srmalloy

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.

This. A good example is a hold; five-slotting it with Lockdown, including the +2 Mag proc, makes it much more effective than five-slotting it without the proc. Seeing the electric ball when the proc goes off tells you that you've got extra time to drop that target.

Rather than hitting Potter's Field, you're better off running circuits around the island to the east that has the Sky Raider runway on it -- Hellfrosts spawn on the rocks near the water on the west, north, and east sides, on the ledges on the west side, and sometimes on the hill about midway on the west side west of the shed roof. You can get anywhere from two to six Hellfrosts per loop around the island. And when you're crossing from the east to the west side (about where the mesa ends and the buildings on the south side start), you can pick up a couple of Wolf Spiders and the odd Sky Skiff as lagniappe. If you run Unai Kemen's mission for the masks, and you're a ranged AT with flight, you don't need a tank for aggro management -- popping the minion in the minion/lieutenant pairs grabs the lieutenant's attention to get them to summon a mask, which will come up to you while you stay out of range -- the times I've done this, I haven't had to get past the south end of the map, going back to plink a lieutenant when their interest wanes.

One of the hidden limitations bio space is that, while the game supports Unicode (as it would have had to in order for chat to work for the Korean rollout, however much of a flop it was), Unicode characters are 16 bits wide, while ASCII characters are 8. So while you could put "Αντάρα" in your bio, it takes up 12 'characters' of space. There may not be a lot of use of Unicode, but it does cut into the bio space harder than ASCII.

Given that just letting the mob level increase doesn't change the mob's abilities -- an Outcast (normal cap 20) won't have the variety of attacks and defenses when scaled to 50 that a level-50 character would have -- I would say that scaling them to 50 works, not that it works well. Low-level mobs scaled to 50 are going to be significantly less of a challenge than mobs built to be level 50.

Endurance and Recharge reduction enhancements are inverted. Enhancements like Damage or Accuracy have a multiplication effect -- base * (1 + enhancement) -- so two even-level SOs, 66%, give you base * (1 + 0.66). Recharge or Endurance is base / (1 + enhancement), so the same two even-level SOs give you base / (1 + 0.66), which is ~60% of base. Each increment of recharge reduction gets you a smaller decrease -- 50% to 100% gets you 10% better reduction, 100% to 150% gets you 6.7%, and so on. Even 400% recharge reduction only gets the recharge time down to a fifth of base, so a power with a ten-minute base recharge would still take two minutes to recharge, and you'dhave to put an awful lot of work into doing it.

The point of eliminating transfers, as I read it, was to prevent people from leveling and building out their PvP combat monster with the population resources of a PvE server, then transfer the character to the PvP server once it's fully twinked out. Admittedly, with the ability to funnel resources across servers, the limitations are going to be play-based -- doing all the core TFs for the Task Force Commander accolade, for example. If you have to get all the things that require you to play the character with the population resources of a PvP-only server, you're going to have to work harder at it.

And have donations to cover operating costs be pulled out separately for the PvP-only server so that when if it fails to get enough support to cover the cost of running it, we can shut it down and we'll have hard numbers to wave in people's faces the next time the idea comes up.

Back on live, I had a stack of emote bind files for my Bots/Dark MM, whose background was being a 'failed' Soviet experiment to create a robotic director of combat robots. What the bind files did was let me make a sequence of pet 'statements' in Russian like this: <em taunt> Твоя мать носит обувь солдата! Your mother wears the footgear of a soldier! Что? What? Это должно быть оскорблением? That's supposed to be an insult? Так написано в словаре. That's what the phrasebook says. Я никогда не пойму органику. I'll never understand organics. I need to recreate the bind set; maybe with a popmenu, so it doesn't take up much keyboard space.

The only problem you're going to find is that the slightly slower speed of Group Fly and the jerky response of your pets will cause them to fall out (literally) of the Group Fly volume if you try to make any decent speed across a zone. Unless and until this gets worked out, you either have to stop at intervals to make sure you haven't lost anyone, or use tricks like putting yourself on follow to one of your pets, then using the Goto order on that pet to send it where you want to go, which keeps you from outrunning your pets.

Something that I found to be useful if you're going to do this is to remember the base portal and base transporter. If you use your Ouroboros portal to go to Ouroboros to talk to Mender Ramiel, then exit to FF and enter the Vanguard office right across the street to go to RWZ to talk to Lady Grey, the portal won't be recharged after you talk to her. If you have the right teleporters, you can go to Echo:Galaxy City and take the tram to Ouroboros before the portal recharges, then you talk to Ramiel to complete the mission, go back via FF to talk to Lady Grey again, and then back to Ramiel to turn it in (the Ouro portal may not be recharged yet if you're quick, so you can either wait or take another loop through Echo:Galaxy). If you haven't learned from the "Talk to the Perez Park Security Chief" mission, which always sends you into Perez after Circle of Thorns you're not leveled enough for, don't just complete the mission to talk to Lady Grey -- this just completes the 'talk to Lady Grey' part and auto-accepts the 'rescue the Honoree' mission, and now you have to wait three days to auto-complete that. This, like the "Talk to [zone] security chief" missions, is a chained double mission -- the mission to talk to the temp contact, and the mission they give you -- you want to auto-complete the second, not the first.

They're incorporated in New York for the tax break.

Sondra Castel's arc also pops you out right next to Thiery, and about 80% of the time the XP award for finishing her arc pushes you across a level break, so having BAB right there is quite convenient. I'd like to see him put back into Echo:Galaxy City, though, along with the other fixed NPCs; if it's supposed to be an echo of the past, it should resemble it as it was more closely.

Something separate from the Controller ATOs, which are universal mez, then?

This is why both of my DP Blasters have been sidelined; they're at levels where Hail of Bullets is an important part of whacking a spawn, and I don't want to get used to having to work around its defects.

The AR/EM Blaster I had back on live was an experiment to see if Statesman's claim that "range was a Blaster's defense" could be made to work. One of the things I used to amuse myself with was standing on the platform near Imperious in Cimerora waiting for an ITF team to fill, sniping the mobs in the plaza on the other side of the valley with Snipe and LRM, then shooting the survivors as they made their way toward the platform after aggroing on me.

The only real issue I have with the Snipe in Archery is that the animation is a textbook example of "How Not to Shoot a Bow" -- you draw the bow and hold it, with the subsequent wavering of your aim that is the inevitable result of trying to hold a high-powered bow at full draw, and you're expected to believe that this is the highly accurate longest-range shot you can make. If the point of the arrow is waving around, you're either pulling too much draw weight, or you need to work on strength and stamina in your arms. And medieval military archers generally didn't hold full draw at all -- once they reached full draw, they loosed. I'd much prefer a Snipe animation that had you holding the draw smoothly, but that would raise complaints like "why does my character just stand there holding the shot?"; a slower, more careful draw that releases when it reached full draw would feel better. But there are already enough liberties taken with Archery to make it a viable powersetn what's one more?

Which is why I added the update; I haven't taken a dive into the data structures, so I can't say for certain that it's just a matter of changing a link to a sound file. I can only speculate based on what I would have done if I'd been responsible for defining the data structure. In any case, I'm just trying to see if there's enough support for the idea to actually present it to the devs for consideration.

That was the uniform they had at launch.

One of the things that has always bothered me about the DE is how the Granite mobs 'rip off' the Council wolves, particularly the howling; it just feels wrong for an animated rock formation to be sounding like a wolf. Fortunately, there's already a good replacement in game -- in The Hive, the monster-rank Quarries have a deep, almost subsonic cry that feels much more appropriate for animated rock. So I'm throwing out the suggestion of asking to have the Granite 'wolf howl' be replaced by the Quarry low-frequency call. Comments? Update: In theory, this should only require replacing the 'play this sound file' value for the animation a Granite does that currently plays the Council wolf howl with the one a Quarry uses, but I've learned not to trust that how I'd set up data structures would be the way another programmer would do it.

I use this trick with the Bertha and Long Tom missions in the Synapse TF. Since the next mission after Bertha (defeat Long Tom) is always in Steel Canyon, and the mission after Long Tom is always in Skyway, hitting the base teleport when each mission ends speeds up getting to the next mission. You could also do it after the first mission of Posi 2, since only one person needs to talk to the Hero Corps field analyst, and the following mission is always in Faultline.