srmalloy

If I remember the way badge credit works, your character has to do more than a set fraction of the mob's HP to get credit -- with your team's total damage being used for the check if you're in a team (obviously, it's easier to do, say, 15% of Babbage's HP if you've got a team of four or five helping the team doing Synapse than if the four or five of you all go it solo). If you move someone between teams in a league during the fight, I'm pretty sure that they don't take their team's damage total with them. So if you've got a league with nine people, and for most of the fight it's split into a full team of 8 and 1 on the other team, then close to the end push three people onto the short team to even things out, they may not be able to do enough damage after the move for that team to get badge credit.

But it's a little immersion breaking to fire M30 Grenade at a mob at the back of a spawn and see all the mobs in the spawn fly away from you, driven by the blast behind them.

I have discovered that it's possible to be too effective in building for separation between you and your target. I took my AR/EM Blaster out to Terra Volta to work on the defeat badge for Sky Skiffs, and after shooting more than three dozen of them out of the sky, my defeat total on the badge stands at... nine. This appears to be an artifact of my hunting them at extreme range. Sniper Rifle, with a full set of Superior Blaster's Wrath, claims to have a range of 180 feet; I don't know whether this includes the 10% bonus from Superior Blaster's Wrath. Boost Range gives me another 59%. When I shoot a Sky Skiff using just Snipe, the defeat count credits; if I'm far enouogh away that Boost Range needs to be active, the defeat count does not increment, no matter how many Sky Skiffs I put down at extended range.

Although ED forever killed the hilarity that was Hellion Golf. Take a /EM blaster, six-slot Power Thrust for KB, then go to the edge of the zone in AP and find a Hellion. Hit Power Boost, then hit the Hellion with Power Thrust, and watch him go flying across the whole zone.

The snow flurries around you are less work than you might think; like the 'instant snowstorm' temp power, they're client-side on the player, not a zone change, so that would be a simple matter of making all the city zones apply the snowstorm effect when you zone in. The code is there to special-case it for AP; it should be easy to extend it to the other city zones. There were also effects in other zones -- the ponds, like the one east of the hospital in Steel Canyon, froze over for part of the event back on Live -- but doing a full AP conversion on the other zones would be a lot of work. Things like having ice around the edges of water but not fully frozen over (IP still needs to get shipping in and out) would be a pain.

That's why I said 'some'. Look at Imperial City in Praetoria; you see buildings that look like they were built across several different style periods -- older buildings torn down and replaced, or expanding the built-up area. Taking some of the buildings that are already in a zone and replacing them with a different style will freshen the zones' appearance. Not a wholesale revamp, just making some updates as if not all of the buildings damaged in the Rikti invasion were reconstructed exactly as they were.

I imagine that after years fighting villains, a hero gets rather blasé about common dangers, and after so many years, the civilians likely have gotten used to it, but is there some way to tweak the timing on the way the client presents the tram for you to enter so that your character doesn't randomly decide to throw themselves in front of the tram when it pulls into the station? I know it's just a visual thing, but it's still quirky enough to be distinctly odd to have your character decide to hurl themselves in front of the tram just to test themselves or something.

Without knowing how often you used it, I wonder how much the bug that dropped the base damage from Hail of Bullets (beta patch notes: "Hail of Bullets (Blaster): Fixed an issue where the blaster version of this power would not trigger the base lethal damage in PvE") affected its performance.

Nor was the change that gave essentially every mob in the game a ranged attack of they didn't already have one, that in many cases outranged a snipe with Range Boost, driving a stake through the heart of Jack Emmert's declaration "Range is a Blaster's defense".

An observation I made from a number of "defeat Freakshow in [location]" missions -- if there's no one within melee range of a Super Stunner when you drop them, they don't rez -- they need a body to draw End from in order for their self-rez to work. Since I discovered this, whether I try to get separation on Super Stunners when I drop them depends on how much my character will be affected by the End drain.

I can't say for certain, but I believe that this number is the record number of your SG in the server's SG list, so if you set your passcode to "PASSCODE" and get "PASSCODE-12345" back, your SG was the 12345th SG created on that server; this allows the server to distinguish your SG's passcode from any other SG's passcode using the same string.

Or take some of the buildings in First Ward, replace the grungy textures with cleaner ones, and use them to replace some of the generic Brutalist structures in other zones. Or, for some areas that are already grungy, like parts of Cap au Diable and Port Oakes, just drop them in as is.

Or use initialisms and think they're acronyms, because the meaning of 'acronym' has been diluted through sloppy usage of the term. To be pedantic, an acronym is pronounced like a word -- SCUBA, LASER, etc. -- while an initialism spells out the letters -- 'CoH' pronounced as 'Cee-oh-aitch'.

Use the Cook-Voice: "Get out of the kitchen. It will be ready when it's ready!"

I briefly entertained an idea for an undeclared change for April Fool's Day, where the badges would have their names twisted (so 'Burning the Midnight Oil' might become 'Oiling the Midnight Burn', 'Hero Corps Insider' becomes 'Hero Corps Reject', 'Apex' becomes 'Nadir', etc.), but when I realized that this would need humorous rewrites of the badge descriptions, too, and that all of the names and descriptions would be in the client data files, so it would not only be a major task to do all of the rewrites, but need a sizeable data file update at the start and end of the event, I discarded it as being too complicated to make work.

I know exactly what that's like. I work at a military hospital, and have been writing code in MUMPS for the medical information system, CHCS, for several decades now. Most of what I've done has been local, such as reports pulling data out in ways the built-in reporting tools can't, and I've made some minor cleanups of the core code, but I won't touch anything connected to order entry, because of how much of a cesspit of unreadable spaghetti code it is and that I've got no documentation whatsoever about what the code is supposed to be doing. And I had the routine I created to automatically process noncompliant prescriptions (patient never comes in to pick it up) taken up as core code, so that's part of every MTF's setup. As with yours, we're getting a complete replacement for all of the separate medical information systems as a single system, so the horror of some of that code is going away.

Lady Jane. I've taken to using a sort of degenerate approach to that mission, where I'll use an Empowerment Station in my base to create a two-hour Invisibility buff, then skate past the group holding Lady Jane hostage to clear the route through to the end room with the chest, then come back and pull nearby spawns (with Nemesis Staff and Blackwand if on a melee character) to get them as well, then take out Lady Jane's guards to free her. Canceling the invisibility, I drag her through the now-empty tunnels to the chest, wondering all the while if it would be simpler just to be able to bind her, throw her over your shoulder, and carry her there. I imagine that the same sort of tactic, using ranged attacks to pull the nearby mobs away while keeping their AoEs on you, where they can't hit the hostage(s) you need to rescue, would work in other missions.

That has me flashing back to flying around DA (pre-revamp) with my map view expanded, using the map for navigation, the same way I'd use the map when flying bombers in Aces High, because looking out the cockpit windows didn't tell you squat about whether you were flying in the right direction.

I did this with Personal Force Field when we started hitting the southwest wall of monsters setting up a Hami raid.

It's the usual "I have a character whose costume does this" flash of recognition. I wasn't aware of the others, because I hadn't used them yet. But it's always a good bet that if you found a slip in one place, it's in other places, too.

The Circle of Thorns 3 shoulders (1 is two gradient-colored shoulder points, 2 is three shoulder points with colored edging, and 3 is Circle of Thorns 2 with a stiff collar and a pointed half-cape; the inside of the half-cape can only be colored with the "match all colors" trick.

Just the combination of Agility and Gymnastics is going to force a respec on mine, or I'm going to have Oil Slick five-slotted with Luck of the Gambler. I'll have to fiddle with the numbers to see how the tradeoff between set bonuses, defense, and slots needed elsewhere go for the new Gymnastics.

My Dark/Plant Blaster is Токсичный Подлесок ('Toksichniy Podlesok', 'Toxic Undergrowth'), with the Dark blasts given an overtone of dark green to suggest toxins causing the debuffs. I've also got a Fire/Plant Blaster, Пожарная Сорняк ('Pozharnaya Sornyak', 'Fire Weed'). They're both 'secondary' heroes (in the sense of their origin being fallout from the origin of another character), having acquired their powers from shoddy safety practices during the cleanup after the accident that gave Разрастание ('Razrastaniye', 'Overgrowth', a Plant/Nature Controller) her powers.

It's a portmanteau, a combination of 'stench' and 'strength'

You might also want to have 'thumbtack' take the same parameters that 'pow_exec_location' does, so you could thumbtack your position with "/thumbtack me" and the like. And have it work the other way, too -- being able to use a command like "powexeclocation tack Rain of Fire".