srmalloy

I've had occasions -- always out in a zone -- where I will find mobs that are invisible, with only their shadows rendered (which implies that it's a bug, because characters with a stealth power active don't have shadows), but are nonetheless targetable, and if I move around, I can get them to render.

All of the Paragon devs will have found other work, and I'm pretty sure that, until the HC staff can work out some sort of legal accommodation with NCsoft to legitimize HC's status, none of them would be able to work on Homecoming in any sort of recognized capacity. HC is trying to work out a legitimate status for itself with NCsoft, and I think that they would tapdance around doing anything overt to interfere with the (perceivedly glacial) negotiations to that end.

As I said, it's theoretically possible; I've spent enough years working with databases to know how I'd do it. But that's predicated on being able to work with organized and structured code, not with the rat's nest that makes up most of the CoH server code. I shudder to think of how much code would need to be rewritten to clean things up to where a sweeping change could be made, and that doesn't even consider the other things that would need to be updated -- a final solution to name collisions, cross server chat, and a host of other things.

No, it couldn't, because even in a totally instanced environment, the players on a team have their character information stored in their server's database; an instanced mission has to be run on a single server, and that server won't be able to read the character data from another server's database. It's theoretically possible to fiddle with the database engine to share databases across multiple instances, but I wouldn't want to have to write the code that utilizes that functionality to manage character data from each individual server; I can see where it could introduce some nasty lag.

They're going to have a big uphill PR road ahead of them -- the Disciple history badge is for collecting the plaques marking the history of Hero Corps in Paragon City, with the plaque in Boomtown partially buried in rubble loosely in the middle of the zone (-686, 272, 3123) stating "After the destruction of Hero Corp's first Paragon City office, the company planned to rebuild their headquarters here. But public sentiment could not have been more firmly set against them. Despite the patronage of Countess Crey, this site remained vacant, and in October 1999 Hero Corps was forced to move on to another city."

Yes, well, try creating a bio that makes extensive use of non-ASCII characters. CoH supports Unicode, but at a cost -- for example, including the name "Институт Эволюционной Физиологии и Биохимии им. И.М. Сеченова" ('I.M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry') takes up 114 characters in a bio, even though it's only 62 letters, because each Unicode character is 16 bits wide, taking up two 'characters' of the bio space.

In fact, getting attuned purples jerks you over, because you can boost regular purples; boosting a set of purples to +5 won't get you much on the primary effect, which usually hits the ED barrier pretty hard, but generally at least two of the secondary increases will benefit significantly.

What is stopping players from building an armor-based character, taking a self heal from an existing powerset or pool, and defining it as a repair function? I've got a Bots/Dark MM whose backstory is having been a Soviet military research project to develop a director for a team of combat robots which accidentally became sentient; I think of Howling Twilight as the ejection of a cloud of nanites that extract energy from its target to power them to reconstruct the entities around him.

That depends on which mechanism behind time travel is the one that's actually working. If I'm remembering the arc correctly, in the Pilgrim's arc, your final mission is from Twilight's Son, who sends you back to engineer a change in history, to no net effect, and he mentions in your debrief that this type of mission has not generally produced the desired outcomes. This increases the likelihood that, when you undertake an arc through the Pillar of Ice and Flame, you are actually going back to a close but parallel time stream, not your actual past, so the increase in familiarity with the arc's contact exists only in that time stream -- and after completing the arc, if you use the Pillar to do the same arc again, you get sent back to yet another time stream where you hadn't done it. So no matter how many times you do an arc through the Pillar, it doesn't affect your relationship with that arc's contact in your native time stream.

It all came from the same bloom produced from the iron sand; because the iron sand was not smelted at a high enough temperature to fully melt the iron, the bloom created has different grades of steel in different parts of the bloom. The smith had to separate the pieces the tamahagane was broken into according to the quality of the steel, making final determination of where each piece would go according to its behavior when first hammered into thin plates before being forge welded together. Some swordsmiths would separate the tamahagane pieces into more grades -- Masamune Goro allegedly created swords from seven different grades of tamahagane, for example. The actual construction of the base sword billet depends on the smith; the crudest method just used one homogeneous block, while many used the trough-and-core method, while others would use a more composite construction, with a more ductile core, a very hard edge, and side/back panels of a steel less rigid (and brittle) than the edge, as well as other geometries for layering the different grades of metal.

It was already established (I'm not in a good position to search the forums for the post) that pool-power copies of powerset abilities have, IIRC, a doubled recharge time. Replacing the single-target attack with a snipe that, instead of having a doubled recharge time, doesn't get the in-combat 'fast snipe', continues the policy of making the pool power a weakened version of the powerset ability while keeping it distinct as a power.

Making the pool power a snipe that does not have the fast snipe option, so that it's always the interruptible long animation, would be a decent way to help balance the power by making it less generally useful while still giving it situational advantages.

Depending on the skill of the smith, folded-steel edges can be kept sharper than regular forged billets, but the actual purpose of the folding is to address the crap quality of the raw material they had to work with. Satetsu (iron sand) produces a low-quality bloom of steel (tamahagane) that does not have a uniform character; the Smith will break it into pieces and sort them into harder and softer steel by eye. The pieces chosen for the blade are wrapped together and heated to be hammer welded into one mass, then folded repeatedly to drive out impurities and voids in the billet. This process is necessary to turn the low-quality steel into something that can equal -- not outclass -- the steel in other swords. This material is then forged into a trough shape, and an inner layer of more ductile steel is welded as the core to give the blade strength, then the blade is shaped, a tapered layer of clay for the final quenching giving the edge its temper and creates the curvature of the blade. It's possible to make an excellent blade this way, but it takes considerably more skill, which is why the best swordsmiths are revered; the average katana was of much lower quality -- from simply mediocre to having defects that compromised the blade (too hard and brittle, too soft, voids in the steel reducing its strength, etc.).

That one I fell back on an obvious solution a while ago. Exit your base portal to Striga, then park your character on top of the mausoleum just NW of the base portal; problem solved.

You're right; I must have missed the fine print on all of the 'use on defeated opponent' powers that says that they can't be used on any BP except bosses... Oh, wait... And while we're at it, we can have the HC staff go after all of the other inconveniences in the game. CoT ghosts are resistant to Dark damage; this handicaps characters with Dark-based powers, so they need to be changed to remove that. And mobs that attack with powers that go against AoE defense, and all you have is Ranged defense? Can't have that, either. In fact, let's just grind the game down to where nothing is different except visual effects between powers, and the only difference between NPC mobs is the model.

Heaven forfend that you might have to display some vague acquaintance with tactical decision making, the same way that characters with anchored debuffs need to pick an anchor that leaves a body on defeat if they don't want the debuff to turn off instantly when the anchor is defeated.

Most of the Council missions have the potential for this -- I've seen lots of "Archon Archon [name]" or "Adjutant Archon [name]". I think the problem may be that the list of possible Council boss names has some with the rank attached in the list, so that when the server picks a mission boss, they get a rank -- either Adjutant or Archon -- and a random name, which sometimes already has 'Archon' attached, so the rank gets doubled.

It's a stock aspect of most games that the NPCs have different effects and costs for their abilities than PCs; this is done as a crutch to make them more competitive against PCs, because the preprogrammed 'AI' for the NPCs can't compete on an even basis with a human-controlled PC, so the NPCs get to 'cheat' to one degree or another. One place this is easily seen in CoH is endurance use, where NPCs with only a tiny sliver of their End bar are able to fire off abilities that would take a noticeable chunk out of a PC's End bar, which makes a character focusing on End drain harder to do, because you can't just drain most of their End -- you need to drain it all the way to zero and keep it there, preferably with recovery debuffs to inhibit their getting any End back.

How dare you suggest that a group of people on the internet should stop pounding a dusty reddish brown spot on the ground that used to be a dead horse before it was beaten into mush, then to a liquid that, with additional beating, soaked into the ground and dried up? It goes contrary to the established norms of the intarwebs.... 😉

The game also doesn't try to execute powers a character doesn't have. As part of my stock bind file, I have a bind that has powexecname commands for each of the possible non-P2W flight powers; since I'll only have one on any given character, the bind activates whichever one the character has; this way, no matter which flight power the character has, it's the same key to turn it on and off. And a similar one for teleportation.

Not a bonus to acquiring every day job, I think, but I could see getting a bonus toward the day jobs that are part of a day job accolade with a day job badge you have. So getting the Chronologist day job badge would give you a small increase in how fast you acquired the Cimeroran day job badge, because they're both part of the Time Lord accolade.

It occurs to me that it might be possible to take the old Atlas Park and Galaxy City contacts and their missions, and set them up as Ouroboros mission sequences -- temporal scaling exemps you down to level 1, and you're registered as a new hero, to talk to your origin contact in the zone, and go through the origin story, with the missions curated to have them in the Echo: Atlas Park and Echo: Galaxy City zones (removing any that would send you to Perez Park or Kings Row). I'm not sure whether the Ouroboros mechanics could handle your being handed off to the second contact in an origin story, so they might have to be separate mission sequences, the second with a prerequisite of completing the first.

I think the phrase you're looking for is "Broken as designed."

Depends on the Protector. The ones that fire energy blasts, for example, need to be pounded hard before they fire Elude and become almost impossible to hit, while the claws type are just another speedbump, and don't need special attention.

You craft and slot Ion Judgement. It's in your incarnate screen and nowhere else, so you can't macro/keybind it, except as "powexecname Ion Judgement". Upgrade it to Ion Core Judgement', and the bind/macro stops working, so it has to be edited. If you drag your Ion Judgment to, say, Tray 6 Slot 2, you can use a bind of "powexectray 6 2" to fire it off. But if you upgrade it to Ion Core Judgement, that destroys the Ion Judgement, so it's no longer in the tray, so you have to drag Ion Core Judgement into Tray 6 Slot 2, and then your bind/macro works again. Either way it requires some intervention on your part; your binds and macros don't update automatically when the power changes. Now, I made a suggestion that there be a new type of powexec command that would fire off whatever incarnate power you had slotted (i.e., 'powexec_Judgement'), but Zepp's suggestion in his reply of creating a set of variables, like $Judgement, $Lore, etc., that could be used in the existing powexec commands is a better idea, so you would use 'powexecname $Judgement' to fire whatever your currently slotted Judgement power was, and 'powexeclocation 0 1 Lore' to drop your currently-slotted Lore pets right in front of you. You'd still want to pull the icons for the powers out into a tray so you could see the recharge timer, though, so the utility is limited except in special binds (i.e., 'targetcustomname Kahn$$powexecname $Judgement') that would 'grow' as your slotted power changes.