srmalloy

It's a known bug that respecs will fail if you are not fully trained up; it may feel like a waste of time, but you need to go through all the training before using the respec if you don't want it to blow up in your face.

If a contact has both storyline (i.e., progresses the story that the little book icon under the contact shows) and random missions, if they only offer you one mission at a time, whether you get a storyline or random mission is up to the RNG. If they offer you a choice of two missions, and you have a storyline open with them, one will always be the storyline, the other one will be random (and between two characters, you may not get the same random mission).

In the mission 'Defeat Freak leader, his crew' that awards the Pwnz badge (map FREAKSHOW_ABANDONED_OFFICE), in the last room, there is a small meeting room on the lower level of the room (loc 1602.4 0.0 427.3). If you move into the SW corner of the office, and look back to the center of the office, there is a phantom pillar: It's also possible to get odd visual cutouts appearing on your character: The pillar does not obstruct movement, but despite not being solid to view, it blocks visibility of characters as if it were solid.

I should point out here that Vigilance gives Defenders an end discount based on how hard their team is taking it in the shorts -- if the team isn't badly beat up, Vigilance doesn't do squat.

The "pessimal playstyle" finger-pointing can go in lots of directions. One of my peeves is the team rushing up to a new spawn, and someone slaps down an AoE immobilize or hold as soon as they're in range, while the spawn is still scattered, so that the AoEs the rest of the team has can only get three or four mobs at a time, dragging out the process of clearing the spawn.

The Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Act Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act was a piece of hot garbage. I can see extending the term of copyright for new works going forward, but it should never have applied to copyright terms already in force.

I also get background noise changes when I add/remove items; I always assumed that it was the client dropping some ambient playback while it talked to the server to update the storage object, and ignored it.

If I had to guess, I'd say that it would require copying all of the relevant mobs into new entries in the database, then tweak the entries to make them autoscale -- the same thing had to be done for the Rikti mobs for Rikti invasions, and unless the Nemesis assaults were already coded and just waiting to be turned on, the HC staff did it for them. So it's certainly theoretically and technically feasible.

Should have edited my quote to remove your last sentence; I was referring to LotG:+Rech as being another of the boost/special combination IOs.

So is the Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Global Recharge IO, even though a lot of people ignore the Defense boost.

Given what appears to be a revolving-door policy at the Zig, I'd bet on anyone you... arrest... being back on the streets within days if not hours.

How about adding a feature, when you slot an enhancement on top of another one, and you have unslotters in your salvage, you get asked if you want to unslot the existing enhancement and put it in your tray rather than destroying it?

Another possibility is to give Domination a microscopic recharge time while keeping the requirement for having a full domination bar to activate, and activating Domination empties the bar. If you're making enough attacks to refill the bar before Domination runs out, then you are effectively permadom. The amount that attacks contribute to the domination bar can be adjusted to make that more or less difficult as needed. It doesn't remove the benefits of global recharge, because all your powers recharging faster means that you can attack more, but it's not so fundamental to a build that you have to squeeze it until it screams to get enough global recharge.

Why didn't you make these arguments back when the game was live? Before ED, it was possible to get permaHaste and others with just SOs, and with IO set bonuses, it was possible to get permaDom and all those other 'nasty' perma powers, and the devs knew it could be done years before the game was shut down, yet they chose not to alter it, instead altering individual powers that they saw as abusive when made perma so that they couldn't be. The single-auto-power restriction was maintained, so that players had to stay alert to click powers that came off recharge, instead of letting them set up their perma ability to fire automatically alongside Hasten. If you played on live and raised this issue, which the devs clearly decided wasn't worth changing, why would you believe the Homecoming staff (working as unpaid volunteers) would have a different reaction to your proposal, as well as the desire or the ability to rebalance every single power in the game around the changes you want? If you played on live and didn't raise the issue, then I think that horse has pretty definitely left the gate; Hasten is baked too deeply into the game mechanics to make such sweeping changes viable. If you didn't play on live, then I can only bow to your superior ability to swoop in and, in less than a year, identify a core problem with the game that has to be fixed which the original devs, in the seven-and-a-half-year life of the game, didn't see as a problem.

And the HC staff seems to have worked out a two-step solution that preserves its use while keeping it out of combat, although I still don't see why it couldn't have just been tied into the same "Are you in combat?" check that triggers movement suppression, thereby eliminating completely the ability to use it to escape from the middle of combat -- you throw an attack or have one thrown at you, it's disabled until a certain period after the last attack/damage.

... then wait seven days to regain the alignment power you got when you went to Null and had him flip your alignment out and back early on. It's not always as simple as people describe.

I had it happen to me last night, when my Stone/Storm Controller was rescuing a city official who'd been conned into working with the Family; after I spoke with her, an assassin showed up, and after the assassin was defeated, she addressed my Animated Stone pet rather than myself.

It’s not just enhancements -- all base storage that shows its contents as a vertical list does this. I can't say for sure without looking at the code, but it feels like the storage is recorded internally as a simple array of single items in the order in which they were deposited, and the contents view builds the stacks for display dynamically -- if the storage had, say, level 25 common Acc IOs as the 1st, 12th, and 15th items put in, and five other random enhancements as the second through sixth stored, you'd initially see the three Acc IOs at top of the list, but as soon as you took one, thellist would be recomputed, and the UI wouldn't start the stack of Acc IOs until it got to the 11th item in the storage, so they would drop way down in the displayed list.

I noticed the range vs. aggro distance around level 6 with my Fire/Rad Sentinel Termoyaderniy ('Thermonuclear' in Russian), long before getting Build Up or her tier-9 nuke. And the Celerity global just patches over the problem; it doesn't stop mobs from spotting you at close range. And, like the statement that you can fix their range problems with the ATO sets, just tries to hide the fact that the casual player is still getting jerked around, just because they don't have 100M+ inf to throw into the ATO sets that they won't have the slots to use until at least mid- to late-game.

Not to mention the fact that with the range reduction, Sentinels generally have to go inside a spawn's aggro range to use their AoEs, which means that the spawn aggros and gets their first shot off before the sentinel can, where a Blaster can sail up, drop an AoE, and be on their second attack by the time the spawn's response comes back. And even with the defenses to take the incoming, it's still annoying to have to give up control of the fight right at the start.

No, I just see it as another case of "I don't like that this is possible, so make everyone unable to do it". If the OP doesn't want to buy purples on the AH, that's their prerogative. They can get all their purples from drops and share them out with their alts for their account. But that's not good enough; everyone else has to be made to play the same way, because that's the One True PlaystyleTM.

In the build.txt file saved out with /buildsave for my Electric Affinity/Electrical Blast Defender, the Electric Affinity powerset is still named "Shock Therapy", and the tier 3 Galvanic Sentinel power appears in the build as "Discharge".

I used the Sentinel+ tool from the Titan Network to archive all my characters from Guardian, and kept them along with a set of character selection screen captures so that I would have references to recreate the ones I wanted most when CoH came back; I was certain that someone at Paragon Studios would have had an under-the-table set of all the code for the server and client. It took years for them to be willing to go public with it, but I was immensely gratified to have been proven right. And I have to salute the person or people who kept it safe and gave it back to us.

From the bits of conversation I've picked up on in The Hive while waiting for the nightly Hami raid to start, the reason why they're not being run in The Abyss is that the DE monsters are more scattered around the zone, making the initial grind to defeat them to get EoEs and get Hami to spawn is more drawn out and tedious. So the players go where the payoff is better/faster.

The End cost is assessed when you trigger the power; the power goes on cooldown once it fires off at the end of the animation. If it is interrupted before the animation completes, the power doesn't fire, so it doesn't go into cooldown.