srmalloy

I've been noticing an oddity with the ragdoll animation recently. When a mob is knocked over or falls over a railing, sometimes it appears that they have an invisible bungee strap attached to them, and they will start bouncing up and down in mid-air as if suspended from the railing. Most of the time, this happens with defeated mobs, but yesterday I had this happen in the Defeat Toothbreaker Jones mission in KR when my Scrapper had knocked a mob over the railing in the first room of the map, and he was bouncing up and down mostly out of range for a melee attack. Having to try to time my attack so that he'd be at the bottom and in range was like whacking at a pi񡴡 someone was jerking up and down. Another less entertaining quirk with the ragdoll animation was in the Rescue Manticore mission, where I knocked the second 'Arachnos' lieutenant back, and he got his boot hung up on the glass case in the middle of the room, and it apparently locked his foot there, making it impossible for him to stand up. I stood there and watched for fifteen seconds, and he just twitched with his foot stuck up on the display case, so I finally gave up and finished him off. While I have to admit that this is an awesome soft CC, and often hilarious to watch, the fact that it's heavily dependent on the environment, and appears to be unbreakable by the victim, leads me to believe that this is not working as intended. I do wish that I had been able to record the Council soldier making two-floor-high bounces after being defeated and falling off the railing he was standing on, though.

Based on my experience getting him as a contact on several different characters, he stops giving you missions if you're over level 10 -- but he's perfectly happy passing you off to another contact with a minimum level of 15. On the basis of that, it feels as if he should be offering missions in the 9-14 range.

Exiting from the Base Portal (inside or outside the Base) is a RANDOM radial direction. Actually, it's not. I was annoyed that I was always coming into my base and getting stuck into a corner where I'd have to go around the portal to get to the rest of the base. I alreadykknew that you can move the base portal, so I went into base edit mode, selected the entry portal, then rotated it, exited the base, reentered, and checked which way I was facing. I originally did it in the wrong direction, which meant I needed two more quarter turns to align it the way I wanted it.

It's a chain of trust; the antimalware software is trusting that an executable digitally signed with a code-signing certificate is a legitimate piece of software because it trusts the certificate authority to be responsible about issuing signing certificates. You will see the trust chain pop up with regard to web pages -- you'll see a message like "this website has a valid encryption certificate, but we cannot verify the validity of the issuing authority" and be prompted to tell the browser whether to trust it or not. If a certificate authority becomes known for handing out signing certificates that get used for malware, then the authority will be deprecated, and certificates issued by that authority will stop being accepted.

My AR/EM Blaster, back before the shutdown, between all her power slotting and Boost Range, had a Snipe that could hit targets out past 240 yards (LRM was, IIRC, 273 yards at max). At that range, I could get two and sometimes three Snipe shots off before my target got close enough to attack back. One of the things I used to to for amusement waiting for ITFs to start was to stand on the platform near Imperious and snipe the mobs in the plaza across the valley, where I'd be able to take down one mob (with Build Up), leaving them clueless about where the shot game from, hit another one (aggroing the spawn even if it took them down), and be able to take two more shots with Snipe before switching to my shorter-ranged attacks, and be able to finish picking off the whole spawn before they got close to the platform I was on. Now, with this change, I make the first shot, and *BAM* my snipe range is cut in half, even though it will be thirty seconds or more before the mobs I aggroed can get close enough to shoot back. And with enough range, if you one-shot your target, the rest of the spawn usually won't aggro, just stand around wondering why Frank fell down until the second shot comes in. But because I fired, I have to wait for longer than the power recharge to be able to use Snipe the way I slotted it to be used. Another thing I could do was to cruise Peregrine Island, using Boost Range and Snipe to take down mobs, far enough up to be immune to return fire from anything but the Nemesis Comets and the Malta Gunslingers. With this change, I shoot once, and then get forced to drop into range of their return fire if I want to continue shooting. Make this an option that you can set on a character-by-character basis, perhaps, but I feel that the tradeoff of animation time for range is a gimp for insufficient utility. Having to work the tactical situation in a fight to give yourself enough time to get a snipe off in combat was part of what made a Blaster interesting to play.

The things that made me certain that his vision of the game were his 'balance' concept that "three villains should be an even fight for one hero" and his view of 'fun' in a game being throwing himself at the end boss over and over again, getting defeated sometimes twenty or thirty times, until he discovered the one trick that you had to use to defeat the boss -- and trying to get that implemented all through CoH. As if the 'trick' wasn't going to get out on the Net five minutes after someone beats them. Once he left, the big fights had things you had to overcome, but there were always several different ways to do it. Much more satisfying to take the Big Bad down differently than the 'stock' solution. And CoH offered so many different things to try.

I can see "I'm really close; can we clear this mission, so I ding before the next one and can get [power]?", exiting either at the ding or on clear, but doing it more than once feels like I'm imposing on the rest of the team. And I've laughed at the situation more than once when we cleared the mission, and I'm still a hair short of leveling, and see if I can hit up a few free-range mobs on the way to the next mission.

I fail to see how immobilizes converting knockback to knockdown breaks your tactics -- they're still held in place, and when hit with your AoE knockback power, they'll still be held in place, but they'll be getting dumped on their asses by the converted knockback, keeping them from shooting back at you.

Full Auto comes into its own with the Energy Manipulation secondary, where Boost Range gives you the ability to stand off far enough that the cone spreads to a useful width.

Not Devices Blasters. Web Grenade doesn't deal damage so there's no point slotting it for that although it's still worth slotting up a bit for accuracy and immobilize duration. Or Energy Manipulation's Power Thrust, which is perfectly fine as a "Get the hell away from me!" power with just an Accuracy in its base slot. Of course, slotting it to max the KB boost and going to Atlas Park for some Hellion Golf is always a laugh.

How it would it affect you if you are trying to exit a mission? Yes; this is primarily for cases where you're leaving an instance and going to a zone map. Ideally, this would be a flag under Options, something like "Auto-Select Single Open Zone", that would control whether you would automatically be sent to a specific zone instance if it was the only one in the list that wasn't full, then you could have it both ways -- turn it off for trying to get into a mothership raid, or Hami raid, or a specific AP instance for a CC, and flip it on for mission running if you don't want to be bothered with an exit menu.

One of the things I have noticed when exiting missions, particularly in Atlas Park, is that you'll get a "choice of zones" pop up listing, say, AP1, AP2, and AP3 -- but AP 1 and 2 are both full, leaving AP3 as your only choice -- but you still have to click on the one non-full zone instance. It's a minor QoL thing, but if, when you hit the "exit" button after completing a mission -- or, indeed, anywhere you get a prompt to select which instance of a single zone you want to enter -- if the list of instances only has one that you can enter, the others being full, you automatically enter the open zone instead of getting a list of all the instances of the zone that you have to pick from

Died on me right as I was jumping into the sewer entrance, leaving me on a loading screen. The team got a little scrambled as we came back out of order, putting us at a lower level to start.

"Just a temp thing until it calmed down." Well, as you've observed, it hasn't calmed down, leaving the reason for having the XP reduction for AE missions fully as applicable as it was when it was applied. While it's not a reason to be deprecating AE grinding in and of itself, I think that one of the reasons the AE grind is so attractive to people (beyond the 'get my recreated character to 50 ASAP so I can have it back' group) is that, for many MMOs, the game doesn't really start until you hit level cap -- the missions are just there for you to grind XP to max level. And many of us remember the stories we leveled through in the game, and some of them likely look at AE grinding as throwing out the majority of the game world in the single-minded pursuit of endgame -- that it's more important to get to level cap than to enjoy the trip getting there. For myself, if you want to dive into a virtual combat simulator inside a virtual combat simulator and ignore the stories, go to town -- but the GMs run the server the way they want, and if they want to discourage your "right" to run huge ambush farms that degrade the game for hundreds of people for every one of you running the farm, that's their prerogative.

It would be annoying to do, but the processing is straightforward. Doing it would require taking the server down to ensure that no costumes get created or changed during the changeover. You would need to temporarily have two sets of costume piece lists for each location and a duplicate of the character database, then sort the second list, and make a table of old-to-new mappings. Once this was done, the servers would be taken down, the character database copied, and each character would be called up, run through the mapping tables to reassign the costume piece IDs, and then saved into the copied character database. Once all of the characters had their costumes rebuilt, the copied data would be restored to the server along with the new, sorted, costume piece lists. However, even though I concede the convenience of having the costume pieces ordered consistently, I'm not sure that doing this would be a good thing unless it could be propagated to all the free-range servers to preserve consistency. And even then it may be more trouble than it's worth.

Yes, let's go all the way back to the way pets were originally, where you could double and occasionally triple-stack your pets... and they all die and have to be resummoned every time you go through a door or up an elevator. If you're going to hand controllers back a big buff like that, put back the penalty associated with it.

One of the things I've noticed since Homecoming brought Paragon City back is the piles of bodies at the tram stations. It doesn't affect gameplay, but I think it would would be less disturbing if Mastermind pets went through their "dismiss" animation when the Mastermind gets into the tram than simply running to the tram door and falling over dead. I don't know if people think the additional visual clutter of the dismiss animation is better than dead MM pets lying in front of the tram door. Thoughts?

If I recall the changes the devs had to make to prevent pets from spazzing out under Speed Boost, it still increases your pets' movement, but the -recharge, as you describe, has no effect on their abilities. I'd prefer to see whatever caused them to wig out get fixed, so we could get the full benefit from it, but without knowing how much attention Paragon Studios gave it, I have no idea how intractable a problem it was.

Wes Schnabel in Steel Canyon will give you a mission that shows up in your mission list as "Defeat Archon Archon Roget and his guards".

No. Pet powers are intended to inherit enhancements and some (mostly pseudo pets) also inherit buffs. The exception is recharge which pets don't inherit due to that causing AI issues. If I remember the issue correctly, it wasn't recharge slotted in the pet power that was the problem, but the various recharg-boosting buffs applied to the pets after summoning. I remember that Fire Imps on two or more Speed Boost applications were scary. Like hummingbirds on crack.

I'm going to have to either find or recreate the set of bind files I made for my Bots/Dark MM that ran a dialog among the bits -- the Assault Bot does the taunt emote and says "Your mother wears the footgear of a soldier!", then one of the Battle Drones double-takes and says "That's supposed to be an _insult_?", after which another Battle Drone does the Research emote, then says "That's what the phrasebook says.", then one of the Protector Bots finishes the sequence by doing the shrug emote and saying "I will _never_ understand organics."

I can't help you with the zone as a whole, but Back Alley Brawler is still a trainer, in Atlas Park over in the southwest corner, in the traffic circle just north of the southernmost warehouse in the Argosy Industrial area.

I've enjoyed my DB/WP Scrapper before the Snap enough that I recreated her here, suffering through the levels of incomplete combos. Willpower is the mostly-fire-and-forget secondary that Regen used to be before Instant Healing was made a click power, without the nasty slotting constraints that making IH sustainable required.

It is always 10% of the sale price, with your listing fee credited against it. Say you list an item for 100; the listing fee is 5. If it sells for 1000, the service fee is 100, of which 5 is already paid by your listing fee, so you would receive 905. Yes, and? It's been this way since the AH was instituted; one of the purposes of the fee is to be an Inf suck. Also unlike most other MMOs, you can leave an item listed in the AH forever, subject to the number of AH slots you have. The listing fee is a sunk cost -- that you lose this fee if you take an unsold item back is a feature to discourage people from listing items for outrageous prices in the hope that someone will eventually be desperate enough to pay what you're asking. And with other ways to get the rarest recipes than random drops, someone seeing unmet demand can turn merits into a recipe and list it to undercut you.

This is true only for items that don't go into the 'general pool' as it exists now, and then only if there are a small number of bidders. Remember that, for salvage, the AH is like a Star Trek replicator -- you put in rare salvage A, and someone can buy it as rare salvage B. If there are, say, 1500 people bidding on various rare salvage items, the likelihood that someone with a bid of 100 is going to get your item is miniscule -- and, in fact, listing low helps the low-level character, because the AH sells the lowest-listing item to the highest bidder.