srmalloy

Given that, as one of the projects I worked on in my previous position was an import/export module for multi-layered data sets that would let you export a dataset and all of its supporting records, transfer them to a new system, import it all into temporary tables, then go through the old system to see if the supporting records were already there, and if so, go through the imported dataset and update its pointers to point to the existing supporting records, remove the duplicate records from the temporary tables, then move the remainder of the records into the main database, updating those pointers because the pointers to the main tables will change from the pointers in the temporary tables, I'm intimately familiar with how to do it right. A brute-force solution is neither clean nor efficient; its only virtue is that it works. And it's all just pointers; sweeping a database to update pointers is comparatively simple to write, compared to going through the spaghetti code that eight years of development left CoH as to 'fix' something that was baked into the code before launch. Doing the set-duplication process has the sole advantage of being able to be done in a short time, compared to the effort involved in digging into the core server code to allow secondary selection, which is likely to be a long time coming.

It would probably be annoying to do, and create some confusion in the process until people got used to it, but ultimately, there is a simple, and brute-force, solution to the problem that shouldn't require major code changes. Double the number of secondary power sets -- the 'standard' powerset as it is now, and an 'inverted' powerset with the tier 1 and tier 2 powers swapped. When you're creating a character, if you'd rather have the original tier 2 power as your first choice for your secondary, you pick the 'swapped' version.

In the code that writes out your character's build when you use the /buildsave command, the tier 4 Ice Manipulation (Blaster) power is listed as "Chilling Embrace"; I understand this was changed for i24? I haven't tried /buildsave with my Ice Armor Sentinel, so I don't know whether the same 'old power name' appears there. Aside from the 'wait, what?' moment when I saw the power that I didn't remember taking, and which wasn't in either my enhancement management screen or my Mid's build for the character, it has zero effect on the game, so it doesn't need to be fixed any time soon, just tossed into the 'when we get time' pile.

IIRC, all of the Prestige Enhancements had their tooltips broken that way when Homecoming went public. It's just a text error, the enhancement works correctly.

The buff pets you get from the P2W vendor are also not affected by any non-AoE (Shadow Fall, Steamy Mist, Group Invisibility, etc.) stealth powers, and can also pull aggro to you; this isn't as much of a problem if you have an actual invisibility power active, not just stealth, but it's still annoying.

And even with the rework, Faultline is still not particularly Super Speed friendly.

With a name like "Lahar", I'd expect the power effects to be similar to Energy Blast's 'Energy Torrent' -- a high-speed torrent of water and pyroclastic material sweeping people off their feet.

Taking them out of the fight with a spray of high-velocity, copper-jacketed, armor-piercing arrest warrants. Yes.

I think it's in the order it is because of the associated levels of mobs around the tram increasing as you move down the list -- AP, then KR, then south Steel, then north Steel, north Skyway and south Skyway), Talos Island, north IP, south IP, FF, and Bricks. You wouldn't leave KR at 10-12 to do missions in Steel and head for the north tram, would you?

This was something Positron confirmed back on live during a period when the oil slick was bugged and would not reliably ignite. An Oil Slick is a pseudo-pet that (on live) would be defeated by any energy or fire attack; when it was defeated, it spawned a Fire pseudo-pet in its place.

Precisely this. The Blaster damage buff from Defiance is guaranteed; the damage buff from Scourge is RNG-dependent. I don't agree that Scourge on a minion is irrelevant; it speeds up taking them down, but it's not something you can count on, and generally saves you no more than one attack. I've had Scourge trigger on mobs just under 50%, and fail to trigger on mobs with just a sliver of health left. If the RNG likes you, and triggers Scourge more often than the raw chance would suggest, then a Corruptor can outdamage a Blaster; however, if you look at the average damage that a Corruptor does over a large number of targets at a random amount of health, their average damage factor is roughly 0.98; when you factor in that mobs you encounter will start at 100% health, and typically spend considerably less time below 50% than above it, that number goes down. Luminara is correct that this tips the other way to a greater or lesser degree once you step up from minions -- facing Reichsmann in the Dr. Kahn Task Force, for example, with his 250,000 HP, he's going to be under 50% for a lot longer than a minion, allowing your Scourge more chances to trigger. But, again, it's wholly dependent on the RNG cooperating; it's entirely possible to fight a boss, EB, or AV into the ground and never once have Scourge trigger. Part of what makes a Corruptor more fun, I think, is that its buff is visual. Blasters just do more damage with their attacks; you don't see anything special. Scrappers have the 'Critical Hit' floaty text when their inherent goes off, but that's almost always a single target. Beam Rifle, if you got a good target in a cluster, can give you a bunch of 'Disintegration Spread' floaties. But there's nothing that gives you a warm feeling deep down better than watching a forest of 'Scourge' floaties so densely packed you can't read them from a well-placed DoT AoE, even if it's just a low-damage power like Rain of Fire.

Not cyborg arms, but I created a character who'd been dumped into Paragon through an unstable portal from a world that had developed similarly to the world of Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos or Harry Turtledove's The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, where magic was the technology, naming him 'Machinator Magicus', having recalled the occupation of a character in Kirk Mitchell's novel Cry Republic (third in an alternate-history series where Rome never fell, but stagnated) -- a 'machinator', what we would call an engineer. This let me justify having what was very loosely a magical version of Iron Man (albeit with different abilities).

I can see giving full or close to full experience, because it's a fully-immersive experience giving all the sensory feedback of actually fighting the opponents in the AE mission, but since it was rolled out I've held the same opinion as you regarding other rewards -- all you get are tickets. Having leaderboards and badges for mission performance would make for additional incentives. And I think it would be entertaining to have the AE missions be streamed for the city's residents to view, with appropriate NPC commentary added, things like how well or poorly a character did on a recent mission, or (for the characters that dive into the AE building immediately on creation and don't come out for tens of levels, comments like "XXX is awesome in the AE replays; just think of what they could do if they came out and actually fought crime!" (blueside) or "I'm glad XXX spends all their time in AE missions; they'd be terrifying if they were out making a name for themselves." (redside).

Sometimes you can create odd 'concept' justifications. I have a Fire/Rad Sentinel, Termoyaderniy ('Thermonuclear' in Russian); her background had her uncontrollably emitting high-energy plasma and radiation, brought under control through technological assistance. She flies using rocket boots, but they're properly jets, not rockets; she's learned to vent plasma into the the 'combustion' chambers of the boots, superheating the air inside, producing thrust.

It was a Science origin that got you sent out after Vahzilok -- Jonathan St. John Smythe in the S.E.R.A.P.H. office in City Hall, your first mission being 'Talk to Iris Parker about the zombie attacks', and he would forward you to Henry Peter Wong. The Mutation contact would send you up against Council/5th Column. I gave up playing Science origin characters after getting bitten by that a couple times.

Once I get my Bots/Dark MM up to 26, I need to resurrect the cascading exchange I had created based on something I had read years ago about how certain Federation insults don't translate into Klingonaase: Assault bot: <em taunt> "Твоя мать носит солдатскую обувь!" ('Your mother wears the footgear of a soldier!') Protector bot 1: <em huh> "Это должно быть оскорблением?" ('That's supposed to be an insult?') Battle drone 1: <em research> "Вот что говорит разговорник." ('That's what the phrasebook says.') Battle drone 2: <em yatayata> "Я никогда не пойму людей." ('I am never going to understand humans.')

And I've never been clear on why AE missions award inf at all. Considering that the in-game explanation for inf as you're being able to get things from other people because of a) their respect for your reputation (blueside influence), b) fear of your reputation and what you might do to them if they cross you (redside infamy), or c) the leverage that you've got on them (goldside information), I fail to see what crawling up your own electronic navel in the AE building does for your reputation out in the real world. It's effectively working your skill with your abilities, so it's certainly a source of experience, and AE can choose to award tickets to claim for 'real' world rewards for your performance in AE missions, the public doesn't care how many electronic analogues of real-world threats you've defeated, it's what you do out in the 'real' world that they respect.

It's not relevant to the game per se, but this reminds me of a comment made by a blimp pilot: "I don't care how long you've been flying; you'll never see an airplane stop just to take a better look at the sharks." With SS or SJ or TP, you have to end somewhere; SS leaves you down in the streets, and you have to plan with SJ or TP to stop on an empty rooftop. But with Fly, you just zip straight up and stop, and aside from a few specific mob types you can go idle for a drink, or to answer the door, or to the bathroom, secure in the knowledge that you're out of range of interruptions. And it gives you enormously more leisure to frame screenshots of a scene you find particularly noteworthy. Or Echo:Faultline. Even the revamped Faultline can still be ugly.

You're missing the point -- the change wouldn't change Regen's vulnerability to a big alpha. You still have to survive the hit for Instant Healing to kick in and remove part of that hit. Taking the damage off the front before it affects the character, would require a much more sweeping rebalance to the other powers.

Regen isn't 'better' than either Def- or Res-based sets; that it was seen as superior is due, I believe, to Regen characters finishing battles at 100% health. But I remember with a Katana/Regen scrapper, back before the rework to Regen, learning to judge where the line was between running out of HP faster than I ran out of enemies and being able to get on top of the incoming damage. You don't learn that judgement, or misjudge the incoming damage rate, and you're kissing pavement. It took some work to be able to keep Instant Healing running, but that was part of virtually every Regen build; the rework, filling the set with click regeneration, took away the 'fire and forget' aspect that the set had (which Willpower took over). A Regen character will typically go down in the first quarter of a fight, and a typical team's healing doesn't contribute much to their survival, because it's usually not a significant addittion to their own healing rate. For a Def- or Res-based powerset, damage is coming in slow enough that healing will cover enough of the incoming damage to keep those characters standing. I did some stochastic analysis of the three types of powersets when it was still the old powerset, and Regen was much more vulnerable to increased incoming damage or increased time-to-defeat. Interestingly, it also proved what has become an axiom for builds -- you need a mix of regen, defense, and resistance for maximum survivability. It didn't take a lot of defense and resistance to significantly improve a Regen character, but as you point out, Regen didn't have many options in that regard.

The problem with Regen is, in my opinion, a matter of perception. In a really tough fight, the Def and Res powersets come out seriously injured and need to rest; the Regen character is at 100% health. This is because Regen heals the damage that the character takes over and over and over again until it's gone -- fast enough to keep the character alive at the start of the fight, when all the enemies are attacking, but at the end of the fight, even if all the surviving enemies hit every time, they're doing less damage than the character's regen rate. A character whose protection is mainly Res-based is resistant to a big alpha, but they're going to get nickle-and-dimed over time, each hit building up damage taken. A character relying on Def-based protection is vulnerable to the lucky hit; they'll avoid most damage by not being hit, but take damage in big chunks when a hit does land. Both of these will graph out as a more-or-less steady decline in HP as a fight goes on. Regen, on the other hand, nose-dives precipitously at the start of a fight, their regen rate unable to keep up with the incoming damage until they thin the pack, cutting the incoming damage first to slow their HP decline, and then to pull ahead of the incoming damage. Once they're outhealing the incoming damage, they are effectively unkillable, and will be at or close to 100% HP at the end of the fight. But people don't see that the Regen character is down at 25% HP or less a minute into the fight; they just see them jump into a huge spawn, and come out looking untouched. IF you break apart the powerset healing from the character's base healing, Def- and Res- based defenses get one shot at incoming damage -- Def tries to make the attack miss completely, and Res tries to reduce the amount that did it. Regen, on the other hand, chips away at the incoming damage over and over and over again; it's an advantage the other types of defenses don't get. An idea I had back well before shutdown was that Instant Healing was misdefined as a power. Instead of just being a big crank to your healing rate, it should literally be instant healing -- you take damage from an attack, then after a second or two, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals back. This essentially makes all incoming damage act similarly to the way Spectral Wounds does -- you take all the damage from the attack, and if you're still alive when the illusion fades, part of it disappears. This would let Instant Healing be returned to being a toggle, and because it applies once against each incoming attack, it can be balanced against Def- and Res-based defenses. And at that point, its End cost could be reduced to something similar to the other defenses, instead of the huge end cost of the original toggle, or the intermittently-available click power it was turned into after the devs saw that people were willing to build Regen characters around being able to support the End cost of the IH toggle running continuously.

My Controllers all make extensive use of the Nemesis Staff and Blackwand prestige powers, and somewhat lesser use of Sands of Mu, regardless of their powersets; they're all significant additional DPS.

I am reminded of one of the narrator voiceovers from Dave Sim's comic "Cerebus the Aardvark" in the Palnu Trilogy -- "When the bureaucrat speaks, the sound of snoring soon fills the room."

That would be reasonable, but when I'm deciding where to park a character, I'll pull up the day job badge list, see what day jobs are left incomplete, and then travel to the day job location and log out. With universities, unless I'm closer to another one, the Kallisti Wharf location is my go-to choice, and with the minute or so it takes me to get there and the tram connection, I should have run down any recent-combat countdown.

It’s a cave entrance along the SE corner of the lake W of City Hall.