srmalloy

Not to mention the -- not a requirement, but a strongly-held 'best practice' -- for the person organizing the MSR needing to make sure that all of their teams are 'double-stacked' with 50s, so that if a team leader disconnects, the rest of their team doesn't suddenly find themselves to be 14, because that's what level the second person on the team happens to be. When there's a gatekeeping level requirement -- i.e., for incarnate trials -- you don't need to worry about this, but even if there's a level minimum, you can suddenly find yourself facing +6 or higher opponents because the team leader disconnected, and the next person on the team isn't level-capped for the content.

Ghu, do not get me started on all of the ways that AI-driven text-to-speech manages to mangle narration. The stilted presentation, inability to reproduce conversational intonation, garbled pronunciation -- AI text-to-speech still stumbles badly with homographs, in many cases picking a single pronunciation regardless of grammatical clues to the correct pronunciation. Take, for example, 'present'. Is this something that has been sent ahead ("pre-sent" with a long first 'e'), the act of conveying information to one or more people ("present" with emphasis on the second syllable), the current time ("present" with emphasis on the first syllable), or a gift ("present" with no significant emphasis on either syllable)? Is 'close' referring to something that is near (unvoiced 's'), or something that is being shut (voiced 's')? Which of the three pronunciations of "slough" should be used? Not to mention that AI-driven text-to-speech is still horrible when it encounters words not in the lexicon it was trained on, particularly when the word is taken directly from a foreign language.

The target is just too dumb to notice your attack...

When you are in a league and the leader queues the league up to start (i.e., instanced MSR or an Itrial) , you get a timer countdown when the 'join the mission' window pops up showing how much time you have to accept or decline. After you accept, though, the timer disappears, so you don't know how long you have to wait until the AFK players get automatically punted. Could the countdown be modified so that it continues to be displayed after you accept, so you get an idea of how long you have to wait if someone is asleep at the switch?

This can happen with any pet, due to the sudden distance change when you use an 'elevator' — office and lab elevators or, as you found, a door between inside and outside of a multi-area map like you had. The pathing algorithm sends it to the door, but if you're already too far away for the 'follow thru the door/up the elevator' code to trigger, the pet will just stay there bouncing off the door. You have to wait for your pet to catch up before entering for it to come with you.

It is. For the generic 'blue tunnels' map blocks, that room has several levels of rocky floors ringing the outer walls. For the Council/5th maps, that room has three floors of pool basins. With each one, the additional geometry makes the room feel different, even though the the shape of the outer walls of the room are the same for both. Some of the matches between the Council/5th and blue tunnel map blocks are easy to see; others have enough visual clutter from the additions (whether Council structures or rock formations) to make them hard to match between the two sets.

The cake room is the pool room, just with different dressing. The blue caves and Council/5th bases share the same general tunnel geometry, just with different modifications added to them to make them visually distinct.

Given some of the things that are described in the lore for Praetoria, it makes me wonder whether making the entirety of Praetoria open-world PvP wouldn't be more accurate to represent the 'everyone for yourself' attitude of a lot of the residents. Watching the Responsibility Loyalists and Resistance Wardens trying to hold the moral high ground while the Power Loyalists and Resistance Crusaders are pushing their own agendas to the limit of what they can get away with. Unfortunately, that would likely depopulate Goldside even more than it already is.

It would be easier if the HC staff could figure out how to make everyone turn around when a helicopter is the mission 'door', so that when you enter the mission, you're running out of the back of the helicopter, not into it so that everyone behind you blocks you from leaving the helicopter. And the MM pets have been intangible for a while; it's the rest of your team jamming you up, not MM pets; they're just visual noise at that point.

What changed is that people learned to break LoS before coming back to the formation area, so that Hami would stop firing at them; his blasts have the range to reach out to the sides of the pit in any direction. Similarly, there have been times when someone's been stupid and grabbed aggro on Hami in the Hive, then flown back to the 'assembly rock', where Hami demonstrates that he can hit people at the rear of the rock area, and the only way to stop his fire is to break LoS by hiding behind a rock pillar.

At least it knows that it changed your weapon(so) when you set it back you don't get charged for it, but you're still stuck with the base tailor fee unless you back out of the screen completely. And it's annoying to miss that the change was made and commit the changes.

Something I discovered on a 'defeat all' mission that included that room is that there is an additional 'floor' at the bottom of the room very few people ever notice. When you enter the room, go to the left side and take the ramp down to the 'lower' level, then out onto the ramp leading down into that area with its four pools. Now step to the left off the ramp, turn around, and move under the ramp. There is a cross-shaped passageway between the pools under the walkway of the 'lower' levels, and I've had two missions where there has been a Council mob hiding down there that prevented mission completion until I dug them out and defeated them.

You also get the buff if you're standing outside the Dispersion Bubble VFX horizontally, too -- the range for the buff is larger than the VFX limit -- and the same occurs with the Destiny powers, so just "I'm above the bubble and get buffed, too, so that proves that it's a sphere" is an insufficient argument.

I haven't seen it happen recently, but I've participated in Hami raids in The Abyss 2 while another Hami raid was running in The Abyss 1, so it's definitely possible. More often, though, it's been done artificially after a "Hamikaze" style raid goes wrong, and the raid leader decides that they don't want to try powering Hami down after reforming everything, and opens The Abyss 2 to move the raid there and let the first instance of the zone reset itself -- which isn't the same thing.

If there's nothing to 'alter the shape of the sphere', then where do the values come from that cause some PBAoE power displays to show up as oblate sphereoids, like Dispersion Bubble: ...while others appear as true spheres? Clearly, there is data in the database to define different PBAoE effect shapes, and not all PBAoE effects are spheres.

They're all spheres? Do tell.

There's another option. Adapted from a macro someone posted to get around the issue of people piling up around the portal for the wedding missions, I created this: /macroimage "WheelofFortuneFortune" "LvOro" "enterdoor 259 670 -764 P" This creates an icon you can drag into whatever power bar slot you want, and like the use of the 'enterbasefrompasscode' command, only requires that you be near the departure portal to bring up the destination window; you don't have to actually click on the proper part of the portal.

Look at the way AoE effects are rendered when used by flying characters, so you can see the full limit of the effect. Some of them are spheres, and some are oblate sphereoids that look to be half as tall top-to-bottom as they are edge-to-edge horizontally. Barrier, for example, is a sphere, but Dispersion Bubble from the Force Field powerset is oblate. One of the perennial annoyances I encounter is in the runup to spanking Adamastor, where I'll often see someone with a flying character fire off their Destiny power, and you can see that it never reaches the ground, so it doesn't benefit anyone there but themselves.

You're thinking of the room at the end of the Moonfire TF, which was rethemed by stripping out the mech and gantry to use for the Trapdoor mission in Mender Ramiel's arc. The Arachnos reactor room is an enormous hollow space where you enter about halfway up one wall on a walkway along the wall; it has some (railing-free, so falling risk) ramps going to higher levels, and (IIRC) elevator shafts that take you do the bottom, where there are a number of reactor pods in a pool of some disgusting liquid, and it's big enough to hit the render distance limit from top to bottom, and exceeds the limit of range-boosted attacks from one side to the other. It's huge, mostly empty, and if you're unlucky enough to get it in a 'defeat all' map, you'll spend more time running around trying to find everything there than you would in the Arachnos training facility room cluster.

I had a similar conversation with Positron at one of the Meet'n'Greets at the San Diego Comic-Con, where I mentioned Re-Volt, a 3rd-person RC toy car racing game that had a 'user track generation' mode where you could place predefined track blocks to create a race track, and wondered if it would be possible to do the same sort of thing with the map blocks in CoH for designing custom maps for AE. He said that the map creation interface wasn't robust enough for that, and that it would take a really large amount of work to make an editor bulletproof enough to give to the users for making maps. Aligning adjacent blocks was a big issue -- on the yellow office maps released with CoV, you would (and, rarely, still do) run into cases where a corridor ends in a black wall, which you can pass through and find yourself in the continuation of the corridor, and turn around to look back and see the corridor you came from; this is caused by a tiny misalignment of the map blocks causing the rendering engine to not see the blocks as joined, so it draws a black wall instead of rendering the next block. However, doing a uniform scaling (and translation) of the pieces making up the existing tunnel maps should keep the relative positions of all the joints the same, so it shouldn't break something. It would still be a significant amount of work, but less than throwing them out and reconstructing everything.

Even something as simple as going back and upscaling all of the tunnel geometry by 25% in each dimension would make a significant improvement in the navigability of the caves. The concern I have is how it would spill over elsewhere, since the Council/5th Column base maps use the same geometry dressed differently -- I don't know if they actually use the same internal tileset with different colors and greeblies, or have their own tileset; if they use the same tileset, it would break all the Council/5th maps or generate scaling issues with the greeblies.

I always craft a Grant Invisibility buff at an empowerment station before running that, and I don't seem to have a problem with drawing unwanted aggro. Are you remembering to turn off any aggro auras before you make the run? I made that mistake once. Well, twice...

Particularly since, while the signature weapon of the musketeers was the musket, its long reload time (and the easy interruptibility of the reloading process, an aspect not noted anywhere in the original suggestion) and increasing inaccuracy as range increased made its use impractical for more than setpiece battles, with their primary weapon being the rapier or epee. As such, the addition of another mixed ranged/melee MM set that requires a completely new set of animations that occurs, unlike other powers, during the power recharge time, doesn't seem to me to add much to the diversity of MM primaries.

In the tailor window, selecting Pool/Epic and the Sorcery pool, then selecting Mystic Flight, shows your character in the 'idle standing' animation, not the 'stationary in flight' animation that it used to display. The visual effects still animate around the character; only the character pose is affected.

There's another 'too obscure for the devs to take notice of' geometry bug that goes back to Live. This one is in the last room of the mission to defeat Frostfire. If you go into the room to your right, if you move around carefully, you can see phantom building structure -- a beam and pillar, both of which are insubstantial and fade out before reaching the wall/floor. Since it doesn't affect game play at all, and is invisible unless you're at the right angle in the room, they probably decided it wasn't worth the time to fix.