srmalloy

Plot it out fully -- say you have 500 HP, and you take 100 damage. With a 60% IH, you'd drop to 400 HP, then 'instantly' heal back to 460 after the delay. If you have 50% resist and 60% IH, you'd drop to 450 damage, then 'instantly' heal back to 480 after the delay. Yes, you're getting less benefit from your IH, but that's because you're not taking as much damage in the first place, so there's less for it to heal.

Guess again. Resistance is also resistance debuff resistance, so if you apply a 50% resistance debuff to a target with 90% Resistance, they resist 90% of the debuff, resulting in a net of 5% debuff to their resistance (see the wiki for Resistance (Mechanics)). Now, if it was an unresistable debuff, then it would be the strongest power, but if it's resistable, it's not going to do much against the targets you would most want to use it on.

That's what I normally do, although it can take a bit for them all to respond; GoTo/Passive is faster, but then you have to put them back on Defensive or Aggressive afterward. *shrug*

There's already a popmenu out there for summoning your lore pets, whatever they may be, so it should be possible to make a similar popmenu file for the vanity pets, either as one big list (unwieldy) or grouped in sets by the source of the pet (i.e., anniversary pets, monstrous aether pets, S.T.A.R.T. pets, etc.). So you could have a single icon to pick from all the pets you have, and see the ones you don't have.

With one exception. There used to be a Cone Range enhancement; this was taken out and folded into the Range enhancements, so that if you slot Range into a cone attack, it increases the depth of the cone, allowing you to hit targets further away. Because it doesn't change the cone angle, this increases the beaten zone for the cone attack, although the maximum number of targets doesn't change. Boost Range will do this to cone attacks like Full Auto and Flamethrower, allowing an Assault Rifle character to really reach out and touch someone.

Range enhancements and Boost Range; unless I'm doing something like 'See that dot?' shooting, such as from Imperious north across the E/W valley to the courtyard on the other side in Cimerora, the mobs will almost always react. And ask me how I found out that the Malta Gunslingers with their pistols can outrange Snipe+Boost Range. This is shooting from a distance in excess of 250 yards. Although when I am doing the really extreme-range shooting, with some mobs it can be amusing that I take one shot, and the spawn is all "Fred fell down. How about that.", and it's not until I take the second shot that they aggro on me. Shooting like this is how I found out (while going after Council war walkers for the badge) that there is a maximum range for badge credit -- IIRC, it's about 210 yards -- and if you're shooting from farther out, you'll still get the defeat message and XP/inf/drops, but you won't increment the defeat count for badges.

I've made this type of suggestion before, where Instant Healing is changed from a click that gives a big boost to regeneration to a toggle that makes incoming damage work similarly to how Spectral Wounds does. Spectral Wounds does X amount of damage, then if the target is still alive a short while later, Y amount of that damage heals back. Instant Healing would work in a similar way -- you take damage, and a second or so later, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals. I'm not sure how the internal mechanics would work in the game code, but it would add a step before damage is applied to the character where a heal based on the incoming damage gets put in the event queue with a short delay. So if you had your IH slotted to bring its heal to 60%, and you took 100 points of damage (after any Resistance was applied), a short time later (a second or thereabouts), you'd be healed for 60 points. The queued heal only happens once for each time you're damaged, so a 60% heal from IH acts like 60% resistance with the proviso that you have to survive taking all the damage first, before IH will restore you. Depending on how the power gets balanced, the entire amount could be enhanceable, or there could be enhanceable and unenhanceable parts.

Well, it's completely understandable that they should be salty about what happened.

As I recall, it was a moderately complicated issue to fix. Making pets survive zoning was easy; the problem was that they would become uncontrolled, and be hostile to everything, attacking the pet owner and their team. It would be necessary to go back into the pet code and winkle out what the solution to reasserting control after zoning was, and carry that across to other pets. And there's a surprisingly large number of 'ancillary' pets that this would need to be applied to -- Dark Servant, Force Field Generator, Seeker Drones, etc. -- and you've got oddities like the Acid Mortar from the Traps set, which already gets pulled out of missions with you if it hasn't run out of mortar charges when you exit (a bug having been fixed with that, where the base, but not the mortar proper, was drawn after exit).

Depending on the situation, follow mode isn't a panacea. When I've had my Necro/Marine MM on Rikti Mothership raids, despite having my henchmen set to Follow, I will almost always see one or two halfway up the side of the bowl whacking on some random Rikti that hadn't even made it down into the bowl where I was standing, much less attacked me. So you can still get shafted by your henchmen's target fixation; ordering them to a location near you, then using Soul Extraction, then releasing them to Follow again, or ordering them to attack a particular target, is the only way to really be sure.

My Grav/Traps controller plays completely differently on teams than when solo, given the normal "rush rush rush" mode of most teams. Solo, it's almost lazy, and I take it as a bit of a failure if one of the mission mobs gets an attack off.

Or drag the icon to your power tray; that works, too.

I'm not sure if this is properly a bug, instead of working as intended, but I had an incident with a character in Ouroboros just now that had me scratching my head. Another character had summoned a crafting table, and I moved over to craft the recipes I had salvage for. After crafting the first IO, the other character ran off, dragging the crafting table behind her, and disappeared into the Ouro building proper (I was by Mender Sears). The crafting window remained open, and I was able to craft another three recipes before I ran out of matching salvage and closed the window myself. Just like the crafting tables do in bases, there is a range outside of which you can't click on the summoned crafting table and get a crafting window. However, for the tables in bases, you move away from the table and the crafting window will close; I was well outside the presumed range of the summoned table, but the crafting window didn't go away. I won't argue that this has benefits, but I don't think this is intended behavior.

Sticking with Assemble the Team, why does it, in the third mission of the Penelope Yin Task Force, leave you standing on the tail boom of the mission helicopter with your midsection in the plane of the spinning rotors? Didn't Vic Morrow teach us anything?

I'm viewing this through the lens of a career in programming, but I can't help but associate this with "real soon now"...

I have no way to prove it, since those decisions are closed off behind any number of doors, but I suspect that one of the things contributing to NCsoft shuttering CoH was that its cash shop was deliberately designed with account-wide unlocks, so a player would only ever buy a costume set once and be able to use it forever on all their characters, instead of having one-shot individual costume pieces on NCsoft's own cash shop, where they could bury players in microtransactions that would pay directly into an NCsoft account (presumably using their 'NCcoin' currency), instead of having to filter back through Paragon Studios and bulk up their bottom line, and represent a continuous source of revenue while choking off player choice (since if you bought a one-shot costume piece, then added it, if you went back later and replaced it with a different costume piece, changing back would mean you'd need to buy it again, or buy it again if you wanted it on a different character). That's where NCsoft makes their money from all their F2P MMOs -- an ongoing stream of people buying one-off gear before they move on to another game. The retention rate CoH had was considerably at odds with other MMOs of the time.

You're spot on. If you have a specific 'Arcane Blast' set, then if you're creating a character who's a dimension traveller from a universe like Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos universe, where magic is the technology, then if they're using enchanted devices to produce their power effects, then neither a Magic nor a Technology origin really fits to the character concept. I have a Fire/Time/Dark Corruptor, Machinator Magicus (roughly 'magical engineer' in Latin), who is exactly that -- someone from another dimension where magic takes the place of technology in our dimension -- and I could just create them as a Magic origin character and pick whatever powersets I wanted, because all of them could be handwaved as magical effects. Creating a powerset that is defined as magical breaks concept for any character origin that isn't Magic, because the powerset is locked in concept to the origin; you're constraining the ability of players to create whatever character they want with whatever powerset(s) they want, and foot out how they tie to the character's origin on their own, either in their head or in the character's bio.

The OP's statement about being punished is for their rapidly resummoning pets, which is what you're doing now -- under the current configuration, you pay the same End cost for summoning Tier 1 henchmen whether you are summoning 1, 2, or all three of them. The OP's proposal appears to be to apply an endurance discount of 1/3 if you're only summoning 2 of the Tier 1 henchmen, and a discount of 2/3 if you're only summoning a single henchman. To break it out more clearly: Current Arrangement: Summon 3 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 2 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 1 henchman: Full End cost Proposed change: Summon 3 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 2 henchmen: 2/3 End cost Summon 1 henchman: 1/3 End cost So with the OP's proposal, you're only paying the fraction of the base End cost for the number of henchmen you're actually summoning, instead of paying the full End cost regardless of how many you're pulling up, so it's more 'efficient' in terms of End to wait for all your Tier 1 pets to be defeated and summon them all back at once, rather than replacing them one by one as they go down. For myself, while I can see the argument for not paying the full End cost to get only one henchman, I would prefer to see a sort of "overhead" to the summons, so that the act of summoning has a cost, regardless of how many henchmen you're summoning: Summon 3 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 2 henchmen: 3/4 End cost Summon 1 henchman: 1/2 End cost This would make resummoning defeated henchmen a more strategic decision; you're not paying the full cost of the summons for a fraction of the effect, but it's still more 'efficient' to summon all three at one time, so the MM still has a reason to wait to summon more at once.

In the mission "Bust Countess Crey & her guards" from Janet Kellum, one of the Crey Gamma Tanks says "[NPC] Crey Gamma Tank: I know. And nothing ever seems to phase her." That should be "faze", not 'phase'. 'Faze' is a verb meaning to disturb or disconcert; 'phase' is either a noun describing a part of a process, or a verb indicating carrying out something in stages.

And there's a clear distinction between being able to stand toe to to with an AV and actually being able to do anything significant to the AV in return.

I didn't say the listing was consistent, merely that it didn't properly fit the effects of the collective 'vanity pets' group; it's probably put there to reduce the size of the menu tree in the popmenu. If we went through and listed all of the inconsistencies in CoH, we'd never get any play in.

The other term that seems to be popular for the same tactic is "Hamikaze".

I don't think that's properly a vanity pet, since it's a predictable reward from a high-difficulty Aeon TF for a particular accomplishment within the TF, and it's a targetable and destroyable pet, unlike the others.

And even back on Live, CoH stood out in that the character customizations that were in the Paragon Store (or unlocked as veteran rewards) were unlocked account-wide, instead of being something you had to buy on a character-by-character basis -- and, even more attractive, your costume choices were entirely cosmetic, having nothing to do with your powers, instead of your stats being bound into the gear so that you outleveled it and would have to throw it away unless the game supported some sort of morphing feature that let you apply the appearance of a particular costume piece to the gear you were actually wearing (and didn't use up that item in the process, so when you outleveled that gear, you'd have to buy the piece you wanted again, and again, and again as you leveled or geared up).

Amusingly, one of the forms ascribed to the 'real' cryptid referred to as Lusca is a literal sharktopus, a half-shark, half octopus, found in the area of the blue holes around Andros Island in the Bahamas.