srmalloy

There already is a beacon for Kallisti Wharf.

Today is the fourth time that I've gone down to the M.A.G.I. office in City Hall to find some random hostile mob -- this time, a level 5 Fallen Gunner, last time a pair of level 7 Clockwork minions -- tucked into the far right corner of the office behind Azuria. If this isn't the result of a broken spawn point that got stuck in that room and can be removed, can we get a police drone stationed there to take out the spawns before they take out low-level heroes that have to visit Azuria?

Without access to the code, I can't say how the process actually works, but there are enough powers now that apply an effect to the target if the attack hits (i.e.,most Dark powers applying a to-hit debuff) that making a variant that applies an effect with a delay and a heal should be doable. The difference would be that it would need to be done as a check after any Resistance defenses reduce the base damage of the hit, so that the magnitude of the heal could be determined. So I believe that the pieces of what would make up such a change already have examples in the code, although I can't say whether assembling them into a new effect would be practical.

It would probably play hob with the row of buff icons, but you could modify it so that if you had IH on, every time you were hit you got a short-term buff to your regen rate. I'm not sure that 'number of enemies in melee range' is viable to do, because you could surround a high-level character with low-level nominally-hostile mobs that would ignore you for the purposes of buffing your regen against a higher-level attacker -- determining what an 'enemy' is may be more complicated than we want to make the server do in combat, and it ignores mobs with ranged attacks that may actually be attacking you.

Ignoring the bugged internal server that led to the devs claiming that a Claws/Regen Scrapper could casually solo missions set at +4/x8, which resulted in the rework of the powerset that turned Instant Healing into a click power, it always seemed to me that Instant Healing was poorly done as a power. Part of the perception of Regen as an OP set, I believe, was the fact that a Regen character would generally finish a fight 'unhurt' -- with a full health bar. This was the result of the fact that, unlike every other defensive set in the game, Regen applies most of its powers to incoming damage again and again and again without limit. The basic premise behind Regen is that you take all the damage, but heal it back fast enough to keep you alive. In combat, this results in a character's HP nosediving at the start of the fight while the character tries to drop enough attackers to reduce the incoming damage below their regeneration rate. If they can do it, they will survive, and they will almost always be completely healed by the end of the fight; if they can't, they faceplant early in the fight. Instant Healing just makes this 'worse' by increasing the regen rate, ensuring that the character looks even less damaged by the end of the fight. It always seemed to me that IH didn't need to be made a click power that couldn't be made perman it needed a change in how it worked to make it more in line with other defensive powers and to better match its name. The concept I had was to return IH to being a toggle, but that instead of cranking a character's regen rate, it made every hit the character took act similarly to the way Spectral Wounds does -- you get hit, and you take all the damage, then after a moment, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals. This would make IH directly comparable to and balanceable against the Resistance and Defense toggles, while keeping it thematic to the powerset. And because its effect would only get applied once against each incoming attack, it, wouldn't add to the 'OP regen' perception. But it would have a good visual effect in combat, popping up big green heal numbers as IH healed the incoming hits, and keep a Regen character's health bar dynamic in tough fights, bouncing up and down as they dance with taking damage too fast to heal.

"Tied to other lore" is something that I've done with a number of my characters. It started when I saw someone say "для" in chat, leading me to fiddle with chat, discovering that it supported Unicode. The first character 'benefiting' from this was a Fire/Rad Controller named "Yadernii Ogon" ('Nuclear Fire' in Russian), who had a number of chat binds in Cyrillic. Picking character names using foreign languages led me to create other characters with Russian-based names, and I wound up concocting a loose collection of shared background relating to Soviet superheroes, villains and groups, looking up real Soviet research institutions when I needed an organization to connect to a character's origin. State-sponsored hero teams like Верховные Советы ('Supreme Soviet'), Народная Армия ('People's Army'), and Зимняя Охрана ('Winter Guard'), heroes like Красный орел ('Red Eagle') and Зимняя дева ('Winter Maiden'), the villain group Красная Угроза ('Red Menace'), the supervillain Генерал Зима ('General Winter'), and actual research facilities like Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова. Using common references across different characters created a sort of parallel lore to Paragon City -- the US couldn't have been the only place where super-powered individuals began appearing, and gave the feeling of those characters coming from an actual place, not a bunch of independent little bubbles of backstory for each character.

The issue gets exacerbated by the fact that most email clients do this by default when replying -- your response is stuck at the top of the message so people can see it immediately, with the rest of the email thread cascading down underneath, where you can scroll down if you need to pick up context. So it's what a lot of people are used to doing/seeing.

I remember running a Citadel TF where the first three missions shutting down Fifth Column bases were all at exactly the same tunnel entrance in IP (the one SW of where the road N out of Terra Volta turns W -- and it's weird the way some details stick with you even after years); we joked about how the Fifth were so hard up for bases that they sent in teams to quickly refurbish the base as soon as we exited. In a more accessible example, if you take a new character and go into City Hall and get missions from the old Origin contacts, both Rick Davies and Prince Nandelu (Tech and Mutant, respectively) hand you missions to the exact same door (the building north of the W half of Prometheus Park), so you can click on the door, enter, defeat all the Clockwork, exit, turn around and click on the door again, enter, and defeat the Skulls that moved in during the five seconds it took you to get out of the building. It always seemed, though, over my eight years playing CoH before it was shut down, that there were at least ten times as many doors in Paragon City as there were doors that were used for missions -- different missions from different contacts, and some doors would get used again and again, while most of them were apparently just there for show. I would like to see whatever RNG algorithm that picks mission doors be given a much bigger list of possible door locations (well, except for the level 11 mission I got a few days ago where the door was in Faultline, but I'll be posting that one with screenshots for proof in the Bug Reports board).

I think Hold is more appropriate than Stun, given the long-standing issue of hitting a mob with a stun after they've queued up movement and having the visibly stunned mob skate fifty yards away, leap onto the roof of a building, and disappear from sight. There is already an animation -- I think it's used for Taser Dart and the other electric-based holds -- that has the victim standing there shaking from the effect of the shock that would work as a visual effect of being hit by a hail of bullets. I'm not sure, but I think that there are some powers that apply an animation to the target only for the duration of the power's cast animation, which would give some precedent (and an existing example in the code) for doing this. I'm not sure, though, if applying a status effect on your targets, even if it turns off at the end of the power's animation wouldn't bump its effectiveness up enough to require adjusting other aspects of the power. Just as an anecdotal reference, though, pre-shutdown, my AR/EM Blaster would set up on a spawn of white or below Nemesis minions in PI, and with Boost Range up, pop Build Up or Aim (both, if there were more than two lieutenants in the spawn), then open up with Full Auto, expecting to take out the entire spawn... and usually winding up at no lower than 25% HP from the return fire. Then rest to recover HP and zip off to do the same thing to another spawn as soon as Full Auto recharged (compared to the 'crash' nukes of other sets). Having FA incapacitate my targets while I was shooting feels a bit like cheating, even though the removal of crashes from the other tier-9 nukes lets the other sets do much the same thing, and being 'boom' effects don't expose the character to return fire for an extended animation as FA does.

For those who don't happen to be logged in when the announcement is made, putting something like "Donations are Open" in the MotD would let people know as they sign in, and it can be removed when donations are closed again.

Go look at the Homecoming Beta board. Based on comments and datamining on the 22% To-Hit triggering insta-Snipe, they were looking at changing Snipes to have different stats in and out of combat. Out of combat, they were the stock 'slow snipe', with a higher base damage; in combat, they would be 'fast snipes', with the damage a Snipe has now, but have their max range cut to 80m. Once you either attack or are attacked, you are 'in combat', forcing the reduced-range fast snipe until you have spent 15 seconds neither attacking nor being attacked. Along with this was a new Snipe-specific enhancement set, the sixth piece of which functionally put you in permanent fast-snipe (and nerfed range) mode. After considerable pushback on the proposal, the changes are being revised. Snipes will retain their full range throughout, and the in/out of combat timer is being reduced. Several proposals on how To-Hit will affect snipes are being kicked around, as are revisions to the new sniper enhancement set. It's not easy to describe;you should read the thread in the beta board.

One of the quirks with the combat mechanics is the way that Stuns work. Normally, you can hit a mob with a stun, and they'll stand there 'drunk', swaying back and forth. However, if you Stun a mob that has movement plotted, the mob will complete the move before taking any effect from the Stun. I'm sure people remember having an Outcast in Steel Canyon decide to bug out, you hit them with a stun, and while they do display the 'swaying' animation, their movement actually speeds up, and they can skid across the street, leap up onto the roof of a building, and disappear from view before the Stun affects them. For melee-based characters, it can take the runner out of sight until it decides to wander back. This makes Stuns an unreliable way to stop runners. And a mob that is rushing you will often, even if stunned, skid right up to you before stopping, putting it in melee range when it becomes unstunned -- which defeats the purpose of stunning them at range. When a mob is hit by a Stun effect that exceeds the magnitude of the mob's resistance to Stun, it should immediately change the endpoint of any movement the mob has queued to the spot where the mob got hit -- essentially stopping them in their tracks. This makes the effect of Stuns the same for NPC mobs as it is for players -- you get stunned, it stops whatever you're doing and stand there dazed. And NPC mobs should be affected the same way.

There are a couple of corner cases, though. If you've built level 15/20 IOs starting at 12, then when you hit 22 and are set to go with 25 common IOs, burn a respec and save out your low-level IOs to go into your SG base enhancement storage, where you can pick them up with another character as they hit 12, saving you some inf as you pass them down to alts. And, as say, any time the value of the enhancement exceeds the cost of the unslotter.

Actually, there's a toggle setting for that. "/screenshot UI [0|1]" sets whether or not to include the UI in screenshots, so if you need a screenshot that includes the chat window, map, mission list, etc., you can do it.

The only character name I have that is deliberately punish is a DP Blaster from before the shutdown recreated as a Sentinel; with the original, I noticed how several of the costume pieces could be combined to look like mecha from anime series, and Mobile Suit Gun Dame was born. With the exception of one outfit using the Mecha costume pieces, all of her costumes are designed to resemble different Gundam mecha.

Another way to do it would be, after you've done enough radio missions in PI/Grandville at 50 to have received the mayhem/safeguard mission once, to have subsequent radio missions send you to any city zone for the mission. That would spread people around the city/isles and by the time a character is 50 and done the first set of radios in the zone, they should have enough fast ways to get around that traveling from, say, PI to Atlas isn't excruciating.

Likewise; I'm still poking at the sets, looking to see what I should be building for. It does appear to be a fun build. Amusingly, I created the character on a whim after I happened across the term 'burevestnik', the Russian word for the storm petrel, a seabird historically believed to be a harbinger of bad weather, and thought that it would make a good name for a Water/Storm character.

I've been noticing an oddity with the ragdoll animation recently. When a mob is knocked over or falls over a railing, sometimes it appears that they have an invisible bungee strap attached to them, and they will start bouncing up and down in mid-air as if suspended from the railing. Most of the time, this happens with defeated mobs, but yesterday I had this happen in the Defeat Toothbreaker Jones mission in KR when my Scrapper had knocked a mob over the railing in the first room of the map, and he was bouncing up and down mostly out of range for a melee attack. Having to try to time my attack so that he'd be at the bottom and in range was like whacking at a pi񡴡 someone was jerking up and down. Another less entertaining quirk with the ragdoll animation was in the Rescue Manticore mission, where I knocked the second 'Arachnos' lieutenant back, and he got his boot hung up on the glass case in the middle of the room, and it apparently locked his foot there, making it impossible for him to stand up. I stood there and watched for fifteen seconds, and he just twitched with his foot stuck up on the display case, so I finally gave up and finished him off. While I have to admit that this is an awesome soft CC, and often hilarious to watch, the fact that it's heavily dependent on the environment, and appears to be unbreakable by the victim, leads me to believe that this is not working as intended. I do wish that I had been able to record the Council soldier making two-floor-high bounces after being defeated and falling off the railing he was standing on, though.

Based on my experience getting him as a contact on several different characters, he stops giving you missions if you're over level 10 -- but he's perfectly happy passing you off to another contact with a minimum level of 15. On the basis of that, it feels as if he should be offering missions in the 9-14 range.

Exiting from the Base Portal (inside or outside the Base) is a RANDOM radial direction. Actually, it's not. I was annoyed that I was always coming into my base and getting stuck into a corner where I'd have to go around the portal to get to the rest of the base. I alreadykknew that you can move the base portal, so I went into base edit mode, selected the entry portal, then rotated it, exited the base, reentered, and checked which way I was facing. I originally did it in the wrong direction, which meant I needed two more quarter turns to align it the way I wanted it.

It's a chain of trust; the antimalware software is trusting that an executable digitally signed with a code-signing certificate is a legitimate piece of software because it trusts the certificate authority to be responsible about issuing signing certificates. You will see the trust chain pop up with regard to web pages -- you'll see a message like "this website has a valid encryption certificate, but we cannot verify the validity of the issuing authority" and be prompted to tell the browser whether to trust it or not. If a certificate authority becomes known for handing out signing certificates that get used for malware, then the authority will be deprecated, and certificates issued by that authority will stop being accepted.

My AR/EM Blaster, back before the shutdown, between all her power slotting and Boost Range, had a Snipe that could hit targets out past 240 yards (LRM was, IIRC, 273 yards at max). At that range, I could get two and sometimes three Snipe shots off before my target got close enough to attack back. One of the things I used to to for amusement waiting for ITFs to start was to stand on the platform near Imperious and snipe the mobs in the plaza across the valley, where I'd be able to take down one mob (with Build Up), leaving them clueless about where the shot game from, hit another one (aggroing the spawn even if it took them down), and be able to take two more shots with Snipe before switching to my shorter-ranged attacks, and be able to finish picking off the whole spawn before they got close to the platform I was on. Now, with this change, I make the first shot, and *BAM* my snipe range is cut in half, even though it will be thirty seconds or more before the mobs I aggroed can get close enough to shoot back. And with enough range, if you one-shot your target, the rest of the spawn usually won't aggro, just stand around wondering why Frank fell down until the second shot comes in. But because I fired, I have to wait for longer than the power recharge to be able to use Snipe the way I slotted it to be used. Another thing I could do was to cruise Peregrine Island, using Boost Range and Snipe to take down mobs, far enough up to be immune to return fire from anything but the Nemesis Comets and the Malta Gunslingers. With this change, I shoot once, and then get forced to drop into range of their return fire if I want to continue shooting. Make this an option that you can set on a character-by-character basis, perhaps, but I feel that the tradeoff of animation time for range is a gimp for insufficient utility. Having to work the tactical situation in a fight to give yourself enough time to get a snipe off in combat was part of what made a Blaster interesting to play.

The things that made me certain that his vision of the game were his 'balance' concept that "three villains should be an even fight for one hero" and his view of 'fun' in a game being throwing himself at the end boss over and over again, getting defeated sometimes twenty or thirty times, until he discovered the one trick that you had to use to defeat the boss -- and trying to get that implemented all through CoH. As if the 'trick' wasn't going to get out on the Net five minutes after someone beats them. Once he left, the big fights had things you had to overcome, but there were always several different ways to do it. Much more satisfying to take the Big Bad down differently than the 'stock' solution. And CoH offered so many different things to try.

I can see "I'm really close; can we clear this mission, so I ding before the next one and can get [power]?", exiting either at the ding or on clear, but doing it more than once feels like I'm imposing on the rest of the team. And I've laughed at the situation more than once when we cleared the mission, and I'm still a hair short of leveling, and see if I can hit up a few free-range mobs on the way to the next mission.

I fail to see how immobilizes converting knockback to knockdown breaks your tactics -- they're still held in place, and when hit with your AoE knockback power, they'll still be held in place, but they'll be getting dumped on their asses by the converted knockback, keeping them from shooting back at you.