srmalloy

May he go forth in the sunrise boat May he come to port in the sunset boat May he go among the imperishable stars May he journey in the Boat of a Million Years -- The Book of Going Forth by Daylight, Theban recension, ca. 18th dynasty

Digging up some amusement from the depths of my memory... We're slimy, we're squishy, we're all a little fishy, And in this adventure, we'll be feasting on your brain! We're abysmal creatures, with gross, horrific features; in Cthulhic adventures, lose a lot of sanity! And here's Miskatonic U., where all the creatures dwell. Take one look in a Mythos book, and you'll go straight to hell! Your guns aren't defective, they just aren't real effective. Our feast on your immortal soul's about to start! Your magic and voodoo will not stop Great Cthulhu, Don't eat with the Tchoo Tchoo, and the Mi-Go steal your brain! Here's dread Tsathoggua, and over there's Cthugha, Don't forget Nyarlathotep, and Hastur hates his name! So here's drowned R'lyeh where the angles are all wrong, You'll lose your soul and go insane if you stay there too long! We're slimy, we're squishy, we're all a little fishy, Our feast on your immortal soul's about to start! And now we'll eat your heart!

It's not a game-breaking bug, since you can adapt to it readily enough, but the game's internal targeting box for the Barrier Reef pet is shifted down relative to the visual model of the pet: You can see that the model for the reef sticks out above the targeting reticle, and the reticle extends significantly below the model. This is reflected when you are attempting to target the Barrier Reef; clicking on the middle of the model as drawn gives a bit of a crapshoot as to whether it's going to select the Reef or not; you have to click near the bottom of the model as rendered.

You should only ever get one of any origin-based set of contacts in a level group -- Trevor Seaborn, Hugo Redding, and Haley Phillips are the trio that most people will have experience of this with, as they give out the "Rescue the mystic from the Circle of Thorns" mission for the Spelunker badge. I haven't experimented with Ouro flashbacks enough to find out whether the Pillar of Ice and Fire picks a random contact out of the three if you weren't introduced to any of them, picks a fixed contact from the set (IIRC, I got Trevor Seaborn the one time I needed to run that mission via flashback), or will send you to the contact from the set you've already been introduced to. I suppose I could go through a few of my characters and pick one for each of those three contacts and see who the Pillar sends me to.

And, by the obdurate and unbreakable standard, if it doesn't exist, it can never exist. We can, therefore, close the entire Suggestions subforum, because it's filled with ideas for things that don't exist in the game, which you appear to believe makes them impossible to ever implement. And as @PeregrineFalcon stated back on the first page of this thread, the HC staff have already said that they're not going to do this. Just like some rando MM can walk by and cast their empowerment abilities on other MMs' henchmen to upgrade them? The fact that the target_custom_next (and related) slash commands have the "mypet" and "notmypet" filters shows that the game has internal tags to distinguish between your pets and other characters' pets, and your continued inability to recognize my repeated use of the phrase "your pets" shows that you continue your straw man arguments.

Which, I believe, is due to the Malta Kronos titan, Council Goliath War Walker, BP Ravager, and (IIRC) Longbow Cataphract all having the same rigging to simplify their animation (the Kronos and GWW vanity pets, which are just shrunken versions of the GMs, also exhibit this behaviour, and are easier to find to see it in action.

John Heywood, Dialog of Proverbs, 1546. "Who is so deafe, or so blynde, as is hee, That wilfully will nother hear nor see?" Once more, and maaaaaybeeee this time you won't misread it. The pseudopet casts an ability that is IDENTICAL to the current upgrade power, except that it is PBAoE, rather than targeted AoE. It applies the empowerment to any of your pets in the AoE in EXACTLY the same way that they would receive the empowerment from the version of the power as it exists now. The buff does not expire, nor is constrained to function only within the AoE, any more than the existing MM empowerment buffs turn off if the pet moves further away than the range of the current empowerment ability. But, as I expect, you will recoil in mock amazement, and spuriously claim in self-justification that I previously misrepresented what the proposed ability did, instead of your having read your own preconceptions into what I said, then attacked that.

A sessile female or a feral male? And did you travel to Down, or did you have it smuggled offworld?

That gives me a BINGO on card seven -- 25 requests for MM henchmen customization.

"Infinite-duration clicky powers" -- so the current Mastermind pet upgrades wear off? They're click powers, and their effects are permanent. A couple of years ago, you could make an equally absolute statement that there are no archetypes with a ranged primary and armor secondary; now we have Sentinels. It's a good thing that the lack of existence of something now doesn't preclude it from existing in the future, no matter how many straw men you set up to argue against. You could create a power that is a toggle that has the effect of spawning some sort of invisible and invulnerable pseudo-pet that periodically pulses a PBAoE version of the current pet upgrade power; aside from being PBAoE rather than targeted AoE, the upgrade effect would remain identical to the current one.

Yes. The upgrade would be a one-and-done effect, yes, so that the upgrade toggle essentially sits there idle until one of your pets without the toggle appears in or enters the toggle area, at which time the upgrade is applied as if the MM had used the current version of the upgrade power.

As opposed to, say, all of the 90% of the doors around the city that exist only to give you somewhere to knock during the Halloween event, because they're never used as mission doors? But the doors you get stuck from in the backs of stores is a case of sloppiness on the part of the zone designers, for whom it was easier just to drop in the predefined 'door' object with all of its attributes than make a visually-identical 'pseudo-door' that had no functionality tied to it and wouldn't get used as a character login point.

The rationalization falls down redside and in Cimerora, but the game lore already has you making 'non-lethal' arrests; when a mob is defeated, if you examine them closely, they still have a tiny sliver of health, and the lore explanation is that the police transporters are able to lock onto the mobs once defeated and transport them to holding cells (presumably, with medical attention at the ready); any lethal apprehension is a character-roleplay bit, not what is putatively happening in game.

Along with removing the "do you really want to go here?" alignment prompt when you try to take a character with an 'intermediate' alignment (i.e., vigilante or rogue) to a non-mixed zone (i.e., from Dark Astoria to Talos Island). The game already won't let you go through the gate if you're not an allowed alignment, so getting the "This passage in front of you leads to Paragon City. Here you will find both Heroes who combat great evils and Vigilantes who do what they must to maintain the peace. Are you brave enough to face the challenges of this city of heroes?" every time is just a time-waster and can be removed without affecting the functionality of the zone gates.

And while it has not worked out that way in practice, according to the devs the original design of City of Villains had Masterminds being the closest analogous AT to the heroside Tanker. I think, though, that with the shift toward increasing difficulty in play, with more groups going for +4 and then multistar difficulty, that the structure of the Mastermind archetype has fallen behind, but as @GM_GooglyMoogly says, balancing the AT is a complicated process. One thing that might be looked at is making the pet upgrades PBAoE toggles, with a minimal or zero base End cost, that automatically apply the upgrade to pets at some End cost per pet receiving the upgrade. It's not an 'automatic' effect, but it would work in a similar way.

You mean that not including "...and leave them" was deliberate?

From the numpad MM control binds, an example from the 'robotics' general bind file (the rest of the general bind files follow the same format for the bind): add powexec_name "+targetcustomnear alive mypet$$equip robot" numpadenter powexec_name "+targetcustomnear alive mypet$$upgrade robot"

As opposed to the PPD on guard at the gates in/out of hazard zones, whom you often have to grope in order to get the mouse click to register.

You just weren't using the right drugs. Several decades ago, up in the Bay Area, some yahoo hopped up on PCP was stealing a refrigerator when he was accosted (been too long, I don't remember whether it was a guard or a police officer), refused to cooperate, and was shot three times. He put down the refrigerator, beat the shooter unconscious, then walked a half mile to a hospital and presented to the ER. He survived, but was later prosecuted.

If you used the Titan Icon program to save out your character to a local file on your computer, there's a program to extract the costumes from the save file -- although you may run into 'invalid costume element' errors. You can recreate the build from the build information, and if you can read the game's internal enhancement names, you can get back how you had the character slotted: <power> <id>Mastermind_Buff.Dark_Miasma.Tar_Patch</id> <level>2</level> <slots count="5"> <slot level="40" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Recharge.Crafted_Recharge</slot> <slot level="50" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Pacing_of_the_Turtle_E.Crafted_Pacing_of_the_Turtle_E</slot> <slot level="50" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Tempered_Readiness_E.Crafted_Tempered_Readiness_E</slot> <slot level="35" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Snare.Crafted_Snare</slot> <slot level="35" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Snare.Crafted_Snare</slot> </slots> </power> But you're not going to be able to pull your character back into Homecoming from the saved file; at best you'll be able to recreate it starting with a new character and following the build you saved out from Live.

Note that the Cupid's Crush proc is a Dmg/Proc IO, so, like the LotG Def/+Rech IO, you're only getting the enhancement effect of a two-aspect IO for the damage -- 26.5% at 50, where a straight Dmg IO would be 42.4% -- so if you're not getting a significant benefit from the proc, you need to look hard at another IO from the main set you've slotted the power with, or a more contributive set IO if you're frankenslotting.

The chance is the same 100% that the Assault Rifle's Burst, despite firing multiple projectiles, will only hit (at best) the single target you aim at. It's a game design decision to make the power single target, regardless of the 'real' characteristics of the attack. It may not be reflective of real-world weapons, but it's the way it works in game.

Euuuuw. I also play ESO, and it's very apparent that its control setup is hugely console-controller centric, with its restriction to five selectable abilities plus an 'ultimate' on each of the 'front and back bars', with only the currently selected bar's slotted abilities being usable, and any active powers switch off when you switch to the other bar. I have CoH characters with five or more full bars of abilities that are continuously available; having to cram fifty or more abilities into the button set available on a console controller is like trying to fit a quart of soda into a teacup. Even if you're restricting your idea to game consoles with attached keyboards, you have the fundamental problem of not having the correct graphics libraries -- and this would involve having to rewrite parts of the game engine to hook into the graphics libraries in the console, a much deeper and more involved process than simply recompiling the code to the new platform. 'Trivial' it is not.

And I just finished going through all of my Mastermind bind files to preface the binds for the upgrades with '+targetcustomnear alive mypet$$' to make the bind target the nearest pet, eliminating the need to double-tap the first use to target a pet. I can corroborate from testing with my Necromancy/Marine Mastermind that I can run through the Skeleton/Grave Knight/Lich summons, then slap the first empowerment on a Skeleton while the Lich is still untargetable, and the Lich gets the empowerment.

I would like to see a program of "Door diversification" -- there are so many clickable doors in the zones, and relatively few of them, in my experience, are used as mission doors. It would be good to see them get used for something other than being knocked at during the Halloween event for trick-or-treating.