srmalloy

"Infinite-duration clicky powers" -- so the current Mastermind pet upgrades wear off? They're click powers, and their effects are permanent. A couple of years ago, you could make an equally absolute statement that there are no archetypes with a ranged primary and armor secondary; now we have Sentinels. It's a good thing that the lack of existence of something now doesn't preclude it from existing in the future, no matter how many straw men you set up to argue against. You could create a power that is a toggle that has the effect of spawning some sort of invisible and invulnerable pseudo-pet that periodically pulses a PBAoE version of the current pet upgrade power; aside from being PBAoE rather than targeted AoE, the upgrade effect would remain identical to the current one.

Yes. The upgrade would be a one-and-done effect, yes, so that the upgrade toggle essentially sits there idle until one of your pets without the toggle appears in or enters the toggle area, at which time the upgrade is applied as if the MM had used the current version of the upgrade power.

As opposed to, say, all of the 90% of the doors around the city that exist only to give you somewhere to knock during the Halloween event, because they're never used as mission doors? But the doors you get stuck from in the backs of stores is a case of sloppiness on the part of the zone designers, for whom it was easier just to drop in the predefined 'door' object with all of its attributes than make a visually-identical 'pseudo-door' that had no functionality tied to it and wouldn't get used as a character login point.

The rationalization falls down redside and in Cimerora, but the game lore already has you making 'non-lethal' arrests; when a mob is defeated, if you examine them closely, they still have a tiny sliver of health, and the lore explanation is that the police transporters are able to lock onto the mobs once defeated and transport them to holding cells (presumably, with medical attention at the ready); any lethal apprehension is a character-roleplay bit, not what is putatively happening in game.

Along with removing the "do you really want to go here?" alignment prompt when you try to take a character with an 'intermediate' alignment (i.e., vigilante or rogue) to a non-mixed zone (i.e., from Dark Astoria to Talos Island). The game already won't let you go through the gate if you're not an allowed alignment, so getting the "This passage in front of you leads to Paragon City. Here you will find both Heroes who combat great evils and Vigilantes who do what they must to maintain the peace. Are you brave enough to face the challenges of this city of heroes?" every time is just a time-waster and can be removed without affecting the functionality of the zone gates.

And while it has not worked out that way in practice, according to the devs the original design of City of Villains had Masterminds being the closest analogous AT to the heroside Tanker. I think, though, that with the shift toward increasing difficulty in play, with more groups going for +4 and then multistar difficulty, that the structure of the Mastermind archetype has fallen behind, but as @GM_GooglyMoogly says, balancing the AT is a complicated process. One thing that might be looked at is making the pet upgrades PBAoE toggles, with a minimal or zero base End cost, that automatically apply the upgrade to pets at some End cost per pet receiving the upgrade. It's not an 'automatic' effect, but it would work in a similar way.

You mean that not including "...and leave them" was deliberate?

From the numpad MM control binds, an example from the 'robotics' general bind file (the rest of the general bind files follow the same format for the bind): add powexec_name "+targetcustomnear alive mypet$$equip robot" numpadenter powexec_name "+targetcustomnear alive mypet$$upgrade robot"

As opposed to the PPD on guard at the gates in/out of hazard zones, whom you often have to grope in order to get the mouse click to register.

You just weren't using the right drugs. Several decades ago, up in the Bay Area, some yahoo hopped up on PCP was stealing a refrigerator when he was accosted (been too long, I don't remember whether it was a guard or a police officer), refused to cooperate, and was shot three times. He put down the refrigerator, beat the shooter unconscious, then walked a half mile to a hospital and presented to the ER. He survived, but was later prosecuted.

If you used the Titan Icon program to save out your character to a local file on your computer, there's a program to extract the costumes from the save file -- although you may run into 'invalid costume element' errors. You can recreate the build from the build information, and if you can read the game's internal enhancement names, you can get back how you had the character slotted: <power> <id>Mastermind_Buff.Dark_Miasma.Tar_Patch</id> <level>2</level> <slots count="5"> <slot level="40" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Recharge.Crafted_Recharge</slot> <slot level="50" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Pacing_of_the_Turtle_E.Crafted_Pacing_of_the_Turtle_E</slot> <slot level="50" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Tempered_Readiness_E.Crafted_Tempered_Readiness_E</slot> <slot level="35" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Snare.Crafted_Snare</slot> <slot level="35" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Snare.Crafted_Snare</slot> </slots> </power> But you're not going to be able to pull your character back into Homecoming from the saved file; at best you'll be able to recreate it starting with a new character and following the build you saved out from Live.

Note that the Cupid's Crush proc is a Dmg/Proc IO, so, like the LotG Def/+Rech IO, you're only getting the enhancement effect of a two-aspect IO for the damage -- 26.5% at 50, where a straight Dmg IO would be 42.4% -- so if you're not getting a significant benefit from the proc, you need to look hard at another IO from the main set you've slotted the power with, or a more contributive set IO if you're frankenslotting.

The chance is the same 100% that the Assault Rifle's Burst, despite firing multiple projectiles, will only hit (at best) the single target you aim at. It's a game design decision to make the power single target, regardless of the 'real' characteristics of the attack. It may not be reflective of real-world weapons, but it's the way it works in game.

Euuuuw. I also play ESO, and it's very apparent that its control setup is hugely console-controller centric, with its restriction to five selectable abilities plus an 'ultimate' on each of the 'front and back bars', with only the currently selected bar's slotted abilities being usable, and any active powers switch off when you switch to the other bar. I have CoH characters with five or more full bars of abilities that are continuously available; having to cram fifty or more abilities into the button set available on a console controller is like trying to fit a quart of soda into a teacup. Even if you're restricting your idea to game consoles with attached keyboards, you have the fundamental problem of not having the correct graphics libraries -- and this would involve having to rewrite parts of the game engine to hook into the graphics libraries in the console, a much deeper and more involved process than simply recompiling the code to the new platform. 'Trivial' it is not.

And I just finished going through all of my Mastermind bind files to preface the binds for the upgrades with '+targetcustomnear alive mypet$$' to make the bind target the nearest pet, eliminating the need to double-tap the first use to target a pet. I can corroborate from testing with my Necromancy/Marine Mastermind that I can run through the Skeleton/Grave Knight/Lich summons, then slap the first empowerment on a Skeleton while the Lich is still untargetable, and the Lich gets the empowerment.

I would like to see a program of "Door diversification" -- there are so many clickable doors in the zones, and relatively few of them, in my experience, are used as mission doors. It would be good to see them get used for something other than being knocked at during the Halloween event for trick-or-treating.

Atlas Park was revamped in Issue 21 by the OG dev team. Not by the Homecoming team. ...with the exception of, as on Mercy Island, removing the AE building from the zone (and moving Fort Liberty into a building occupying the same footprint, instead of just destroying it, as on Mercy Island). But that hardly constitutes a 'revamp'.

You can also use it to enter an Ouroboros portal, although the necessity of having coordinates renders that less than useful for dropped Ouro portals. I created a macro for the main return portal in Ouroboros, removing the problem of clicking on the portal through a six-deep morass of characters, lore pets, and archetype pets stacked up around the portal for five, ten, or even fifteen minutes while their players get drinks, use the head, or wait for their request for an iTrial invite to be responded to and for the trial to kick off: /macroimage "WheelofFortuneFortune" "LvOro" "enterdoor 259 670 -764 P" As long as you're within range of the portal when you activate the macro, you'll get the pop-up destination list.

Simultaneous mapserver invasions in every zone, and the HC staff won't have to take the servers down for maintenance, because they'll all crash from the load.

I accumulated five sets, with a few extra of the Dmg/chance for confuse as sixth-slot options, but wasn't particularly dedicated in getting all the badges for all of my characters, just because it became tiresome after a while. Fortunately, most of the people I ran the Nemesis version had coherent plans for the tactics, as opposed to the one "pull the world and pray" run I was on. I did go back and do 'duck in, be annoying, get out and abandon' runs on several characters I hadn't got the 'Down in Front' badge on, though.

It's an issue with any sort of projectile weapon, in that if you're firing a single projectile, a miss doesn't magically stop at your target, but will continue until it hits something else or the ground, so to model it correctly you'd need to treat a pistol/rifle shot like Piercing Rounds with a max target limit of 1, checked in order of increasing range. And all firearms have an inherent accuracy, usually measured in minutes of arc, that specifies how big a circle of random dispersion a weapon has around the point where the shooter is aiming, but that's already baked into the game as the power's accuracy. The same thing is true for other types of attack -- 'realistically' if they missed the intended target the effect would continue in a line until it hit something, but like your ability to, say, throw a Fireball into a mixed group of Outcasts and NPCs and hit only the Outcasts, a single-target attack only being able to hit the one target you're aiming at is a game design decision. A multi-shot burst should act like Piercing Rounds does, with all targets in the line of fire checked. Barring the extensive use of Handwavium in their construction, both Gun Drone and Tri-Cannon should, by the fact that they're not (at least visibly) anchored to resist the effect of recoil on dispersion, have looser effective accuracy over the length of a burst, with the rounds more affected by recoil dispersion flying past the target to potentially hit something else. But, again, it's a game design decision to restrict their fire to a single target, however improbable this would be in a 'real life' situation with a weapon of that design.

It does not affect game play in any way, so it's going to be low on the priority list for a fix (unless it's a particularly easy one), but there is a graphical issue with Temporal Bomb from the Traps powerset. After you detonate the temporal bomb you placed, the bomb is still there on the ground, completely unimpressed by the fact that it was supposed to have blown up.

And, unfortunately, Paragon City's building standards prevent them from constructing a home out of the stack of toasters they received as wedding gifts...

One of the things that would need to be done is to eliminate the binary effect of the controls in the game, where you either get full effect or nothing; that resulted in all sorts of specialized PvP-only modifiers to prevent situations like pera-hold. It would have taken a considerable amount of work to properly implement an incremental control system — for example, holds could increase your target's animation time as well as recharge, slowing their actions until they were frozen, making it useful even if you didn't get a full lock down of your target. But that is considerably more work to set up and implement, which the original developers didn't have — and once the current framework was in place, it made it much harder to change, because of how widespread the changes would be, snaking through virtually all of the combat mechanics.

With the changes that Paragon Studios made to PvP, the mechanics are different enough that builds and habits that work for PvE can fail horribly in PvP, and it's unlikely that this is going to change in the future. Even back on Live, beyond exploration badge and Shivan runs, the sole time I've spent any significant amount of time in a PvP zone was shortly after the release of CoV, when a couple of friends and I decided to sunbathe on the roof of the hero base in Bloody Bay, just hanging out, and only engaging in any sort of PvP when someone came up (generally solo) to try to throw us off. After an hour or so, we packed up and went home. But overall, my attitude toward PvP has been cast in duracrete by my experience from other MMOs that PvP is a magnet for the sort of gamer whose sole measure of their "leet skillz" is how fast their level-capped combat monster in BiS gear can gank lowbies fresh out of the tutorial zone.