srmalloy

I'm not sure if this is properly a bug, instead of working as intended, but I had an incident with a character in Ouroboros just now that had me scratching my head. Another character had summoned a crafting table, and I moved over to craft the recipes I had salvage for. After crafting the first IO, the other character ran off, dragging the crafting table behind her, and disappeared into the Ouro building proper (I was by Mender Sears). The crafting window remained open, and I was able to craft another three recipes before I ran out of matching salvage and closed the window myself. Just like the crafting tables do in bases, there is a range outside of which you can't click on the summoned crafting table and get a crafting window. However, for the tables in bases, you move away from the table and the crafting window will close; I was well outside the presumed range of the summoned table, but the crafting window didn't go away. I won't argue that this has benefits, but I don't think this is intended behavior.

Sticking with Assemble the Team, why does it, in the third mission of the Penelope Yin Task Force, leave you standing on the tail boom of the mission helicopter with your midsection in the plane of the spinning rotors? Didn't Vic Morrow teach us anything?

I'm viewing this through the lens of a career in programming, but I can't help but associate this with "real soon now"...

I have no way to prove it, since those decisions are closed off behind any number of doors, but I suspect that one of the things contributing to NCsoft shuttering CoH was that its cash shop was deliberately designed with account-wide unlocks, so a player would only ever buy a costume set once and be able to use it forever on all their characters, instead of having one-shot individual costume pieces on NCsoft's own cash shop, where they could bury players in microtransactions that would pay directly into an NCsoft account (presumably using their 'NCcoin' currency), instead of having to filter back through Paragon Studios and bulk up their bottom line, and represent a continuous source of revenue while choking off player choice (since if you bought a one-shot costume piece, then added it, if you went back later and replaced it with a different costume piece, changing back would mean you'd need to buy it again, or buy it again if you wanted it on a different character). That's where NCsoft makes their money from all their F2P MMOs -- an ongoing stream of people buying one-off gear before they move on to another game. The retention rate CoH had was considerably at odds with other MMOs of the time.

You're spot on. If you have a specific 'Arcane Blast' set, then if you're creating a character who's a dimension traveller from a universe like Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos universe, where magic is the technology, then if they're using enchanted devices to produce their power effects, then neither a Magic nor a Technology origin really fits to the character concept. I have a Fire/Time/Dark Corruptor, Machinator Magicus (roughly 'magical engineer' in Latin), who is exactly that -- someone from another dimension where magic takes the place of technology in our dimension -- and I could just create them as a Magic origin character and pick whatever powersets I wanted, because all of them could be handwaved as magical effects. Creating a powerset that is defined as magical breaks concept for any character origin that isn't Magic, because the powerset is locked in concept to the origin; you're constraining the ability of players to create whatever character they want with whatever powerset(s) they want, and foot out how they tie to the character's origin on their own, either in their head or in the character's bio.

The OP's statement about being punished is for their rapidly resummoning pets, which is what you're doing now -- under the current configuration, you pay the same End cost for summoning Tier 1 henchmen whether you are summoning 1, 2, or all three of them. The OP's proposal appears to be to apply an endurance discount of 1/3 if you're only summoning 2 of the Tier 1 henchmen, and a discount of 2/3 if you're only summoning a single henchman. To break it out more clearly: Current Arrangement: Summon 3 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 2 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 1 henchman: Full End cost Proposed change: Summon 3 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 2 henchmen: 2/3 End cost Summon 1 henchman: 1/3 End cost So with the OP's proposal, you're only paying the fraction of the base End cost for the number of henchmen you're actually summoning, instead of paying the full End cost regardless of how many you're pulling up, so it's more 'efficient' in terms of End to wait for all your Tier 1 pets to be defeated and summon them all back at once, rather than replacing them one by one as they go down. For myself, while I can see the argument for not paying the full End cost to get only one henchman, I would prefer to see a sort of "overhead" to the summons, so that the act of summoning has a cost, regardless of how many henchmen you're summoning: Summon 3 henchmen: Full End cost Summon 2 henchmen: 3/4 End cost Summon 1 henchman: 1/2 End cost This would make resummoning defeated henchmen a more strategic decision; you're not paying the full cost of the summons for a fraction of the effect, but it's still more 'efficient' to summon all three at one time, so the MM still has a reason to wait to summon more at once.

In the mission "Bust Countess Crey & her guards" from Janet Kellum, one of the Crey Gamma Tanks says "[NPC] Crey Gamma Tank: I know. And nothing ever seems to phase her." That should be "faze", not 'phase'. 'Faze' is a verb meaning to disturb or disconcert; 'phase' is either a noun describing a part of a process, or a verb indicating carrying out something in stages.

And there's a clear distinction between being able to stand toe to to with an AV and actually being able to do anything significant to the AV in return.

I didn't say the listing was consistent, merely that it didn't properly fit the effects of the collective 'vanity pets' group; it's probably put there to reduce the size of the menu tree in the popmenu. If we went through and listed all of the inconsistencies in CoH, we'd never get any play in.

The other term that seems to be popular for the same tactic is "Hamikaze".

I don't think that's properly a vanity pet, since it's a predictable reward from a high-difficulty Aeon TF for a particular accomplishment within the TF, and it's a targetable and destroyable pet, unlike the others.

And even back on Live, CoH stood out in that the character customizations that were in the Paragon Store (or unlocked as veteran rewards) were unlocked account-wide, instead of being something you had to buy on a character-by-character basis -- and, even more attractive, your costume choices were entirely cosmetic, having nothing to do with your powers, instead of your stats being bound into the gear so that you outleveled it and would have to throw it away unless the game supported some sort of morphing feature that let you apply the appearance of a particular costume piece to the gear you were actually wearing (and didn't use up that item in the process, so when you outleveled that gear, you'd have to buy the piece you wanted again, and again, and again as you leveled or geared up).

Amusingly, one of the forms ascribed to the 'real' cryptid referred to as Lusca is a literal sharktopus, a half-shark, half octopus, found in the area of the blue holes around Andros Island in the Bahamas.

No Omega Mu?

It's been a bug for quite some time that Wes Schabel, whose level range is putatively 10-14, has an actual level range of 10; he won't give you any missions if you're below level 10, and won't give you any missions once you ding 11. This, IIRC, existed back on Live, and every time I've had a character get him as a content on Homecoming, he's worked the same way; I've never seen the bug actually fixed.

My mistake copying and pasting the wrong line in the file; I didn't keep the original file, so working from memory and what the necromancy.txt file looks like now, the issue was divide powexec_location 300:5 "zombies" This would fail to match against the power name, so I updated it to be divide powexec_location 300:5 "zombie Horde"

If that's correct -- and I don't recall the few respecs I've done and used that with -- another option would be to open another tray, drag the macro to it, then close the tray.

You can try using /cleartray, but that's sort of the nuclear option, since it will wipe out all of your trays and make you rebuild them. Using Windows' snipping tool to screenshot your trays beforehand will give you a reference you can use to reposition all your power icons except the offending macro.

This left me snickering as I remembered the story about the Navy conducting a study on the effects of Viagra on healthy individuals. They gave regular doses of Viagra to a selected population of sailors and Marines over a six-month period, but they were stymied about how to analyze the results. The sailors all reported increased sexual stamina and performance, while the Marines just got taller.

The problem is that it doesn't allow a character to fly; it forces them to fly. You don't get the option; if someone has Group Fly on, and you're within the area of effect, you will be flying. That's what the option from Null addresses, and changing Group Fly to make what it does more manageable is what this thread, and the others going back to Live, is about.

It would be amusing if there was a big table of flavors tucked away on the server, and when you were teleported, you got a message like "You arrive back at Point du Hoc with a strange taste of [random flavor] in your mouth". Maybe something to add for the April Fool's event.

'&nbs' is the HTML 'non-breaking space' entity (so if you had a string 'mad&nbslad', you would always see 'mad lad' on one line in a web page, never splitting 'mad' and 'lad' across two lines); the game should not be inserting HTML entities into your macros.

Some of the mini pets, such as the mini Adamastor, have a resting animation of them standing there waving about as if unsteady on their feet, but it looks to me as if the animation is turned up too fast, making them weave about frantically. The pets that don't use this animation, like the mini Kronos and mini Paladin, don't have such a visibly high-speed animation. Could the weaving be slowed down so it's more comparable to, say, the Zombie Horde from the MM Necromancy primary?

I wonder whether it would be possible to create a "Pet Fly" power for the START vendors that would act like Group Fly, but only for the character's pets; it would further marginalize the Group Fly power, but even for MMs I don't know whether Group Fly gets enough use to justify a power choice in most builds. There are a few examples of content where not having Group Fly gimps a MM -- the Seed of Hamidon is one good example, where not having your henchmen flying eliminates the vast majority of their DPS. Perhaps the temp flight power you get from defeating Seedlings could be tweaked to affect your pets as a test to see how well it would work while keeping it limited before deciding whether to implement it as a START product.

Not just Masterminds; for most of the pet classes, you get to stand around waiting after a fast run/fly/jump to a new location for your pet(s) to deign to catch up with you, although it's objectively worse for MMs, since the whole AT is built around their pets being the majority of their damage output.