srmalloy

It's the same constraints; what makes them different is that they despawn immediately upon defeat, whereas most 'animate' mobs lie around as a body for a bit before the police teleporters lock onto them and drag them off to the Zig.

What I've been doing is to start with the five prestige enhancements for attacks, then use ten merits from what I get for exploring Atlas Park, Echo:Galaxy City, and Echo:Atlas Park to buy converters, which I dump into the auction house. With that for funding, I'll equip with level 15 IOs at 12, making more 15s until I hit 22, where I'll burn the level-20 respec to get all of them out and dump them into SG storage, replacing them with level 25 IOs, then stay with those while I level, picking up attuned set IOs as I can, then buying unslotters to pull out IOs and replace them with the sets when I get enough to fill out a power as my plan has it slotted, dumping the 25s back into SG storage. Then, as subsequent characters level up, they can hit SG storage for their 15s and (eventually) 25s, lowering the upgrade costs, with an ongoing cascade of common IOs to newer characters.

How about just going to either BAB or the Icon tailor (just W of the hospital) to make extended costume changes? Yes, you get six costume slots right off the bat, but you don't have to set them all up right away. Your costume and power customization is free before level 10; you should be able to make it to either one of those to set up your other costume slots, rather than bunching up around Ms. Liberty.

Unfortunately, I suspect that it would wind up increasing AE use, because of its ability to sidestep the 'effort' of leveling. Create a character with whatever the current 'meta' is for farming, pump it to 50 via AE. Now respec it to save out the enhancements, then take the inf that you built up farming to 50, buy a reroll token, and use it to create a character with an AT/powersets that don't lend themselves to quick leveling -- i.e., controllers/defenders. It basically allows you to use an easily-leveled build to sub for the work of leveling one that's harder to get to 50. And I'll take it as read that this isn't how you intended it to be used, but like AE itself, as soon as you hand an 'easy button' to players, it's going to get used that way, no matter how little you intended it.

If that's to be done, then the new maps for the updated zones should be reworked to use the same iconography as the originals. The badge and plaque markers are bigger and fuzzier on the new maps.

I had the name floating around for a while, and I finally decided to make the character. An AR/EM Blaster named Rolande; initial costume baggy jeans, motorcycle boots, vest, wife-beater tee, green skin, no head, and a submachine gun for his weapon. Rolande, the headless Trollkin gunner...

Well... unless the runner is your AoE debuff anchor, and you're tied up in the fight and don't notice your anchor's run off until the four spawns he ran through show up and want to argue. Some of those were epic in the sudden addition of aggro.

Just out of curiosity, you have picked up all the plaques in Echo: Galaxy City, not just the plaques in the 'live' zones?

What? The game doesn't record what level you assign slots at -- had that data been available, it would have been reflected in the Sentinel+ extractor that archived characters out of Live before the shutdown. From looking at combat attribute data on live, if you had a power you picked at level 4 that you assigned slots to at level 50, it had those slots even if you exemped down to 4.

I've generally found Council only on the street just north of the university in Steel, with about an 90/10 bias toward the 5th Column in the spawns north of there, except for the "five 5th Column beating up one Council" spawns. Since all of this was 5th Column before the addition of the Council, as were the missions we got handed, would it be possible to make these missions "defeat N Council or 5th Column" rather than just defeat Council?

This is why the Homecoming Group shuts down the donation page when they reach their monthly cost goal. Whether there are two hundred or two hundred thousand players, what's the cost/benefit tradeoff for them to sue a group that has no more resources than what's needed to keep the servers running for another month?

The only issue I have with Pine's running at the same time as CoH is that I have a display issue with the respec helper window, and have to drag it a bit to get it to display the window content, rather than just a black expanse. Minor enough and easy to deal with.

One of the reasons why I used to pick Energy Manipulation as a secondary for Blasters is that the automatic tier 1 power was a "get away from me" ability that was useful for reestablishing range when a mob ran up into melee distance,as well as being soft CC that rendered the mob 'inactive' while it got back up. This proposal would kick half of the benefit into the ashcan. It would also make the strategic choice of whether or not to slot a KB->KD IO into powers pointless, with probably thousands of characters needing to alter their builds to reallocate the slots devoted to no-longer-needed IOs. And it changes the dynamics of several powersets -- look at Storm, for example, when Hurricane just flings mobs into the air. Making it selectable through Null the Gull is going to be problematic, as people will want different powers to have different settings -- keeping Power Thrust or Gale as a knockback, while changing Hurricane to knock-up; this would make implementation significantly more complicated.

The run in Kings Row is about as safe -- you head due west from the tram, crossing the road; there's an empty lot with a rock formation toward the back in front of you. If there are Clockwork in the lot, jump over the fence to its north and use it to mask you from them. At the end of the lot, there's a trench; if you jumped over the fence, jump diagonally to it, because there are often Clockwork on the north side of the fence from it. Run west and cross the next road; there's another empty lot, which may have a spawn of Skulls near the building to the north; they're easy to go around. On the west side of the lot is a chain-link fence you jump over, and right there is a truck with its lights on. Go around to its back, and you'll see Pocket D flyers on the ground. Click on the back of the truck, and you'll be taken to Pocket D. Barring any detours to skate Clockwork, it's a dead straight line west from the tram.

It’s not the "DFB group lfm, pst" messages that seem to be the most obtrusive in the LFG channel, it's when I see four or five "lf DFB team" messages after the message about the DFB team looking for more people. The player trying to fill their team is making an active effort, but the 'lf team' messages popping up afterwards feel like "I can't be bothered to read the channel and make an effort to find a group or start one; find me and invite me". That said, I don't say anything in game about it; raising a stink over it is just going to make the game less enjoyable for everyone. Everyone probably has something other players do that they're unhappy with, but it's not worth trying to shoehorn them into your preferences.

Elecom EX-G M-XT3UR trackball. I've used trackballs with my computers since before I started playing CoH. Originally Logitech Trackman, then Trackman Marble, and then Logitech went wireless or to different ergonomics that didn't feel right, so I investigated a couple of different varieties, and that's what I wound up with.

Don't diss the Shoulders of Doom... ;D

Having seen the dedication that the Paragon Studios staff brought to the game, I was certain that there would have been at least one of the developers who had a full copy of the server and client code, as a high-paranoia off-site backup if nothing more, and that the reappearance of CoH as rogue servers was just a matter of time. And it turns out that my expectations were too low, and sub rosa servers had been running for years. None of which could dampen my mood when the Homecoming people brought servers out in public... and it's been sucking up as much or more time than it did back in 2012.

The 'stay' command doesn't always 'take', particularly when you get a runner. I've has battle droids in 'stay' mode happily take off after a runner and keep chasing it until explicitly called back or defeating the runner.

The 10-20 IO set Energy Manipulator set has a recipe "Energy Manipulator: Chance to Disorient". This cannot be found anywhere under the crafted enhancements; instead, there is an "Energy Manipulator: Chance to Stun" enhancement. The name should be the same for the recipe and the IO it creates.

I don't remember seeing one in Outbreak, but there's one in the Galaxy City tutorial for heroes about ten feet away from the Longbow Heavy you train at before you jump past them to the second part.

Related to this, when you are in the costume editor, and you are editing your weapons for either Dual Blades or Dual Pistols, and you zoom in, your character assumes a pose with their arms crossed upward at an angle holding their weapons. Is there an emote that assumes this pose? The 'villain 2' isn't right for that. The only match I remember from in game was the vampyri in the regen chambers that would get released in some of the later missions redside on live.

Not just radio and paper missions - the number of doors in any zone that are used for missions is a small fraction of the doors in the zone. Sometimes it gets ridiculous -- back on live, I was part of a Citadel TF where the first three missions were to the exact same cave entrance; by the third mission, we were all joking about the Fifth Column ninja redecorating team that was running in behind us to set up a whole new base the moment our backs were turned. Starting a new character, I generally pick up missions from the old Magic, Tech, and Mutation contacts in City Hall;half the time, the 'defeat all gang members' mission is the same door as the 'defeat all Clockwork' mission -- the office building just north of the west side of Prometheus Park. When it's not, it's the east-side door of the brownstone just north of where Matthew Habashy's 'Defeat Five Hellions' mission is -- and the other starting mission, defeating the Council in the warehouse, is the door on the south side of that same brownstone. The follow-on mission from the first Clockwork mission is usually the east door of that brownstone, and the follow-on for the Council mission is virtually always the back door of the brick building just east of the south end of Argosy Industrial. The 'defeat gang members at party' mission you get if sent to Jose Brogan right off will be either thessouth door of the business just northeast of the AE building or the front door of the building north of that one past the park and down the concrete slope. The problem doesn't go away as you level; you keep getting sent back to the same doors over and over again. Given the hyperdimensional nature of Paragon City (come on; how many office or warehouse maps have you seen that would fit inside the walls of the building they're in without being folded through higher dimensions?), there's no real reason not to pick a door completely randomly from all the doors that don't have a dedicated interior (stores, universities, police stations, tailors, etc.).

I think Cutting Beam in the Beam Rifle set is a 120° cone (and you get such a nice visual demonstration of the arc when you fire); it's certainly the widest cone I've seen in the game.

The combat attributes window shows correct numbers, so it appears to be something broken in how the numbers are being calculated for display, but if you right-click the 'Frequent Commuter' day job icon in your buff list, it shows running and jumping speed as +2.15 mph, but flight speed as -5.01 mph. Since this appears to be an error only in the tooltip, not in how it modifies your actual movement, stick this way down on the list of bugs to fix.