srmalloy

I was entertained to see that the game rolled over smoothly into scientific notation when it exceeded the integer limit.

You also have to detoggle Hover, Fly, or Mystic Flight to summon a buff pet.

I got yelled at during a MSR on the test server when IOs were being tested; I had a Katana/Regen Scrapper (before the Regen rework making it click), and I got a Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage recipe that I crafted and slotted. It showed up on mouse over as 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative... and was bugged to have the abbreviated description be more accurate -- when the proc went off, it did a negative amount of damage to the target, healing it. Not being really concerned about a minor reduction in damage during the beta test, I left it in, and it proc'ed against a tower during the raid. The devs fixed that bug, but slapped in another, making it Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot -- when it went off, it would do an outrageous amount of damage. So I went hunting, and found Jurassik. On my first attack, it proc'ed, and I did "6.043E+13" points of damage, dropping him in one hit. As it turned out, I didn't even have the best one-shot damage with it; other players had done much better.

Several days ago, I was running a character past the exploration badge at the N end of Steel Canyon E of the tram as part of grabbing all the zone's badges for the accolade, and I heard two of the NPC civilians talking about how great it was to have a job on a construction project where they didn't actually have to build anything.

If I remember correctly, Mercedes Sheldon, being a contact inside the Midnighter Club, is technically out of range for you while you're in the 10-14 range for Trevor Seaborn, Haley Phillips, or Hugo Redding (and, I think, one other) if you haven't completed Montague Castaneda's arc to get access to the Midnighter Club (or got the badge from Night Ward), so the may not be picking up the description for her. She's still a better choice than any of the Science contacts.

What Vanden said. What you are describing is true for set bonuses, not the enhancement values themselves. If you had slotted two Numina's Convalescence -- say, a level-50 Healing and a level 50 Healing/Endurance -- the two-piece set bonus is +12% Regeneration. If you exemplar down below level 47, you lose that set bonus, but the direct effect of the enhancements themselves -- +42.4% Healing from the former and 26.5% Healing and 26.5% End reduction from the latter -- simply scale down according to the exemplar computation that Vanden linked to. And the enhancements themselves never stop giving you an improvement to your ability once they're slotted, no matter how low you exemplar -- if you exemplar down to level 5, for example, that level-50 Heal gets scaled down from 42.4% to about 4.8%, but it's still improving that power.

Sort of; it appears that the boots are more of a pneumatic-ram sort of thing, creating a visual effect supporting why your jumping so far. This is supported by the animation, which not only compresses and expands the pistons, but creates a little cloud that you leave behind when you jump, leading to the costume piece having been widely referred to as "poot boots".

Rather than having two binds, I chose to set mine up as lctrl+lbutton "powexecname Translocation$$powexecname Teleport" This way, I have one bind that can go into my file of default binds, and it doesn't matter whether the character has Mystic Flight or Teleport, the ctrl-mousebutton combo works (since I don't expect to be taking both on any character, although the bind is set up to prefer Teleport over Translocation if you have both, so it won't require you to be flying to teleport).

Unless they have changed for Homecoming, the unlockable stores in Brickstown and Founder's Falls only stock their origin's enhancements, so your supposition is a good one, Honorbridge.

I don't think that, say, Nemesis scattering snipers around a residential zone with instructions to harass heroes is unreasonable, given the fact that you have groups of Council, Rikti, Circle of Thorns, and Crey standing around on the street, and Devouring Earth and more Circle of Thorns in the peripheral parkland. Expecting to be able to zip around the zone unmolested is about as reasonable as expecting to start at the tunnel from Talos Island, turn Walk on, and mosey down to the Icon tailor without getting in a fight.

It's only a bug in the same sense that the NPCs running loops over the sewer entrance just W of the tram in Kings Row was a bug (and which got a history plaque when it was fixed), since it doesn't affect gameplay, but in Skyway City, in the grassy area west of the Left Behind badge, there is a parade of NPCs walking continuously around the border of an invisible square. It's entertaining to watch for a bit, and may qualify for another history plaque if it can be retconned into a set when it's fixed, but

This is something that will, I believe, require some coding to change the way things work, but I just wanted to throw it out to get awareness. For Atomic Manipulation, the powers in the powerset are all colorable. The Gamma Rays effect, however, appears to be hardcoded to use the stereotyped (and wrong) bright-green default radiation color (minor rant: the green color popularly associated with radiation is actually the color of the phosphor in radium-glow displays, not from the radiation itself. The glow from radiation, Cherenkov Radiation, is blue). I would like to see the Gamma Ray secondary effect in Atomic Radiation be made colorable as part of the powerset (perhaps taking the color of the tier 1 power, so it doesn't have to be shoehorned into the power customization window).

Back Alley Brawler is over in Argosy Industrial on the W side. Removing the costume change functionality from Ms. Liberty addresses the likely crux of the problem -- once you log in the first time, you've got five additional costume slots to tweak out, and with all of the choices available to you, that can easily take a half hour or more... and Ms. Liberty is right there for you to do it with. I don't see that making people cross Atlas Plaza to go to Icon for their costume updates is particularly onerous (for level 1/2 characters, the run to BAB and back can be chancy, particularly with a new player unsure of how to jump up the retaining wall to BAB's east to get back to the center of AP). And it means that new players who learn that Ms. Liberty is where you change your costume(s) -- and don't learn about the Icon tailors and the other trainers who can, too -- will learn about them. Particularly if they can add "how do I alter my costume?" to the list of "what other things can I do" questions, with Ms. Liberty pointing players to the Icon tailor across the street from the hospital.

Paragon Studios (formerly NCSoft West) was wholly owned by NCSoft...I mean the revenue model might still be the same, but it’s not like they are undercutting Paragon Studios The cash shop driven by NCcoin is something NCsoft was doing with all their other games; the intent was to have the cash shop income going directly to NCsoft, who would then decide how much or even whether the production company would receive from the purchases. Another example of the carrot-and-stick management style NCsoft had.

Based on NCsoft's track record with Asian-style MMOs, I would also expect: Powerset unlocks for single characters (i.e., buy access to a powerset, you can create one character with that powerset) Costume piece unlocks specific to the character they're purchased on Character-specific content unlocks All unlocks paid for with the NCcoin currency purchased directly from NCsoft, with no revenue going to Paragon Studios Group-dependent content in the primary advancement line required for character progression, shifting from solo-friendly content in the starter zone(s) to group-mandated content by the middle levels. All of the above are based off of the dependency of most Asian MMOs on a microtransaction-based cash shop that produces the vast majority of the revenue from the MMO.

Slotted enhancements were always scaled when you ex'ed down for low-level missions, but as I understand it, the game only recorded the level at which you picked powers; the slots were the same no matter what level you'd exemp'ed down to. I believe one of the reasons for this was to make it consistent no matter how you'd slotted your enhancements -- consider a six-slotted power where three of the slots got inactivated due to exemping, and the difference in effectiveness for someone who'd put an Acc/End, an Acc/End/Rech, and an Acc/Rng in the first three slots vs. someone who'd put a Dam/Acc, a Dam/End, and a Dam/Acc/End in those slots. It would make exemping down a crapshoot before the introduction of unslotters, because the randomness with which people acquired set IOs could mean that powers were slotted in essentially random order unless you burned a respec for nothing more than ordering your enhancements.

It's the same constraints; what makes them different is that they despawn immediately upon defeat, whereas most 'animate' mobs lie around as a body for a bit before the police teleporters lock onto them and drag them off to the Zig.

What I've been doing is to start with the five prestige enhancements for attacks, then use ten merits from what I get for exploring Atlas Park, Echo:Galaxy City, and Echo:Atlas Park to buy converters, which I dump into the auction house. With that for funding, I'll equip with level 15 IOs at 12, making more 15s until I hit 22, where I'll burn the level-20 respec to get all of them out and dump them into SG storage, replacing them with level 25 IOs, then stay with those while I level, picking up attuned set IOs as I can, then buying unslotters to pull out IOs and replace them with the sets when I get enough to fill out a power as my plan has it slotted, dumping the 25s back into SG storage. Then, as subsequent characters level up, they can hit SG storage for their 15s and (eventually) 25s, lowering the upgrade costs, with an ongoing cascade of common IOs to newer characters.

How about just going to either BAB or the Icon tailor (just W of the hospital) to make extended costume changes? Yes, you get six costume slots right off the bat, but you don't have to set them all up right away. Your costume and power customization is free before level 10; you should be able to make it to either one of those to set up your other costume slots, rather than bunching up around Ms. Liberty.

Unfortunately, I suspect that it would wind up increasing AE use, because of its ability to sidestep the 'effort' of leveling. Create a character with whatever the current 'meta' is for farming, pump it to 50 via AE. Now respec it to save out the enhancements, then take the inf that you built up farming to 50, buy a reroll token, and use it to create a character with an AT/powersets that don't lend themselves to quick leveling -- i.e., controllers/defenders. It basically allows you to use an easily-leveled build to sub for the work of leveling one that's harder to get to 50. And I'll take it as read that this isn't how you intended it to be used, but like AE itself, as soon as you hand an 'easy button' to players, it's going to get used that way, no matter how little you intended it.

If that's to be done, then the new maps for the updated zones should be reworked to use the same iconography as the originals. The badge and plaque markers are bigger and fuzzier on the new maps.

I had the name floating around for a while, and I finally decided to make the character. An AR/EM Blaster named Rolande; initial costume baggy jeans, motorcycle boots, vest, wife-beater tee, green skin, no head, and a submachine gun for his weapon. Rolande, the headless Trollkin gunner...

Well... unless the runner is your AoE debuff anchor, and you're tied up in the fight and don't notice your anchor's run off until the four spawns he ran through show up and want to argue. Some of those were epic in the sudden addition of aggro.

Just out of curiosity, you have picked up all the plaques in Echo: Galaxy City, not just the plaques in the 'live' zones?

What? The game doesn't record what level you assign slots at -- had that data been available, it would have been reflected in the Sentinel+ extractor that archived characters out of Live before the shutdown. From looking at combat attribute data on live, if you had a power you picked at level 4 that you assigned slots to at level 50, it had those slots even if you exemped down to 4.