srmalloy

When people are running around opening presents, they get a 'Naughty' result and spawn some hostile snowmen. If they're in a large enough group and unlucky, they'll spawn a Winter Lord, and the message "A Winter Lord is wreaking havoc" will go out as a zone message. But when you find it, the Winter Lord is just standing there among the other snowmen in the spawn, not hurting anything. Now, I know that there are NPC-destructible objects in the zones; in Kings Row, for example, you'll occasionally see something like "Gravedigger Assailant has defeated Car" when an NPC has done enough damage to an environment object to destroy it. I don't know if it's possible, but it would enhance the immersion if, when a Winter Lord spawned, it would be given some sort of random-walk path through the zone where it would attack the destroyable environment objects it passed by, so that a) it's legitimately 'wreaking havoc', and b) isn't waiting in some static location for heroes/villains to show up to beat it into the pavement.

And you define a valid target for being controlled for enemies as being organic, which eliminates Clockwork, robots, presumably the DE stone and crystal mobs, etc., but all player characters are vulnerable, even when their character concept is that they are a sapient machine or some other non-organic construct/entity. While this is understandable, given the difficulty of determining whether any given player character is vulnerable or not, it still represents an ability where players and NPCs are treated differently, which is a dubious basis to build an archetype from.

Any ambush-type group of mobs will be able to follow you by the tracker invisibly planted on you when you entered the mission. Stealth, invisibility, cloaking devices, or any other method of avoiding aggro is inconsequential; you will be tracked, and the only way to avoid them is to move faster than them.

You're missing the point. Having someone whip out their T9 and discovering that they've fallen out of a comic book and conservation of momentum actually works on them is funny, not that I'm suggesting that should be how it works.

And the mini-pets where you get the same physical distortion are just... disturbing; the ones that are properly-shrunk versions, like the mini-Kronos, mini-GWW, or mini-U'kon, and the ones like mini-Lusca are all significantly more palatable.

I see something loosely similar to this with Arsenal Control's Smoke Canister, which has a confuse rolled in; if I drop the rest of the spawn, the remaining mob, while still showing the purple "I'm Confused" dots, will attack me. It's specific to being the last mob from a spawn; as long as there's another mob in the spawn still standing, they'll attack a friendly, and will only attack me if there's nobody else to 'shoot' at.

And I have the mental image of a character making the huge arc while in the air, and because they're not anchored on the ground, they spin one way while their weapon swings the other, turning the attack from an arc to a single target effect...

I've got one following me around right now, and it's definitely non-creepy. Unfortunately, it's so small it's invisible, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a pet following you around, but...

The Alpha slot acts like a custom enhancement slotted in every one of your powers, but if none of your powers can be slotted for a particular aspect of the incarnate boost, that aspect won't do you any good.

They'll generally offer missions up to level 6, and push you to the next contact in the string at that point; I try to avoid the Science contact because I dislike getting sent to face off against Vahz with no effective counter for the zombie barf.

I do this as well, except that I'll pick up the Tech and Magic starting missions inside City Hall, then do them at +2 once I've run out Sandra Costel's arc and been introduced to Thiery.

For future winter events, it would be nice if we could get an option at the S.T.A.R.T. vendor to turn off the "Instant Snowstorm" drops from presents, the same way we can turn off certain inspiration and recipe drops. I'm sure there are other people who never use them, and who would just as soon not have them piling up in the Temporary Powers list needing to be deleted. On a related note, can the 'drop the new power into your power trays, even if it's already there' feature be looked at? Right now, there are quite a few temporary powers that will drop an icon into your power trays on receipt -- only once per tray, but you can get an Instant Snowstorm (or Arrow of Jealousy, et al.) icon in tray 1, tray 2, tray 3, and so on, as long as you have an empty spot in the tray and there isn't one there already.

I have a Dark/Plant Blaster, Toksichniye Podlesok (Токсичные Подлесок, 'Toxic Undergrowth'), with her Dark Blast powers recolored black/green to create the effect of shooting various types of toxic attacks, with the -ToHit effect of Dark Blast rationalized as decreased muscular control from the toxins. You can do all sorts of things if you play with visuals and pick appropriate secondary effects.

Back on Live, I used to be able to keep Super Speed on running the blue cave and Council/5th Column bases; I don't have the twitch-response skills to do that any more, and sometimes plow into walls with just Sprint.

If you're buying the recipe from the vendor in the Ski Chalet for canes, you get the recipe at a level appropriate for the character's level, so if you buy it with a 50, you get a level-50 recipe. Passing the canes to a level 10 to buy it means the recipe will be level 10, meaning that you don't need to attune it if you're going to slot more than one IO from the set and get the (IIRC) 7.5% movement bonus all the way down to level 7.

It's an artifact of the game having to cheat to be competitive -- the AI can't realistically be smart enough to imitate a player intelligently using their abilities, so the game compensates by giving them access to the powersets' full range of abilities, albeit throttled back in power somewhat.

It's a trope.

It's not because she found a way to hack the boob slider on the body proportions screen to double its normal maximum? 😁

"It's not pink, it's... light red." "It's pink."

...at a price that is significantly higher than the cost of buying the regular enhancement and a catalyst, even accounting for the fact that the seller has acquired the IO, slotted it, acquired and used a catalyst, and acquired and used an unslotter to make the Superior version available to be put in the auction house; the surcharge for the 'convenience' is often out of all proportion to the value of the enhancement.

It's not just the icon; any "indoors" location on a map would have to be excluded from the snow animation -- Icon, all the stores, the Universities, the Midnighter Club, the building on the other side of the square in Steel where you get sent doing the invention arc, hospitals, the AE buildings, the Vanguard offices in FF and PI, the Portal Corp buildings, inside and under the tram stations, the large building behind Statesman's statue in Kallisti Wharf, the abandoned labs, any underground area (like the tunnels on the E side of Brickstown)... These would all have to be special-cased the same way similar locations in AP are. Is it worth the effort? I don't know; the amount of global interest in something like this would need to be studied before any sort of prioritization could be done, if it gets into the work queue.

This reminds me that back during Live, I used to be able to run the small caves with Superspeed on; now, I sometimes have problems hitting the walls with just Sprint. But for petty vandalism, you can go around to the various fence gates, like the one south of Penny Yin in Independence Port, and push against the gate to get them to rip off the hinges, or to the phone boxes in Faultline and the Rogue Isles and push the doors backwards until they pop off -- a clear indicator that the Paragon Studios staff knew that people would do this, even on blueside, is that there is a special animation where the hinges spark as they rip free when you do this, and the gate/door becomes a separate object that can lean up against the fence or fall over to the ground.

Or you can just ask Zero, like Jonathan E did. And get the same sort of contentless answer.

That takes me back; when I was in college, my mother bought a condo, and we spent time repainting the downstairs to an off-white from its original color, which my mother, sister, and I all agreed to refer to as "vomit brown", being a slightly orange shade of medium brown that was vaguely disquieting to look at.

The 'snowing around you' visual is a hidden power on you like the 'Instant Snowstorm' power you get from presents. What ties it to the zone is that it has a zone-geometry-based lockout, so that when you go under an overhang (like into a zone gate, or into a non-instanced building like the Vanguard building or City Hall, or inside or under the tram station) the snow effect stops. This would have to be done for each of the zones you wanted to have the same player-affecting snow, unless you wanted it to be just a blanket snow effect, regardless of where you were, which would cause problems with, say, the Icon outlets. Now, as a minor thing, I remember back during the first winter event that there was a map for Steel Canyon that had the two lakes frozen over; if that map still existed, it could be swapped in for a future winter event and spread the skating out a bit more, but that would have to be researched by the HC staff before it could be considered.