srmalloy

We actually went underwater some time before shutdown. On the west side of the main island in Grandville, there's a pool deep enough for you to go completely underwater, and in the Cimeroran caves, the end room with the cross-shaped walkways (the goal room in the 'Rescue Suicide Girl Lady Jane' mission from Montague Castaneda, or the room before the map switches to the Praetorian labs inside Manticore's mansion), you can swim under one of the walkways from one pool to another. It just never got used to any degree before shutdown.

Or 'Technophile', if you want to follow the stereotype of the Luddites as being technophobes. But as many of the Luddites were skilled machinery operators, and they were conducting their machine breaking as a protest for better wages and more work. So 'Torch Breaker' would be a more appropriate badge name, without referencing misconceptions about their origins.

No, all the callbacks to Live serve a purpose. We need to look back at how it worked on Live, and then say, "This is how PvP worked on Live. What parts of it do we want to keep, and what parts to we want to change, to make it good for Homecoming?" A starting point, not a goal.

This is not true; everyone on a team gets the same base XP and influence (modified by XP boosts, patrol experience, etc.), and the drops are entirely random per individual (again modified by various boosts, like the ones for day jobs). Now, where this becomes heavily true is when you are dealing with a league. In this case, all the members of a team in the league get the same base XP and influence, but the XP allocated to a team depends on how much damage the team did within the league. I have noticed this most severely during Hamidon raids. These break out, at a minimum, four teams -- a taunt team, made up of tanks (and occasional brutes) with a healer, a melee team (more tanks, scrappers, brutes, and stalkers), a ranged team (blasters, sentinels, etc.; primary qualification is having ranged attacks), and a hold team (controllers, doms, etc; primary qualification is having holds). The taunt team taunts the yellow mitos and Hami, the melee team kills the taunted yellow mitos (which need melee attacks to damage them), the hold team kills the green mitos (which have to be held before they can be damaged), and the blue team kills the blue mitos (which need ranged attacks to damage them) This inherently produces disparate XP rewards. The blue team will zip around killing its mitos, and then gang up to help the green team. Since the green team's holds do little damage, they get little of the XP when a mito goes down. To illustrate, when I've done Hami raids on a blaster, I will generally get 30k-55k XP per blue mito (times six blues), and 20k-30k XP per green mito (times 5-6 greens). When I've done a Hami raid with a controller, I get between 6k and 8K per mito (times six greens). The taunt team has a similar issue, as they generate no damage until after their assigned mito is down and they can join the melee team; the melee team has a smaller penalty, as they generally only fight the six yellow mitos. All of which make doing Hamidon raids a crappy source of XP for controllers, doms, and the taunt tanks, even running three raids in an evening, and dropping two sets of mitos before taking out the Hamidon nucleus. The raid rewards are the same regardless, though -- a random HO (once), or four Empyrean merits (once), or 60/40/40 reward merits (first/second/third time that reward picked).

One just tonight, when parking a character in the Shadow Shard for the day job badge: [NPC] TUNNEL Supervisor: I. . . I looked at the sky. . . I think I am going to be sick.

And, as a contrast, one of the reasons I started playing CoH back in May of 2004 was that it didn't have PvP.

Normally, you would expect that a level 50 character you invited to a team would quickly join the team where it was forming; when AE was new, it was a crapshoot whether you'd get "Where do I go?" followed by "How do I get there?" when you told them what zone you were in. I remember one Citadel where the leader got five of these AE babies back-to-back before giving up and running with seven.

No; I haven't yet worked through my feelings about the chatspam from all the newly level-50 characters in Atlas Park asking how to get to Steel Canyon as they emerge from the AE building, back when AE was introduced on Live. 🤨

Doesn't happen as fast, though, and from what I've seen, the people who PL to 50 seem to have the same "Gotta have it now" attitude exhibited by individuals sporting the sort of scorch marks on their pants caused by the spontaneous combustion of currency.

When the defeated anchor despawns, it turns off. This is an important distinction. Put Darkest Night on a CoT spirit, and since they don't leave bodies when defeated, the toggle turns off the moment they go down. Put it on, say, an Earth Mage, and DN will stay up for a while after the anchor goes down, until the body vanishes. That said, there are a fair number of mobs that are 'bad' anchors -- the gem and rock types of DE, for example; since they have a chance to spawn the "mini-me" versions when they're defeated, the original anchor disappears immediately. Sky Raider Sky Skiffs blow up when defeated, as do the Council flying bots. Darkest Night is a -Res and -ToHit, so dropping it on a mob will make it and his friends go down quicker and hit less, so it's more effective against EBs, AVs, Monsters, and GMs than it is on lieutenants or minions, as you observed, simply because the higher the 'grade' of anchor, the longer the AoE debuffs them and everything around them.

/buildsave, and you'll see "buildsaved" in your chat window if the save is successful. However, from repeatedly trying to shortcut entering a build into Mids prior to doing a respec, you won't save any time; there is a note in the Mids subforum stating that the output from /buildsave does not import correctly. Every time I have tried it, the import blows up with one or another error, almost always related to an unrecognized enhancement. The import will do its best, but I seem to always wind up with a build full of empty slots that still makes me manually enter any slots the character has in "below the line" powers -- typically Health and/or Stamina. And if I'm recording a non-capped build, I'll have to keep changing the enhancement level as I place common IOs.

Since inf is, in game lore, supposed to reflect how readily you can get people to provide you with support based on your reputation as a hero/villain, and while I, personally, would like to see negative inf as a feature for 'heroes' that dive into AE at level 1 and don't emerge until they go to Ouroboros to do Mender Ramiel's arc at 50 to unlock their Alpha slot (the public perception of someone who crawls into their electronic navel rather than building their reputation as being rather laughable, and not at all heroic/villainous), I recognize that my opinion is likely not shared by many people and vanishingly unlikely to be implemented. As an observation of programming practice, though, many languages and databases default to four-byte signed integer for variables that are declared integer unless explicitly defined otherwise, so it may have simply been a case of not thinking about it when the data structures were defined, the devs not thinking that ~2 billion would ever prove to be a constricting limit.

"pure healing based set"... Tier 2 toggle, +Res to all but Psi; tier 4 toggle, +Res to all but Psi; tier 7 auto, +Res to all but Psi. So, basically, you want a set like the original Regen, except that it has Resistance built into it so you don't have to turn to set bonuses and power pools for that.

Something similar to the animation for Radiation Melee's Atom Smasher, then?

Since the game prevents you from having a negative amount of inf, it would be theoretically possible to change the field to an unsigned integer, which would double the cap without affecting the space required for the field (an important consideration when there are other parts of the code that expect data structures to be a particular size), but that would still require a cascade of changes through the rest of the code to be able to accommodate the altered type for characters' inf. Basically, every other variable in the game that stored an inf value would need to be changed to an unsigned integer, as well as updating all the relevant database tables to change their field type. A good example of the "you can never change just one thing" principle in programming.

The UV perception has its own peak separate from the 'blue' cones, which is where the term comes from. And an aphakic dichromat would be technically an aberrant trichromat. There's still no good explanation for the survival of UV sensitivity in the human eye, though, and for the most part, arguing over terminology is just splitting hairs.

A variation on this worked for me -- I had been using 'targetcustomnext mypet', which made me cycle through all of my pets and back to the first before the second part would trigger, but setting it up as /bind ctrl+h "+$$targetcustomnear mypet alive $$ powexecname Rejuvenating Circuit" worked for me. Thank you.

Not to mention that characters who were over level for the TF had to be matched one-to-one with characters in the level range of the TF for the exemplar to work, and if the 'aspirant' (the character serving as the level anchor for the character being exemplared) disconnected, the exemplar had about 30 seconds for the aspirant to reconnect -- or establish another exemplar/aspirant link -- before they were automatically kicked from the TF for being over level.

I've noticed this with other mobs -- well, at least they don't get up before I finish defeating them, even if it takes several attacks. When it happens with human opponents, it looks to be tied into the ragdoll physics -- they land twisted up, and the server doesn't seem to be able to figure out how to get them 'unwound' and stand them up again. I've never given them more time than it took to finish them, so I don't know if the server would have eventually figured it out.

If you have your Sentinel+ files, you can use Titan SentIcon to extract the costume files from the saved XML files. The extracted costume files do not always load cleanly -- there are occasional "invalid costume piece" errors -- but for the most part you can get all the costume files back. I have a 'costumes' folder underneath the folder where all my old Sentinel+ files live that has the extracted costumes for the characters I saved out prior to shutdown.

Tetrachromancy in humans doesn't increase the range of perception; it increases the discrimination of color. There are two genes for retinal cones on the X chromosome, for the middle and longer wavelengths of light (red and green). In some cases, one of these genes is mutated, shifting the response range of the cones formed from that gene toward the gap between the two ranges. In men, who only have one X chromosome, this causes anomalous trichromancy. In women, normal copies of the two genes on the other X chromosome gives them four types of cones, giving them addtional color discrimination if the mutation shifts the response range of the cones from that gene far enough from the 'red' and 'green' cones to create a sufficiently distinct signal. Because the human retina is sensitive to UV, but UV is blocked by the lens of the eye, you can make the case that humans are blocked tetrachromats, and the women with this mutation are blocked pentachromats. Of course, all humans fall short compared to creatures like the mantis shrimp, some species of which have 18 different types of light receptors.

Not just a repetitive slog, but doing it before you got a travel power. Which cranked the slog up even more, as you had to run across zones, dodging mobs that could con in the deep purples.

Fun fact -- ordinary humans would be able to see ultraviolet if the lens of the human eye didn't block it. People who had a lens removed due to cataracts, or who underwent early lens replacement, are able to see UV down to around 300 nm. It is believed that Claude Monet's works after the lens of his left eye was removed as a cataract treatment, which heavily feature bluish colors, is an indicator of this. More recent lens replacements use materials that, like the natural lens, block UV. Seeing IR is possible, too, although the mechanism is less effective, and a 'superhuman' alternative would work better. If two IR photons hit a cone cell at the same time, they can act like a single photon of a higher frequency -- so two 1000nm photons can act like one 500nm photon, resulting in a perceived green color. Obviously, to get IR colors that shift off the red end of normal perception, you'd need to have different receptors.

Just as a stylistic thing, taking some consideration of the posting environment is a good thing -- black text for the power names against the dark blue background is virtually illegible.

You don't need a second application to lock down bosses, which is what I typically use the single-target holds for, figuring that if I can sideline them as fast as possible, my team will be able to clear a spawn faster.