srmalloy

There are a number of powers with similarly mistimed effects and animations. One that I have seen consistently is using the Nemesis Staff and Blackwand (both the prestige attack version and the temporary power version) against a destroyable mission object -- you draw the weapon, the blast effect fires and strikes (or misses) your target, and then you perform the attack animation.

The one counterexample I can think of is, since it's a readily repeatable source of Empyrean merits, is to join a Hami raid immediately after unlocking your Alpha slot and pick the 4 Empyrean merit reward, then convert three of them to threads and use them to make your first Alpha boost to get rolling as fast as possible -- you can complete a Hami raid a lot faster than you'll ding your first vet level for the 120 thread reward, and with a tier 1 Alpha already slotted, you can use the 120 threads when you do get your first vet level to make a tier 2 Alpha. But that's the only time I can think of when you can justify converting merits to threads.

It's a question for going back and reslotting various powers on high-level characters; I think I've got two of a few PvP IOs in the various sets I've accumulated over time, but where I have several from a set, I generally have no more than one of each type in that set; when I have some that are 50, one that's 23, and one that's 32, I'd like to know if I can just slot them all on a 50 and have them act like 50s so I can avoid the hassle of dumping them into the AH and rebuying them as 50 before I boost the whole set.

This leads to a question that has bothered me for some time. You can get PvP IO recipes at lower levels than 50; if you craft, say, a level 27 Gladiator's Javelin Acc/Dam IO, does that level up with you as you increase level, or does it stay a level 27 IO even when you're 50? I know it will scale down to level 1 and keep counting for set bonuses all the way, but it's unclear whether it scales up as well -- this would make PvP IOs function differently from other IO sets -- if you craft a set of level-20 Positron's Blast IOs, they'll be level 20 forever, and you need to attune them to get them to scale up with you, but do PvP IOs do that automatically?

Random NPC dialog in Echo:Dark Astoria: [NPC] Soul Mage: The Sacredotes have no idea what they would unleash. The correct spelling is 'sacerdotes'.

I'm not sure if a RIng Mistress is ever the boss of the mission; I just ran the mission on another character, and 'The Lady Apprentice' was a Master Illusionist, like before.

Uninstall Mids, then run the installer again; that fixed the problem for me.

In the mission from Harvey Maylor to recover the Da Vinci Codex, the mission goal text in the nav window is "Defeat Ring Mistress and her crew", but the boss in the mission, the Lady Apprentice, was a Master Illusionist. I'm not complaining about that, since it gave me three more summoned Illusionists, a Phantasm, and a Dark Servant toward the Illusionist badge, but the misstion text should be aligned to the actual population of the mission.

I've had invisible mobs pop up from time to time -- the doors on the north side of the central building in Kallisti Wharf during the Halloween event were notorious for spawning invisible 'trick' mobs.

I see that with Wormhole, too; with my Grav/Traps controller, when soloing and facing a large spawn, I have to remember to trail the trip mines I'm putting down out to the northeast to cover the 'tail' of a transported spawn so I'm not left with live mobs after the wormhole. Curiously, this 'tail' extending to the northeast is the same direction that spawns used to shift during invasion events -- it was easiest to see this in a Rikti or Nemesis invasion in Kings Row where the players would group up north of the plaza where Blue Shield was, and the Rikti/Nemesis would spawn in further and further northeast until they 'fell off' the road, spawning in down on the dirt area to the east of the road. The HC staff fixed that (although I could wish that the incoming spawns were more spread out -- there's no reason why mobs with ranged attacks need to spawn in at melee range to everyone, and it rapidly hits the engine draw limit for mobs, making it impossible to see/target incoming enemies), so perhaps this can be something the HC staff could look at as well.

Just now, I exited the SG portal into Kings Row, and while I stood there, another character popped out of the portal and proceeded to push my character out of the way... pushing her all the way to the lip at the NE corner of the platform overlooking the Wentworth's building. I can understand the logic of characters pushing other characters out of the way when they zone in from a teleport point like an SG portal or the Ouroboros portal or entering/leaving a mission door -- although I would prefer that the character arriving first get priority, with subsequent arrivals being displaced to a clear spot instead -- but I think there needs to be a limit on how much one character is allowed to push another; pushing another character around until they're stopped by a railing is not, in my opinion, acceptable. Can this be looked at?

Being on the edge of the bowl doesn't help much; I've had mobs I was targeting fade out and vanish when the teleports into the bowl put enough mobs closer to me than my target to push my target off the end of the draw list, making them disappear even when I'm still shooting at them. What I'd like to see is an option to change the bias of your client in building the draw list for mobs -- prefer hostile, prefer friendly, no preference -- and to automatically keep your current target in the draw list if it hasn't been defeated.

The one that I have in my default keybinds file to use control-left button is CTRL+LBUTTON "powexecname Translocation$$powexecname Teleport$$powexecname White Dwarf Step$$powexecname Shadow Step$$powexec_unqueue" This is set up so that, regardless of which flavor of teleport you have -- Teleport, Sorcery pool, or being a Kheld -- it tries to activate them all until one works.

Who writes their dialog? I'd expect something like this from the Warriors, given their theme, but the Skulls? [NPC] Death Head Soldier: Begone, woman. I must fight now.

Something I have been noticing with melee characters during the Hamidon Bud extermination after taking down Hamidon is that follow is badly broken. I'd gotten used to the old "run up just out of melee range, then slow down to the speed your target is moving" type of follow, but what I'm seeing trying to get the game to help me chase down Hamidon Buds is a succession of "run 40' past your target, stop, turn around, make one attack" moves, repeated ad nauseam, as if your character can't recognize that they're approaching their target and have to continue running at full speed until the queued attack triggers and works its way through the server event queue, forcing them to stop, but not until they've zoomed well past their target, even if they started only barely out of melee range. Is there any way that 'follow' can be made to more intelligently follow its target?

Yes and no; it's a bog-standard text file, but it's saved in Homecoming\Data\texts\English\menus (in your client's install tree) with a '.mnu' extension. The .mnu files are loaded only when your game client starts, so if you make any changes to a file and save it out, you need to exit the game and restart for the changes to be updated. Hopefully I'm doing this right; I'm attaching my 'Location Powers.mnu' file to this post; drop it in the game's 'menus' folder as I describe above, then add them to your tray with a command like "/macro Rain popmenu FireRain", which will give you a macro button you can drag to different slots in your tray. For virtually all of them, after hitting the macro, '1' gives you the normal mouse targeting for placing the effect, '2' puts the effect directly under you, and '3' puts the effect at your target's location. Location Powers.mnu

I have a file for popmenus of location powers. One of the common ones are for rain powers, where I have the choice of normal targeting, straight down, or under my target: // Rain of Fire Menu "FireRain" { Title Rain of Fire Option "Rain of Fire &1" "powexecname Rain of Fire" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation down:max Rain of Fire" Option "Target &3" "powexeclocation target Rain of Fire" } The purpose of the 'down:max' is for use when the character is flying over targets, as in a Hami raid during the monster hunt, when I want to drop the rain on the DE on the ground below the character. If the character is on the ground, it's the same as toe-bombing the rain, so I don't need a separate menu line for it. For Wormhole, it's more complicated, because it has several different directions to throw the mobs being targeted: // Wormhole // Wormhole will attempt to teleport the current target and the mobs // around it to the location specified by the targeting cursor; this // popmenu adds some predefined options // 1 -- standard power activation // 2 -- teleport to in front of character // 3 -- teleport straight up over character to max altitude // 4 -- teleport in the direction the character is facing to // the maximum range of the power // 5 -- teleport behind the character to the maximum range of the // power. Because Wormhole does not appear to generate aggro, // this can be used to pull all or part of a spawn far enough // back to be defeated more readily, after which the remaining // mobs can be attacked. Menu "Wormhole" { Title Wormhole Option "Wormhole &1" "powexecname Wormhole" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation 0:10 Wormhole" Option "Zoom &3" "powexeclocation up:max Wormhole" Option "Boom &4" "powexeclocation cam:max Wormhole" Option "Pull &5" "powexeclocation back:max Wormhole" }

You can use the location modifiers with a number of other powers, too; I've got a few I use with Wormhole -- 'left:max', 'right:max', and 'back:max' are useful for pseudo-stealthing missions, because they just move mobs out of the way. 'up:max' is odd; while it normally causes it to rain mobs (they don't take damage on impact, though, unfortunately), it's got an odd bug in it -- occasionally a mob will have a Wile E. Coyote moment and forget that they're supposed to fall to the ground, and will just stand there high up, oblivious.

If you buy them off the AH from the "Attuned Enhancements" group, you can't; it is a rookie mistake to buy them that way, or apply catalysts to them, since they already function as if they're attuned. Buy them from the "Crafted Enhancements" group, then you can boost them

Borea, the first person you're sent to in the 'join the Vanguard' series; you get her as a contact when you exhaust Levantera's missions.

The character database from the original servers is not available, so there's no way to recover your characters from Live, even assuming that the HC staff would allow it to be done. As an indirect method, if you used the Titan Icon program to save your characters off of the servers in advance of the shutdown, you can use the build description in the files that it saved to create a new character and use your old build as a template as you level it up. There is even a tool that will extract the costume data from the Titan Icon saved character data as .costume files that can (mostly) be loaded in the Icon character edit screens.

...when the 20th anniversary event will be reopened during the month of the 21st anniversary? Heh.

Aaargh. No. Shards were part of a teaser for the F2P players -- they could start the incarnate process, but would only ever be able to populate their Alpha slot. To ensure this, incarnate threads were locked to only drop for subscribers, while shards would drop for anyone with their Alpha slot unlocked. This is why the Alpha slot boosts have recipes made with shard-based requirements, and with thread-based requirements, but the higher level incarnate slots only have thread-based recipes. The devs also used the shard-based components to hand out 'themed' rewards for some TFs, like getting a Hero-1 DNA Sample from the LGTF, or being able to buy a G'rai Matter with Vanguard merits. In addition to tweaking the thread drop rate to account for the shard drop rate and the fact that you need 5x the number of threads as shards to make components, none of the shard-based components have ready equivalents among the thread-based components -- if G'rai Matter is removed from the game along with the other shard-based components, what thread-based component would be thematically appropriate for you to be able to buy with Vanguard merits, or are you just going to remove one method of obtaining incarnate components without replacement?

It's not as convenient as just being able to save/load only the scales, and I don't know how well it would work, but given the structure of a .costume file, I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't. Change the scales of your character, save the costume, then open it up in a text editor, and copy the scales lines -- lines 3-16 -- from the file: Scale 25.49 BoneScale -0.5129 ShoulderScale 0.236 ChestScale 0.2179 WaistScale -0.2651 HipScale -0.2565 LegScale 0.008806 HeadScales 0.3, 0.39, 0.4 BrowScales 0.16, -0.52, 0.63 CheekScales 0.5, 0.42, 0.42 ChinScales 0.77, 0.32, 0.34 CraniumScales 0, 0, 0 JawScales -0.04, 1, 1 NoseScales 0, 0.3, 0.15 Now switch to each other character and save the costume -- you can re-use the same file name as a temporary -- then open it up in the text editor and paste the copied scales over the scales in the costume file. Save the file from the text editor, switch back to CoH, and load the costume file. This should load the costume you just saved, but with the updated scales.

I discovered something new in the game this morning; I'd just picked up Mystic Flight on a new character, and had gone to the Icon in Atlas to switch it to 'Minimal Effects'. While I was in the tailor editing screens, the character graphic shook repeatedly. When I exited the tailor screen, I found that there was another character (to be unnnamed) who had one of the "jump up, then slam your fist on the ground when landing" PBAoE powers on autofire; every time the power went off, I got the camera-shake effect -- and this effect was displayed even in the costume/powers customization screens. This is distracting from the process of customizing your character. Yes, I know you can turn off camera shake globally, but if you want to have camera shake on during normal play, but find it distracting inside the tailor screens, having to go into the options to toggle it off and on because one person suffering from rectocranial occlusion can inflict camera shake on everyone around them seems to me to be a case of the game world improperly spilling into the UI. Can the camera shake be disabled while in the full-screen tailor windows?