srmalloy

If the TF is locked to the level it's started at, that would work, but having seen the hate and discontent over TFs that spawn max level regardless of the team level, picking the highest-level character on the team as the new leader minimizes the number of surprises with sudden level shifts. Also, consider that TFs generally have a five-level range; if the second character on the team is minimum level for the TF, making them the new leader results in the game saying "Hi! Because your old leader went inactive, a new leader has been designated; everyone else on the team will lose access to up to two powers because of the new exemplar level. Sucks to be you." — the rest of the team is penalized for the idleage of the leader and their picking a min-level character as the first team member.

However, as I noticed while running a route around Talos to get the Tracker badge (200 Tsoo Sorcerors), both of the un-signed businesses have "TAKE OUT" neon signs in their windows, which strongly argues for both of them being food joints of one flavor or another.

It works the same way any other command does; you create a keybind or macro that calls the popmenu, and when you hit the key or macro icon, the popmenu appears under your mouse cursor for you to pick an option. The Long Range Teleport power is a popmenu macro with its own icon, for example. With the popmenus I created, I wanted them to be usable from the keyboard; the "&1", "&2", and "&3" in the Rain of Fire popmenu are the hotkey definitions — when the popmenu is displayed, hitting one of those keys selects the associated entry.

However, changing the auto-logout in a TF to an auto-demote could be useful — when the team leader goes idle for longer than the cutoff (with the ability to lower the cutoff in the TF difficulty screen), they're kicked from the leader position, replaced by the next highest character on the team. That would allow TFs where the leader locks up to shift leadership without the leader's cooperation so the rest of the team can continue.

I have a file with popmenus for the location AoE powers my various characters have, most of which have three options (selectable with 1/2/3); '1' is the normal power activation, where you use the mouse to place it, '2' is "powexeclocation down:max", which puts it at your feet if you're on the ground and straight down if you're flying, and '3' is "powexeclocation target", dropping it at the feet of your current target. I macro the popmenu and put it in my trays in place of the power icon, which I stuff in an unused tray so I can see the recharge. Some powers have more options -- Wormhole has six: standard, down:max, up:max, fwd:max, back:max, and cam:max; the last three are useful for repositioning spawns when I'm trying to stealth a mission. That mobs don't take damage from being repositioned into midair and falling is sad, but it's at least consistent; not drawing aggro when using it is convenient. A sample popmenu definition from my 'Location Powers.mnu' file in the 'Homecoming\data\texts\English\menus' folder: //------------------------------------------ // 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" } And I would use "/macro Rain popmenu FireRain" to create a macro button, and when I activated it, I'd get the 1/2/3 choice for where to put the rain. And a somewhat different one for more options with Wormhole: //------------------------------------------ // 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" }

Virtually every mission Anton Sampson gives out; "Check out Nemesis base" (and variations thereof) as it shows in your mission list almost invariably becomes "...and defeat every Nemesis soldier you find inside" once you enter -- whether or not it actually appears in the mission goal text.

No, they just have the Depth of Field setting wrong; it's fuzzing up the distant buildings too much.

If the choice were up to me, I would prefer that the HC staff devoted time to building the tools to allow them to create new animations going forward than work to recycle existing animations as alternates for powers, accepting the short-term lack of options against a wider array of them in the future. However, since a decision like that is based on factors I have no knowledge of — the distribution of skills and time among the HC staff, the likelihood that NCsoft will continue to ignore the CoH rogue servers as long as they don't rock the boat, the progress or lack thereof in negotiations with NCsoft to establish some sort of legitimacy for the rogue servers, etc. — any such decision will be up to the HC staff.

And you can argue that ATOs and WOs are like-but-distinct to purple sets, because you can get purple IOs as ordinary crafted IOs and then boost them, while applying a catalyst to an ATO or WO gives it a purple border, but they cannot be boosted. They share some characteristics but not all.

If you're not already doing this, when you join a Hami raid, keep your auction window open during the monster mash. As you get large inspirations, drag them into the AH window to stick them in storage, and Immediately pop the small and medium ones to maintain space for more drops. When you're done with the raid, strip the AH of the inspirations you stuck there, take them back to your base, and dump them in storage for your other characters before you restock your inspiration tray.

Damn... Now I need to add another digit to my counter for the number of separate times someone has asked for MM pet customization to be added to the game.

The Halloween event drops time-limited costumes; these are full-model replacement, like Granite for a Stone Tanker, or the Hellion/Girlfriend from Hell appearance you get doing Matthew Habashy's mission into the Hellion safehouse. The Prismatic costumes are likewise full-model replacements except that they're not time-limited, and there are quite a few that you can't get from the Halloween drops as temp powers. When you activate a Prismatic costume, you get the whole outfit; there's no way to get, say, just the clothing.

And make sure you have a current copy of your 27B/6 in case something goes wrong.

They did, yes. Homecoming made a change so that combining SOs increased their level, so merging two level 30 SOs got you a level 31 SO, not a level 30+ SO. As I understand it, that made it possible to implement the 'upgrade' function on the slotting screen.

The problem I have noticed seems to be tied to the pets being significantly slower than the character. As long as you move slowly enough that your pet stays in relatively close proximity to you, it follows you quite readily. However — and I have not done the experimentation to determine where the limit is — beyond a certain distance, the pathing for 'follow' degenerates into a straight line from the pet to you, resulting in the pet hanging up on obstacles and being unable to pass through doors and portals. One amusing example is to go to FBZ and summon a Singularity at the portal back to Portal Corp in PI, then quickly fly to the portal from the base to the rest of the zone and go through it, then jump off the rock and fall until you're ported back to the base. If you go over to the portal you just went through, you'll find your Singularity bumping against the portal unable to go through, and unable to recognize that you've come back, and should be following you. If you resummon your Singularity, go back to the portal, wait for it to catch up, and then go through the portal, it follows you through the portal without issue.

What makes the keyboard input capture so annoying is that what you type goes into the bid textbox without the textbox being visible, so that you have no visual feedback about the capture; all you see is that your keystrokes don't seem to do anything.

When you have the Auction House window open and drag an inspiration into the auction house, the AH window captures your keyboard input until you click outside the AH window. I noticed this happening during a Hami raid, where I was dragging the large inspirations that dropped into the AH to save for later, and then discovering that the various keyboard commands for the tray powers didn't work until I clicked outside of the auction house window. Recently, I discovered where the captures keystrokes were going -- after having keystrokes 'intercepted', when selecting a stored item in the auction house, the 'missing' keystrokes appear in the bid/minimum textfield of an item, disappearing if you close and reopen the AH window. I happened to have not closed the window before going to list extra EoEs for sale, and saw "2341136213" in the bid textfield for the inspiration, having appeared there even though I didn't have a stored item selected to enter a minimum for. I don't think that this form of 'stealth' bid entry is an intended or desired behavior, although I'm not sure how the problem would be corrected.

And sometimes you have to tweak the stock powers to make them work the way you believe they should. For me, that's all of the Radiation powersets, whose default color is fixed around the misperception that radiation glows green, when in fact that was the color of the phosphor used in radium-illuminated displays. All of my characters with Rad powers have them recolored as close to the #22BDFF color of Čerenkov radiation as possible. Sometimes, though, it's just affectation; many of my characters with Fire powers have them colored bluish-white to imply that the fire is incredibly hot, based on black-body thermal emission colors -- it doesn't change the power, or even how it works for the character concept; it's just a conceit that the character's firing hotter blasts than one shooting red/orange fire.

Pollice verso for everyone!

Except that you a) have to get people to use it, and b) stop people from going back to LFG, General, Help, and whatever when people don't use it. I remember back on Live when the Paragon Studios staff tried to crack down on AE farming; one of their tactics was to put filters in chat to squelch messages with banned words, resulting in a cascade of euphemisms for AE farms that changed as the devs identified them and added them to the bans -- for example, the "meow missions". Attempts to force behavior on the player base have not ended well in the past.

Particularly after pouring in the carboy of Lysol®...

You have to look at the cost tradeoff. Many of the more desirable recipes/enhancements have a cost of 100 merits. 100 merits buying 300 convertors and put on the AH should get you 18 to 20 million inf if you're willing to be patient. So if the enhancement is selling for less than that, using the merits for convertors and buying it off the AH is more cost effective. And remember to include the crafting cost for recipes -- most VR recipes require two or three rare components, so that can add another million or million and a half to the cost, plus the ~600k crafting cost. If there aren't any of the specific IO you need in a set, look at the incremental cost of buying another IO in the set and converting it to get the one you want. In most cases, using merits directly won't be your most efficient route, although it is much faster.

Here you go.

If someone wants to keep an auction slot occupied with an outrageously-priced item in the hope that someone sporting the sort of scorch marks on their tights caused only by the spontaneous combustion of huge wads of inf, that's no skin off my nose, and if someone has such a 'gotta have it now' attitude that they're willing to pay it, that's their choice. Putting in a reasonably-priced bid and being willing to wait a few days is more beneficial. As I see it, the only problem that really needs to be fixed with the AH is killing the bug that keeps mixing up bid history, so what you see for an item's history may not be for that item.

Most of the non-weapon powersets can be recolored and roleplayed as a different type of attack -- I have a Dark/Plant Blaster, Toksichniy Podlesok (Токсичный Подлесок, 'Txic Undergrowth') where I took the Dark attacks and colored them a shadowed green to represent various biological toxins, with the Dark debuff being the lingering effects of the toxins. A little imagination can take you a long way, particularly with all the customization options the game gives you. And sometimes it's possible to do it with weapon sets, too; I have a Kat/Rad Brute, Hoshasen-Ken (放射線 剣, 'Radiation Blade') where I gave the character the Fire and Ice Sword colored to match the Čerenkov radiation color of her armor powers, handwaving it as a manifestation of her radiation-based abilities.