srmalloy

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.

I was noticing after picking up Blazing Arrow with my Archery/Tactical Arrow Blaster that -- not always, but most of the time -- Blazing Arrow was using the Dual Blades 'Vengeful Strike' animation. It didn't seem to use the wrong animation if I had it queued up as the pending attack, but any time I hit it without having it stacked up behind another attack, the Vengeful Strike animation played.

As I recall, it was something Positron had talked about doing in the future, and I recall him mentioning that one of the issues with making customizable animations was modifying the database to give the ability to make the power origination points different. In the OP's example of a powered-armor suit with built-in weapons, having a gun mounted on the back of the forearm, so you stuck your arm out and the gunfire visual started at the back of your hand. Since this is a fairly serious alteration to the power and character databases on top of just the coding for the different origination points, I suspect that it's a pretty long-term future enhancement (on the basis of 'if it were easy, the original design team would already have done it, just to make the game more awesome').

I don't mind having Brawl in their abilities; I'd just like for them to put Brawl at a much lower priority than it is.

Yes, but I think that what the OP was asking is for some intermediate steps between "Full XP" and "No XP" -- since we already have a 100% Inf boost at -100% XP, that would be a 25% Inf boost with 3/4 XP, 50% Inf boost with 1/2 XP, and 75% Inf boost with 1/4 XP. It's a convenience thing, so you can just queue up the modifiers and play without worrying about turning XP off and on to get the relative inf rate you want.

In the Dual Blades and Dual Pistol costume designer screen, if you select a weapon and then zoom in, your character takes a pose with their arms crossed over their chest, forearms angled up, sort of like the pose on a pharaoh's sarcophagus: I think this would be an interesting idle pose for weapon-based characters, and would like to submit it for consideration when the game state advances enough to add new emotes.

I had the same problem, with an "unable to connect to login server" error, also having left Tequila running. When I restarted it it downloaded about four .pigg files and the homecoming.exe file, after which I was able to log in.

I had a character on Guardian whose background had him originating in a world much like that of Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, where magic was technology. A flashlight is still a flashlight if it contains a charged runestone rather than a pair of 'D' cells.

Everyone is somewhat squishy just before you get to the SO level; you're fighting mobs that are stronger to face So-slotted characters, but you're still at Do-level enhancement modifiers.

It depends (at least, it did before shutdown) on how far away from the target you are, and what you do to the target. I remember, with my AR/EM Blaster, being able to stand up near Imperious in Cimerora, pop Boost Range, Aim or Build Up, and Snipe to one-shot a mob in the spawn standing in the plaza on the west side of the valley... and the rest of the spawn would just stand there wondering why Fred just fell over. It took a second shot before they'd figure out that they were taking fire and come charging across the map. In general, I've found that the faster you drop a mob, the less likely it is that the rest of the spawn figures out where they're being attacked from. The more 'observant' a mob type is, the more likely it will be to aggro on incoming damage, as well -- minions less than lieutenants less than bosses -- and missing your target seems to generate more aggro but it's more affected by range; missing from short range gets you more aggro than missing from long range (often you'll only pull the one mob you attacked at long enough range. And some mobs spread aggro -- Vahzilok Reapers and Mortificators will make the Cadavers and Abominations in their spawn aggro when a group of just Abominations can be sniped down at long range several times before they aggro as long as you keep one-shotting them.

Fire imps on multiple Speed Boosts. Like hummingbirds on crack. I remember a couple of ITFs before pets were made impervious to recharge-affecting powers, and it only took a couple of Kinetics characters to make them go strange.

Two runs through a minor AE 'XP farm' with XP turned off and ticket rewards, one for common Arcane, one for common Tech salvage, usually sets that character up with the vast majority of the salvage they need for the first batch of IOs at level 12, alleviating the problem of getting to 12 unable to afford them. I expect the problem will get better when the server move drops XP back to normal, so you'll be earning more influence and getting more salvage for the same level increase. And if you get a rare salvage drop, kicking it into Wentworth's solves the influence problem for a long time.

If you're willing to put in the effort to get enough merits, the recipes are readily available, and Ouroboros gives you a way to go back and grind arcs solo for merits when you get tired of running TFs.

Part of the reason why there were so many individual copycat farm missions is that the Paragon Studios staff were fairly rigorous about going through and weeding out the AE missions that existed for no purpose beyond delivering the maximum XP/inf reward for the minimum investment of time or effort, so that many of these clones were confusingly named, and even more obliquely referenced -- I remember the chatspam soliciting people for "meow missions", one of the euphemisms for AE XP farms. I think more of the playerbase would have been onboard with restricting AE missions if the Paragon Studios staff had come out and said that a loaded AE farm takes up as many server resources as, say, ten full teams running regular missions, and that having large numbers of people doing this was contributing to the lag and rubberbanding everyone else experienced. Unfortunately, it was never explained this way, and any social opprobrium was buried under "I'm paying to play the game, I can play it the way I want" responses. The GMs are trying to maintain the servers in a state that provides the best play experience for the most people, and if that requires tweaking rewards to make it less attractive to be a huge resource hog, I'm okay with that; it's their bat and ball, after all. If, with better servers and more capacity, they choose to reinstate the 'standard" rewards, I'm okay with that, too.

One of my best memories is from the test server, where I learned that sometimes even the bugs can be awesome. I'd copied my Katana/Regen Scrapper to the test server when they were testing IOs, and I got a "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage" recipe. Because of the limited space in the label, it showed up as "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative"... and I found out that it was correct -- when the proc went off, it did a negative amount of damage to my target, healing it. I thought this was hilarious and kept it in my build, even though it made fights a little harder. Then the devs fixed that bug... and replaced it with a new one. Now, the IO should have been named "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot" -- when the proc went off, it did an absurd amount of damage, taking your target down instantly. I was curious as to how far this went, and hied myself off to Crey's Folly, where I found Jurassik... and literally one-shotted him -- led off with the attack that had the proc in it, and did something like (working from memory here) 6.043 E+13 points of damage. I was also impressed to see that CoH seamlessly rolled over into scientific notation when necessary, instead of just having an endless string of zeroes. I found out later that, even doing that much damage, I was nowhere near the record for having the broken proc kick off for enough damage that it should leave a crater. Good times.

I checked earlier today, and Lomyril is right that there's a badge marker on the floor in front of Hero 1's cape display, but when I moved up to it, nothing happened. You're correct, though, Corlagon, that 'Patriot' is the exploration badge marker at the top of the City Hall dome.

In two early missions -- Matthew Habashy's mission "Incognito", where you're disguised as you enter a Hellion hideout, and Sandra Castel's "Confront the Skull Leader" mission -- will bring your pets into the mission. In the former mission, it's perhaps not too discordant for your disguised Demon Summoning MM to have a demon following them, but other pets, both in that mission and Sandra Castel's, would probably raise suspicions. This happens with both the MM pets and the various buff pets from the P2W vendor. Additionally, the disguise you assume in Matthew Habashy's mission doesn't seem to understand tails, so your Hellion disguise may be marred by the presence of a tail sticking out behind you.

Even with a Mastermind, setting your pets to Defensive/Follow, once a spawn aggros, a runner can sucker your pets into following them, where they can drag friends back to meet you. If you're not a Mastermind, you're basically SoL for controlling them.

Back before the shutdown, Positron told me that I was the only one who ever made the observation in the entire life of the game, and it's a niggly enough detail that makes absolutely no difference in the game play, but I still cringe when I see the harborages in Paragon City. All those nice red-and-white vertically striped buoys, some parked well out in the water, some parked right next to a pier... and of all of them, there are less than five that are right. The IALA maritime buoyage system specifies what colors and shapes are used to indicate navigation directions, and the striped buoy you see all over Paragon City means "fair water -- deep-draft vessels may pass on either side" -- which seems absurd for most of them, like the one ten feet from the corner of the concrete pier on the west side of Talos Island.

I think the intention is not to remove Rest as an ability itself, but to have some mechanism whereby, in the absence of hostile mobs, or using a power on another character your character would, after a delay similar to that of Rest, get an increased HP and End recovery rate. I would expect that this would be smaller than what you get from Rest, and have limits on its activation that might be too hard to code (i.e., not if any member of your team is in combat, not if hostile mobs are within a range dependent on your stealth and their perception, not if you use a power on another character or pet, etc.).

You suggest adding the Swap Ammo functionality from Dual Pistols to Archery; what would you take out of the set to make room for the ability? Remove Blazing Arrow, which already has a fire DoT, and replace it with an ability that does no damage of itself, and only adds minor damage to the others? You need to look at the balance of the set if you're proposing significant changes to it.