srmalloy

"Please, continue your petty bickering; I find it most intriguing." — Data

And the mechanics are in the game for confetti...

The problem I see with this is that it breaks the way targeting works — while it could be coded to work only on "target blocked" mobs, that leaves the possibility of it being used on targets that aren't stuck in a wall, just around a corner; given the fact that the game doesn't auto-reposition stuck mobs, I don't think the game engine can identify a mob as being stuck in the geometry, and I don't think it can tell the difference between LoS being blocked due to the mob's position relative to the attacker, and LoS being blocked due to the mob being physically in the geometry. It would be a complex coding problem to keep it from being misused.

However, it's a good lead-off attack when your target is oblivious. My Ice/Ice Blaster, when running Heather Townsend's arc, will use it on the higher rank in a spawn, then the other, fast-triggering, hold on the other mob in the spawn before taking them apart. Not as reliable as my Grav/Traps Controller's 'lay down mines, then Wormhole the spawn into the mine field' tactic, but quite a bit faster.

Let us rather discuss how this would be animated, and who would be doing the work to create the animations, since there are no existing character animations that could be repurposed for the abilities in this powerset. It's easy to talk about what the powers and their effects would be; it's considerably more difficult when none of the character animations exist, with the lack of animation resources available to the HC staff.

It depends a lot on the flavor of Paragon Protector; the claws scrappers don't get significantly harder when they pop their MoG, nor are the healers. It's the energy blasters that go full-on unhittable if they're allowed to get their MoG off. Back on live, I picked up the habit of saying "Hello, Azuria? I'd like to have this piece of the Wheel of Destruction filed under 'Will Call' for the Banished Pantheon, please" as a recognition of the existence of a hidden walk-up window outside the MAGI vault for enemy groups to show up and collect items from the vault.

I had the "blindfolded escort" cancer just now -- the "Out of the Corner of your Eye" alignment tip mission, where I had to rescue two rogue PPD officers... and they would drop out of follow if I got more than 30 feet from them (I had them targeted, so I could see where it happened); at 30 feet away, they would 'lose sight' of me... in a twenty-foot wide corridor with a clear line of sight from them to me, and I have no movement or stealth powers active. A seemingly endless cycle of 'back up ten feet, wait for them to decide to move, then wait until they close to nine feet, rinse and repeat'. I don't care if it's handled in game by a graphic of your closing a collar around their necks and attaching a leash, losing sight of you at thirty feet is utterly broken.

In the Blaster Tactical Arrow powerset, the info window for Glue Arrow describes it as a Location AoE, but the power is actually a Targeted AoE: The Detailed Info tab shows that its Target Type is 'Enemies', which is correct for a Targeted AoE power (Oil Slick Arrow shows 'Location' for Target Type, which is correct for a Location AoE power). So the word 'Location' in the info pop-up window and in the short info that appears when you right-click on the icon needs to be changed to 'Targeted' so that it matches the actual power.

And that they summon regular Illusionists, which also spend half their time phased out, dragging the fight out even more, and summon a Phantasm who summons a decoy that is invulnerable but becomes your target at annoying moments, so you have to keep checking your target window to make sure you haven't accidentally switched to the decoy and are wasting your attacks. If it weren't for the badge for defeating their summoned pets, it wouldn't be worth fighting them at all.

I believe if you just close the salvage rack window, that will stop it from happening, but if you have the window open, every time you use a catalyst, one gets moved into the rack. Annoyingly, the catalyst gets moved into the rack first, so if you only have one catalyst, when you try to use it with the salvage rack window open, it will move into the rack and your IO won't get catalyzed.

Yes, but it doesn't do what you want. If you have an Oranbega map that includes the chamber with the six portals, you can trigger them all and get a transfinite number of Behemoth spawns through the portals. Unfortunately, since this was determined way back on Live to be an exploit, the summoned Behemoths grant no experience. Similarly, the mobs summoned through portals created by Rikti Communications Specialists grant no experience.

You never looked at the Hami-Os, did you? There's already a term for that in the game: Acc/Dam Acc/Mez Dam/Mez Dam/End/Rech Mez/End/Rech Proc

It's a bad comparison, because it's not directly equivalent -- the сволочь doing this is affecting the environment, not other players directly -- but I read that and pictured Group Fly sitting in a corner with a drink in its hand, snarking "But all they have to do is go to Null and have him make them immune to Group Fly"...

I recognize that the game has a render limit for nearby mobs, and that mobs in excess of that limit won't be rendered, with mobs appearing close to your character causing more distant mobs to disappear, becoming untargetable and immune to attack (while the converse does not appear to be true -- non-rendered hostiles can still attack). Today, I saw this happen in Echo: Dark Astoria. There was an unusually large number of people who showed up to take down Adamastor, and when he was summoned, he was completely invisible to me, being defeated before I could target him -- or target through another player -- to get an attack off. The logic that the game uses to prioritize what mobs to render needs to be tweaked so that hostile mobs do not disappear entirely and leave only friendly ones. Update: The hidden defeat appears to have confused the server -- at Adamastor's summoning spot, the 'Adamastor Rising' window shows Adamastor's health as 0/100, with a countdown of "Time until Adamastor retreats". Update 2: Lured back by someone calling out a suspiciously low timer for Adamastor, I took the same character back, seeing the above window; when the timer expired, the message "ADAMASTOR RETREATS" was displayed in large red letters, followed by a normal timer reset; this implies that I was originally wrong, and the summoning was bugged, and Adamastor did not actually appear, rendering my observation about rendering priority moot.

In the hero tip mission 'Extract Sister Jocasta', once you rescue Sister Jocasta and begin to lead her out, her first action is to turn on her stealth ability. However, if you have any stealth power activated, she'll lose sight of you and whine about being left behind. I had already cleared a route back to the door, so I don't know whether she's a "just follow while wearing a blindfold, gets lost if you go around a corner" hostage, or a "fights with you, can see through some of your stealth" hostage. Either way, a rescued hostage who uses stealth shouldn't be fazed when you use it yourself. Additionally, the tracking for the "defeat Silent Blade to escape" part needs to be pushed a bit harder; I was able to lead Sister Jocasta to the exit without encountering anyone, and it was only after running back into the mission that Silent Blade showed up for me to defeat and complete the mission. Either she needs to show up faster, or getting to the exit without encountering her should also complete the mission.

As wretched hives of scum and villainy go... it's about average.

...he obviously wasn't trying hard enough... 😁

Oil Slick Arrow is vulneable to this on the docks at the southeast of Peregrine Island. I know from reporting players back on Live using it as an export that it used to be possible to get through a gap in the geometry to get under the northern dock, which allowed you to attack any mobs standing on the dock with impunity, so I expect that the location targeting is tagging geometry under the paved surface of the docks.

I think the OP's posting is more about how the game render limit causes mobs to disappear when there are lots of figures in a tight area -- MSRs, the various invasions, Hamidon raids, etc. -- anywhere you have a full league, or most of a league, and can find yourself attacking a mob that, because another mob has teleported in closer to you than the one you're attacking, fades out and disappears because the client is at its render limit (this appears to be separate from the game-engine quirk that allows mobs teleporting in to be targetable but not attackable, while allowing them to attack while protected from being attacked). Unfortunately, this is built into the game engine and is difficult to tweak. Over time, I've conceptualized two possible ways to address this: 1) Add a flag to the rendering that forces the one mob your character is currently targeting to be rendered if it is within render distance, regardless of the other mobs within render distance. This would allow you to continue to attack a target even if additional mobs arrive that would otherwise push your targeted mob off the render list. 2) Add an entry to the graphics options for 'Mob Render Bias', with values 'Nearest', 'Hostile', and 'Friendly'. 'Nearest' is the way rendering works now. 'Hostile' sorts the hostile mobs ahead of friendly mobs for render order selection, so that in mass fights like an MSR, your league members may not be rendered, but you won't have hostile mobs fading in and out. 'Friendly' would sort friendly mobs ahead of hostile mobs, basically the opposite. So if you were running a character focused on attacks, you could select 'Hostile' and always see the hostile mobs, and if you were running a character focused on support (i.e., healing), you would always see the friendly characters in your group. Which one, if either, is a viable option would depend on how readily changes could be made to the way the game engine renders nearby mobs, and how much work would be entailed in the process.

If you reply to a post that is not on the last page of a multi-page topic, the forums will occasionally fail to jump to the new post, and just leave you with your reply window open, with no indication that your entry was posted to the topic, encouraging you to hit the 'submit' button again, resulting in a double post.

It's sort of pointless to make the argument in a superhero context, where you can handwave access to all sorts of super materials, but 'boob armor' has a number of inconvenient structural issues, and exists only to perpetuate the "Look! Teats! See, I'm female!" trope. Compare Bo-Katan Kryze's armor from 'The Mandalorian' with Captain Phasma's armor from 'The Force Awakens'.

Unfortunately, there are aspects of the game lore that swept through play and disappeared, never to be seen again. For those of us who played through it back on Live, we can remember the falling out at the top levels of the 5th Column that broke it into the 5th Column and the Council, with scattered mass battles between the two in various zones, with the Council seemingly triumphing over the 5th Column and replacing them all over Paragon City, and it was only much later that we found out that the 5th Column had gone deep to lick their wounds and rebuild, eventually pushing their way back into the city, where the animosity between the groups continues to be seen in zones like Steel Canyon. In my opinion, it would be worthwhile to create content that showcases the animosity separating the two groups, with a story arc that feeds you clues about the original breakup of the 5th Column, with an Ouroboros-only arc that puts you back in the middle of that breakup -- being on the edge of the street fights between the 5th Column and the Council, investigating a 5th Council base and having a Council team invade to attack everything inside, infiltrating a Council base shortly after their victory and seeing the new Council banners but crates and other decorations still showing the old 5th Column markings because the Council didn't want to go to the expense of repainting everything when they could just use it up.

The issue I have with automatically-scaling content is that it eliminates a practice seen in comics -- you're unable to defeat a particular opponent, you go off and get better, then come back again and defeat them this time. If all content scaled to your level, if you were unable to defeat, say, Requiem at the end of an arc, the only option you have is to rope in some other heros to help you. And if the content that you're hung up on is tagged as a solo mission, well, then, you're SoL -- your only option is to autocomplete it.

The game is quirky about what constitutes a 'safe location' -- the universities are 'unsafe', the Midnighter Club is 'unsafe', the police stations are 'unsafe', but standing on top of a tram station where you can have an ambush pop up at any time is 'safe'.

It's hard to convey sarcasm unequivocally with just text, and certain conventions like "@BEGIN(Sarcasm) [sarcastic remark] @END(Sarcasm)" were niche usage even before they largely fell out of use.