srmalloy

In the build.txt file saved out with /buildsave for my Electric Affinity/Electrical Blast Defender, the Electric Affinity powerset is still named "Shock Therapy", and the tier 3 Galvanic Sentinel power appears in the build as "Discharge".

I used the Sentinel+ tool from the Titan Network to archive all my characters from Guardian, and kept them along with a set of character selection screen captures so that I would have references to recreate the ones I wanted most when CoH came back; I was certain that someone at Paragon Studios would have had an under-the-table set of all the code for the server and client. It took years for them to be willing to go public with it, but I was immensely gratified to have been proven right. And I have to salute the person or people who kept it safe and gave it back to us.

From the bits of conversation I've picked up on in The Hive while waiting for the nightly Hami raid to start, the reason why they're not being run in The Abyss is that the DE monsters are more scattered around the zone, making the initial grind to defeat them to get EoEs and get Hami to spawn is more drawn out and tedious. So the players go where the payoff is better/faster.

The End cost is assessed when you trigger the power; the power goes on cooldown once it fires off at the end of the animation. If it is interrupted before the animation completes, the power doesn't fire, so it doesn't go into cooldown.

Babbage will also not spawn if there is any other zone-wide event ongoing -- Rikti invasion, zombie invasion, or the Halloween Deadly Apocalypse. This has been around for some time.

Note that having an NPC walk/run into you and push you around, or another player coming through a door and pushing you, counts as you moving for purposes of interrupting your snipe.

Surface textures are baked into the individual costume pieces, so adding glass or jewel effects would involve reworking each costume piece that is to get the effect. It isn't just patterns that are mirrored vertically down the character -- in the original database for characters, everything was mirrored; the internal data for both the character, the costume, and the patterns on the costume pieces only had definitions for one side of the character, and it was mirrored on the other. Only belts, hairdos, and some chest details (for some chests) could be asymmetrical. The addition of 'mixed' hands and feet, driven by a need with costume sets like Pirate, expanded the options, but the left and right glove/boot pairs had to be hardcoded as a costume piece. The Homecoming staff figured out how to break that out and let us pick gloves and boots separately for left/right, but asymmetric patterns is more deeply embedded into the character models and will be enormously more difficult to implement. Adding limbs adds the problem of animation -- how does the character walk, jog, run, jump, etc., and how are those animations affected by the power animations? Make it possible to create a character that is a quadruped, and you have to make a completely new set of animations for the whole game to support that. And do it again for different types -- the animations for a spider/insect on four legs will be different from those for a centaur, which will be different from those for a felitaur. Hell, in the entire live run of the game, the devs never put in the work to give a proper digitigrade gait to characters with the Monstrous leg type, which would still have required two full sets of animation replacements, because hooved and padded digitigrade gaits are different.

I've done this in a much looser manner. Way back in the first couple of months of live, I saw a line in chat that was in Cyrillic. Testing, I found that CoH supported Unicode, so I started making characters with origins outside the US and Paragon City. Many of them came from the old Soviet Union, cut free with its collapse, and I used real Soviet research institutions for background material, making up state-sponsored hero groups, individual heroes and villains, and villain groups that got referenced in the origins of different characters. So, while they didn't all have backstories that were part of a bigger story, they all tied into a common set of background entities, like the hero group Народная армия (People's Army) or the I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary and Physical Biochemistry.

It’s a minor annoyance, and you don't do it often, but could the enhancement combination screen be tweaked to allow you to pull down multiple enhancement boosts when you're using them so you can boost an enhancement to +5 in one go, rather than having to go through the process five times?

And that was why he was asking if an option setting could be added; there are all kinds of notifications that throw themselves into the dead center of the screen; there's never been a way to turn them off, and when you get a bunch at once, the obscuration can interfere with your targeting.

You're missing the point. It's not in a chat window; it's the message that flashes across the middle of your screen, unconnected to anything that appears in a chat tab.

Starts a chat message in the Local channel. Whatever the rest of the macro is will be the text said in Local.

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.