srmalloy

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...

Some attacks have more KB than others; the base protection from the one enhancement is good, but I remember from the OG that it wasn't a universal protection; some mobs, like the Lost Swordsmen, could still dump you on your ass. Adding more KB protection mitigates that.

No, you're right; I'm misremembering another power. Burn as the PBAoE damage aura will be affected by Fury.

No matter how furry you are, your Burn will be the same. ;D But, seriously, I don't recall off the top of my head whether the pseudo-pet spawned by Burn inherits a Brute's current Fury state or gets the base damage. I want to say that it gets the base damage, because Fury is a state on the Brute, and pseudo-pets don't inherit other effects on the caster like Hasten, but I will bow to someone with a better knowledge in this case.

You're not being forced to grind a character to 50 to keep it, just log in and right back out periodically; the higher the character, the less often you need to do it. However, since the namechecker is obviously going to have to check character level and last login for potential duplicates, I would like to propose an addition: If someone does a name check that matches an existing character who is within a week of having their name go up for grabs, send an email to the global handle notifying them that the character name has been queried and is potentially at risk to be taken by another. Since all they need to do to protect it is to log in and out on the character, I don't think that this puts an onerous burden on a player even if they pick a popular name, leave the character at level 1, and don't log in on them.

Whether it's actually breathing fire or sending a cone of fire from the hand isn't an issue; I just wanted to verify that this was working as designed, and not an animation bug, like Archery seems to have.

Well, given that if you have two Battle Drones out when you're level 10, each of them will be level 9, and you ding to 11, each of the drones is still level 9 until you dismiss and resummon them, I can see why that would be -- the MM pets become separate mobs in the server when you summon them; anything you do to the power that summoned them isn't going to affect already-summoned pets.

The game supports Unicode in chat, but as I found when pasting a bit of character background, the forums will show the Unicode characters in the text entry window, but when they're saved to the forum database and redisplayed, they come back as the escaped Unicode characters. My supposition is that the forum code doesn't properly support Unicode, so it doesn't process the Unicode characters correctly. When I discovered that CoH supported Unicode back in 2004, I started making characters with ex-Soviet histories, looking up actual research institutions like the I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, making up Soviet superhero and supervillain group and individual names ['Narodnaya Armiya', 'Krasniye Orli', 'Krasnaya Ugroza', 'General Zima', etc.], research projects like the 'Polniy Kyborg' total-body replacement for radically-injured individuals and the 'Brigadyr' combat-direction robot program, and the like, but while I was able to put the Cyrillic in text areas like the character background, copying and pasting elsewhere only worked if the application that I was pasting into could handle Unicode. Other applications either turned the Unicode characters into '?' characters or showed the escaped Unicode.

It is apparently a change to address the problem of "Drop anchored debuff, Blaster doesn't notice anchor and snipes your anchor down at the start of the fight, debuff immediately drops and is unusable for the whole fight while recharging" problem. Now the anchored debuff stays on until the body despawns or you turn it off, so if someone drops your anchor at the start of the fight, you get the debuff for a bit of time after the anchor goes down.