srmalloy

The groups collecting to summon and defeat Adamastor have taken to, more often than I have seen in the past, clustering on top of the area that Adamastor spawns on, crowding the area that it has, in more than one instance, caused the summoning to fail due to being no space for Adamastor to spawn on. What I would like to throw out as a suggestion for comment is that, as an additional bit of threat added to Adamastor, is to have his summoning include his new "BEGONE" effect as an integral part -- the summoning bringing Adamastor to this plane, but accompanied by an eldritch blast of energy that hurls nearby heroes away. This would make clustering on top of Adamastor's spawn point unwise, as you would make yourself vulnerable to being hurled off the platform. It would also serve to hinder the practice I have seen (much less often since the 20-hour lockout on all the rewards but XP) of parking a melee character at the spawn point with a PBAoE attack on autofire to, first, evade the AFK idle disconnect timer, and second, to automatically engage Adamastor while the player is doing something else, possibly while dual-boxing and playing CoH on another account, or simply with CoH in the background. Characters left at the spawn point with a PBAoE attack on autofire would find themselves flung well away from the spawn point, after which they would have to manually be brought back to the spawn point, so just leaving them there for hours or days wouldn't work any more.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."

I have to agree with @Uun -- if it's thematic for the character, I'll pick Cryonic; my Ice-based characters all have it, my Fire-based characters will have Pyronic, Electric-based characters will have Ion, etc., with Ion being a common fallback if there's no better choice to match the character. There are a couple of oddities -- Rad-based characters taking Pyronic recolored with the same blues used for the rest of the Radiation powers, instead of the incorrect green color that has become the popular perception of radiation.

Or have a recurrence of the all-too-brief war between the two factions of the 5th Column -- the 'loyalist' side and the Council -- that broke out into open battles in different zones for, IIRC, only two or three days before disappearing forever as the Council completely replaced the 5th Column across Paragon City (which has been reversed to a degree, but we still don't have as much of the fights between the two groups, or the big knock-down-drag-out fights with twenty or so mobs on each side that occurred during the Council rebellion.

And 'proper footwear' is another fairly wide target, although not so much as clothing is. Besides the stereotypical geta, which were worn for specific purposes and by specific social groups, you had waraji, woven straw sandals (for which the existing Roman sandals make a decent substitute, zori, slip-on straw sandals that became 'flip-flops' when soldiers brought them back from Japan after the end of WWII and the style caught on, jika-tabi, which were originally outdoor footwear from which the more recent tabi sock evolved, and okobo, thick wooden sandals worn by young girls and apprentice geisha.

That opens up an immense can of worms; 'kimono' just means 'thing you wear'; what people commonly refer to as a kimono is commonly a hitatare, kachie, kosode, one of the varieties of ho, hoi, suikan, or kariginu (different garments, not just names), one of the various styles of hakama, and optionally a happi coat, kataginu (in one of that garment's several styles), haori, jinbaori, or dofuku. Along with this are the specific combinations of garments composing the various types of sugata or the kataginu kamishimo, the latter being what has become the common stereotype of samurai clothing, composed of a kosode with a kataginu and hakama in matching fabric. And this is just men's clothing; women's clothing had different styles and outfit combinations, sometimes sharing names with the men's clothing -- nagabakama, for example, were different for men and women. Picking which garments you're going to implement as costume pieces in game, even ignoring the potential range of patterns and colors worn during the Sengoku and Edo periods (and completely ignoring kasane no irome, the layering of different colors of garments by women to produce specific patterns that varied by season and sometimes by day within a season, with wearing an improper color choice severely impacting a woman's reputation) is a highly complex decision, unless you're going to take the route of doing the same sort of oversimplification as was done with the various 'samurai armor' costume pieces. If you're interested in a deeper dive into Japanese clothing, armor, and related subjects, I refer you to the Sengokudaimyo website, originally started by the late Anthony J. Bryant as a resource for members of the SCA interested in creating a Japanese persona.

The macro that gets posted in league chat fairly often during the mapserver events: /macro_image "originicon_natural" "LAG Toggle" "++noparticles $$sync" will address some of the lag during a mapserver event, by cutting out most of the haze of power effects. However, many powers have visuals made up of nothing but particles, like Fire Cages, so it's going to make it hard to see what you're doing, and the presence of so many mobs in a small area firing off lots of powers is going to cause significant lag, compounded by the apparently insoluble issue of the sequence, when mobs spawn in, of "mob becomes visible... mob becomes targetable... wait... mob attacks... wait... mob attacks... wait... mob becomes a valid target for attacks that require a target... mob is dead from other players'/pets' attacks before your attack goes off" unless you're targeting through a pet, whose targeting occurs on the server and is not subject to the targeting delay you see on your client.

Ion Judgement also has the drawback that it will not affect mobs that have too recently been hit by another Ion Judgement, which makes it less than ideal in mass-attack situations, like the monster hunting phase of a Hamidon Raid. You can fire off Ion Judgement and have it jump to thirty or forty targets, or you can fire it off and have it make no jumps at all -- and potentially not even damage your main target for the power, because someone got an Ion Judgement off a half-second before you did. The other Judgement powers, while they don't have the targeting flexibility that Ion Judgement gives you, are more reliable -- if a target is in the beaten zone of the power's AoE, they can get hit by the power, regardless of their having had the same Judgement power used on them immediately prior. And Ion Judgement isn't the only "aggro on animation start" power in the game. It has become less of an issue since HC made the change to not have the absurd delay on the power's damage, but Rain of Arrows from the Archery powerset also draws aggro the moment you start drawing your bow. Fortunately, targeting is now determined when the animation starts rather than after the (old) animation delay when the arrows land (at which point in a rapid firefight all the targets were likely to have moved out of the beaten zone before the arrows landed, making the power useless in the vast majority of situations, so all you have to worry about is having all of your targets turn and attack you before you even get the attack off, no matter what degree of stealth you have prior to starting the attack. (The quirk that has the arrows falling vertically from the sky, but turned at a 45° angle, is a separate but not game-breaking bug.)

Let's address some of the long-standing problems with team transport -- like the fact that when you use TT to move your team to the ship in the middle of IP during the Yin TF, it drops you on top of the tail boom of the Hip (Mi-8 -- yes, Paragon City, or Longbow, operates a fleet of helicopters purchased from the Soviet Union; do an image search on 'Mi-8') you enter to get into the mission, leaving you standing in precisely the right position to be struck by the main rotor. Stack this with the long-standing inconvenience of exiting a mission to a helicopter, and finding yourself running into the helicopter, where characters exiting the mission after you stack up blocking your ability to exit the cargo bay, and you get a pair of annoyances that should be easily fixed.

It's not ED that did that, it was the target cap. When you can't run around the "close the dimensional ruptures" map (the one that looks like the NE corner of Boomtown) grabbing more and more mobs with each use of Taunt, to get them to chase you into the dumpster, and the /Dev Blaster can't hit each of them with each of the dozen Trip Mines they've put down inside the dumpster, it pretty well kills farming that mission for wolves -- or at least makes it much more tedious, as you have to clear the map section by section, limited to what you can grab aggro on at one time.

I'm in favor of a team teleport that has a sixteen-ton weight drop out of the sky onto each member of the team, squashing them flat, then having them poured out of a giant beaker hovering just outside the mission door, where the liquid reconstitutes itself into the team members. Not all transport has to be fun -- look at the experience of the Knight Bus from the Harry Potter books and movies.

Demonstrating this is easy enough. Take a ranged character with a Flight travel power and Athletic run. Engage a mob with Flight and Sprint turned on, then move away at full speed. You will move at a reduced speed for a second or two, until the game decides that you're no longer in combat and removes the movement suppression that is dampening your speed. Now do this again, but with Sprint off and Athletic Run on. You will find that you are moving much more slowly, and for a (at least perceptively) longer period of time before the movement suppression turns off and you return to your normal flight speed. To make things even more unreasonable, Athletic run is doing this despite the power having zero effect on flight: 445 + ( 5 * Level ) % jump height on self 109.45 + (0.55 * Level) % jump speed on self 99.184 + (0.816 * Level) % run speed on self The same effect occurs with running or jumping, although this is more explainable (except for the magnitude) because the power affects those types of movement. Teleportation, however, is unaffected, and using, say, Translocation from the Sorcery pool runs the timer for the suppression out, allowing you to fly normally once you reappear at your destination. I can't say for sure, but it feels as if Athletic run is applying the movement suppression debuff twice, holding your character back more strongly than movement suppression does with any other movement power.

As I remember it, it stemmed from complaints about Regen being grossly OP, finishing fights completely undamaged (a huge misperception, because people were only looking at how the Regen scrapper was at the end of the fight, and not seeing how they would typically drop close to defeat about 25% of the way into the fight, before they could reduce the incoming damage below their regen rate before they ran out of HP -- and when you rapidly heal the same damage over and over and over again, by the time you finish the last opponent, you will be virtually completely healed) and being able to solo +8/x8 content without risk (a much more impressive feat in the days of just SOs). The devs set up a test on their internal test server, and reported that their tests showed that a Claws/Regen Scrapper could, in fact, solo that content with impunity, to the retorts of the forum community alleging shenanigans. I may be misremembering, but based on @PeregrineFalcon correcting me on the relevant dates, I believe this was when we got Jack's understatement of the year, "Concern = small tweak", followed by a radical gutting of the Regen powerset with the subsequent update, and after the devs had to cough up an admission that the server they'd run their test on did not have the 'purple patch' installed, meaning that the Regen scrapper was taking 1/10 the damage they should have and doing 10x the damage, they refused to roll back the changes, claiming they were 'necessary'.

"No, Flambé, we're not accusing you of using excessive force; all we're saying is that the criminals you arrest arrive at the police recovery teleportation point with third- and fourth-degree burns over more than 80% of their bodies." It's not just radiation that has the potential to cause lingering, painful, and traumatic post-combat effects, if you're going to try to jam real-world physics down on top of an essentially 'cartoon' world.

Aside from the fact that it would interact wierdly with Weapon Customization, it could be handwaved by making the attack powers generic, with the specific attack a selectable option in the tailor screen -- so you would, for example, take your MM's first power as their attack, and select 'pulse rifle', 'bow', 'whip', etc. as the visual component of the attack. Perhaps as a separate pseudo-power you get when you select the attack, the only effect of the pseudo-power being to manage the animation for the associated attack. Both of these would be complicated to administer on the back end, and both would necessitate a database change for the character data to accommodate the additional fields, so the impact would be wider than just tweaking the MM class.

I'd have to go back and look up the specific dates, but I seem to remember that ED was put into the game after Paragon Studios was split off from Cryptic, which means that at the time ED was implemented, Jack had already gone off with the rest of the staff remaining in Cryptic for their own work on other games.

We already know that Paragon City is in an alternate universe; it just has physical laws that make some forms of radiation beneficial rather than damaging, similar to the way people fixated on it historically as a health treatment. For example, Radithor, a patent medicine that was sold between 1925 and 1930: Or the "Revigorator", a pottery crock for water lined with an ore that emitted radon: In the world of Paragon City, it's easy to handwave that some of the early research into radioactivity identified effects that were genuinely positive, rather than the negative effects in our world -- William Bailey, the producer of Radithor, dying of cancer in 1932 after fervent consumption of Radithor, the deaths of the "radium girls" hired by the US Radium Corporation to handle radium and paint luminescent indicators, the deaths of Marie and Pierre Curie, who had no idea of the harm their handling of radioactive material was doing to their bodies, and the deaths of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotkin after accidents with the "demon core" at Los Alamos, among many others.

If you were going to eliminate one of the two first powers in the pool, keep Kick, rename it 'Strike', and have a power customization for it to animate as either a punch or a kick, with the activation time, animation time, and damge all identical between the two animations. I'm not saying that's what should be done, but it lets people keep the animation they prefer while keeping the slotting flexibility of Kick.

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.