srmalloy

Two doubles is 1.3 of each, three triples is 1.5 of each, four quads (are there four different sets in a set type with the same quad? I don't think so, but...) is ~1.7 of each. Three doubles is a little less than two of each (1.825), four triples is two of each. This last is fairly easy to do with damage sets, giving you six IOs of improvement in four slots.

Although it may not kick in immediately; you'll get your interval of complete defense, but if they've already started their attack when you hit them with the knockback/down, the attack will still go off if it's not a Snipe or other interruptible power. You'll just get it after they shoot.

It's deep overkill for the purpose, but back before the Snap I had a setup with a PERL script that read in a text file containing a list of insults on startup, then looped every (IIRC) five seconds to select a random insult, then write a file with a bind to say the insult, do a taunt, then load the file again. Then I /binloadfile the file once to 'prime' the taunt, and each time I hit the bind key, the character would deliver the insult, taunt, then reload the bind with a different insult. With about a hundred insults in the file, it was unlikely to repeat insults on consecutive taunts.

You don't get the full benefit for reducing the number of slots you need in a power at lower levels; that's not to say that it has no benefits, only that you can do better with higher-level enhancements. this page describes frankenslotting a Hold with six level-30 set IOs; doing the same thing with level-50 versions could get you the same result with one fewer slot. As many tweaked builds are tight on slots, being able to pare a slot out of one power to use in another.

Two-aspect IOs give 5/8 the bonus of a same-level single IO, three-aspect IOs give 1/2,and the few four-aspect IOs give 43.75%. See this page for the percentage values for any given level. For more information on frankenslotting, look here.

Phantom Army is invulnerable; unless it's been changed, Phantasm can be damaged like all the other Controller level-32 pets.

Frankenslotting doesn't really pay off at the lower levels, because you can't hit the ED limits as easily. Yes, two Dam/Acc IOs from two different damage sets will give you a better improvement than one Dam and one Acc common IO, which beats the same two as SOs, but this isn't where frankenslotting shines. At level 50, a single-aspect IO in group A is 42.4% bonus; a three-aspect set IO will give you 50% base in each bonus, so if you can slot four different level 50 Dam/Acc/End set IOs, they will give you the effect of having two each Dam, Acc, and End IOs -- six slots worth of bonus that only uses four slots. And it stays just under the point at which ED starts grinding the boost down. If you do the same slotting with 35s, you'll be starting with a lower value for the base improvement, so you'll get around 70% bonus instead of 84.8%. The other use of frankenslotting is to stack specific set bonuses -- for example, putting two Cleaving Blow and two Armageddon into Burn to get the two-piece Recovery bonus from each set. Sometimes you can do both, but more often you'll need to pick one or the other -- optimized enhancement percentages or neatly stacked set bonuses -- and accept that you can't get a 'perfect' build.

Oh, lord, the number of times I embarrassed myself doing that when I started the game back in 2004 before I got it pounded into my head...

Some attacks have more KB than others; the base protection from the one enhancement is good, but I remember from the OG that it wasn't a universal protection; some mobs, like the Lost Swordsmen, could still dump you on your ass. Adding more KB protection mitigates that.

No, you're right; I'm misremembering another power. Burn as the PBAoE damage aura will be affected by Fury.

No matter how furry you are, your Burn will be the same. ;D But, seriously, I don't recall off the top of my head whether the pseudo-pet spawned by Burn inherits a Brute's current Fury state or gets the base damage. I want to say that it gets the base damage, because Fury is a state on the Brute, and pseudo-pets don't inherit other effects on the caster like Hasten, but I will bow to someone with a better knowledge in this case.

You're not being forced to grind a character to 50 to keep it, just log in and right back out periodically; the higher the character, the less often you need to do it. However, since the namechecker is obviously going to have to check character level and last login for potential duplicates, I would like to propose an addition: If someone does a name check that matches an existing character who is within a week of having their name go up for grabs, send an email to the global handle notifying them that the character name has been queried and is potentially at risk to be taken by another. Since all they need to do to protect it is to log in and out on the character, I don't think that this puts an onerous burden on a player even if they pick a popular name, leave the character at level 1, and don't log in on them.

Whether it's actually breathing fire or sending a cone of fire from the hand isn't an issue; I just wanted to verify that this was working as designed, and not an animation bug, like Archery seems to have.

Well, given that if you have two Battle Drones out when you're level 10, each of them will be level 9, and you ding to 11, each of the drones is still level 9 until you dismiss and resummon them, I can see why that would be -- the MM pets become separate mobs in the server when you summon them; anything you do to the power that summoned them isn't going to affect already-summoned pets.

The game supports Unicode in chat, but as I found when pasting a bit of character background, the forums will show the Unicode characters in the text entry window, but when they're saved to the forum database and redisplayed, they come back as the escaped Unicode characters. My supposition is that the forum code doesn't properly support Unicode, so it doesn't process the Unicode characters correctly. When I discovered that CoH supported Unicode back in 2004, I started making characters with ex-Soviet histories, looking up actual research institutions like the I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, making up Soviet superhero and supervillain group and individual names ['Narodnaya Armiya', 'Krasniye Orli', 'Krasnaya Ugroza', 'General Zima', etc.], research projects like the 'Polniy Kyborg' total-body replacement for radically-injured individuals and the 'Brigadyr' combat-direction robot program, and the like, but while I was able to put the Cyrillic in text areas like the character background, copying and pasting elsewhere only worked if the application that I was pasting into could handle Unicode. Other applications either turned the Unicode characters into '?' characters or showed the escaped Unicode.

It is apparently a change to address the problem of "Drop anchored debuff, Blaster doesn't notice anchor and snipes your anchor down at the start of the fight, debuff immediately drops and is unusable for the whole fight while recharging" problem. Now the anchored debuff stays on until the body despawns or you turn it off, so if someone drops your anchor at the start of the fight, you get the debuff for a bit of time after the anchor goes down.

I was noticing after picking up Blazing Arrow with my Archery/Tactical Arrow Blaster that -- not always, but most of the time -- Blazing Arrow was using the Dual Blades 'Vengeful Strike' animation. It didn't seem to use the wrong animation if I had it queued up as the pending attack, but any time I hit it without having it stacked up behind another attack, the Vengeful Strike animation played.

As I recall, it was something Positron had talked about doing in the future, and I recall him mentioning that one of the issues with making customizable animations was modifying the database to give the ability to make the power origination points different. In the OP's example of a powered-armor suit with built-in weapons, having a gun mounted on the back of the forearm, so you stuck your arm out and the gunfire visual started at the back of your hand. Since this is a fairly serious alteration to the power and character databases on top of just the coding for the different origination points, I suspect that it's a pretty long-term future enhancement (on the basis of 'if it were easy, the original design team would already have done it, just to make the game more awesome').

I don't mind having Brawl in their abilities; I'd just like for them to put Brawl at a much lower priority than it is.

Yes, but I think that what the OP was asking is for some intermediate steps between "Full XP" and "No XP" -- since we already have a 100% Inf boost at -100% XP, that would be a 25% Inf boost with 3/4 XP, 50% Inf boost with 1/2 XP, and 75% Inf boost with 1/4 XP. It's a convenience thing, so you can just queue up the modifiers and play without worrying about turning XP off and on to get the relative inf rate you want.

In the Dual Blades and Dual Pistol costume designer screen, if you select a weapon and then zoom in, your character takes a pose with their arms crossed over their chest, forearms angled up, sort of like the pose on a pharaoh's sarcophagus: I think this would be an interesting idle pose for weapon-based characters, and would like to submit it for consideration when the game state advances enough to add new emotes.

I had the same problem, with an "unable to connect to login server" error, also having left Tequila running. When I restarted it it downloaded about four .pigg files and the homecoming.exe file, after which I was able to log in.

I had a character on Guardian whose background had him originating in a world much like that of Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, where magic was technology. A flashlight is still a flashlight if it contains a charged runestone rather than a pair of 'D' cells.

Everyone is somewhat squishy just before you get to the SO level; you're fighting mobs that are stronger to face So-slotted characters, but you're still at Do-level enhancement modifiers.

It depends (at least, it did before shutdown) on how far away from the target you are, and what you do to the target. I remember, with my AR/EM Blaster, being able to stand up near Imperious in Cimerora, pop Boost Range, Aim or Build Up, and Snipe to one-shot a mob in the spawn standing in the plaza on the west side of the valley... and the rest of the spawn would just stand there wondering why Fred just fell over. It took a second shot before they'd figure out that they were taking fire and come charging across the map. In general, I've found that the faster you drop a mob, the less likely it is that the rest of the spawn figures out where they're being attacked from. The more 'observant' a mob type is, the more likely it will be to aggro on incoming damage, as well -- minions less than lieutenants less than bosses -- and missing your target seems to generate more aggro but it's more affected by range; missing from short range gets you more aggro than missing from long range (often you'll only pull the one mob you attacked at long enough range. And some mobs spread aggro -- Vahzilok Reapers and Mortificators will make the Cadavers and Abominations in their spawn aggro when a group of just Abominations can be sniped down at long range several times before they aggro as long as you keep one-shotting them.