without a lot more work.

That can depend on your circumstances. Just yesterday, for example, I ran my Arch/TA Blaster through a Hami raid, having earlier run him through a Posi 1 to get a Notice of the Well. He had three shards and 18 threads going into the evening's raid, and with the 4 Emp merits from the first downing of Hami, plus the 120 threads he got for dinging his first vet level, plus two shards and a few threads during the raid itself, I was able to build T1 and T2 Intuition with threads, go to the Vanguard base and buy a G'rai Matter, spend four shards on a common, and use them and the Notice to craft the T3, giving him his first level shift. It just happened that the Alpha I wanted used a purchaseable shard-based component, so I didn't have to accumulate eight shards, allowing me to step up to a T3 much faster than I have been able to on other 50s.

I can second this observation; back on Live, my TA/Arch Defender never did a lot of damage in fights, but I could see fairly clearly how much faster an AV or EB (and their retinue) would go down when I started throwing debuffs into the melee. There's only so far you can push outgoing damage, but nerfing incoming mitigation has more potential for boosting net damage.

Actually, that's not true. They have an abysmally low drop rate, but I've been able to address a shortfall of one or two threads by a bit of street-sweeping in DA. Shards, though, seem to drop even more infrequently from street mobs than threads, so you're better off going to Ephraim Sha for repeatable missions to get shards from the mobs you defeat in them. Of course, what I'm doing when I street sweep DA is to find the groups of a BP Shaman, Elder, and random minion, snipe the Shaman down, hit the Elder with an AoE, which kills the minion and almost destroys the Spirit underling that the Elder summons when the Shaman goes down, finish the Spirit, then finish the Elder, so it's taking out a boss each group, which would affect the drop rate a bit.

The ones I've gotten that are in office maps, I've learned to stop when I get out of an elevator and watch the chat window, because the boss says something panicky when I reach the right floor, which tells me that he's started to run. I'll move a bit up the hall and wait for him to come in range, then use all my movement-obstructive attacks (holds, I mobs, KB, etc) to pin him down while I defeat him. More annoying is a Family mission, where you have to stop the boss -- I think his name is hard-coded as 'Draco' -- from escaping. The map is a warehouse map, and invariably has two routes to the end room, so it's a crapshoot which one he'll take when he bugs out, and you have to defeat mobs into at least one of those routes to get him to bolt. I had one instance of this mission where the map had two separate double-path sections, and I waited at the place where the paths closest to the end room came back together, and he somehow spawned past me at the other split, because he escaped without my ever seeing him.

To quote from the series "The Journeys of McGill Feighan", an appropriate aphorism would be "The enemy of my enemy is my fall-guy."

It's not always useful, but when you click and drag an IO, and slots don't light up, look around your build while you have the IO dragging. If you have that exact IO in another power, it will light up as well as the 'acceptable' slots. So if you were slotting a set of, say, Thunderstrike in a power, and you had two other powers slotted with Thunderstrike, and you dragged the Acc/Dam, the Acc/Dam IOs in the other two powers would light up as well (a relic of the early days of Inventions, when you didn't have Catalysts, so there might be a reason why you'd want to drop a higher level IO on a lower one).

Some new ones: Heard while hitting the badges and plaques in First Ward: [NPC] Resistance Fighter: Aw, this ain't good. He done got baconized! In the 'Find kidnapped body builder' mission, proof that the Council are just cranked out on assembly lines with minimal sapience: [NPC] Equinox Parasite: I, too, hope to go to Ravenna someday. [NPC] Vortex Cor Leonis Fire: Leon Natale is a lucky, lucky man. [NPC] Zenith Hoverbot: I, too, hope to go to Ravenna someday. [NPC] Equinox Parasite: Leon Natale is a lucky, lucky man.

Are you ever going to exemp down below 45? Then the answer will likely be 'yes'.

The primary objection to it appears to be that it can be used to skip out ahead of being defeated, either in PvP or when running a Mo TF. If it were tweaked to do an 'in combat' check to disable its use, similarly to the way movement suppression works, that would remove it as a "Help me, Mr. Wizard!" button (and that dates me...) power, so it remains a way to get around zones (and access the trainer/vendor/tailor NPCs and storage).

On the whole, I believe that I'd much prefer a rework of Assault Rifle that didn't break builds the way that the Regen nerf rework did. Adjusting target limits, recharge, damage, range, etc. doesn't alter the basic functionality of the powerset. Adding mechanics that change the way every power works in addition to removing two powers entirely to make room for new powers that do not themselves do damage (unlike the powers being removed) but which are necessary as part of the new mechanics seems like something that should be implemented as a new powerset, rather than ripping up an existing one.

Not to mention the advantage that you can burn a spare respec (they're easy enough to earn) and pull out all of the newly-attuned IOs at one time.

It would be more complex to do that, because the game is set up to drive similar powers off the same timer. For example, the prestige power Return to Battle and Rise of the Phoenix both go out for recharge if you use either.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that it's all well and good to suggest adding extra merits for the extra challenges, but what are these bonuses going to be? Flat number of merits based on the challenge, so you'd get the same number of extra merits for running Miss Liberty at +4/x8 as you would running Penelope Yin at the same setting? A flat number of merits based on the challenge, but different for eacyTF/SF? A multiplier to the base merit reward? Separate multipliers by category of challenge (i.e., a multiplier for no deaths, and a separate multiplier for level/team size), and how should the challenges be grouped into categories? And then the bottom line -- who do you expect to take away from the other things they're doing for the game to work on all of this?

And have an option for AE missions that let you pick 'normal' (default), 'initial sepia', or 'all sepia' for the missions, to give a few more choices for customization.

Just to be excessively pedantic, the phrase should be either 'gaseous neurotoxin' or 'neurotoxic gases', so you're not stacking two nouns.

I don't know if this qualifies as a geometry error, or is worth spending the time to fix, but from my memories of Boomtown and the picture on the relevant Paragonwiki page, the building where you find the Towering Inferno exploration badge doesn't have the pillar of smoke rising out of the ruins of the top of the building that it had on live.

If you're going to point fingers there, you should be pointing fingers at all the crafting badges that don't tell you that you need to craft an equal number of each tier of IOs of that type.

Or you could look at them as an Italian-style version of a medieval meat pie, prepared and served open-face.

What struck me about the work that was put into the little details was something that I noticed a couple of months into live. All of my characters to that point had taken Fly for their travel power, and I suddenly noticed that each and every costume piece for boots had a different sole pattern.

This takes me back to when I was playing SVGA Air Warrior on the GEnie dialup network. It was a WWII MOBA, and it handled hit resolution by, when your client thought you got a hit, sending it to the server, which would look at where it thought your target was, and if your shots went through a 'hit bubble' around the target, would count it as a hit. Clearly, the more lag you had, the greater the difference between what you saw and what the server saw. There was a tracker, the "D" value, that showed how many seconds what you were seeing was behind the server's view. On a good day, I had a "D" of fifteen, and could see it climb to thirty. Obviously, trying to hit a maneuvering target was a lost cause, so I became a buff driver -- the ground didn't move, so what I dropped on was where my target would be. So I have to snicker a bit when I see people complaining about a third of a second lag, because I can see how far things have come from when people would kill to only have a third of a second lag.

There are a number of 'dead' Clockwork that appear to be part of the game's collection of 'scenery greeblies', added randomly to make the world seem a little more alive; this may be one of them.

It's not set up to be a rink, but the lake to the east of the hospital in Steel Canyon gets frozen over during the winter event. Adding the rink markings would be straightforward, but the code to allow playing hockey on it is more problematic.

I'm not sure that the game is coded in a way that would allow XP to be shared evenly across all members of a league, but it would be a more equitable solution to do so than restricting XP sharing to be within teams only.