srmalloy

Back Alley Brawler is in the southwest part of Atlas Park, in the center of the traffic circle at the south end of Argosy Industrial (just N of the big warehouse at the south end). Every time I've gone by -- always when finishing Marie Castel's arc, and whenever the dogpile around Ms. Liberty gets too insane -- there's rarely been more than one other hero in the area.

Back before ED, "Hellion golf" involved a level 50 six-slotting Power Push for KB, then going to Atlas Park, popping Power Boost if you had it, then hitting a Hellion, preferably doing this from the east side of the zone, with spotters to see where the body landed. I don't think you could make it all the way across AP, particularly with buildings in the way, but it was possible to hit Argosy Industrial. IIRC, this was one of the reasons the devs modified Power Boost to not affect knockback; it was far too easy to get insane amounts of knockback with it.

IIRC, the power description specifically states "sniper" in its effects, the same as Sniper Rifle, so even if the power's damage is Targeted AoE rather than single target, it should inherit all the Snipe characteristics and changes.

The Rule of Five is that you can't have more than five of the exact same set bonus. The KB-to-KD effect is the direct effect of the enhancement, not a set bonus, so theoretically it's not affected by the Rule of Five. At least as I understand it.

It didn't make ENOUGH money. In their eyes, yeah, because when you're a greedy company like NCSoft, you never make enough money, regardless of what IP they publish.. In point of fact, Paragon Studios was losing money, although that was due to them working on an undisclosed project that NCsoft had dumped in their laps; CoH wasn't making enough money to cover its own expenses and the development costs for this undisclosed project, so the studio was technically a losing proposition. Why NCsoft didn't just shut down the development project and keep CoH and Paragon Studios, I don't know. You could argue that killing the development project would be admitting that it was a bad decision to start it in the first place, an action damaging to the face of the manager who made the decision to go forward with it. You could also argue that NCsoft wanted to shut down Paragon Studios, and handed them the project so that it would run a net loss, giving them a reason to shut down the company. Another possible reason is Paragon Studios' attempt to buy themselves away from NCsoft, with NCsoft shutting them down for failing to display the proper respectful subordination to NCsoft. Or it could be that CoH had no way to be turned into the sort of microtransaction-driven cash-shop-based MMO that was their staple business model. But we can't know for sure. All we have is NCsoft's statement that CoH and Paragon Studios didn't fit with their ongoing plans for the future of the company.

I ran Posi 1 on a Beam/Marty Blaster yesterday, and there was disintegrate spread all over against the Vahzilok,mostly because of the way everything bunched up -- I would hit an Eidolon with Disintegrate to maximize the likelihood that I'd be able to hit them again for spread before they dropped, and when I hit them again, I'd usually get four or more "disintegrate spread" popups, then Cutting Beam to catch everyone that it spread to, and "disintegrate" would go fountaining up with the damage numbers. Running solo, it's harder to get the spread to work, because the spread range seems to be fairly short, and the mob you hit with Disintegrate usually takes off running towards you, pulling too far away from the rest of their spawn before you can hit them with a second attack to spread it. If you can hover above the group to use Disintegrate, so that the mob just runs back and forth under you and doesn't separate from their spawn, then it's much easier to spread disintegration.

IIRC, this was discussed early on in the original run, and the capability wasn't there -- if you've ever knocked back a Tsoo Sorcerer or one of the CoT mages, you'll know that there's nothing under their robe; it's a solid cone with feet sticking out of the bottom. I don't know if the advances that have allowed things like the long "Circle of Thorns" skirts would allow this to work, but I believe that if it had, the 'trenchcoat' costume piece would have been extended to have its proper length all the way around the body, rather than being just a buttcape.

Unfortunately, using the example of M80 Grenade from the Assault Rifle powerset, knockback is broken for that. You're shooting an explosive device at a target, and it and it explodes; logically, the other mobs around the target should be knocked away from the target by the blast, but as you see in game, all of the targets in the affected area get knocked back away from the shooter. This means that doing this (and fixing how M80 Grenade does knockback) would involve coding the effect as doing ordinary KB to the target and spawning a pseudo-pet that immediately applies a repel effect. The mechanisms for doing all of this is already in the game; the problem would be coding out the ability so that it works that way. Realistically, it would be more practical to develop the code to do knockback out from the center of an explosion first, and then see what other applications there are for it. One of the bits of fallout from making explosion knockback be 'out from the center' rather than 'away from the caster' is that it would be possible to make some powers like M80 Grenade into location AoE powers, rather than targeted AoE powers, allowing you to use them strategically to knock targets back in a desired direction (i.e.,the tank has mobs herded into a corner, and you could drop the grenade a bit away from the corner to push the mobs more tightly into the corner rather than just scattering them).

They probably could, but I think the intention of doing it this way is to ensure that they're taking in only what they need to cover the operating costs, removing the "making money off of our IP without our permission" violation that would give NCsoft the excuse to sue for damages, rather than just issue cease&desist letters, if they decide they need to make an example of the people operating the rogue CoH servers.

For a Greco-Roman style, he'd be wanting a chiton, for which the toga approximates, but covers the upper body, too (it would also be considered an athletic chiton, as a regular chiton was much longer. The kilt, plus one of the wider 'wrapped and tied' belts to represent the kolpos tied off at the waist would be as close as you can get with the existing available male pieces.

It's got a trivial workaround, but when you complete a respecification, and return to the normal CoH screen with your power tray(s) that have all your power icons dumped into them willy-nilly, any power that is "unavailable" won't appear in the trays. This includes powers like Follow Through in Titan Weapons, which requires Momentum to be usable. It's still in your Powers window (and will appear in red, showing that it's unavailable), and can be dragged down to your power tray(s), but if you're not paying attention, you may not notice that you're missing one or more powers until some time later.

There's a clue, which unfortunately people don't normally see any more (and may not have looked at when they got it), in the description for the 'Experienced' power that new characters got for the first few weeks -- "When this power is used, you will gain half a level of Patrol XP, however, you can only ever have 1 level worth of Patrol XP at a time. NOTE: Any Patrol XP granted through this power beyond the one level limit will be lost."

Because enhancements scale down as you exemplar, the special effects of uniques will work down to the higher of the minimum level of the enhancement set or five levels below the level you picked the power it's slotted in. So putting a level 10 Karma: KB protection in the power you picked at 49 isn't going to do anything if you exemplar below 44. The game doesn't record when you added slots to a power, so if you took Combat Jumping at 4, then put a second slot in it at 50, you could put that same Karma IO into the second slot, and it will work down to 10, the minimum level of the set. Basically, the you get the effect if the enhancement exists at the level you're exemped to and the power it's in isn't disabled for being too high. And even if you lose the set bonus effects, the base values (i.e., Dam/Acc increase) are scaled as long as the power is available.

Both "Meet the Gang" and "Help defend the Shining Star's Base" missions from Twinshot have execrable pathing. In the former, after you talk to Dillo and head back to the entrance to help with the intruders, Flambeaux goes into spaz mode each time you go down an elevator, exiting one, then running back in, sometimes several times. In the latter after you deal with the intruders on the second floor and go into the room that leads to the elevators, Grim runs back and forth pressed up against the railing of the raised section apparently unable to figure out how to reach you, until he finally realizes that he can jump and jumps onto the railing, then down to you.

Just as a sanity check, did you play the character between logouts, or just log in, see that the bar hasn't progressed, move them to a different location, and then logged back out? The badge requires you to earn 30 bars of Patrol experience, and you can only have 10 bars at any point, so if they've been logged out long enough to have 10 bars, and you don't use any of it by doing things to earn XP on the character, you're going to stay at the cap and not earn any more. Ifyou're at 96%, log in on the character, run a mission or two, and that should use up enough of your accumulated Patrol XP that you can log out and have the badge next time you check.

... that duplicates the texture of each possible costume piece for each slot, and doesn't fall victim to the animation quirks that cause existing costume pieces to clip weirdly. So at a base, ignoring whatever clipping issues might arise, you're wanting to double the art resources for costumes just to create a single effect? And this is also ignoring the rendering load -- I recall when it was discovered that the lag and rendering issues in Grandville were the result of all the Arachnos buildings having complete original-issue Brutalist building architecture hidden under the Arachnos facades. I'm not saying that asymmetrical costume designs aren't something that's worth setting up as a goal, but trying to implement one effect by troweling more graphics on top of the existing models in a way that isn't going to set up an ongoing way to produce additional asymmetric effects is probably not a good place to allocate the limited developer resources at this time.

Now that you mention it, I have a vague recollection of Positron saying that this wasn't possible the way that the rendering was set up, because the left side of a character was a mirror of the right side, and except for things like skirts and capes, it would take a major change in how characters were rendered to do asymmetrical styles.

OH NO YOU DIDN'T Well, the art doesn't seem as if it would be that difficult, assuming that the color maps were done reasonably (but you're right; this is Paragon Studios; it's going to be done pessimally). Getting it added as an option to the costume pieces, though; that's going to be the problem, given what we've been told about the arrays for options.

While Null the Gull has the ability to let you toggle the pop-up power bars (i.e., Translocation when using Mystic Flight) off so they don't appear, I'd like to be able to put things in the slots on the bar. For example, with Mystic Flight active, have macros for 'Up', 'Back', 'Fwd', 'Cam', etc. (using powexec_location with 'up:max', 'back:max', 'forward:max', and 'camera:max', respectively) to have predefined jumps to use as "oh sh*t" responses. I don't need them in my regular power bars, because they're not useful when Mystic Flight isn't active, so having them pop up when Translocation does is a win. Right now, if I try to drag macros into the Translocation pop-up bar, it doesn't work. Or is there a command to do it already that I'm missing?

That makes the other comments about salvage changing order as you pull things out make more sense now; it suggests that a salvage rack is a base item with the array of stored salvage as attributes of the rack. I'd have to look at the code to be sure, but that would make it much easier to increase the rack storage than do anything about changing the display order of items in the rack.

Yet another one confused about the "This is my rifle, this is my gun..." mnemonic...

Let's see if the copy-and-paste doesn't destroy the Unicode. Brigadyr, a Bots/Dark Mastermind. … Калибрование… Один… Два… Три… Базовые системы онлайн. Чек памяти… Переданный. Кодовые модули… Нагруженный. Просмотр окружающей среды… Угрозы: Ноль. Эксплуатационный БРИГАДИР. A crate buried in the depths of a dusty, forgotten warehouse is a lonely thing to wake up in. Even when you're a robot. БРИГАДИР ('Taskmaster') was the prototype for a robotic officer, the director for a squad — or a platoon or company — of robotic infantrymen. But the Soviet researchers had built better than they knew. The Ministry of Defense wanted a soulless combat manager that would direct equally-soulless shock troops into frontal assaults with no consideration for casualties; what they got was a cybernetic Napoleon critiquing the tactical failings of the officers who tried to order him into action. When he decided the orders he'd gotten were practical, he could carry them out flawlessly. When given orders he decided were ill-conceived, he would as often as not completely disregard those orders and undertake a different objective, or at best disregard the battle plan he was given and implement his own. Finally, it was decided the problem was fundamental to БРИГАДИР's design, and he was deactivated, crated up, stuck in a warehouse, and forgotten... where he was lost for more than a decade, until, during an earthquake, an automatic threat sensor restarted his systems. There is another six and a half pages of background that I added over time, hung up on completion mostly because I can't write a fight scene for crap, but the remainder of the original bio (before being cropped to the space available, and before I started expanding on it) I'd written for the character in its villain incarnation (morality shifts being a thing of the future when City of Villains was released) went as follows: Breaking into the facility of a major shipping company, БРИГАДИР crated up his subordinate robots, then himself, with shipping tags sending them to a holding dock in the United States. But the increased tensions in the post-9/11 world threw him a curve; his shipping container was opened and searched. Activated by the opening of the shipping container, his subordinate drones gave him sufficient covering fire for him to escape... until run to ground by a pair of heroes and incapacitated. After a flurry of buckpassing (and intervention by the ACLU), Homeland Security decided БРИГАДИР wasn't an object, and couldn’t be destroyed out of hand. Failing any better solution, he was shipped off to the facility best suited for holding individuals with the types of abilities he exhibited -- Zigursky Prison in Paragon City -- until Arachnos blew the facility open, taking thousands of incarcerated villains out of the prison. The other inmates had never properly understood his designation, so he gave up and accepted that people would call him 'Brigadyr' -- at least, until they were brought under proper direction. Reclaiming his communications module and his surviving drone, he completed the tasks set by the Arachnos operatives to prove that he met their qualifications for extraction. The other inmates had never properly understood his designation; he had finally given up and accepted that people would call him 'Brigadyr' -- at least, until this sample of the dregs of society feared to address him at all. «Этот 'Арахнос' - - мощный. Но это имеет те же самые внутренние конфликты, которые подрывают человеческое общество. Я должен быть терпеливым.» A tactical subroutine intruded. «Нет -- по-английский.» His ruminations shifted smoothly to English. «Arachnos will provide support -- as long as we continue to prove ourselves worth supporting. Hah. Sound tactics. "Скройте ваших друзей, но ваших врагов ближе." With them tied to his logistics train, this Lord Recluse can observe all those he has brought out of this 'Ziggurat'. He will be able to determine which ones are worthless, which ones he can use, and which ones will become a threat to him; the Rogue Isles are the crucible where the dross will be burned away. Well, then... 'beware of a quiet dog and still water'... I will take your aid, and your direction, so long as I can do so safely. But you will find that TASKMASTER is not your muzhik.»

Most of my characters have names that derive (generally in other languages, because it's easier to get a name you're after that way than in English) from the character's powersets, like a Fire/Dark Corruptor named Tenevoy Ogon (Теневой Огонь -- 'Shadow Fire'), or a Fire/Rad Sentinel named Termoyaderniy (Термоядерный -- 'Thermonuclear').

It would be nice to have a "move all remaining enhancements to enhancement tray" button, though, for when you're making a big slotting change and don't want to move twenty or thirty enhancements one at a time. It would take enhancements left-to-right, top-to-bottom from the enhancement display, so if you had any at the end you wanted to save and didn't have room, you'd want to move them first.

And this was one of the things that attracted me to CoH in the first place -- when I started playing, a few days after launch, the game didn't have any form of PvP whatsoever. And even when Arena dropped, I just declined to participate. About the douchiest thing I ever did in PvP was hanging out with several of my friends -- all of us were playing villains in the 25-30 range -- in Bloody Bay, where we managed to occupy the roof of the hero base (at the time, it didn't have turrets on it) and rain attacks down on the people trying to dislodge us. Occasionally one of us went down and would have to fly back, and eventually the heroes pushed us out, defeating enough of us at once that we couldn't sustain our occupation, but it was a hilarious couple of hours.