srmalloy

Well, barring imports from other MMOs whose experience from those games is that the high-end content assumes that you're min-maxed to get the last 0.0008% possible performance out of your character, and will kick you if you don't meet their standards of how you should be having fun. If they're that fixated on having the One True Build™, then there are better places to spend your time than arguing about why you don't have a particular power slotted a particular way.

None of the contacts are there, and BAB is missing from his pedestal; the Freedom Corps building is an empty shell. Which is strange, because if you go to Echo: Atlas Park, Ms. Liberty is in her normal spot on her pedestal, and the origin contacts are down in City Hall where they should be (and I've even gotten introduced to new contacts by them on occasion). So why is everyone missing from Echo: Galaxy City.

I'd + this if I didn't think that it would have an effect on CCs (you'd get a BIG cry about it). Costume contests. Although putting power suppression in, say, a 40'-50' radius around Ms. Liberty, rather than Atlas Plaza as a whole (what ever radius would not quite reach the plinth the Atlas statue is on, so CCs up on the plinth are good) would be sufficient. Although the idea of turning off Ms. Liberty's function as a costume editor, so people would spread out to BAB and Icon, is a good one. CC's = costume changes? I wouldn't think we would dampen that as they are a power...

*sigh* Once more for emphasis. Except for costume pieces specifically hard-coded to work around it, when you pick a costume piece, you are defining the costume for one side of your body; this is mirrored by the game engine to the other side of your body. Every costume piece that's not side-to-side symmetrical has code in the game client defining it that way, and adding more is not just an art issue, it's a programming issue. I see the "asymmetrical costume pieces" suggestions come up again and again, and it seems no one looks to see if it's been asked for before -- like the person making the post somehow believes that they're the first person who's played CoH to ever have wanted more asymmetric costumes. And the answer is the same one that the Paragon Studios devs gave back when the game was live -- the whole costume manager would need to be rewritten to allow more than the one-off asymmetrical pieces we have,and it would double the data storage requirements for costumes (not the stumbling block it was a decade ago, but still...).

Unfortunately, it's really hard to fly in at precisely 90° to the 'backstop', so you wind up sliding to one side or the other, and come to a stop mashed up against one or the other of the guards. They seem to be disciplined enough to resist the opportunity to cop a feel, but it's still a bit embarrassing.

The 'grope location' on the hazard zone guards seems to be dependent on how far away you are from them. I ran a character into Perez today, and with the character right up against the stop barrier, I was able to click the open space about a foot to the side of the right guard. Other times, clicking the head/chest work; the farther back I am when I click, the vaguer the location is -- at maximum range, I can click anywhere on the figure and have it work. Unfortunately, I tend to zoom in flying, and let the barrier in the back stop me, which puts me in the guards' armpits.

I'm tempted to suggest a brute-force solution, something like "if you are within 20 feet of Ms. Liberty for more than five minutes without interacting with her, you're automatically teleported to a random location in Atlas Plaza", but that's probably overkill.

Either that, or create a new travel power PvP IO set that can be slotted into the prestige sprints that give, say, Speed, Speed/End, End, and the Speed IO has a PvP-only effect of giving +4 KB resistance.

I saw the sale history on enhancement catalysts the other day where someone had suffered from a zero spasm and bought one for 100,000,000 inf -- about 1,000 times what the running average seems to be.

Sometimes the game doesn't register that you've entered the area where the 'open-world instance' is set; the consensus seems to be that you move to another area (the blue dots on the map defining neighborhoods) or zone out and back. I've had times when it was like pulling teeth to find Arachnos commanders, and other times when they've respawned so fast that I have to be careful to avoid pulling in a second spawn.

And it's this that makes me sad every time I see something like "lvl 50 Brute looking for AE or farm" in the LFG channel -- you can get your enjoyment from the game how you want, but seeing someone who's powerleveled to 50, and all they're interested in is more farms, is depressing. Thinking about all the content they don't care about because it's not a farm (or don't know about, because all they've ever done in game is farm) reminds me of a line from a novel referring to mining the asteroids for resources: "Out there it's raining soup, and we don't even know about soup bowls." But if endless farming is the only way they know how to play, or what they think is the 'best' way to play, I'll just be disappointed in them and let them go off and do their own thing.

The Vahzilok are the reason I abandoned Science as an origin back when you got an origin-based first contact, because you got thrown up against the Vahz right off, and then forwarded to Henry Peter Wong for more of the same. And I will still avoid picking up a new contact if they're described as following the Vahzilok, unless I have no choice. I'll go into City Hall and talk to the Magic, Tech, and Natural contacts (Prince Kiros Nandelu, the Mutant contact, makes you run back to him to tell him about the Council you found; the others chain a second mission directly on completion of the first without your needing to talk to them again) to get a wider variety of forwarded contacts, but I avoid the Science contacts until later in the game, when the Vahz get replaced.

Ran it yesterday, and was a little disappointed by having to show, with my tauntless Brute, the concept of using a ranged attack to get aggro on one or two of the doppelgangers, then pull them back around the corner where we can take them down without engaging the whole group at once. I wish there was some way to make a deliberate miss, though; if you miss your attack you're less likely to get bigger pulls.

Go to the back of the club, upstairs; go through the door in the back wall. You will be in an antechamber with exits to all the Midnighter Club buildings in the zones. Go up the corridor, and there will be a "T" intersection; if you continue straight, you'll get to the antechamber for the other faction. At the intersection is a pair of Midnighters, one hero, one villain, flanking a Pillar of Ice and Fire. You use this Pillar to go to Cimerora.

Or the "The security chief for Perez Park has asked for you by name" mission you can get around level 5-6, which invariably sends you into the woods after Circle of Thorns, who appear in spawns of 5-8, usually with a Madness Mage to help speed up your trip to the hospital. Nothing like being perma-held while you're carved into hamburger.

This becomes problematic when the team leader doesn't zone first. Do you just accept the possible split? Make the first person to zone select the instance for the team? Leave team members in limbo until the team leader zones?

I need to rebuild the stacked emote sequence I had for my Bots/Dark MM, whose background was being a "failed" Soviet military project (was not intended to become sentient) that had an exchange among the bots (all dialog in Russian): Assault Bot: <taunt emote>"Your maternal parent wears the footgear of a soldier!" Battle Drone: <slapreact emote>"What?" Battle Drone: "That's supposed to be an insult? Protector Bot <research emote>"That's what the phrasebook says." Battle Drone: “Implying that a parent is a skilled soldier is derogatory?" Protector Bot: <shrug emote>"I do _not_ understand humans."

It seems a bit like waving a dead chicken at the problem, but if you save the character's power customizations, then edit the file to remove references to powers in the Munitions Mastery pool, save it, then load it in a tailor session, does the rifle go away? I remember when I did a respec to replace Fly with Mystic Flight on a character, then tweaked the Sorcery pool colors and saved the customization to import to the character's other costume slots, that the Flight pool powers still had entries in the power customization list. If you have effect customization entries for the abilitiesin Munitions Mastery, it might force the weapon to remain in your costume. Then there's always the brute-force method of editing the rifle out of a .costume file and loading that to see if it works.

I used the "Find Contact" button on my level-17 Elec/Elec Dominator to sift through available unknown contacts, selecting Jim Temblor. When I clicked the 'Teleport to Contact' button, nothing happened, and when I tried to click the "Find Contact" button, I got the error message "An error has occurred with the Contact Finder. No contacts could be found for your level, alignment, and universe." Repeated attempts produced the same error. The first basic 'kick the problem' fix -- zoning from AP to Skyway -- cleared up the problem, so there is a trivial workaround, but this is the first time I've seen the error. My character had seven missions at the time; it didn't affect things when I tried after zoning, but it is possible that it contributed to the initial error.

I don't have a Demon Summoning MM, but "/petsayall <em sleep>" works on bots; the Protector Bots wake up to bubble you and the other bots, but it seems to be a reasonable "shut up and stay" command as long as you don't move far enough away to trigger their follow.

The only remaining way being to make the power effects generic, with the visual effect being entirely cosmetic, so while you may shoot an ice blast while your teammate shoots a fire blast, and while yours tossed a spray of ice shards around on a hit while his burst in a brief cascade of flame, the result to the target is the same. And then it gets boring.

I've done the "Meet the Gang" mission several times when I've goofed, having been doing the early missions from the origin contacts in City Hall so that I get forwarded to a wider variety of contacts (since all of those are level 2, and my characters are typically level 5 or 6, I'll bump up the mission difficulty for more XP) and forgot to scale down the difficulty again, so that I'll be facing red, or in one case purple, mobs. I've found, though, that if I wait once I come back down out of the elevator until Flambeaux decides to show up, and then move past the intruders so I drag both Dillo and Flambeaux into range of the intruders, their contribution will keep me alive even when I've screwed up with the mission level. You can't just start firing at range, though, or they'll never aggro on the intruders; you have to drag them in close enough for them to 'see' them themselves.

Everyone blueside gets introduced to Twinshot at, IIRC, level 5, so names are hardly a spoiler. Flambeaux is a ditz that puts Fusionette to shame in that regard, so her horrible following is at least in character. Grim, however... When you first meet him, he's on a raised platform running to meet you... except that he keeps running back and forth rubbing against the railing, unaware that there's an actual route down to where you are, and takes almost 30 seconds to realize that he can just jump over the railing. After that, he's got some fair pathing. Twinshot is a mixed bag; sometimes she follows you normally, sometimes she'll just stand there when you move off, only to pop up later. Dillo is the only really solid one among the group; he reliably follows you wherever you go, while Flambeaux has a tendency to run back into the elevator and disappear like she remembered she left her curling iron plugged in or something. The game has always had pathing issues. Just ask anyone who's had a "lead rescued victims out" mission, or a Mastermind. Some of them are hard to explain -- Grim should do better than he does -- while others, like Flambeaux and Fusionette, appear to be part of the characterization, even if it feels as if the devs went overboard with it sometimes.

The rework of the Hive is old enough that, if there isn't an Echo version already, I have my doubts that Paragon Studios kept a copy of the original version around, which would mean that the zone would need to be rebuilt and the original Hamidon and mitochondria would need to be redefined. And you'd need to decide whether you wanted the real original (and unfair) version where you got your Hami-Os from defeating the Hamidon Buds Hamidon scattered when defeated, or the intermediate 'drop directly to each participant' version. Let's see if I'm remembering everything. Originally, Hamidon spawned on a timer, not as the result of the players' actions in the Hive. If you had enough Illusion members, you would have a group up above the Hamidon dropping Phantom Army to draw Hamidon's fire, otherwise you used a tank and dedicated healer. The remainder of the group would bulk up as a group with all of the healers essentially putting their AoE heals on autofire as the leader of the group led them around to take out the mitos one by one. When all the mitos were down, everyone with a hold would start throwing them at Hamidon, with nothing else but the taunt tank going (except for buffs like Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism, et al.) until Hamidon stopped shooting at the tank, signifying that he was held, at which point everyone started unloading on him with everything you had while continuing the holds. If the hold broke, there would be a "yellow dawn", with one yellow mitochondria spawning for each person in the goo; this would almost always be a full wipe (except for the very lucky or fast), and was very difficult to recover from. Because of the one exploration badge directly under where Hamidon spawned, getting the zone accolade depended on either participating in a raid or coming through before he respawned, since it was right under the nucleus and you'd eat a ton of incoming fire getting there. Originally, when Hamidon was defeated, he would spawn a Hamidon Bud for each player in the goo, and you got a Hami-O for defeating a Hamidon Bud. This was heavily biased toward builds with high AoE damage; a Fire blaster could sometimes get six or seven Hami-Os in a run while most of the Controllers and Defenders would be hard-pressed to get any. This was later regularized so that each participant got their own Hami-O drop. The whole thing got reworked when they changed the zone to require you to defeat an unknown number of the DE in the zone to spawn, collecting the EoEs that dropped from them. The different types of mitochondria required different methods to drop them -- one only vulnerable to ranged, one only to melee, and the last required being held first, so the group was broken into teams for specific mitos, with the taunt tank and healer (and usually a backup pair) keeping Hamidon's attention. Once the mitos were down, it moved to attacking Hamidon directly. Instead of the "yellow dawn", at 50% and 25%, Hamidon would spawn a fresh set of mitos; the raid would pull back out, reorganize back into the mito teams, and do it again. If the raid seemed powerful enough, sometimes the raid leader would opt to simply power through the second (and sometimes the first, although that was much rarer) mito respawn to finish more quickly; this happened more often as more players showed up with higher-level Incarnate powers.

I think it's rather more complex than that. The issue isn't what other people play, not as such. The issue is that if the idea of 'one true build' takes hold in CoH - at it has done in other MMOs in endgame content - then anyone who doesn't follow that build slavishly will find themselves locked out of said endgame. This isn't speculation - it's already happening with the demands for specific ATs, specific builds of ATs, specific levels of Incarnate power that you can see in LFG daily. I don't know of any way to obtain the information you would need to do the analysis, but I have to wonder whether the majority of people doing this are old CoH players, or imports from other MMOs where having the right twinked-out gear was a necessity for completing most of the endgame content.