srmalloy

Working from memory, according to Positron when I asked him at an event held at the SDCC many years ago, they're edge artifacts from the semitransparent textures used to create the lighting cones, because the game engine didn't have the power to do proper dynamic lighting.

The costutme auras have an option for "combat only"; this is a status check that activates the aura when you attack or are attack, and your aura remains on for a period of time after the last incoming or outgoing attack -- I'm not sure what the timer is on it; ten or so seconds feels about right. If you took the same status value -- done efficiently, it would be a field in the character record on the server that was set when the character was 'in combat' -- and used it to disable the ability, so that you couldn't use it in combat (thereby rendering it useless for escaping from PvP or to skate defeats in Master runs), and give it a delay after leaving combat before it could be used, it would prevent the two primary uses that are being cited as its presence allowing you to skip around risk in certain content. Add a second check that skips past the first check if the character using the command is flagged as a GM. Just as an observation, there are a lot of activities your characters can take that, while there are ways to do them using the existing user interface, using a slash command makes them much easier -- and in at least one widely-used case, possible without major inconvenience. You can right-click on a character and select 'Add friend' or 'Add global friend' from the menu, but if they've dashed off, there's nothing to click on; "/friend" and "/gfriend" allow you to add friends if they're not physically present. You can drag inspirations onto your pets to apply the inspiration to your pet, but doing this in the middle of combat when your pets are moving around is a crapshoot; the "/inspexec_pet_xxxx" commands allow you to toss inspirations to your pets without twitch skills. You can activate abilities by clicking on them from your trays, but it's "/bind" that attaches them to keys to make them more accessible, and the "/powexec_xxxx" slash commands give you additional functionality when setting up binds and macros. Or the "/ah" command to conveniently bring up the Auction House interface. And the less that is said about the backflips that you had to go through to get your alts added to a personal SG without the "/altinvite" slash command the better. And while a lot of these aren't things that a superhero would be doing while beating up miscreants, arresting miscreants is not the be-all and end-all of a superhero's existence -- and the 'powexec' and 'bind' slash commands are examples where our methods do include using slash commands.

I was leveling a new alt, running missions in Kings Row, and I noticed that I had the popup window for taking down the Clockwork Paladin. This was unexpected, because when it popped up, I was flying above the road that heads due North from Blue Shield, and was due West of the KR tram station -- well South of the area where the Clockwork Paladin spawns up in High Park. Flying up to High Park, I roamed around, finding the Shining Stars standing around looking bored, but no sign of the Paladin. Flying back to Blue Shield, the popup disappeared where I would have expected it to (leaving the spawn area), and did not reappear. Since before getting the popup, I had not been further North in KR than a line through the AE building, I'm not sure why I would have gotten the popup.

Something like having a checkbox that appears next to the Skirt selection and Jacket selection labeled 'Hide' that suppresses drawing of the costume piece in that slot?

And in mission instances, if there's a way to distinguish a mission instance from an SG base instance. Doing that kills virtually all of the ability to use it in missions as an 'escape button' for Master runs. Or even add it to the list of things that fall under Movement Suppression, so that you can't use it if you're in combat.

Just the few missions I spent testing after I slotted a Sudden Acceleration: KB to KD in Hurricane had me grinning with the herding possibilities. Always assuming that the tank in the group knows how to pull into a location I can pin mobs into.

Look up 'frankenslot' in the wiki, and on the forums; depending on the sets you pick, it can benefit you more to slot powers 3/3 or 4/2 from two different sets, and sometimes 2/2/2 from three sets (or 3/2 for a five-slotted power). It's more complicated to do, because you have to look at what the partial set bonuses are to see where the set bonuses you want are. If you're going after the recharge bonus in a set, those are usually the 5-slot bonus, so frankenslotting for set bonus won't get you anything, but if you're five-slotting a set in a power, and you're close to the ED limits in an enhancement type, you may do better slotting, a dual or triple IO from another set -- say, if you're at 80% Acc from a set with one slot empty, then slotting an Acc/Rech IO from another set instead of a straight Acc common IO reduces the overall bonus to Acc, but doesn't waste as much of the Acc bonus to ED, while giving you a boost to Rech.

Karma, in the 10-30 range.

And it's an ongoing thing in the craziness of a fight during TFs to activate an attack, and by the time your power finishes activating and fires, the target is already dead -- but dead too slowly for it to abort your attack, so you spend the attack for no results. It's a fact of life.

The way to fix this is to special-case the XP that the Kraken used to give as a mission-completion bonus, so you can farm the trial to get boss-level XP for them, or complete the mission and turn it in to get the full XP. I'm pretty sure that there are missions that award XP and/or drops when you talk to the contact after completing the mission, so the mechanism should already be in the game.

Everything just feels so much smoother with the 64-bit client, and I can't help but wonder, given how much bigger the Paragon Studios development team was compared to the Homecoming team, why did Paragon keep on with their "we can't release a 64-bit client, and have no plans to do so" denials? Have the development tools improved that much over the years?

I have been setting my characters up with 15 IOs at 12, then burning the level-20 respec at 22 to pull them all out and drop them into storage before replacing them with 25 IOs. I can then mine the storage as I get alts to 12, rolling enhancements down through the line. Back in live, I'd save out Accuracy enhancements, then others in order of salvage cost to craft as I had room, accepting the sale of the rest that I couldn't keep. Rather than returning to selling back unslotted enhancements, I'd like to see a 'move all to tray' button that would take all of the 'up in the air' enhancements and move them into your enhancement trays, after which, if you had more than 70 enhancements you were dealing with, you could do the much smaller task of swapping any remaining enhancements you wanted to keep with ones that you could drop.

Or using Focused Accuracy for the same purpose with characters without TD.

The 'three minions should be a challenging fight for a single hero' concept being one of the major ones. How can you feel heroic if, regardless of level, you struggle to defeat three mooks?

Unfortunately, barring the few specifically-coded examples like the robotic arm, peg leg, and jacket chest detail options, the costume definition actually only stores data for one side of the character -- the data for one side of the character is mirrored for the other. There is actually no separate 'left glove' and 'right glove' costume data, just 'gloves', and it would require significant coding to enable the feature.

There are some reasons to use it. Positron TF Part 1 last mission is a good example; it's a 'board transit' instance, and if you're defeated, going to the hospital respawns you in the hospital in the zone you entered the instance from. In the case of Posi 1, that's often Steel Canyon, which puts you the width of the zone from the tram. If you enter the instance from Ouroboros, you respawn in the back, with a portal a few yards away, making it much quicker to return to the mission

I posted this same suggestion in Make Atomic Manipulation fully colorable about a month ago. Unfortunately, radiation effects have all been given a default color derived from the popular misperception of radiation as being green, which derives from the green color emitted by the phosphor in radium-powered glow-in-the-dark paint used in displays like watch faces.

As a really minor and side aspect of this, I would suggest that -- as long as we can establish a redside analogue -- that there should be a floor for the influence you get from an NPC when you defeat the mobs assaulting them. The minimum shouldn't be high enough that it competes with ordinary defeat rewards, but given the premise that influence represents your positive reputation, rescuing citizens from hostile mobs should contribute to that reputation even if you're too high level to get XP from the mobs themselves. Something like 10% of the influence that an even-level hero would get, rounded down, with a minimum of 1, perhaps.

Are you doing this with a character that's under 20? The conversion code may be looking at the 'effective' level of the enhancement to see what it can be converted into, and not finding any other sets in the sub-20 range.

When I've gotten access to the Midnighter Club via the exploration badge in Night Ward, I immediately get a pop-up window with her announcing herself as a new contact, and the 'go here' arrow leads me to her. If I get access by doing Montague Castaneda's arc, when I enter the Midnighter Club, I immediately get the same 'go here' arrow pointing to her. I think acquiring her as a contact is stomping on the directions to the man behind the counter by establishing a new target.

When using Dehydrate (Water Blast) against the String Field Generators in the "Get Proton to Help You!" mission from Twinshot, you perform the activation animation, and you can see the damage numbers and healing numbers from a successful attack, but the game never draws the actual visuals of the attack. It's not a particularly severe bug, because the effects still occur, but the missing attack visual is also an indicator that you missed with the power, which can cause confusion, particularly in a busy environment (like combat during a TF).

It's not a major functionality issue, more of an easily-repeatable annoyance, but I thought I'd throw it out for comment as a possible QoL change. When you're crafting, as at an invention table, and you open an IO category (i.e., Damage), then scroll down until the level of IO you want to make is visible, then click on that, the recipe box opens up -- but if you didn't scroll down enough to have the entry fairly high in the window, when the recipe box opens up, the 'Create' button, and sometimes the 'Buy' buttom as well, are below the bottom edge of the window, so you have to go back to the scroll bar and scroll up some to make them visible so you can click on them. If clicking on a closed entry (i.e., level 25 Damage) forced a scroll of the recipe list to make the entirety of the expanded recipe box visible if it wasn't when it expanded, it would make crafting a little more convenient.

Oh, I've got the mousebutton teleport bind already, and I've been binding Fly to 'y' since early May 2004 (my current default bind for 'y' toggles both Fly and Mystic Flight, since I never take both on one character, so it activates whichever one they have). I just see all those empty power slots when the Translocation temporary bar opens up, and think of how having predefined 'bug out' macros for Translocation on that bar would be useful, since they'd only be usable when the bar was open, and when you didn't have Mystic Flight active the bar disappears, taking the Translocation-specific macros with it, so they don't take up power tray space when you can't use them.

I appear to have found a database issue with regard to enhancements. Beta Decay in Radiation armor shows on the enhancement screen in game as taking End Rdx, Rech Red, Taunt, To-Hit debuff, and Defense debuff enhancements, and regular and accurate To-Hit debuff and Defense Debuff sets. In Hero Designer, if you try to slot common IOs, you are limited to EndRdx, Rech Red, and Taunt IOs, and only Defense Debuff sets. It's missing the Defense and To-Hit debuff common IOs, and the two categories of To-Hit debuff sets as well as Accurate Defense Debuff.

You can macro teleport binds using the powexec_location command: /macro Fwd powexec_location forward:max Translocation /macro Cam powexec_location camera:max Translocation /macro Up powexec_location up:max Translocation /macro Bck powexec_location back:max Translocation Being able to put these in the temporary power bar that pops up when you activate Mystic Flight so they're only visible when you have Mystic Flight (and therefore Translocation) active would be useful.