srmalloy

It is for the three people unable to join the MSR because the league is full... How much of an issue it is depends on the raid leader.

MMs are the only AT that inherently gets jerked over for more difficult content; at any point in the game where an MM has more than one of any tier of henchmen, bumping the difficulty automatically gimps the MM for that content to a degree depending on the difficulty increase. I don't know how it could be made to work dynamically with changing content (i.e., being on a team where one team member has missions at +0, another at +2, etc., so the difficulty varies with whose mission is being run), but some of the issues could be resolved by tweaking MM henchmen so that, at +2 or higher difficulty, it erases one level of disparity (so three tier-1 henchmen would be -1 instead of -2, and two would be even-level instead of -1), and at +4 difficulty, it erases two levels of disparity (making all your henchmen even-level to you). Or make the 'erasure' happen at +1 and +3 if you wanted to buff the MMs a little more, but I think shifts at +2 and +4 will work adequately.

It's not going to stop all the possible abuses of teleports -- early in Live, there were people who got their jollies by going up to the edge of the roof of a tall building, invite a low-level character to team, and then teleport them to a spot about five feet out in the air from their position, just to watch them fall to the ground (remember, this was when you had to be level 6 before you could get even Hover, and 14 to get Fly, Super Jump, or Teleport) -- but one of the things I've been seeing with increasing frequency is the use of Incandescence in Rikti mothership raids to teleport the league to a pylon -- but there's no way to tell where the teleport is going; it could just as easily be bringing you to an extreme corner of the zone as it is to be taking you somewhere useful. I would like to suggest three modifications to the way that Teleport Target, Team Teleport, and Incandescence work to make them a little friendlier to the victim recipient: If you have 'Prompt for teleport' turned on, your pets should not be teleported unless you click 'accept'; this keeps you from being denuded of your pets in the middle of combat. Allow the teleport prompt window to be moved on the screen and remember its position. Currently you can drag it around, but the next time you get a prompt, the window pops up dead center in your screen where it can obscure the maximum amount of what's going on around you, and won't go away until it either expires or you click on one of the buttons (requiring a mouse click, even if you're using the keyboard) Put a flashing marker on the map showing where the target of the teleport is. It's not going to help if you have the map closed, or zoomed and panned so that the teleport target is outside of the zone window, but it at least gives you the opportunity to know where you're going before you click 'accept'.

It's been too long since I had my DB scrappers back on Live, and I've gotten out of the muscle memory of the rotation that looped its way through the three combos -- I need to practice more so I don't just fall back on the 'what power is recharged?' crutch.

The Incandescence Destiny incarnate powers already do this -- with two caveats: First, if you have a tier-4 Radial active, the untouchable Lore pet is unaffected by the power. I've watched the Lore pets get teleported back and forth in the Hami raids in the Abyss with, generally, two to four Incandescence usages before the Hamikaze charge (with its own Incandescence to pull everyone into the fight). Second, the teleport from Incandescence is automatic for your pets -- it doesn't matter what your personal teleport settings are, your pets will be teleported. I personally have had quite a few instances when my Mastermind has been left standing, all alone, in the middle of a group of hostile mobs because some yahoo on the team decided that it was appropriate to fire off Incandescence unannounced, and in the time it took me to find my mouse pointer in the special effects on the screen and move it to click 'accept' on the teleport prompt (and don't get me started on the 'accept all teleports, without having any idea of where it's going to take you' issue -- I played on Live when people thought it was funny to teleport lowbies just away from a tall roof just to watch them fall) my MM would faceplant from being the focus of all the damage. A minor correction -- when you get two of a henchman (whether tier 1 or tier 2), they summon a level below you; when you get three of a henchman (for the tier-1), they summon at -2. So if you're running at 50+4, your tier-1 henchmen are -6 to the hostiles, effectively rendering them useless except as Bodyguard fodder to soak up damage if you can keep them healed and standing.

The new contacts that have been added to the game with the new content, that aren't in the existing "refer to next contact" tree. Or at least put them into the same sort of "you are contacted by X" popup you get at certain levels or when you get certain achievements, like automatically getting introduced to Mender Ramiel when you train to 50.

And without access to the other server's code base, there's no way to tell how it was implemented on that server. I've watched features, updates, and bugfixes being made to Homecoming since I joined, and I appreciate the way that the HC staff takes the time to try and establish that changes they make are going to be stable and not cause problems with the existing characters and gameplay before they get rolled out; I would rather wait for them to take the time to do it right in the context of Homecoming, rather than just have it riveted onto the side without a proper integration with the rest of the game code.

The game uses a 'lower is better' hit mechanism, so that if you have a 57% chance to hit, you need to roll a 57 or less on the virtual D100. The game actually drops a step in the normal "dX" random-number generation, and just converts the internal random number to a 1-100 range, leaving all the decimal places (although you only ever see the first two digits after the decimal place), instead of truncating it to an integer; this allows for more subtle modifiers to be applied to random chances, instead of rounding to whole numbers (adding, say, three 5.4% modifiers to make a 16.12% modifier, instead of having three 5.4% modifiers each rounded to 5%, adding up to 15%). This isn't entirely altruistic on the original devs' part, though; skipping the integer truncation speeds up the RNG for combat resolution a small amount and lets the server make more combat rolls without slowing down.

No... Peepshi:

In the patch notes, the description of Shifting Tides has the text "...and provide you and your allies a stacking Rising Tide buff that increases ToHit, Damage, and Recharge time." Unless this power slows the recharge of you and your allies, this description should be "Recharge speed", not "Recharge time" -- increasing recharge time is not a buff.

I was too startled to get a screenshot when it happened, and I didn't get any zone name text on subsequent attempts to enter the zone, but I had used the SG teleporter to exit to Eden, and had gone to the entrance to the Hive to verify that I'd gotten the exploration badges for the zone, but when I zoned to the Hive, the screen announced "The Cascades" in the initial zoning text before it was replaced with the correct zone loading screen. This was at approximately 0930 Pacific today.

'Collateral Damage Man' was taken?

You mean besides open-world nonconsensual PvP attracting the sort of players whose sole measure of their "leet skillz" as a gamer is how fast their level-capped combat monster in BiS gear can gank newbies fresh out of the tutorial zone? Because that's what I've seen happen in other games with that 'feature', and it's soured me badly on PvP as a whole.

You can occasionally get some funny results with Wormhole. I have a popmenu for quickly selecting various ways to move around a spawn or fractional spawn, and "Powexeclocation up:max Wormhole" will teleport the group, or as much of it as you grab, straight up over you, where they drop to the ground (and take no damage doing it, which feels wrong, but okay). Occasionally, though, they will have a Wile E. Coyote moment, and fail to realize that they should fall to the ground, and simply remain floating up in the air. It does remove them from the aggro radius, though, so except for 'defeat all' missions, it sidelines the group pretty well when it happens.

If you're going to be going with a name derived from the character's powers, then look at translations of 'Stone Thorns' or 'Stone Spikes' into other languages -- 'Steindornen' and 'Steinspitze' in German, 'Epines Pierre' and 'Pointes Pierre' in French, 'Klipdorings' and 'Klipspikes' in Afrikaans, 'Steinthyrmir' and 'Steindoppar' in Icelandic, and many others -- virtually none of which have any significant chance of already being taken, and which give you the opportunity to come up with an interesting backstory to explain why they're in Paragon City with that name.

And some are inherently less valuable than others. Take the Hamidon Bud pet recipe; that averages a cost of around 10,000,000 inf to craft, because its recipe requires 20 Hamidon Goo salvage. It might be amusing to have a Hamidon Bud trailing around behind you through Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, but it's not 10M inf amusing.

Exactly -- you can have a macro that tries to fire off a half-dozen or more things -- toggle on Fly, toggle on Hover, toggle on Stealth, fire an attack if those three are already active -- so that you can just slap the one macro several times to turn on the toggles, ending with the attack. The game can't know which of those you want to show cooldown on, and if you've got emotes scattered into the macro, it gets even more complicated. I've always handled this by having a toolbar for the icons of the location powers that I've built into targeting popmenus: // Rain of Arrows Menu "ArrowRain" { Title Rain of Arrows Option "Rain of Arrows &1" "powexecname Rain of Arrows" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation down:max Rain of Arrows" Option "Target &3" "powexeclocation target Rain of Arrows" } With the icon for Rain of Arrows sitting in the 'drop powers' tray, I can see the icon for the location AoE power with its recharge countdown and keep track of whether it's ready to fire again.

I don't have a character with the temporary power version of the Nemesis Staff power, so I don't know whether it occurs with it as well, but with the prestige power Nemesis Staff, after you fire the attack, you continue to be rooted for around a half second to a second after the animation completes; enough time for the other mobs in a spawn to target you and fire back while you're standing there in the open like an idiot. I can't tell from outside whether this is a timing issue -- the animation speed was changed but the root duration was not -- or just the animation time and root time durations not being properly synched up.

That's like the justifications that have been fabricated to 'explain' why split infinitives ("to boldly go") are bad. One of the more ridiculous was "Latin doesn't split infinitives, so English shouldn't either" -- ignoring the fact that they're different languages and don't have to obey the same rules, Latin infinitives are all single words -- you can't split a Latin infinitive, so the 'prohibition' is meaningless. "This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!" -- apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill

Note also that if you're really close to dinging 50, starting a WST pre-50, then dinging 50, you have burned your level-50 rewards for the week -- if you run another WST the same week after dinging 50, training, and unlocking your alpha, you will not get the Notice of the Well. It's a bit of a corner case, but I got bit by it a few months back, assuming that I'd get a Notice for the first time I ran a WST as a 50, where instead I was running a WST a second time that week, and the code never got to the 'award a Notice' check.

You should also add that the imps had a lifespan and would die off when it expired, forcing you to resummon, and all your imps died when you a) went through a door, or b) went up/down an elevator, which made recharge-heavy slotting mandatory if you didn't want your controller to be petless for half the mission, and made rushing the mission goal problematic unless the controller could stealth the mobs in the mission. The same issue applied to masterminds to a lesser extent; they had to be resummoned and individually rebuffed every time the MM entered a mission door, which hung up teams at the start of missions while the MM recovered End from doing the summon-and-buff routine on six henchmen.

This is an indicator that the tiles from which an instanced map is assembled are not quite aligned correctly where they meet up; this was a regular occurrence with the yellow office maps that were added with the release of City of Villains, and it requires someone to go back in with the level editor and tweak the positions of the two sections (and everything they're attached to) until they line up correctly.

I don't think that there's a way to do it with the existing map system without making the Vanguard Base its own zone, where it would get its own map. The problem is that the zone and instance maps are a strict top-down view of the terrain, and you get no sense of the vertical position of a character in the map -- a classic example is the layer-cake room in the cave tileset, or the multi-layer rooms in some of the Oranbega maps. The RWZ map shows the exterior map of the zone, and when you're in the base, you're somewhere under the main level of the terrain, and there's no way for the map to show this.

That's going to be difficult to work into the game engine. Back before the HC staff made the change to have simultaneous sound effects not stack linearly, there was an occasional problem I ran into running the "Cure Lost" mission; I'd go into Perez Park and look for big spawns of Lost, whacking the boss (if present) with the cure-stick first; when he changed back, all the other Lost would pull out weapons and shoot at him. Sometimes, the entire rest of the spawn would pull out shotguns and fire at once, and the stacked sound of eight or nine shotguns going off at once would be physically painful.

I'd have to go back and verify it as to which one of the powers it is, but one of the Radiation powers is an aura that applies a debuff to mobs around the character; you can recolor the power itself (I recolor all my characters' Rad powers to a proper cyan blue), but the debuff on the mobs remains the original toxic green (adhering to the mistaken premise that radiation glow is green, a misconception fueled by the yellow-green glow emitted by the zinc sulfide phospor used in the first radioluminescent paint).