srmalloy

The only remaining way being to make the power effects generic, with the visual effect being entirely cosmetic, so while you may shoot an ice blast while your teammate shoots a fire blast, and while yours tossed a spray of ice shards around on a hit while his burst in a brief cascade of flame, the result to the target is the same. And then it gets boring.

I've done the "Meet the Gang" mission several times when I've goofed, having been doing the early missions from the origin contacts in City Hall so that I get forwarded to a wider variety of contacts (since all of those are level 2, and my characters are typically level 5 or 6, I'll bump up the mission difficulty for more XP) and forgot to scale down the difficulty again, so that I'll be facing red, or in one case purple, mobs. I've found, though, that if I wait once I come back down out of the elevator until Flambeaux decides to show up, and then move past the intruders so I drag both Dillo and Flambeaux into range of the intruders, their contribution will keep me alive even when I've screwed up with the mission level. You can't just start firing at range, though, or they'll never aggro on the intruders; you have to drag them in close enough for them to 'see' them themselves.

Everyone blueside gets introduced to Twinshot at, IIRC, level 5, so names are hardly a spoiler. Flambeaux is a ditz that puts Fusionette to shame in that regard, so her horrible following is at least in character. Grim, however... When you first meet him, he's on a raised platform running to meet you... except that he keeps running back and forth rubbing against the railing, unaware that there's an actual route down to where you are, and takes almost 30 seconds to realize that he can just jump over the railing. After that, he's got some fair pathing. Twinshot is a mixed bag; sometimes she follows you normally, sometimes she'll just stand there when you move off, only to pop up later. Dillo is the only really solid one among the group; he reliably follows you wherever you go, while Flambeaux has a tendency to run back into the elevator and disappear like she remembered she left her curling iron plugged in or something. The game has always had pathing issues. Just ask anyone who's had a "lead rescued victims out" mission, or a Mastermind. Some of them are hard to explain -- Grim should do better than he does -- while others, like Flambeaux and Fusionette, appear to be part of the characterization, even if it feels as if the devs went overboard with it sometimes.

The rework of the Hive is old enough that, if there isn't an Echo version already, I have my doubts that Paragon Studios kept a copy of the original version around, which would mean that the zone would need to be rebuilt and the original Hamidon and mitochondria would need to be redefined. And you'd need to decide whether you wanted the real original (and unfair) version where you got your Hami-Os from defeating the Hamidon Buds Hamidon scattered when defeated, or the intermediate 'drop directly to each participant' version. Let's see if I'm remembering everything. Originally, Hamidon spawned on a timer, not as the result of the players' actions in the Hive. If you had enough Illusion members, you would have a group up above the Hamidon dropping Phantom Army to draw Hamidon's fire, otherwise you used a tank and dedicated healer. The remainder of the group would bulk up as a group with all of the healers essentially putting their AoE heals on autofire as the leader of the group led them around to take out the mitos one by one. When all the mitos were down, everyone with a hold would start throwing them at Hamidon, with nothing else but the taunt tank going (except for buffs like Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism, et al.) until Hamidon stopped shooting at the tank, signifying that he was held, at which point everyone started unloading on him with everything you had while continuing the holds. If the hold broke, there would be a "yellow dawn", with one yellow mitochondria spawning for each person in the goo; this would almost always be a full wipe (except for the very lucky or fast), and was very difficult to recover from. Because of the one exploration badge directly under where Hamidon spawned, getting the zone accolade depended on either participating in a raid or coming through before he respawned, since it was right under the nucleus and you'd eat a ton of incoming fire getting there. Originally, when Hamidon was defeated, he would spawn a Hamidon Bud for each player in the goo, and you got a Hami-O for defeating a Hamidon Bud. This was heavily biased toward builds with high AoE damage; a Fire blaster could sometimes get six or seven Hami-Os in a run while most of the Controllers and Defenders would be hard-pressed to get any. This was later regularized so that each participant got their own Hami-O drop. The whole thing got reworked when they changed the zone to require you to defeat an unknown number of the DE in the zone to spawn, collecting the EoEs that dropped from them. The different types of mitochondria required different methods to drop them -- one only vulnerable to ranged, one only to melee, and the last required being held first, so the group was broken into teams for specific mitos, with the taunt tank and healer (and usually a backup pair) keeping Hamidon's attention. Once the mitos were down, it moved to attacking Hamidon directly. Instead of the "yellow dawn", at 50% and 25%, Hamidon would spawn a fresh set of mitos; the raid would pull back out, reorganize back into the mito teams, and do it again. If the raid seemed powerful enough, sometimes the raid leader would opt to simply power through the second (and sometimes the first, although that was much rarer) mito respawn to finish more quickly; this happened more often as more players showed up with higher-level Incarnate powers.

I think it's rather more complex than that. The issue isn't what other people play, not as such. The issue is that if the idea of 'one true build' takes hold in CoH - at it has done in other MMOs in endgame content - then anyone who doesn't follow that build slavishly will find themselves locked out of said endgame. This isn't speculation - it's already happening with the demands for specific ATs, specific builds of ATs, specific levels of Incarnate power that you can see in LFG daily. I don't know of any way to obtain the information you would need to do the analysis, but I have to wonder whether the majority of people doing this are old CoH players, or imports from other MMOs where having the right twinked-out gear was a necessity for completing most of the endgame content.

If I'd added a 6th option this would have been it, but I wanted to avoid an excess of options. My objection is along this line, but more nuanced. I don't play reside because I don't want to be just a legbreaker. Look at the character progression -- you start out as a legbreaker for small-time thugs, then advance to being a legbreaker for bigger-time thugs, then for small-time villains, then for bigger villains, until you graduate to being a legbreaker for Arachnos. And then you have the incarnate content, for which it feels as if you need a higher degree of altruism than a truly villainous individual would have. I never feel as if the character is stepping out on their own to become an actor on the stage of the Rogue Isles.

The wiki is referring, IIRC, to the Rocket Board power purchased through the Paragon Rewards program where you got credits for account length of time, and you were unlocking things for your account. The P2W vendor is selling powers to individual characters.

If I remember the process correctly you want to be out in front to a) do a good amount of damage, and b) apply your Taunt before anyone else. The attack gets you your Threat increase and initial aggro, then the Taunt multiplies the effect of them. Yes, Taunt gives you Threat and aggro, but it also is a big buff to the Threat and aggro you already have. This is a mistake that inexperienced tanks make, and was discussed extensively in the original forums -- they would run into/up to a spawn, Taunt, pull the spawn into a convenient corner to clump them up... and have a Scrapper or Blaster pull aggro off them with their first AoE, because the tank's initial Taunt didn't have anything to build on, and was weak.

I remember the "All X ITF" runs on Guardian; those could be insane. The All-Kin ITF, where all of the members had to have the Kinetics powerset, was players and pets on tons of crack zooming around the maps. The All-MM ITF was equally insane, with more than 50 pets clogging up the tunnel missions.

However, you can also look at hover sniping as falling into the original claim Jack Emmert made that "range was a Blaster's defense", which was true only until the change that gave virtually every mob a ranged attack that seemed to almost always exceed the range of non-Snipe attacks; my AR/EM Blaster could drift around high in the sky with Boost Range running and snipe out most mobs without retaliation (a few exceptions, like Malta Gunslingers and Zeus Titans, come to mind), but it was annoyingly slow. I only ever used it in PvE, but Super Jump kiting was also possible. My use of it in PvE was mostly with my Ktn/Reg Scrapper with Super Jump, mostly against the Sky Raider Sky Skiffs in Terra Volta -- he could queue up an attack on the ground, leap up at the Sky Skiff, sail past it, land, and the attack animation would go off; he'd eat the return fire and repeat until the Sky Skiff was down. That character was also the only 50 I ever deleted, after the Regen rework went in based on combat results from a badly skewed internal test server; I wasn't interested in the complete rework I'd have to do on the character to put him back together after the changes. And Willpower showed up later taking over the 'fire and forget' defensive powerset that Regen had been.

My guess is the hard part is coming up with the UI and fitting into the costume designer somewhere. Once the game captures the hex code for the color you want, I'm sure it's just text in the database. And it may not work for picking 'any' color, but I remember from the thread on costume pieces that have two colors (typically an interior color) but only have one pickable color that you could save the costume file, edit the second color for that piece, and load the file to set the color for the missing choice. I wonder if the quantization of the colors is a UI artifact, and you could extend the range by editing a costume file to use colors not selectable in the color picker.

I believe this was thrashed out in the thread on Burn, where people were seeing this specific pattern -- instead of the power delivering the damage with Build Up or Aim boosting it, it would do one tick of damage at the boosted level, then drop back to 'normal'; the supposition that the pseudo-pet spawned by Burn inherits your buffs and their durations when created was confirmed there.

Back before the shutdown, I was on an ITF with a parent and their five-year-old kid (the kid was doing a creditable job of keeping up and contributing; if I didn't know their age, I wouldn't have suspected from their play). The parent made a comment during the run that CoH was the only online game that they would ever think of letting the kid play without supervision. That one statement stuck with me long after the shutdown as a standard for the quality of the playerbase that no other MMO I've played has even come close to matching.

While I really like the concept of giving the DFB spam its own channel and redirecting references to DFB into the channel, I think it would only work as long as people didn't come to the conclusion that they're not reaching the people that they know are just dying to run DFB but don't have the channel active, and come up with euphemisms to get around the filter to solicit players in LFG. And because of, I don't think the effort to do it is worthwhile given the other demands on the GM crew's time.

IIRC, the buff pets just follow you and, with a high recycle rate (or sloe resistance), repeatedly cast their (non-stacking) buff on you. And because they're buffing you, it increases their Threat each time the buff goes off, making them a bigger target than you are unless you've got something with a taunt effect. I believe that the Threat increase is coded into the buff powers, so dealing with it is likely to be complicated.

Maybe a stupid question, how is what you mention above done? Who you talk to depends on if you're a Hero or a Villain. But there's an NPC you talk to, that adjusts your Notoriety. Or... you can click on the speech bubble icon at the lower right corner of your chat window, select "Notoriety" from the menu that pops up, and make your changes there, without having to find one of the NPCs to do it.

And unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to put anything else in the tray that opens when you activate Mystic Flight that shows the Translocation icon; I'd like to put Translocation-dependent macros there so they're only visible when Translocation is usable: /macro Fwd "powexec_location forward:max Translocation" /macro Up "powexec_location up:max Translocation" /macro Cam "powexec_location camera:max Translocation" Just a few shortcuts, either for traveling or an "Oh shit" bugout. I'll have to see if "powexec_toggleon Mystic Flight$$powexec_location up:max Translocation" works as a bind; I suspect that the latter may try to fire off before Translocation becomes available, but it would make a better general escape command.

It would just spawn euphemisms like the "meow mission" solicitations for AE farms that appeared after the devs tried to crack down on exploitative farm missions, but the idea of creating a global channel "DFB", then scanning chat (except for tells or the Team channel) for the string "DFB" and moving such messages to the DFB channel has its appeal. And you'd also see people using "D F B" or "D.F.B" or some such to get around the filter, so it likely wouldn't work in the long run. Still, ghettoing all the DFB chat in its own channel that you can just not choose to in your chat tabs is a nice dream if it would work.

With the drawback that it attracts all the Freakshow within 500 yards to look for the rave?

One of the people I used to play D&D with (the original three-book set in the white box, which tells you what a grognard I am and how far back that was) had a phrase that pops to mind for situations like this: "A crisscross of multi-colored beams, at the center of which nothing living could exist."

One of the things that attracted me to CoH back in 2004 was that it didn't have PvP. Then the devs introduced the Arena, and later CoV. And from there came Movement Suppression, and all the other changes. I watched the devs go from "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make PvE changes exclusively for PvP reasons" to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to a deep silence on whether any given PvE change was driven by some PvP problem.

Have some spot in the game where the organization of heavily-armed die-hard patriots are still stubbornly celebrating Independence Day as if the United States as a political entity still actually meant something, and you can run across people out with barbecues and bunting, shooting off fireworks, and if you start a firefight you'll find yourself in a massive crossfire from all the 'civilians'. Sounds surreal enough to work well in a cyberpunk game.

Like the high-velocity copper-jacketed arrest warrants my AR/EM Blaster uses... ;D

You can even get fancier than your example. Because you can stack 'powexec_toggleon' commands in a single bind, with the limitation that only one power activates with each keypress, you could put all of your toggles in a single bind: /bind alt+I "powexec_toggleon DefenseA$$powexec_toggleon DefenseB$$powexec_toggleon DefenseC$$powexec_toggleon DefenseD" And then set up your keyboard macro to emit "alt-I" four times with a half-second delay between them, giving you a one-key 'toggle everything on' function. You can't stack attacks like this though, but you can stack as many "powexec_toggleoff" commands as you like, and they all take effect with a single keypress, so you can set up another key to turn all your toggles off if you wanted to.

With the introduction of crafted Invention Origin enhancements, particularly the IO sets that have one enhancement that grants a global bonus (like the Luck of the Gambler set's 7.5% +Recharge IO, or the Karma set's Knockback Resistance IO), having 'mule' powers that you take for the single slot which will accept one of these globals is pretty common. Combat Jumping and Hover, for example, will both accept the LotG+Rech enhancement.