srmalloy

No Omega Mu?

It's been a bug for quite some time that Wes Schabel, whose level range is putatively 10-14, has an actual level range of 10; he won't give you any missions if you're below level 10, and won't give you any missions once you ding 11. This, IIRC, existed back on Live, and every time I've had a character get him as a content on Homecoming, he's worked the same way; I've never seen the bug actually fixed.

My mistake copying and pasting the wrong line in the file; I didn't keep the original file, so working from memory and what the necromancy.txt file looks like now, the issue was divide powexec_location 300:5 "zombies" This would fail to match against the power name, so I updated it to be divide powexec_location 300:5 "zombie Horde"

If that's correct -- and I don't recall the few respecs I've done and used that with -- another option would be to open another tray, drag the macro to it, then close the tray.

You can try using /cleartray, but that's sort of the nuclear option, since it will wipe out all of your trays and make you rebuild them. Using Windows' snipping tool to screenshot your trays beforehand will give you a reference you can use to reposition all your power icons except the offending macro.

This left me snickering as I remembered the story about the Navy conducting a study on the effects of Viagra on healthy individuals. They gave regular doses of Viagra to a selected population of sailors and Marines over a six-month period, but they were stymied about how to analyze the results. The sailors all reported increased sexual stamina and performance, while the Marines just got taller.

The problem is that it doesn't allow a character to fly; it forces them to fly. You don't get the option; if someone has Group Fly on, and you're within the area of effect, you will be flying. That's what the option from Null addresses, and changing Group Fly to make what it does more manageable is what this thread, and the others going back to Live, is about.

It would be amusing if there was a big table of flavors tucked away on the server, and when you were teleported, you got a message like "You arrive back at Point du Hoc with a strange taste of [random flavor] in your mouth". Maybe something to add for the April Fool's event.

'&nbs' is the HTML 'non-breaking space' entity (so if you had a string 'mad&nbslad', you would always see 'mad lad' on one line in a web page, never splitting 'mad' and 'lad' across two lines); the game should not be inserting HTML entities into your macros.

Some of the mini pets, such as the mini Adamastor, have a resting animation of them standing there waving about as if unsteady on their feet, but it looks to me as if the animation is turned up too fast, making them weave about frantically. The pets that don't use this animation, like the mini Kronos and mini Paladin, don't have such a visibly high-speed animation. Could the weaving be slowed down so it's more comparable to, say, the Zombie Horde from the MM Necromancy primary?

I wonder whether it would be possible to create a "Pet Fly" power for the START vendors that would act like Group Fly, but only for the character's pets; it would further marginalize the Group Fly power, but even for MMs I don't know whether Group Fly gets enough use to justify a power choice in most builds. There are a few examples of content where not having Group Fly gimps a MM -- the Seed of Hamidon is one good example, where not having your henchmen flying eliminates the vast majority of their DPS. Perhaps the temp flight power you get from defeating Seedlings could be tweaked to affect your pets as a test to see how well it would work while keeping it limited before deciding whether to implement it as a START product.

Not just Masterminds; for most of the pet classes, you get to stand around waiting after a fast run/fly/jump to a new location for your pet(s) to deign to catch up with you, although it's objectively worse for MMs, since the whole AT is built around their pets being the majority of their damage output.

I don't know how it would affect things like execrable pathing getting pets stuck on the map geometry, but it would make for an interesting way to manage pets and travel powers for a character's travel power to automatically 'spread' to pets within a range limit, so that they would (theoretically) be able to keep up with you, with Group Fly being specifically defined to affect other players as well. So if a Mastermind wanted their henchmen to be able to fly with them, they would only have to take Fly or Mystic Flight, and only take Group Fly if they wanted to bring their team along. For many MMs, this would free up a power choice; the disablement by Null would still be needed because we wouldn't be removing the power from the game.

I can just imagine running into a group of Freakshow who are all buffed and polished taking crap from another group of Freakshow and replying something like "Well, of course we're all about individual freedom and anarchy, but that doesn't mean we can't take pride in looking good doing it!" It would be even funnier if this happened in a mission and these were a group of 'good' Freakshow who would help you defeat the hostile mobs in the mission, and then you had a choice at the end to either let them go or attack them to defeat them and 'bring them to justice'. If it's part of a story arc, you could have a knock-on effect to run into the 'dandy' Freakshow in later missions, with them being hostile or friendly depending on your choice in the first mission.

Моё судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей. (because "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?" seemed too pedestrian)

On the other hand, participating in the HO lottery can save you a considerable amount of inf, with a bit of luck; while I don't think I'm going to get them to +3 any time soon, I got both of the Cytoskeleton Exposure HOs I wanted for the basic slotting of my Necro/Marine build from Hami raid drops over a period of about a week. YMMV; you can get Peroxisome Exposure 'thank you for playing' drops over and over and over again before you ever see one you want or can sell for a good amount of inf.

It's not the instant response to an attack launched from stealth, but whether the attack is visibly noticeable. Fire, Ice, Electricity -- most of the attacks in most powersets draw a highly visible line of special effects between the attacker and the target to tell the spawn you're shooting into where the attack is coming from. Some of them are inherently less noticeable -- except for powers like Full Auto, Flamethrower, and Ignite, the sound of Assault Rifle attacks going off aren't going to pinpoint the shooter, and linking a hero off over there waving their hand with a coccoon of rock suddenly appearing around your buddy and crushing them is probably too much of a stretch for villains. And there's a similar situation with regard to ambushes. One of the things that nobody notices about ambushes is the completely undetectable stage ninja that slips up behind you to plant a tracking device on your character just before the ambush spawns, so no matter where you go, the ambush knows where to go to find you. At best, an ambush should know where you are when the ambush is triggered, so that it can proceed to where you were at that time, and from there, if they haven't stumbled across you on their way there, have to look around to actually find you. I can see the ambush being given increased range on their detection ability, so if they, say, hear blasting and yelling from a couple rooms away, they can charge off in that direction, but knowing exactly where you are moment-to-moment if you activate invisibility and stealthily scoot for the exit seems excessive. Ultimately, it comes down to game balance, and reworking all of the attacks in the game to determine individually what their originating visibility is (i.e., how noticeable it is where the attack is coming from) is probably going to take way too much time, as well as getting too far down in the weeds. And the amount of rework necessary to make ambushes both smart enough to search for their target while taking away their omniscience about where that target actually is will almost certainly consume an excessive amount of programming time. There are already a few ambushes where the ambush group runs to the presumed location of their target and then just stands there if they don't immediately spot their target, and I can see giving them an increased spotting range, but a wholesale rework of ambushes to make them more 'realistic' is beyond what we can expect to see in the forseeable future.

And if you can afford a fifth slot in your build, the Lockdown +2 Mag proc is always a solid choice.

So the HC staff should stop all other work they're doing on the game to deconstruct the threat level for mobs 32 and above (the lowest level at which you can slot level-35 enhancements, and then completely reconstruct the combat abilities of all mobs that level and higher, in order to fit some preconceived notion that everyone switches completely to IOs as soon as they can slot level-35 enhancements? And, along with this, they would also have to rework all of the reward drop tables and come up with something to replace SOs in drops with something of equivalent value, since if level-35+ SOs are removed, they won't be dropping, and players won't be able to sell them for inf, in one swell foop removing a source of funds from the game -- and you have no suggestion as to what would replace them.

When you access the Pillar of Ice and Flame in your (or anyone else's) SG base, after selecting the arc you intend to complete and mouse over the Pillar, your mouse cursor turns into the blue hand indicating an interactible object. In Ouroboros, when you complete the selection of the arc you intend to complete and mouse over the Pillar, your mouse cursor turns... blue. If your camera is aligned so that your character partially obscures the Pillar, the cursor remains white while it is within a certain 'halo' distance around your character, so that if you're not paying close enough attention, you can be 'clicking on the Pillar' and nothing happens. Since we already have the cursor changing color when it's over the Pillar, could we get it to change shape to the 'interaction hand' to make it easier to see when you've got your mouse in the right spot?

Not as much as the complete failure of machine efficiency that has Citadel bouncing you back and forth between Independence Port and Talos Island over and over and over and over again, instead of resolving issues in one zone, then the other, then being sent to defeat Vandal. I'm sorry, Citadel, but you've been handing out a completely pessimal plan to clear Council bases leading up to the defeat of Vandal since forever, and you need to figure out what you're doing wrong.

Well, it's not a popular opinion, given that inf has come to be regarded as just a currency, but in lore terms, inf (influence/infamy/information) represented how willing other people were willing to provide you with support -- enhancements, whatever -- based on your reputation from your actions in the game world, so I don't see how crawling into an electronic simulation does anything for your reputation in the game world. The AE simulations exercise your skill using your abilities, so them giving XP is justifiable, but someone who crawls into AE at level 1 and sits in farms until they're level 50 would come out with no one in Paragon City, or the Rogue Isles, having any idea who they are, and no reason to help them at all -- nothing that they did inside an AE mission should award them any inf at all, or any tangible rewards except, perhaps, inspirations, which are defined vaguely enough to skate around the edge. Aeon Entertainment is free to hand out tickets redeemable for randomized rewards based on performance in their simulations, which could then be vended for a supply of inf, but I don't see how the simulations themselves should award inf directly. That ship has, unfortunately, sailed while the game was still live; it's way too late to make that kind of a sweeping change, which should have been done shortly after AE was introduced to the game. The only thing that the AE simulations should give directly is practice using your abilities (i.e., XP); anything else depends on Aeon Entertainment providing additional rewards (i.e., tickets) to encourage people to use their services.

Doesn't always work; I've used ctrl-Tab and gotten a mob forty feet away from me instead of the one right in front of me. The tab targeting in the game is squirrelly, but not broken enough for me to report it as a bug, particularly because it's not readily reproducible, because the precise set of conditions where it occurs is virtually impossible to duplicate. Virtually all of the time it's an annoyance, not something game-breaking, so with more than forty years of experience being on the other side of bug reporting, I'm not going to drop something in the lap of the programmers if I can't demonstrate a way to consistently reproduce the problem.

Yes, the summonable target dummy you can get as a reward for an optional side goal during a high-difficulty Aeon task force.

The tab targeting follows an abstruse internal logic; you can be standing next to a hostile mob, but the tab targeting picks a mob way off in the distance because it's the 'next' target according to the server's internal target list. So you can't always tell from using the tab targeting whether the 'bud' is a pet. And with the movement logic of the 'real' buds varying between running for the hills and jumping back into the scrum of bud killers, you can't use a bud's moving in any given direction while the league is killing buds to distinguish between the genuine buds and the pets. The only way to tell for sure is to try to click on it to target it, which can, due to lag, fail to select a hostile bud immediately on clicking, so when the 'bud' dashes off without being selected and disappears into the cluster of players, Lore pets, and visual effects, you don't know if you just didn't click accurately enough, or it was a pet. Their presence adds unnecessary confusion to the bud phase, where the point is to eliminate all the dropped buds so Hamidon will respawn. And the suggestion is not to 'remove' them from players, but to disable the power in the two zones where its use makes completing the cleanup from a Hami raid more confusing.