srmalloy

Full Auto comes into its own with the Energy Manipulation secondary, where Boost Range gives you the ability to stand off far enough that the cone spreads to a useful width.

Not Devices Blasters. Web Grenade doesn't deal damage so there's no point slotting it for that although it's still worth slotting up a bit for accuracy and immobilize duration. Or Energy Manipulation's Power Thrust, which is perfectly fine as a "Get the hell away from me!" power with just an Accuracy in its base slot. Of course, slotting it to max the KB boost and going to Atlas Park for some Hellion Golf is always a laugh.

How it would it affect you if you are trying to exit a mission? Yes; this is primarily for cases where you're leaving an instance and going to a zone map. Ideally, this would be a flag under Options, something like "Auto-Select Single Open Zone", that would control whether you would automatically be sent to a specific zone instance if it was the only one in the list that wasn't full, then you could have it both ways -- turn it off for trying to get into a mothership raid, or Hami raid, or a specific AP instance for a CC, and flip it on for mission running if you don't want to be bothered with an exit menu.

One of the things I have noticed when exiting missions, particularly in Atlas Park, is that you'll get a "choice of zones" pop up listing, say, AP1, AP2, and AP3 -- but AP 1 and 2 are both full, leaving AP3 as your only choice -- but you still have to click on the one non-full zone instance. It's a minor QoL thing, but if, when you hit the "exit" button after completing a mission -- or, indeed, anywhere you get a prompt to select which instance of a single zone you want to enter -- if the list of instances only has one that you can enter, the others being full, you automatically enter the open zone instead of getting a list of all the instances of the zone that you have to pick from

Died on me right as I was jumping into the sewer entrance, leaving me on a loading screen. The team got a little scrambled as we came back out of order, putting us at a lower level to start.

"Just a temp thing until it calmed down." Well, as you've observed, it hasn't calmed down, leaving the reason for having the XP reduction for AE missions fully as applicable as it was when it was applied. While it's not a reason to be deprecating AE grinding in and of itself, I think that one of the reasons the AE grind is so attractive to people (beyond the 'get my recreated character to 50 ASAP so I can have it back' group) is that, for many MMOs, the game doesn't really start until you hit level cap -- the missions are just there for you to grind XP to max level. And many of us remember the stories we leveled through in the game, and some of them likely look at AE grinding as throwing out the majority of the game world in the single-minded pursuit of endgame -- that it's more important to get to level cap than to enjoy the trip getting there. For myself, if you want to dive into a virtual combat simulator inside a virtual combat simulator and ignore the stories, go to town -- but the GMs run the server the way they want, and if they want to discourage your "right" to run huge ambush farms that degrade the game for hundreds of people for every one of you running the farm, that's their prerogative.

It would be annoying to do, but the processing is straightforward. Doing it would require taking the server down to ensure that no costumes get created or changed during the changeover. You would need to temporarily have two sets of costume piece lists for each location and a duplicate of the character database, then sort the second list, and make a table of old-to-new mappings. Once this was done, the servers would be taken down, the character database copied, and each character would be called up, run through the mapping tables to reassign the costume piece IDs, and then saved into the copied character database. Once all of the characters had their costumes rebuilt, the copied data would be restored to the server along with the new, sorted, costume piece lists. However, even though I concede the convenience of having the costume pieces ordered consistently, I'm not sure that doing this would be a good thing unless it could be propagated to all the free-range servers to preserve consistency. And even then it may be more trouble than it's worth.

Yes, let's go all the way back to the way pets were originally, where you could double and occasionally triple-stack your pets... and they all die and have to be resummoned every time you go through a door or up an elevator. If you're going to hand controllers back a big buff like that, put back the penalty associated with it.

One of the things I've noticed since Homecoming brought Paragon City back is the piles of bodies at the tram stations. It doesn't affect gameplay, but I think it would would be less disturbing if Mastermind pets went through their "dismiss" animation when the Mastermind gets into the tram than simply running to the tram door and falling over dead. I don't know if people think the additional visual clutter of the dismiss animation is better than dead MM pets lying in front of the tram door. Thoughts?

If I recall the changes the devs had to make to prevent pets from spazzing out under Speed Boost, it still increases your pets' movement, but the -recharge, as you describe, has no effect on their abilities. I'd prefer to see whatever caused them to wig out get fixed, so we could get the full benefit from it, but without knowing how much attention Paragon Studios gave it, I have no idea how intractable a problem it was.

Wes Schnabel in Steel Canyon will give you a mission that shows up in your mission list as "Defeat Archon Archon Roget and his guards".

No. Pet powers are intended to inherit enhancements and some (mostly pseudo pets) also inherit buffs. The exception is recharge which pets don't inherit due to that causing AI issues. If I remember the issue correctly, it wasn't recharge slotted in the pet power that was the problem, but the various recharg-boosting buffs applied to the pets after summoning. I remember that Fire Imps on two or more Speed Boost applications were scary. Like hummingbirds on crack.

I'm going to have to either find or recreate the set of bind files I made for my Bots/Dark MM that ran a dialog among the bits -- the Assault Bot does the taunt emote and says "Your mother wears the footgear of a soldier!", then one of the Battle Drones double-takes and says "That's supposed to be an _insult_?", after which another Battle Drone does the Research emote, then says "That's what the phrasebook says.", then one of the Protector Bots finishes the sequence by doing the shrug emote and saying "I will _never_ understand organics."

I can't help you with the zone as a whole, but Back Alley Brawler is still a trainer, in Atlas Park over in the southwest corner, in the traffic circle just north of the southernmost warehouse in the Argosy Industrial area.

I've enjoyed my DB/WP Scrapper before the Snap enough that I recreated her here, suffering through the levels of incomplete combos. Willpower is the mostly-fire-and-forget secondary that Regen used to be before Instant Healing was made a click power, without the nasty slotting constraints that making IH sustainable required.

It is always 10% of the sale price, with your listing fee credited against it. Say you list an item for 100; the listing fee is 5. If it sells for 1000, the service fee is 100, of which 5 is already paid by your listing fee, so you would receive 905. Yes, and? It's been this way since the AH was instituted; one of the purposes of the fee is to be an Inf suck. Also unlike most other MMOs, you can leave an item listed in the AH forever, subject to the number of AH slots you have. The listing fee is a sunk cost -- that you lose this fee if you take an unsold item back is a feature to discourage people from listing items for outrageous prices in the hope that someone will eventually be desperate enough to pay what you're asking. And with other ways to get the rarest recipes than random drops, someone seeing unmet demand can turn merits into a recipe and list it to undercut you.

This is true only for items that don't go into the 'general pool' as it exists now, and then only if there are a small number of bidders. Remember that, for salvage, the AH is like a Star Trek replicator -- you put in rare salvage A, and someone can buy it as rare salvage B. If there are, say, 1500 people bidding on various rare salvage items, the likelihood that someone with a bid of 100 is going to get your item is miniscule -- and, in fact, listing low helps the low-level character, because the AH sells the lowest-listing item to the highest bidder.

Two doubles is 1.3 of each, three triples is 1.5 of each, four quads (are there four different sets in a set type with the same quad? I don't think so, but...) is ~1.7 of each. Three doubles is a little less than two of each (1.825), four triples is two of each. This last is fairly easy to do with damage sets, giving you six IOs of improvement in four slots.

Although it may not kick in immediately; you'll get your interval of complete defense, but if they've already started their attack when you hit them with the knockback/down, the attack will still go off if it's not a Snipe or other interruptible power. You'll just get it after they shoot.

It's deep overkill for the purpose, but back before the Snap I had a setup with a PERL script that read in a text file containing a list of insults on startup, then looped every (IIRC) five seconds to select a random insult, then write a file with a bind to say the insult, do a taunt, then load the file again. Then I /binloadfile the file once to 'prime' the taunt, and each time I hit the bind key, the character would deliver the insult, taunt, then reload the bind with a different insult. With about a hundred insults in the file, it was unlikely to repeat insults on consecutive taunts.

You don't get the full benefit for reducing the number of slots you need in a power at lower levels; that's not to say that it has no benefits, only that you can do better with higher-level enhancements. this page describes frankenslotting a Hold with six level-30 set IOs; doing the same thing with level-50 versions could get you the same result with one fewer slot. As many tweaked builds are tight on slots, being able to pare a slot out of one power to use in another.

Two-aspect IOs give 5/8 the bonus of a same-level single IO, three-aspect IOs give 1/2,and the few four-aspect IOs give 43.75%. See this page for the percentage values for any given level. For more information on frankenslotting, look here.

Phantom Army is invulnerable; unless it's been changed, Phantasm can be damaged like all the other Controller level-32 pets.

Frankenslotting doesn't really pay off at the lower levels, because you can't hit the ED limits as easily. Yes, two Dam/Acc IOs from two different damage sets will give you a better improvement than one Dam and one Acc common IO, which beats the same two as SOs, but this isn't where frankenslotting shines. At level 50, a single-aspect IO in group A is 42.4% bonus; a three-aspect set IO will give you 50% base in each bonus, so if you can slot four different level 50 Dam/Acc/End set IOs, they will give you the effect of having two each Dam, Acc, and End IOs -- six slots worth of bonus that only uses four slots. And it stays just under the point at which ED starts grinding the boost down. If you do the same slotting with 35s, you'll be starting with a lower value for the base improvement, so you'll get around 70% bonus instead of 84.8%. The other use of frankenslotting is to stack specific set bonuses -- for example, putting two Cleaving Blow and two Armageddon into Burn to get the two-piece Recovery bonus from each set. Sometimes you can do both, but more often you'll need to pick one or the other -- optimized enhancement percentages or neatly stacked set bonuses -- and accept that you can't get a 'perfect' build.

Oh, lord, the number of times I embarrassed myself doing that when I started the game back in 2004 before I got it pounded into my head...