srmalloy

The most obvious way to address this is to apply the same sort of force-leveling code that the existing PvP zones use to each zone individually, so that in AP you're force-exemped to, say level 5, in KR to level 10, Steel and Skyway to level 15, etc.; it doesn't eliminate the problem, because characters exemped down still have access to five extra levels of powers that lower-level characters don't have. On the other hand, my experience with open-world PvP is that it encourages play by people for whom the sole metric for their "leet skillz" as a gamer is how fast their level-capped combat monster with BiS gear can gank newbies fresh out of the tutorial and who run like a scared jackrabbit from anything that even hints at having an element of risk. Having the zones scale to 'appropriate' levels would only address some of that. All that said, if this was kept as a separate server that I don't have to pay any attention to, much less play on, my objections mostly disappear, being reduced to a petulant whine about the Homecoming staff's efforts being diluted by having to support a completely separate open-world PvP server with a disjoint codebase.

Force of Will and Sorcery both give you a travel power as the third option, so they fall under the travel pools for categorization.

More accurately, you can have five of the same named set bonuses -- i.e., "Large AoE Defense Bonus" -- regardless of the value of the bonus; this is how you can get ten 7.5% Recharge bonuses: the LotG bonus is "Luck of the Gambler: Recharge Speed", and the one you can get from other sets is "Huge Recharge Bonus". See the wiki page for enhancement set bonuses for more detail.

There were issues with the name 'Afterburner' internally due to its previous use in the game, so the internal name for the power labeled 'Afterburner' is actually 'fly_boost'. The way powexecname works is odd. If you activate a power by name, and you have the power icon in a visible tray, it works normally. If the power icon is not visible, powexecname activates the power with that internal name, which may not be the same as the label name (particularly if the power was copied from another power). Evasive Maneuvers' internal name is 'afterburner', so if you don't have Fly active (opening the pop-up tray with the Afterburner icon) or dragged the Afterburner icon to another tray to keep it visible, powexecname won't find 'afterburner' in the visible power icon names, so it looks for a power with the internal name of 'afterburner', which is Evasive Maneuvers.

"Would you rather have your right leg removed using a rusty hand saw and no anesthesia, OR your left?" Your question exhibits the fallacy of bifurcation, implying that one or the other choice is required, when in fact neither is necessary.

The HC staff could have just altered location and targeted AoEs to put the KB origin at the center of the power effect, but by allowing a direction to be defined in the power, it opens the door to creating powers with more exotic KB effects in the future.

Vectored KB fixes a problem with KB that existed from the first days of the game. Originally, KB was always away from the character using the power. PBAoEs and cones were fine -- the KB was away from the origin of the attack, which is the expected result. However, targeted and location AoEs were broken -- if you fired M30 Grenade at a mob in the center of a group of mobs, they would all be knocked back away from you -- even the ones standing between you and where the grenade landed. At its simplest, vectored KB fixes that by making the center of the attack's effect the origin point for determining KB, in essence making targeted and location AoEs act like PBAoEs. But it also allows for other directional KB effects to be defined -- a line AoE that does knockback sideways, for example, which could be made into a power for the Super Speed pool where you designate a target position and rush there so fast that the shockwave knocks mobs to the sides as you zoom past them. Or tweaking a Battle Axe attack that animates as a right-to-left swing so that its KB is angled left away from you, rather than straight back.

It doesn't matter what you intended with your suggestion; how people would use it is the issue. And the classic example of this is Aeon Entertainment -- the devs intended it to be a way for players to make and share missions, rather than having to wait for additional official content to be released. Instead, it kicked the existing farm missions to the curb and became the go-to place for powerleveling, with the devs fighting a losing battle against it, having to settle for whacking the outright exploits (mobs that were not intended to be used in isolation and had no attacks, allowing for high-reward, zero-risk farms), and trying to ban the use of terms indicating missions were farms just resulted in new terms being created each time one was banned (I remember when 'meow mission' was the current euphemism for a farm). Far too many players are going to choose the fastest, easiest way to get what they want, and if you give them a way to level an 'easy' powerset combo then change it to one that's hard to level once they reach the level cap, they'll do it.

Seen in Grandville: [NPC] Metal Swiper: 'Freakshow' is okay. I wanted it to be 'Horrorshow' but what ya goin' to do?

I'm not sure how complicated it would be to code -- my gut feeling is that it would be annoying to make work, and there are a number of situations where you wouldn't want to have it work that way, but having MM pets 'inherit' any movement effects that the MM has active would address most of the problem.

Just an observation: The Lash power from Demon Summoning has a melee attack icon, and the power detailed info says it goes against melee defense. Therefore it is a melee attack, for all that it can reach out twenty feet.

Well, a zone event that has a long term, the way the Halloween and Winter versions of AP replace the standard one. But having to install new maps on the server and push them to the clients in an update precludes any sort of dynamic zone change. If the original devs had been able to make the instanced outdoor mission code work better, that might have created a way to do it, but the devs admitted that it didn't work well enough as it was to allow wider use.

Depends on the environmental effects. Anything that affects the zone is difficult -- the first couple of Winter Events back on Live, the lakes in Steel Canyon were frozen over, too, but that was dropped for later events. However, if you create effects for a zone that are applied to the characters in the zone, that's easier. See how entering Atlas Park during the Winter Event gets you the Snowstorm effect, and the Instant Snowstorm power. You could do the same thing to create a rain effect in the zone as a visual effect, but making the ground look wet would require a reload of the zone geometry, since the game's not set up to allow you to change textures on the fly, and it would be difficult to make that happen as changing weather.. As long as it's something that's applied to the character, it should be able to be done; if you want something that affects the way the zone appears, it's going to take a ton of work, and is better suited for a long-term change, such as replacing Atlas Park with the 'Winter Atlas Park' zone model.

Someone put up "[Inherent.Domination]" in chat, and I idly clicked on it to open the power description, and noticed this amusing bit: At the end of the description, it reads "gain resistance to status protection". Shouldn't this be "gain resistance to status effects"? Seems counterproductive as the description reads.

Sure. And rewrite every single power animation, movement animation, and idle animation in the game to accommodate the altered character model. As well as all the emotes. And the animations for being affected by powers, like knockback, holds, etc. And every single upper body costume part, as well as -- if that's added -- different gloves for each hand. Not to mention the powerset changes. You can't make a Titan Weapons/Shield Defense Scrapper now, because the character's left arm is occupied with the shield. But with multiple arms, that's no longer an obstacle, but then you've got every TW animation clipping against the Shield visuals, so the dual-wield and two-hand powersets need another set of animations to work with the Shield visuals.

Or mutated out of all recognition. I think that, had NCsoft been able to figure out a way to do it that didn't immediately kill the game due to player exodus, we'd be paying for 'special' individual costume pieces on a character-by-character basis, usable once, so if we wanted the same piece in multiple costumes for a character, we'd have to hit up the cash shop for each one (at least, judging from the way they -- and the other Asian companies running MMOs -- run the cash shops in other games, where the point is to milk players fast before they tire of the game and move on). However, if they'd been able to do that, it's also likely that the game wouldn't have been shut down. Still, that feels like a "we had to destroy the game in order to save it" scenario.

You can make the argument that it 'encourages' more tactical awareness to make all the players in a team keep track of the condition of their teammates; however, I see it as an underhanded effort to force 'trinity' team composition into the game, essentially requiring at least one team member to have an 'organic' rez power -- i.e., dedicated 'healers'.

See what happens if you don't have a properly-filled-out 27B/6?

I think that what the OP wants is an 'ablative' option for increasing TF difficulty -- where, if a team member goes down and either can't or isn't rezzed, they're done, either until the mission is done or kicked from the TF depending on the leader's choice of difficulty. Another way to go about it would be a 'cannot re-enter mission' option, although that would punish people with bad connections who DC.

If you have a choice between a blast powerset that does X amount of damage and a powerset that does the same amount of damage with the same End cost and activation times, but also heals a random teammate for some amount of damage, which one is objectively better? If you add functionality to a powerset, in order to keep it balanced against the other powersets, it's going to have to lose functionality elsewhere.

The two I remember off the top of my head are SE Steel Canyon at the door on the SE side of the big building where the zone 'floor' drops hugely, and Talos Island on the west side of the upper level near the theater.

Specifically, anchored debuffs remain active until the body of a defeated anchor mob vanishes. In the case of mobs that don't leave a body when defeated, like CoT spirits, the debuff shuts off immediately on defeat.

I've got a better idea. Before you ask for a huge buff to MoG, spend some time playing it in its original incarnation: 1. Heals you to 100% 2. Drops your HP to 10% of normal 3. Gives you high Resistance and Defense to all forms of damage except Psionics. Basically, the original form of MoG was "Make me hard to hit and damage, except for taking 10x damage from Psionics". MoG has already had the biggest drawbacks to it removed, and now you want to have the remaining drawbacks eliminated.

Feel free to download the game source code and rip out the code for incarnate shards yourself, then, if you're so adamant that they be eradicated from the game, or write in the additional functionality you want them to have.

And, to maintain balance, both the damage done and the healing provided would need to be significantly reduced, as you are basically rolling two powersets into one, creating a character with three powersets. We would immediately see whines about how badly nerfed the powerset was, because you were so gimped trying to solo with it because of the crap damage, and they were unwanted in teams because they didn't contribute enough in either damage or healing to justify having one on your team instead of a DPS or healing character.