srmalloy

Or, more annoyingly, code crashes that go away when you put in debugging statements so you can see where the program is when it falls on its face. Fortunately, this happening is almost always an indicator that you've got a rogue pointer.

I think the ragdoll physics were sort of spatchcocked onto the rest of the combat effects, and no one bothered to go back and look at whether limits needed to be established on the range of motion at the joints. I do agree with you that some of the contortions are excessive, but I don't know how much work would be entailed in setting range limits on the primary joint movements (i.e., forward/back at the knees, same for hips with in/out, like standing with feet spread, waist rotation and flex, the bend of elbows, two axes of rotation at the shoulder, and again for the neck) -- and, more importantly, applying those limits during the ragdoll movement. It may well be that the code for this would have put too much of a load on the computers CoH was originally intended to be able to run on, and then 'working well enough' later on that no one went back to clean it up.

@BEGIN(SARCASM) Well, I guess it's time for the HC staff to delete the Numina's Convalescence Regen/Recover IO, the Panacea Chance for +HP and +End IO, and the Power Transfer Chance for Self Heal IO, and replace them with effects matching the primary effect of the set, since we now have the ex cathedra pronouncement that we can't have any IO sets that give both healing and recovery... @END(SARCASM)

As I recall, he specifically commented about how, to him, 'fun' was throwing yourself at the end boss again and again, dying over and over, until you found the one technique (I don't want to use 'trick', because I loathe the clickbait "this one trick" videos on YouTube) that lets you beat them. And his commentary shows that he was clueless about how the Internet worked, not understanding that, within a very short time after someone beat the boss, how to do it would be plastered across a half-dozen or more websites for anyone to find out, meaning that at most only issues of timing things to happen at the right moment need to be worked out. It is a challenge to work out the solution up until the first person does it, then it's just following the recipe. This is why so many end bosses in MMOs and FPSes are mostly just sacks of hit points; it's hard to design a boss fight that doesn't boil down to following a picky script (or, even harder, isn't the same on subsequent runs, and even then there is a limit to how many different ways you can build into the game), and it's much easier to just cram in a ton of HP.

Not good enough.

I don't know how much work it would entail to make this happen, but I wonder whether the 'instanced outdoor mission' code could be adapted to 'bring back' Galaxy City. The problem is that in Echo:GC, you're in the past, so that even though you're registered as a hero in City Hall, no one in Galaxy City has a clue who you are. To remedy this, put a contact downstairs in the main building behind a counter who is the 'Hero Registrar'; if you go down there and click on him, you get registered as a hero in Echo:GC, setting a flag on the character. Now here's where the work would be: Characters with that flag set see all of the contacts, and can interact with them the same way you would have been able to before Galaxy City was destroyed by the Shivans, except that they wouldn't refer you to any contacts outside of Galaxy City (characters teamed with a character with the flag set would see the contacts, but they'd get a "You're not registered as a hero; you need to take care of that before I can talk to you" dialog). For contacts that got moved to AP, this would require creating 'echo' versions of the contacts, and all of the contacts' "referral lists" would need to be edited to remove contacts not in Galaxy City (or spread the changes wider to track where a contact got referred from, and have the contacts' initial dialog include something like "[GC contact] told me about you, but it's been years; where have you been keeping yourself?", but that would require an additional database change, and if this can be done, minimizing database changes should be a goal). It may be too much work to make this happen across an entire zone, but it's an idea.

Brawl, but it comes with the drawback that the power can no longer accept set IOs.

It's eternally funny to do this, then see mobs fall over when you taunt them to death.

'No worries. I think the developers can repair it quickly.' Моё судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей. Вы слышали о парне Чукчи, который позвонил туристическому агентству и спросил: «Я хочу знать, сколько времени нужно, чтобы перелететь отсюда в Нью -Йорк», а администратор говорит: «Просто минуту», а парень Чукчи говорит: «Спасибо, прощай».?

May he go forth in the sunrise boat May he come to port in the sunset boat May he go among the imperishable stars May he journey in the Boat of a Million Years -- The Book of Going Forth by Daylight, Theban recension, ca. 18th dynasty

Digging up some amusement from the depths of my memory... We're slimy, we're squishy, we're all a little fishy, And in this adventure, we'll be feasting on your brain! We're abysmal creatures, with gross, horrific features; in Cthulhic adventures, lose a lot of sanity! And here's Miskatonic U., where all the creatures dwell. Take one look in a Mythos book, and you'll go straight to hell! Your guns aren't defective, they just aren't real effective. Our feast on your immortal soul's about to start! Your magic and voodoo will not stop Great Cthulhu, Don't eat with the Tchoo Tchoo, and the Mi-Go steal your brain! Here's dread Tsathoggua, and over there's Cthugha, Don't forget Nyarlathotep, and Hastur hates his name! So here's drowned R'lyeh where the angles are all wrong, You'll lose your soul and go insane if you stay there too long! We're slimy, we're squishy, we're all a little fishy, Our feast on your immortal soul's about to start! And now we'll eat your heart!

It's not a game-breaking bug, since you can adapt to it readily enough, but the game's internal targeting box for the Barrier Reef pet is shifted down relative to the visual model of the pet: You can see that the model for the reef sticks out above the targeting reticle, and the reticle extends significantly below the model. This is reflected when you are attempting to target the Barrier Reef; clicking on the middle of the model as drawn gives a bit of a crapshoot as to whether it's going to select the Reef or not; you have to click near the bottom of the model as rendered.

You should only ever get one of any origin-based set of contacts in a level group -- Trevor Seaborn, Hugo Redding, and Haley Phillips are the trio that most people will have experience of this with, as they give out the "Rescue the mystic from the Circle of Thorns" mission for the Spelunker badge. I haven't experimented with Ouro flashbacks enough to find out whether the Pillar of Ice and Fire picks a random contact out of the three if you weren't introduced to any of them, picks a fixed contact from the set (IIRC, I got Trevor Seaborn the one time I needed to run that mission via flashback), or will send you to the contact from the set you've already been introduced to. I suppose I could go through a few of my characters and pick one for each of those three contacts and see who the Pillar sends me to.

And, by the obdurate and unbreakable standard, if it doesn't exist, it can never exist. We can, therefore, close the entire Suggestions subforum, because it's filled with ideas for things that don't exist in the game, which you appear to believe makes them impossible to ever implement. And as @PeregrineFalcon stated back on the first page of this thread, the HC staff have already said that they're not going to do this. Just like some rando MM can walk by and cast their empowerment abilities on other MMs' henchmen to upgrade them? The fact that the target_custom_next (and related) slash commands have the "mypet" and "notmypet" filters shows that the game has internal tags to distinguish between your pets and other characters' pets, and your continued inability to recognize my repeated use of the phrase "your pets" shows that you continue your straw man arguments.

Which, I believe, is due to the Malta Kronos titan, Council Goliath War Walker, BP Ravager, and (IIRC) Longbow Cataphract all having the same rigging to simplify their animation (the Kronos and GWW vanity pets, which are just shrunken versions of the GMs, also exhibit this behaviour, and are easier to find to see it in action.

John Heywood, Dialog of Proverbs, 1546. "Who is so deafe, or so blynde, as is hee, That wilfully will nother hear nor see?" Once more, and maaaaaybeeee this time you won't misread it. The pseudopet casts an ability that is IDENTICAL to the current upgrade power, except that it is PBAoE, rather than targeted AoE. It applies the empowerment to any of your pets in the AoE in EXACTLY the same way that they would receive the empowerment from the version of the power as it exists now. The buff does not expire, nor is constrained to function only within the AoE, any more than the existing MM empowerment buffs turn off if the pet moves further away than the range of the current empowerment ability. But, as I expect, you will recoil in mock amazement, and spuriously claim in self-justification that I previously misrepresented what the proposed ability did, instead of your having read your own preconceptions into what I said, then attacked that.

A sessile female or a feral male? And did you travel to Down, or did you have it smuggled offworld?

That gives me a BINGO on card seven -- 25 requests for MM henchmen customization.

"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?