srmalloy

Two runs through a minor AE 'XP farm' with XP turned off and ticket rewards, one for common Arcane, one for common Tech salvage, usually sets that character up with the vast majority of the salvage they need for the first batch of IOs at level 12, alleviating the problem of getting to 12 unable to afford them. I expect the problem will get better when the server move drops XP back to normal, so you'll be earning more influence and getting more salvage for the same level increase. And if you get a rare salvage drop, kicking it into Wentworth's solves the influence problem for a long time.

If you're willing to put in the effort to get enough merits, the recipes are readily available, and Ouroboros gives you a way to go back and grind arcs solo for merits when you get tired of running TFs.

Part of the reason why there were so many individual copycat farm missions is that the Paragon Studios staff were fairly rigorous about going through and weeding out the AE missions that existed for no purpose beyond delivering the maximum XP/inf reward for the minimum investment of time or effort, so that many of these clones were confusingly named, and even more obliquely referenced -- I remember the chatspam soliciting people for "meow missions", one of the euphemisms for AE XP farms. I think more of the playerbase would have been onboard with restricting AE missions if the Paragon Studios staff had come out and said that a loaded AE farm takes up as many server resources as, say, ten full teams running regular missions, and that having large numbers of people doing this was contributing to the lag and rubberbanding everyone else experienced. Unfortunately, it was never explained this way, and any social opprobrium was buried under "I'm paying to play the game, I can play it the way I want" responses. The GMs are trying to maintain the servers in a state that provides the best play experience for the most people, and if that requires tweaking rewards to make it less attractive to be a huge resource hog, I'm okay with that; it's their bat and ball, after all. If, with better servers and more capacity, they choose to reinstate the 'standard" rewards, I'm okay with that, too.

One of my best memories is from the test server, where I learned that sometimes even the bugs can be awesome. I'd copied my Katana/Regen Scrapper to the test server when they were testing IOs, and I got a "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage" recipe. Because of the limited space in the label, it showed up as "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative"... and I found out that it was correct -- when the proc went off, it did a negative amount of damage to my target, healing it. I thought this was hilarious and kept it in my build, even though it made fights a little harder. Then the devs fixed that bug... and replaced it with a new one. Now, the IO should have been named "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot" -- when the proc went off, it did an absurd amount of damage, taking your target down instantly. I was curious as to how far this went, and hied myself off to Crey's Folly, where I found Jurassik... and literally one-shotted him -- led off with the attack that had the proc in it, and did something like (working from memory here) 6.043 E+13 points of damage. I was also impressed to see that CoH seamlessly rolled over into scientific notation when necessary, instead of just having an endless string of zeroes. I found out later that, even doing that much damage, I was nowhere near the record for having the broken proc kick off for enough damage that it should leave a crater. Good times.

I checked earlier today, and Lomyril is right that there's a badge marker on the floor in front of Hero 1's cape display, but when I moved up to it, nothing happened. You're correct, though, Corlagon, that 'Patriot' is the exploration badge marker at the top of the City Hall dome.

In two early missions -- Matthew Habashy's mission "Incognito", where you're disguised as you enter a Hellion hideout, and Sandra Castel's "Confront the Skull Leader" mission -- will bring your pets into the mission. In the former mission, it's perhaps not too discordant for your disguised Demon Summoning MM to have a demon following them, but other pets, both in that mission and Sandra Castel's, would probably raise suspicions. This happens with both the MM pets and the various buff pets from the P2W vendor. Additionally, the disguise you assume in Matthew Habashy's mission doesn't seem to understand tails, so your Hellion disguise may be marred by the presence of a tail sticking out behind you.

Even with a Mastermind, setting your pets to Defensive/Follow, once a spawn aggros, a runner can sucker your pets into following them, where they can drag friends back to meet you. If you're not a Mastermind, you're basically SoL for controlling them.

Back before the shutdown, Positron told me that I was the only one who ever made the observation in the entire life of the game, and it's a niggly enough detail that makes absolutely no difference in the game play, but I still cringe when I see the harborages in Paragon City. All those nice red-and-white vertically striped buoys, some parked well out in the water, some parked right next to a pier... and of all of them, there are less than five that are right. The IALA maritime buoyage system specifies what colors and shapes are used to indicate navigation directions, and the striped buoy you see all over Paragon City means "fair water -- deep-draft vessels may pass on either side" -- which seems absurd for most of them, like the one ten feet from the corner of the concrete pier on the west side of Talos Island.

I think the intention is not to remove Rest as an ability itself, but to have some mechanism whereby, in the absence of hostile mobs, or using a power on another character your character would, after a delay similar to that of Rest, get an increased HP and End recovery rate. I would expect that this would be smaller than what you get from Rest, and have limits on its activation that might be too hard to code (i.e., not if any member of your team is in combat, not if hostile mobs are within a range dependent on your stealth and their perception, not if you use a power on another character or pet, etc.).

You suggest adding the Swap Ammo functionality from Dual Pistols to Archery; what would you take out of the set to make room for the ability? Remove Blazing Arrow, which already has a fire DoT, and replace it with an ability that does no damage of itself, and only adds minor damage to the others? You need to look at the balance of the set if you're proposing significant changes to it.

Scrappers tend to be more "They're all down; what are you all doing looking at the bodies like you're waiting for them to despawn? There are more enemies to defeat over here!" Scrapperlock can be a terrible thing.

Not just newbies. Back before shutdown, I was on an ITF with a parent and their five-year-old kid (the kid was doing a decent job of contributing to the TF, too), and the parent made the comment that City of Heroes was the only MMO that they would let their kid play unsupervised, because they knew that they wouldn't get taken advantage of. That one comment has stuck with me as the best demonstration of what the playerbase was like.

I had one of those today; doing Aaron Thiery's mission to defeat five Arachnos commanders. I never looked closely enough to get his name, but he had Axe Melee and I think Super Speed. He was running around looking for the spawns with Arachnos commanders, and on four of the five I needed, he'd run up, take a single whack with his axe at the commander, and run off, leaving me to finish the commander and the rest of its spawn on my own. It was annoying, but I didn't think it was important enough to raise a stink over; that sort of thing only works at low levels where a single hit does enough damage for him to get defeat credit, and won't work at all for door missions.

I don't know if the code is set up to allow this, but it would be useful if, when you went to a contact with a full roster of missions and couldn't take any more, but you'd outleveled the contact, the contact would give you the "you've already solved all my problems" dialog rather than the "you need to take care of some of what you're already doing" dialog, which forces you to go out, complete a mission but not take a new one, then go back to the contact that wouldn't talk to you, only to find out that they have nothing for you. Given how easy it is to outlevel contacts (even if you've never talked to them), or to pick up a full slate of pending missions, having them concede they've got nothing for you up front would be a timesaver.

You could give it an effect similar to the Dark Melee power Siphon Life, so it draws HP from the target and has a small AoE heal... but then you'd need to rebalance the power.

If you have a Sentinel+ archive for a character, double click on the file to open it with Microsoft's browser. This won't actually render it properly, but it will display the parsed XML data. Parts of it -- the costumes and character sliders, for example -- aren't going to be particularly informative, but the powers section should give you the information about the build, and there is a tool that can read the Sentinel+ files you have and save out the costume files. Copying the costume files into your costumes folder for your install (and removing the 'username.servername.' prefix from the front of each filename -- "srmalloy.guardian.ledyanoy kulak.1" doesn't display well in the 'load costume' pick list) will make them available for you to pick at a tailor.

When you are offered Mercedes Sheldon as a new contact (when receiving her from Athena Currie, she's paired with Tristan Caine), there is no description for the contact.

If you opt to do the tutorial, you get to choose whether to do Outbreak (and become a hero), Breakout (and become a villain), or Galaxy City (and make your choice there). Galaxy City is the fastest.

Along with Grym, in the second mission in the base, running back and forth along the edge of the platform pushing against the railing, until you move around up onto the platform where he can run straight toward you. at which points, he remembers he can jump, jumps over the railing to the lower level, then runs around to the ramp you came up to meet you. The NPC pathing in these missions is abysmal.

There's a P2W vendor in the Galaxy City tutorial, the woman in the suit standing to the right of the Longbow Heavy that is the trainer; in Atlas Park, there's one on the west side of the plinth in the center of the zone (a bit north of the enhancement vendor on that side).

You kind of sort of already have that. There's an in-game option to "turn off XP" that will automatically convert that XP into influence instead. Really? Where is that located? From ParagonWiki, Menu -> Options -> General -> "Disable Earning XP" And if you need more directions to find it, it's near the bottom of the Miscellaneous section.

I changed the colors of the abilities, but only that, using the 'match colors across powerset' option to set most of the abilities the same, then turned it off and made Blazing Bolt a more 'intense' flame, but I didn't touch the animations.

If you pick two characters with the same archetype and the same primary and secondary powersets, and if by some freak chance their enhancement slots are allocated identically, you're still going to be looking at a very small chance that they're slotted the same way. There might be some aspects that people try to reach on their characters -- Def cap or Res cap are examples for melee ATs -- but there are enough ways to get there that the rest of the build is generally unique to each character. There is no 'one meta build' for any given combination of AT, primary, secondary, power pools, and Incarnate boosts.

It didn't take Homecoming for me; I'd created a Bots/Dark MM, with a backstory (that has grown to six pages, held up for my not being able to write a reasonable fight scene) of being a Soviet project to create a robotic combat director accidentally given sentience that, instead of just carrying out the orders it was given, replaced them with its own tactics, critiquing the generals who'd issued them. Labeled a failed project, he and his bots were crated up and stuck in a dusty warehouse until accidentally awakened. After taking him blueside, I realized that I still enjoyed playing the sets redside, so I created another from the same Soviet research program, intended to correct the 'flaws' in the original design, but which through a mislabeled backup had portions of the original's programming loaded (the project completely canceled and the techs involved sent to Siberia), creating a more ruthless version of the original. Still later, I made a third character from the same project, the infiltration unit that was to have been part of the 'BRIGADYR' program. (edited to address the problem that the forum, unlike the game itself, does not support Unicode)

I'll freely admit that I've been running an AE mission that's clearly labeled as a low level XP farm -- but when I do, I turn off earning XP and run it for the ticket drops, then turn around and spend them on the common salvage rolls to get what I need for IOs; it's a more reliable source of salvage than relying on the random and Irregular mob drops. Doing it with XP turned off keeps me from outleveling the regular content.