srmalloy

And it sounds a lot like another case of "you're not having fun the way we want you to have fun, so we're going to change the way rewards are handed out to encourage you to have fun the right way." I'm glad it went nowhere; I would have to think back a long way to a Hami raid that defeated all four blooms; even in the raids in the Hive, the most common was two blooms, with three blooms rarely.

It would be interesting to see if that only occurs if the MD is defeated in the RWZ, or if it happens regardless of the MDC's location. If it happens regardless of location, it makes the yahoos who summon an MD into a location with a large group of characters even more annoying, since in addition to the MD sucking the attention of pets awat from the target(s) the group is fighting, it would be spawning a roaming "death from above" creature that would need to be avoided in the RWZ.

To make it work, it would have had to be done as part of the initial rollout of AE; once it had been established as a thing in-game on the live servers, the devs were stuck with playing catch-up to scrub out all of the riskless exploits the players found, and the ways the players worked around things like the attempt at using a filter on chat to hide any chat message with 'farm' in it (I remember in particular the "meow missions" as one widespread euphemism as the playerbase stayed ahead of the devs' censorship). It's far too late to fix it now, no matter how much I think it should have been implemented differently.

The change in attack order preference would be a system-wide change for all pets, not just Umbra Beast, and if it works could result in the 'pet attacks not affected by recharge reduction' change being reverted if it fixes the 'spam first-tier attack' issue. But I agree that it's a deeper code change, and would require more digging on the part of the HC developers.

One problem with this is that the disadvantages need to be balanced against how often they come into effect. With a game like CoH, for a big chunk of the game you can avoid exposure to certain effects by being careful about your choice of opponent groups; it's only in the late game that you lose most of the ability to pick and choose your opponents to avoid your weaknesses.

And when a single solution is found to a tactical problem in game, all curiosity ends, and that solution is run to the exclusion of any other tactic -- the inescapable "Essential: Must have Tier 4 Barrier" addition to any call for four-star teams is the prime example; rotating Barrier spam removes a lot of having to think about your tactics.

I have always thought that the way AE was set up was inherently broken. Take inf rewards -- influence/infamy/information is a currency based on your reputation in the game world based on what you've done. Crawling into your electronic navel and defeating thousands of virtual opponents may teach you how to use your abilities better, but if you go into the AE building at level 1 and don't come out until you're 50, the people around you have no clue about who you are, and don't know anything you've done to base a reputation on. Doing AE missions should earn you XP and tickets, but not inf. The ticket drop rate can be adjusted to make farming AE more or less remunerative from trading in tickets for recipes/components and selling them, but that's an internal arrangement with Aeon Entertainment to attract people to their services. Nothing you do in AE should make you a more well-known/respected/feared character outside of the AE building. I know this is a hugely unpopular opinion, and it's been way too long since AE was implemented for there to be any reasonable expectation that it's going to change, but the Paragon Studios staff could have done a number of things to make AE farming less attractive for sidestepping the ordinary leveling route and earning millions of inf. The whacks with the nerf bat that it got did not, in my opinion, address some of the central broken issues around its design.

Short-recharge power spamming is why pets were made immune to Speed Boost and other global recharge-reduction buffs. What happened was that when you SB'd a pet, it's bottom-tier attack would recharge much faster than other attacks could, so that by the time their bottom-tier attack had completed its animation and effect, it was recharged again, so the combat logic for the pet would just use the bottom-tier attack again, rather than any of the others. What the OP is describing sounds like a miniature version of this effect. I think, though, that tripling the power recharge is whacking it a little too hard with the nerf bat; I would suggest starting with a 50% increase to six seconds, letting an Umbra Beast loose with combat logging on against a harmless target like an MDC, and seeing if that corrects the distribution of attack use before bumping the recharge higher. Alternatively, changing the combat logic for pets from "use the lowest-tier attack that's recharged" to "use the highest-tier attack that's recharged" or "use the least recently-used attack that's recharged" might give better results.

Not if you have to break the wiring harness(es) to do it:

Take a look at Elder Scrolls Online, then; it may be more to your tastes for managing powers. Basically, the UI is really heavily oriented around the assumption that everyone, regardless of what platform they're playing on, will be using a game controller, so your abilities rest in a single bar of six powers and an 'Ultimate', but at, IIRC, level 15, you open a second bar, so you have a 'front bar' and a 'back bar' that you can switch between, and powers are exclusive to the bar, so if you put a power that has a timed effect on your front bar, it switches off the moment you switch to your back bar unless it's also slotted in your back bar. So if you have pet summons powers, unless you want the pet to disappear when you switch bars, you need to use up 1/6 of your bar space slotting that summons on both bars. But all of this does restrict you to a 'basic set of powers' -- by the time you reach level cap, you'll have considerably more abilities than you have bar space for, which addresses your 'too many powers' complaint neatly.

So we need to have all the IOs gone through to correct issues like this, where an IO 'should' be uncommon because the set it's in is uncommon, but the IO/recipe is labeled everywhere as rare, along with others, like the Dark Watcher's Despair: To Hit Debuff recipe and enhancement, which is labeled as an uncommon recipe/enhancement in a set that is otherwise rare, and requires a Rare ingredient (Prophecy)? Essentially sanity-checking the entire range of IO sets?

The Mocking Beratement: Recharge IO shows as a Rare recipe and a Rare enhancement, but in the Conversion window, selecting an out of set conversion by rarity shows it converting as an uncommon IO: This needs to be corrected, either for the conversion by rarity, or for the rarity of the recipe and IO, to reflect that proper rarity.

If you want 'flavor', think about the names of the tech SOs and most of the DOs, and conjure up the mental image of what a hero would look like if they actually carried everything that their slotted enhancements were — faces covered by an array of Benedict Tech Targeting Eyes and ports for Portacio Industries Internal Munitions all over, or multiple Nectanebo's Gourds slung from their shoulders with nine or so of Li Tieh Kuai's Earrings dangling, a bunch of Amulets, more Shoulderpieces than they have shoulders...

Maybe there needs to be a game flag in the options that reverts the opponent difficulty to align with Jack Emmert's declaration that "Three minions should be a tough fight for one hero" (but doesn't increase the XP or other rewards; that would just create another type of farming) that only works when solo, or when all the members of a team have that flag set. That way, the people who are always flapping on about how CoH is too easy can have their hardmode game, while the rest of us continue to play as we like.

When you choose a power, you should be able to expect consistent effects from it. You may miss your target(s), you may not get enough magnitude to affect them, but when you use the power, you know what it's going to do. Having a power that randomly gives you either of two significantly disparate effects seems to me to break the structural design concept for powers. Either trawl the targets, make them intangible, or both, but not randomly one or the other so you can't use it reliably for either effect between one set of targets and the next.

And this is exacerbated by making SOs available all the way down to level 2, where you can buy level 5 SOs -- back when you had to start with TOs, then start upgrading to DOs around level 7, level 15 IOs were about as good as the DOs you could slot, and level 20 IOs were better than DOs, which would carry you up to level 22, where you could either go to SOs for the 22-27 range (or even to 32 if you could afford the upgrading) before switching to IOs, which wouldn't need replacing until you started slotting IO sets. Now, IOs below 25 are essentially worthless, because you're so much better off with SOs until 22 or 27 that the first two tiers of IOs are pretty much make-work deadweight for the crafting badges and progress for the 'free' workbench that most people just pay the 10M inf to get it.

"Making something difficult is no substitute for making it impossible."

This brings up an idea that I haven't seen suggested before as an expansion to Mastermind primaries -- evolving pets. Using the Outcasts as an example, you'd get the minion-tier Outcasts as your tier-1 pets, the lieutenant-tier Block/Brick/Shocker/Freezer as your tier-2 pets, and the boss-tier Lead Brick/etc. as your tier-3 pets. Then, further on in level, you'd lose the minion-tier Outcasts, and the lieutenant-tier Outcasts would push down and become your tier-1 pets, the boss-tier Outcasts would push down and become your tier-2 pets, and you'd get a new tier-3 pet who was an EB-tier Outcast (i.e., Frostfire) before being compressed into the Mastermind pet tiers. It would be a lot more complicated to configure, but it would give a feeling of progression rather than being static once you get your second pet upgrade power. I don't know if it's even viable to do with the current state of the code; I suspect that trying to make it work might be like sticking a fork in the spaghetti code, spinning it around a few times, then tossing it in the air to fall where it may.

No. As others pointed out, this would have you paying only the incremental cost of your SOs forever, so leveling a Damage SO from 5 to 30 would only cost you what the 30 does. If you're going to do something like this, deduct what you can sell the current SO for, which is considerably less than the price you pay for it -- checking just now, buying a level 50 Damage SO costs 60,000 inf, but when you sell it you only get 15,600 for it. You would be spending less money than if you burned unslotters to remove each of the SOs to replace them, then sold the old ones, but you're still paying the incremental cost of the upgrade plus, effectively, 3/4 of the cost of the SO you're replacing. Not as bad as the raw cost of replacing it outright, but you're not getting the 'free ride' you would with your suggestion.

In an amazing turnaround, for the first time I've seen it happen in the game (all the way back to May 2004, when I joined), yesterday I was doing a mission in the sewers where a Rikti Headman Gunman ported and wound up in that 'stand at attention, arms up and out, locked into position while you slide along the railing' pose when they came out on top of the chain edging a raised platform in the end room. It's nice to see that the game is an equal-opportunity jerk, even if the NPCs are generally too smart to get themselves stuck that way.

Now I'm pondering picking one of my characters with Mark and Recall and rerunning Castaneda's arc in Ouro just to see if, when I do the standard run of clearing the route to the chest before I rescue Lady Jane, set the mark, then come back, defeat her guards, have her go into her monologue, and trigger the recall, it yanks Lady Jane with me, potentially before she finishes her rant.

The button at the top right for the "General Discussion" subforum is labeled "Create new topic" (emphasis mine), so that was the terminology I used.

This. I have no objections to people making whatever topics they want, and I have no interest in asking a GM to delete the thread -- that I personally find them as risible as someone spraying liquid manure across my driveway doesn't mean that someone else won't find them entertaining -- I just want a way to make them disappear for me so I don't have half the first screen of topics taken up by (in my opinion) content with less value than "punch the monkey" ads.

It's been tried; the Paragon Studios devs tried to eradicate the flood of farm requests and offers in chat by applying filters to the chat traffic to hide references to farms; it just resulted in an ever-changing collection of euphemisms and code words used instead of the words that the filters wouldn't catch, like the "meow missions" that people who played the game during that period on Live may remember.

No, it would be an active "hide this topic' selection. For the other, you'd probably have to tag people with a clue-by-four to wake them up first.