srmalloy

I have to agree that making it perma would increase the distinctiveness of the set, and I don't think that doing so would upset balance noticeably. It's already functionally perma from the start at the cost of resummoning it when the power recharges, it still dies fairly easily if you use it as an aggro magnet, and its attacks don't actually damage its target, requiring assistance from other End-drain abilities to floor a mob's End.

As I'm sure most people have noticed, the office and cave maps look like they're assembled out of premade map blocks in different layouts. In a discussion with Matt Miller during one of the meet&greet events at SDCC, he confirmed that this actually was how the office and cave maps were created. My question was whether this could be opened up to allow people, say, creating AE missions to have a map editor where they could create new map layouts. Unfortunately, as he described, the interface for doing this was still primitive enough that it takes a significant amount of skill to get the map pieces positioned correctly. Longtime CoH players will no doubt remember the 'black wall' bug in office maps, where there is a black wall across a corridor that you can walk through to find the corridor continues on the other side, and you can look back and see the corridor you came from, but couldn't see where you're standing from the other side. This is the result of a minor misalignment between adjacent map sections, and fixing it requires moving an indeterminate number of map sections to get everything lined up. With the cave map sections having varying amounts of vertical change between endpoints, this makes creating these maps even more fiddly. Matt said that it was something he would like to be able to do, but that they didn't have the programmer/art resources to clean up the map builder to make it a snap-fit process.

Back on live, I think I saw five different groups of characters that deliberately made identical/similar costumes (such as a knock-off of the Crest Team), and one group that deliberately exploited the way that uppercase "I" and lowercase "l" looked the same to make a group that not only looked the same as each other, but looked like they all had the same name. But in every case, this was done deliberately; I don't know of any characters that had more than grossly similar costumes (barring the ones recreating comic characters -- all the green-skinned Huge males with torn purple pants, for example, or the Wolverine claws/regen scrapper clones).

Having just had a character hit 50 and do Mender Ramiel's arc, I can confirm that you get Lieutenant Nolan as a contact with the unlock of your Alpha slot, not when you hit 50.

And power corrupts... And corruption is a crime... And crime doesn't pay... So if you keep learning, you'll go broke!

It’s been in the game since the introduction of Incarnates and isn't a typo per se, but Lady Grey's line "granted unimaginable power in a large amount" feels strained; flipping the second clause -- 'a tiny amount of unimaginable power' -- doesn't work at all. Something like "granted a wide range of unimaginable powers" would fit better.

I'm certain it will be less of an issue later, but my character was level 6 when this happened, and she'd just summoned Galvanic Sentinel for the spawn right before the elevators, so it took time for the power to recharge so I could pull another one out. It's useful for dropping into a spawn to soak an alpha, though. I do think I'm going to be keeping Shield Drone for quite a long time, though; having it hovering nearby makes it possible to use a quick macro to get around the "targeted ally" limitation of Rejuvenating Circuit. It's kind of funny, though, to see a 200+ heal on the drone, when all she had was one Healing TO in the power.

Well... Isn't that... ironic?

If I'm remembering correctly from the 'tests' done back on live, it spawns in whatever zone the mission owner is in when people begin to exit from the mission after completion, so if the mission owner doesn't enter the mission, or exits the mission prior to completion, and travels to a zone -- any zone but Atlas, which appears to have a blanket override preventing things like GM spawns, Rikti/Nemesis/zombie invasions, etc. -- then when people begin exiting the mission, the Kronos will spawn in the zone with the mission owner.

Effective DPS, then. I need to do X damage to each of these mobs to defeat them, and the change has required the damage to be spread over a greater time. The fact that there is 'leftover' damage in the attack when the mobs go down just makes it more inefficient, leaving me locked on the current targets spending End to no benefit instead of proceeding to the next spawn. At the character's current level, the difference between the two attacks seems to be consistently 5-6 points of damage per aspect (smashing/negative) per tick, in that situation doing 40-48 fewer points of damage per target, which is made up in the first tick of the second Shadow Maul attack, wasting 3/4 of its potential.

Sometimes I despair of the people in in-game chat being able to reason clearly, instead of being locked into preconceived ideas. There was an exchange about the changes to Shadow Maul, and I commented that I had seen a DPS decrease as a result of it. Before the update, I was able to take my Rad/Dark Tanker against a spawn of three white minions and with a bit of positioning, hit all three with Shadow Maul + Sands of Mu, and if they weren't resistant, could expect a take them all down. After the update, I could only do that with green mobs; against white mobs, it took a second application of Shadow Maul to take them down. This took more time with the second use of Shadow Maul, and was therefore a reduction in DPS. The chat response varied, with "you're using it wrong" or "it's a wider cone and hits more targets" being common, and every single one fixated on the wider cone and increased target cap, assuming that you will have the full target cap every time you use it, and completely ignored that my example specified a three-mob spawn in the comparison. Yes, if you have a sufficient number of targets, Shadow Maul will do more damage after the update. Assuming that you are going to have that greater number of targets all the time is not justifiable. All the theorycrafting in the world can't refute what actually happens in the game.

Multiple Kronos in a zone other than FF is virtually guaranteed to be a GM intervention to spawn them.

That hasn't stopped the recruiting messages I see in LFG chat asking for responses giving AT, level, and powersets. For regular TF runs, not tweaked-up Master runs. I don't remember seeing more than a miniscule fraction of recruiting back on live that asked for anything more specific than role as long as they met the requirements for the TF. But it seems that the "have to build each team to a precise balance of power" attitude from Wow has carried back to CoH.

It also happened just now in Aaron Thiery's last mission, in the Arachnos base map, when going through the round doors, then again at the elevator. Been pretty consistent for me.

I was running a mission yesterday with a level 9 Elec/Elec Defender, and I'd cleared the ground floor with my Galvanic Sentinel providing, but when I went up the elevator to the next floor, the GS did not accompany me. It still showed as live in the pet window, and going back down, I found it waiting at the elevators. Going back up, I summoned another (replacing the first), then went down the elevator, an it would not follow me down, either. Is Galvanic Sentinel supposed to act like pets used to, or is this a bug?

I know I'm going to be jumped on from all sides for this, but I've always wondered why it is even possible to gain inf in AE missions. Inf, regardless of what side you're on, was supposed to represent other people's willingness to do things for you, for various reasons -- influence because of your reputation as a hero, infamy because of their fear of you as a villain, information because of what/who you know as a Praetorian. All of these accumulate because of your actions in the real world, and crawling up your electronic navel to defeat virtual opponents isn't going to affect how people in the real world think of you. Someone shows up in AP, immediately runs over to the AE building, and runs AE missions and farms until they're 50, then comes out on the street, and no one's going to know them from Adam's off ox; they're not going to have any reputation, and in fact might have a negative reputation, because the real heroes are out fighting the criminals and supervillains, while they're holed up in what amounts to a high-powered video game. Yes, it's a de facto currency, but it still ties into the lore of the game. AE missions should earn you XP and tickets -- XP because you're still learning to use your powers better, and tickets because that's how AE rewards people for playing the scenarios.

Blizzard implemented double XP for WoW during the enforced isolation; I don't think that it's necessary to encourage play here.

Odd, it did for me this morning, at least with regard to parking a character in Cimerora.

But you notice that the threads like this never start out with "I don't like being able to do this; make a change so I can't do it as much", and instead start out with "I don't like it when other people do this; make a change so they can't do it as much" -- they're not asking for the change to control themselves, they want the change imposed on everyone else just because they don't like it.

As do I. The original theme has a bass punch track that underlies the main melodic line; the new theme has a bright, brassy punch track that, in my judgement, stomps all over the main melodic line.

...and was either sufficiently difficult to fix, or was considered by the devs to be inconsequential enough, for it not to be fixed at any time from the introduction of Kheldians through to the shutdown.

A 'don't show this contact again' checkbox, with an additional window that would let you see all the hidden potential contacts, would limit the spam nicely.

Probably the same limitation that causes CoT crystals and jail doors to show up on your map as hostile entities.

I think that 'Homesteader' should be kept back for the badge for if/when the Homecoming team works out a deal with NCsoft that makes them legitimate. Then we'll have really put down roots.

The same thing happens in the 'Incognito' mission in Matthew Habashy's arc where you disguise yourself as a Girlfriend From Hell (if female, a regular Hellion if male) to go into a Hellion warehouse. What's equally amusing is that pets carry over, too -- in that mission, or in Sondra Costel's mission 'Power of the Written Word' where you oversee Deborah Rosenfeld's meeting with a Skull leader, if you have one of the buff pets active, it will enter the mission with you, and a Mastermind's pet will follow them in as well. "Pay no attention to the battle drone; I have an overprotective boyfriend." At least if your character is a female Demon Summoning MM, the demonling pet is appropriate for the disguise.