srmalloy

I was mildly annoyed, logging in at 1720 Pacific, to find that the New Years' fireworks box distribution had already ended, with /servertime showing 240101@0123. I would have expected the timing of the distribution to at least have been driven off of local time at the physical location of the servers, not GMT; if I had known the day would be rolling over at 1600 local, I would have made a greater effort to cycle characters through before then. Still, the boxes of fireworks are at best a cosmetic reward, so their absence isn't really significant, but it would have been nice to know in advance that date/time-restricted activities were driven off GMT, not EST/EDT (or some other timezone).

Group Fly gives flight to everyone in the power radius, whether they want it or not, unless you've gone to Null to disable the effects of Group Fly. That is what the hate and discontent is about. A character -- virtually always an MM; with the ready availability of time-limited flight powers from the S.T.A.R.T. vendor and other sources (like the Posi 2 TF), there's little need for a character to take it for the purpose of allowing the rest of their team to fly) -- takes Group Fly to enable them to bring their pets along with them while they're flying, and the fact that it spreads to their nearby teammates whether they want it or not is largely a "Nicht mein Zirkus, nicht meine Affen" situation, with the attitude of the person with Group Fly almost always being "Well, if you don't like it, go talk to Null and disable it", which can be perceived as making everyone else go out of their way to avoid inconveniencing them in the slightest. I don't have a second account ready to hand to try it on the test server, and I've never been in a position to try it on the live servers, so I don't know if disabling the effect of Group Fly on you at Null the Gull also disables its effects on your pets; if your pets are not affected by your choice at Null, then this creates a clear uncontrollable negative effect from someone else using Group Fly. Is there anyone who can readily test this? One option -- certainly not the only solution, and possibly not the best one -- is to tweak travel powers so that they automatically spread to your pets: for example, if you take Fly or Mystic Flight, your pets following you automatically get Fly; this would remove the need for Group Fly except to allow you to 'gift' Flight to your team, which as I describe above is rarely necessary. Another option is to break Group Fly into two powers in the Flight pool -- 'Team Fly', which works exactly as Group Fly does now, and 'Pet Fly', which only affects the character's own pets; this would retain the distinction between taking the Flight pool to get Fly and the pet flight, and taking the Sorcery pool for Mystic Flight and Translocation, but not getting the group/pet flight choices, and allow MMs to pick a power that lets their pets fly with them, without forcing the power choice on others..

They've been doing that since launch, in the original Atlas Park zone even before it got moved to Echo: Atlas Park when AP got a revamp. Also, if you stand around in the lobby the 'main' building of Portal Corp (the one at the base of the 'U') and watch through the windows, you'll see NPCs wandering through the walls there, too; this has been happening since the zone was rolled out.

But there's already a perfectly good animation for EotS; you just don't see it unless you're flying. If we have the option to make that animation standard for both flying and grounded activation, that would address my issues with the 'breakdance' animation perfectly.

I've never been fond of the 'breakdance' animation for Eye of the Storm from the Staff Fighting powerset, but I recently noticed that, if your character is flying/hovering when the attack animates, they perform an animation for the attack that doesn't have them spinning around on their back like an idiot. Can we get the 'flying' animation for the power made selectable as the default animation for all cases?

This benefits a character only if they want to get TFC by running the TFs only when they're the WST; there's nothing stopping a character from getting TFC in one day by running the required TFs one after the other. And there is nothing stopping you from running the TFs when they come up as WSTs after you've already got TFC. To my mind, this is asking the HC staff to 'solve' a 'problem' that's a non-issue.

Except for the people who seem to be convinced that the $loc coordinates are unique, so you get posts in LFG like "Kronos at [x y z]", and they don't understand what's wrong until you post back that you're rushing right off to Firebase Zulu to fight the Kronos, because that's clearly where it is from their message.

Exactly. Just recruit a smaller team and set difficulty to max team size.

I was throwing it out as something to create an alternative to the WLs just standing around chilling waiting for the players to show up to beat on them, and make it more like they were actually 'wreaking havoc'.

When people are running around opening presents, they get a 'Naughty' result and spawn some hostile snowmen. If they're in a large enough group and unlucky, they'll spawn a Winter Lord, and the message "A Winter Lord is wreaking havoc" will go out as a zone message. But when you find it, the Winter Lord is just standing there among the other snowmen in the spawn, not hurting anything. Now, I know that there are NPC-destructible objects in the zones; in Kings Row, for example, you'll occasionally see something like "Gravedigger Assailant has defeated Car" when an NPC has done enough damage to an environment object to destroy it. I don't know if it's possible, but it would enhance the immersion if, when a Winter Lord spawned, it would be given some sort of random-walk path through the zone where it would attack the destroyable environment objects it passed by, so that a) it's legitimately 'wreaking havoc', and b) isn't waiting in some static location for heroes/villains to show up to beat it into the pavement.

And you define a valid target for being controlled for enemies as being organic, which eliminates Clockwork, robots, presumably the DE stone and crystal mobs, etc., but all player characters are vulnerable, even when their character concept is that they are a sapient machine or some other non-organic construct/entity. While this is understandable, given the difficulty of determining whether any given player character is vulnerable or not, it still represents an ability where players and NPCs are treated differently, which is a dubious basis to build an archetype from.

Any ambush-type group of mobs will be able to follow you by the tracker invisibly planted on you when you entered the mission. Stealth, invisibility, cloaking devices, or any other method of avoiding aggro is inconsequential; you will be tracked, and the only way to avoid them is to move faster than them.

You're missing the point. Having someone whip out their T9 and discovering that they've fallen out of a comic book and conservation of momentum actually works on them is funny, not that I'm suggesting that should be how it works.

And the mini-pets where you get the same physical distortion are just... disturbing; the ones that are properly-shrunk versions, like the mini-Kronos, mini-GWW, or mini-U'kon, and the ones like mini-Lusca are all significantly more palatable.

I see something loosely similar to this with Arsenal Control's Smoke Canister, which has a confuse rolled in; if I drop the rest of the spawn, the remaining mob, while still showing the purple "I'm Confused" dots, will attack me. It's specific to being the last mob from a spawn; as long as there's another mob in the spawn still standing, they'll attack a friendly, and will only attack me if there's nobody else to 'shoot' at.

And I have the mental image of a character making the huge arc while in the air, and because they're not anchored on the ground, they spin one way while their weapon swings the other, turning the attack from an arc to a single target effect...

I've got one following me around right now, and it's definitely non-creepy. Unfortunately, it's so small it's invisible, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a pet following you around, but...

The Alpha slot acts like a custom enhancement slotted in every one of your powers, but if none of your powers can be slotted for a particular aspect of the incarnate boost, that aspect won't do you any good.

They'll generally offer missions up to level 6, and push you to the next contact in the string at that point; I try to avoid the Science contact because I dislike getting sent to face off against Vahz with no effective counter for the zombie barf.

I do this as well, except that I'll pick up the Tech and Magic starting missions inside City Hall, then do them at +2 once I've run out Sandra Costel's arc and been introduced to Thiery.

For future winter events, it would be nice if we could get an option at the S.T.A.R.T. vendor to turn off the "Instant Snowstorm" drops from presents, the same way we can turn off certain inspiration and recipe drops. I'm sure there are other people who never use them, and who would just as soon not have them piling up in the Temporary Powers list needing to be deleted. On a related note, can the 'drop the new power into your power trays, even if it's already there' feature be looked at? Right now, there are quite a few temporary powers that will drop an icon into your power trays on receipt -- only once per tray, but you can get an Instant Snowstorm (or Arrow of Jealousy, et al.) icon in tray 1, tray 2, tray 3, and so on, as long as you have an empty spot in the tray and there isn't one there already.

I have a Dark/Plant Blaster, Toksichniye Podlesok (Токсичные Подлесок, 'Toxic Undergrowth'), with her Dark Blast powers recolored black/green to create the effect of shooting various types of toxic attacks, with the -ToHit effect of Dark Blast rationalized as decreased muscular control from the toxins. You can do all sorts of things if you play with visuals and pick appropriate secondary effects.

Back on Live, I used to be able to keep Super Speed on running the blue cave and Council/5th Column bases; I don't have the twitch-response skills to do that any more, and sometimes plow into walls with just Sprint.

If you're buying the recipe from the vendor in the Ski Chalet for canes, you get the recipe at a level appropriate for the character's level, so if you buy it with a 50, you get a level-50 recipe. Passing the canes to a level 10 to buy it means the recipe will be level 10, meaning that you don't need to attune it if you're going to slot more than one IO from the set and get the (IIRC) 7.5% movement bonus all the way down to level 7.

It's an artifact of the game having to cheat to be competitive -- the AI can't realistically be smart enough to imitate a player intelligently using their abilities, so the game compensates by giving them access to the powersets' full range of abilities, albeit throttled back in power somewhat.