srmalloy

So far, I've only found this in the "Get Proton to help you!" mission from Twinshot, but when I use the Nemesis Staff or Blackwand against the String Relay Transmitters, the blast from the power goes off about 1/4 of the way through the animation, leaving you waving your stick around after it's already fired. This happens only when attacking these objects; when used against any of the mobs in the mission, both powers animate and fire normally.

This. My personal opinion about how they choose to play, so long as what they're doing doesn't throw obstacles in front of me, isn't important to anyone but me. That said, I have to feel a little sad when I see "Level 50 [archetype] lf anything" or "Level 50 [archetype] lf AE farm" in the LFG channel, because i know that there's enough content to keep people busy for a long, long time, and I have to wonder how much of it is people wanting their old characters back as fast as possible, and how much is from other MMOs teaching people that everything you do prior to level cap and getting twinked out for endgame raids is just makework, and the game doesn't really start until level cap, so they come here and treat it the same way, even though CoH is (at least to me) more about the journey than the destination. But, hey, if they want to bumrush the level cap, twink themselves out to the limit, and then spam chat looking for something to do that won't exemp them down off their carefully-crafted peak of power, my only objection is with the latter. I think they're missing out on what made CoH what it was, but if the devs had genuinely wanted to stop people doing things like that, they could have easily made it impossible shortly after the first level-50 "AE babies" that didn't know how to get to Kings Row appeared.

Something I started doing back in the original run of the game was to pick names related to the character's powers; this was complicated by the fact that lots of other people appear to do the same thing. Early on in the game, I happened to see "для" pop up in chat, and on experimenting verified that CoH supported Unicode, albeit not for character names. The next character I made after this discovery was Yaderniy Ogon ('Ядерный Огонь', "Nuclear Fire"), a Fire/Rad Controller, who I set up with custom versions of the stock exclamations in Russian. Other characters were given similar foreign-language power-related names, generally with backgrounds that made the language of their name appropriate -- Dunkelkalte, Sovnya (a sovnya was a historical Russian weapon that was a blade on a staff), Tenevoy Ogon, Stal'naya Deva, etc. Going out to foreign languages for names has made it much simpler to get a name I'm satisfied with and appropriate to the character.

Hmm. Makes me wonder how ParagonWiki has managed to retain incorrect power information. You would have expected that someone would have fixed it in the time since the pool was released.

Giving the squires a mace and a bow would possibly allow them to use the same combat logic as the Battle Drones, and mirrors the typical backup weapon that archers would carry..

No. Each tier summons brings in one car, out of which however many pets you get for that tier pile out, except for the Strongman, who zooms in seated in an Al Bahr-like miniature car, then dives out, rolling to his feet while the car zooms on and fades out (comparable to the arrival of the tier 3 Thugs pet). The Tier 1 and 2 cars, however, must be obviously too small to hold even one pet of that tier, much less 3.

aka "Re-establish range". This takes a mob that has gotten to melee distance and puts it back at range, where their attacks typically do less damage. As such, it's useful for all the /MM Blasters that don't want to be blappers. If you don't want them getting pitched away from you, don't take it. A powerset is not required to have a complete roster of powers well-suited for a particular playstyle. This feels to me like "I want to play a Fortunata with Blaster-level damage". Having damage in the power and not being a PBAoE autohit Confuse make it something that's going to draw aggro to the Blaster and be somewhat risky to use. Changing it so that the Blaster can run in with Invisibility, fire it off to Confuse everything in the spawn but the bosses, and be perfectly safe while the spawn whittles itself down, allowing the Blaster's nuke to more reliably drop the whole spawn feels as if you're tipping things too far the other way.

Back Alley Brawler is in the southwest part of Atlas Park, in the center of the traffic circle at the south end of Argosy Industrial (just N of the big warehouse at the south end). Every time I've gone by -- always when finishing Marie Castel's arc, and whenever the dogpile around Ms. Liberty gets too insane -- there's rarely been more than one other hero in the area.

Back before ED, "Hellion golf" involved a level 50 six-slotting Power Push for KB, then going to Atlas Park, popping Power Boost if you had it, then hitting a Hellion, preferably doing this from the east side of the zone, with spotters to see where the body landed. I don't think you could make it all the way across AP, particularly with buildings in the way, but it was possible to hit Argosy Industrial. IIRC, this was one of the reasons the devs modified Power Boost to not affect knockback; it was far too easy to get insane amounts of knockback with it.

IIRC, the power description specifically states "sniper" in its effects, the same as Sniper Rifle, so even if the power's damage is Targeted AoE rather than single target, it should inherit all the Snipe characteristics and changes.

The Rule of Five is that you can't have more than five of the exact same set bonus. The KB-to-KD effect is the direct effect of the enhancement, not a set bonus, so theoretically it's not affected by the Rule of Five. At least as I understand it.

It didn't make ENOUGH money. In their eyes, yeah, because when you're a greedy company like NCSoft, you never make enough money, regardless of what IP they publish.. In point of fact, Paragon Studios was losing money, although that was due to them working on an undisclosed project that NCsoft had dumped in their laps; CoH wasn't making enough money to cover its own expenses and the development costs for this undisclosed project, so the studio was technically a losing proposition. Why NCsoft didn't just shut down the development project and keep CoH and Paragon Studios, I don't know. You could argue that killing the development project would be admitting that it was a bad decision to start it in the first place, an action damaging to the face of the manager who made the decision to go forward with it. You could also argue that NCsoft wanted to shut down Paragon Studios, and handed them the project so that it would run a net loss, giving them a reason to shut down the company. Another possible reason is Paragon Studios' attempt to buy themselves away from NCsoft, with NCsoft shutting them down for failing to display the proper respectful subordination to NCsoft. Or it could be that CoH had no way to be turned into the sort of microtransaction-driven cash-shop-based MMO that was their staple business model. But we can't know for sure. All we have is NCsoft's statement that CoH and Paragon Studios didn't fit with their ongoing plans for the future of the company.

I ran Posi 1 on a Beam/Marty Blaster yesterday, and there was disintegrate spread all over against the Vahzilok,mostly because of the way everything bunched up -- I would hit an Eidolon with Disintegrate to maximize the likelihood that I'd be able to hit them again for spread before they dropped, and when I hit them again, I'd usually get four or more "disintegrate spread" popups, then Cutting Beam to catch everyone that it spread to, and "disintegrate" would go fountaining up with the damage numbers. Running solo, it's harder to get the spread to work, because the spread range seems to be fairly short, and the mob you hit with Disintegrate usually takes off running towards you, pulling too far away from the rest of their spawn before you can hit them with a second attack to spread it. If you can hover above the group to use Disintegrate, so that the mob just runs back and forth under you and doesn't separate from their spawn, then it's much easier to spread disintegration.

IIRC, this was discussed early on in the original run, and the capability wasn't there -- if you've ever knocked back a Tsoo Sorcerer or one of the CoT mages, you'll know that there's nothing under their robe; it's a solid cone with feet sticking out of the bottom. I don't know if the advances that have allowed things like the long "Circle of Thorns" skirts would allow this to work, but I believe that if it had, the 'trenchcoat' costume piece would have been extended to have its proper length all the way around the body, rather than being just a buttcape.

Unfortunately, using the example of M80 Grenade from the Assault Rifle powerset, knockback is broken for that. You're shooting an explosive device at a target, and it and it explodes; logically, the other mobs around the target should be knocked away from the target by the blast, but as you see in game, all of the targets in the affected area get knocked back away from the shooter. This means that doing this (and fixing how M80 Grenade does knockback) would involve coding the effect as doing ordinary KB to the target and spawning a pseudo-pet that immediately applies a repel effect. The mechanisms for doing all of this is already in the game; the problem would be coding out the ability so that it works that way. Realistically, it would be more practical to develop the code to do knockback out from the center of an explosion first, and then see what other applications there are for it. One of the bits of fallout from making explosion knockback be 'out from the center' rather than 'away from the caster' is that it would be possible to make some powers like M80 Grenade into location AoE powers, rather than targeted AoE powers, allowing you to use them strategically to knock targets back in a desired direction (i.e.,the tank has mobs herded into a corner, and you could drop the grenade a bit away from the corner to push the mobs more tightly into the corner rather than just scattering them).

They probably could, but I think the intention of doing it this way is to ensure that they're taking in only what they need to cover the operating costs, removing the "making money off of our IP without our permission" violation that would give NCsoft the excuse to sue for damages, rather than just issue cease&desist letters, if they decide they need to make an example of the people operating the rogue CoH servers.

For a Greco-Roman style, he'd be wanting a chiton, for which the toga approximates, but covers the upper body, too (it would also be considered an athletic chiton, as a regular chiton was much longer. The kilt, plus one of the wider 'wrapped and tied' belts to represent the kolpos tied off at the waist would be as close as you can get with the existing available male pieces.

It's got a trivial workaround, but when you complete a respecification, and return to the normal CoH screen with your power tray(s) that have all your power icons dumped into them willy-nilly, any power that is "unavailable" won't appear in the trays. This includes powers like Follow Through in Titan Weapons, which requires Momentum to be usable. It's still in your Powers window (and will appear in red, showing that it's unavailable), and can be dragged down to your power tray(s), but if you're not paying attention, you may not notice that you're missing one or more powers until some time later.

There's a clue, which unfortunately people don't normally see any more (and may not have looked at when they got it), in the description for the 'Experienced' power that new characters got for the first few weeks -- "When this power is used, you will gain half a level of Patrol XP, however, you can only ever have 1 level worth of Patrol XP at a time. NOTE: Any Patrol XP granted through this power beyond the one level limit will be lost."

Because enhancements scale down as you exemplar, the special effects of uniques will work down to the higher of the minimum level of the enhancement set or five levels below the level you picked the power it's slotted in. So putting a level 10 Karma: KB protection in the power you picked at 49 isn't going to do anything if you exemplar below 44. The game doesn't record when you added slots to a power, so if you took Combat Jumping at 4, then put a second slot in it at 50, you could put that same Karma IO into the second slot, and it will work down to 10, the minimum level of the set. Basically, the you get the effect if the enhancement exists at the level you're exemped to and the power it's in isn't disabled for being too high. And even if you lose the set bonus effects, the base values (i.e., Dam/Acc increase) are scaled as long as the power is available.

Both "Meet the Gang" and "Help defend the Shining Star's Base" missions from Twinshot have execrable pathing. In the former, after you talk to Dillo and head back to the entrance to help with the intruders, Flambeaux goes into spaz mode each time you go down an elevator, exiting one, then running back in, sometimes several times. In the latter after you deal with the intruders on the second floor and go into the room that leads to the elevators, Grim runs back and forth pressed up against the railing of the raised section apparently unable to figure out how to reach you, until he finally realizes that he can jump and jumps onto the railing, then down to you.

Just as a sanity check, did you play the character between logouts, or just log in, see that the bar hasn't progressed, move them to a different location, and then logged back out? The badge requires you to earn 30 bars of Patrol experience, and you can only have 10 bars at any point, so if they've been logged out long enough to have 10 bars, and you don't use any of it by doing things to earn XP on the character, you're going to stay at the cap and not earn any more. Ifyou're at 96%, log in on the character, run a mission or two, and that should use up enough of your accumulated Patrol XP that you can log out and have the badge next time you check.

... that duplicates the texture of each possible costume piece for each slot, and doesn't fall victim to the animation quirks that cause existing costume pieces to clip weirdly. So at a base, ignoring whatever clipping issues might arise, you're wanting to double the art resources for costumes just to create a single effect? And this is also ignoring the rendering load -- I recall when it was discovered that the lag and rendering issues in Grandville were the result of all the Arachnos buildings having complete original-issue Brutalist building architecture hidden under the Arachnos facades. I'm not saying that asymmetrical costume designs aren't something that's worth setting up as a goal, but trying to implement one effect by troweling more graphics on top of the existing models in a way that isn't going to set up an ongoing way to produce additional asymmetric effects is probably not a good place to allocate the limited developer resources at this time.

Now that you mention it, I have a vague recollection of Positron saying that this wasn't possible the way that the rendering was set up, because the left side of a character was a mirror of the right side, and except for things like skirts and capes, it would take a major change in how characters were rendered to do asymmetrical styles.

OH NO YOU DIDN'T Well, the art doesn't seem as if it would be that difficult, assuming that the color maps were done reasonably (but you're right; this is Paragon Studios; it's going to be done pessimally). Getting it added as an option to the costume pieces, though; that's going to be the problem, given what we've been told about the arrays for options.