srmalloy

On the other hand, participating in the HO lottery can save you a considerable amount of inf, with a bit of luck; while I don't think I'm going to get them to +3 any time soon, I got both of the Cytoskeleton Exposure HOs I wanted for the basic slotting of my Necro/Marine build from Hami raid drops over a period of about a week. YMMV; you can get Peroxisome Exposure 'thank you for playing' drops over and over and over again before you ever see one you want or can sell for a good amount of inf.

It's not the instant response to an attack launched from stealth, but whether the attack is visibly noticeable. Fire, Ice, Electricity -- most of the attacks in most powersets draw a highly visible line of special effects between the attacker and the target to tell the spawn you're shooting into where the attack is coming from. Some of them are inherently less noticeable -- except for powers like Full Auto, Flamethrower, and Ignite, the sound of Assault Rifle attacks going off aren't going to pinpoint the shooter, and linking a hero off over there waving their hand with a coccoon of rock suddenly appearing around your buddy and crushing them is probably too much of a stretch for villains. And there's a similar situation with regard to ambushes. One of the things that nobody notices about ambushes is the completely undetectable stage ninja that slips up behind you to plant a tracking device on your character just before the ambush spawns, so no matter where you go, the ambush knows where to go to find you. At best, an ambush should know where you are when the ambush is triggered, so that it can proceed to where you were at that time, and from there, if they haven't stumbled across you on their way there, have to look around to actually find you. I can see the ambush being given increased range on their detection ability, so if they, say, hear blasting and yelling from a couple rooms away, they can charge off in that direction, but knowing exactly where you are moment-to-moment if you activate invisibility and stealthily scoot for the exit seems excessive. Ultimately, it comes down to game balance, and reworking all of the attacks in the game to determine individually what their originating visibility is (i.e., how noticeable it is where the attack is coming from) is probably going to take way too much time, as well as getting too far down in the weeds. And the amount of rework necessary to make ambushes both smart enough to search for their target while taking away their omniscience about where that target actually is will almost certainly consume an excessive amount of programming time. There are already a few ambushes where the ambush group runs to the presumed location of their target and then just stands there if they don't immediately spot their target, and I can see giving them an increased spotting range, but a wholesale rework of ambushes to make them more 'realistic' is beyond what we can expect to see in the forseeable future.

And if you can afford a fifth slot in your build, the Lockdown +2 Mag proc is always a solid choice.

So the HC staff should stop all other work they're doing on the game to deconstruct the threat level for mobs 32 and above (the lowest level at which you can slot level-35 enhancements, and then completely reconstruct the combat abilities of all mobs that level and higher, in order to fit some preconceived notion that everyone switches completely to IOs as soon as they can slot level-35 enhancements? And, along with this, they would also have to rework all of the reward drop tables and come up with something to replace SOs in drops with something of equivalent value, since if level-35+ SOs are removed, they won't be dropping, and players won't be able to sell them for inf, in one swell foop removing a source of funds from the game -- and you have no suggestion as to what would replace them.

When you access the Pillar of Ice and Flame in your (or anyone else's) SG base, after selecting the arc you intend to complete and mouse over the Pillar, your mouse cursor turns into the blue hand indicating an interactible object. In Ouroboros, when you complete the selection of the arc you intend to complete and mouse over the Pillar, your mouse cursor turns... blue. If your camera is aligned so that your character partially obscures the Pillar, the cursor remains white while it is within a certain 'halo' distance around your character, so that if you're not paying close enough attention, you can be 'clicking on the Pillar' and nothing happens. Since we already have the cursor changing color when it's over the Pillar, could we get it to change shape to the 'interaction hand' to make it easier to see when you've got your mouse in the right spot?

Not as much as the complete failure of machine efficiency that has Citadel bouncing you back and forth between Independence Port and Talos Island over and over and over and over again, instead of resolving issues in one zone, then the other, then being sent to defeat Vandal. I'm sorry, Citadel, but you've been handing out a completely pessimal plan to clear Council bases leading up to the defeat of Vandal since forever, and you need to figure out what you're doing wrong.

Well, it's not a popular opinion, given that inf has come to be regarded as just a currency, but in lore terms, inf (influence/infamy/information) represented how willing other people were willing to provide you with support -- enhancements, whatever -- based on your reputation from your actions in the game world, so I don't see how crawling into an electronic simulation does anything for your reputation in the game world. The AE simulations exercise your skill using your abilities, so them giving XP is justifiable, but someone who crawls into AE at level 1 and sits in farms until they're level 50 would come out with no one in Paragon City, or the Rogue Isles, having any idea who they are, and no reason to help them at all -- nothing that they did inside an AE mission should award them any inf at all, or any tangible rewards except, perhaps, inspirations, which are defined vaguely enough to skate around the edge. Aeon Entertainment is free to hand out tickets redeemable for randomized rewards based on performance in their simulations, which could then be vended for a supply of inf, but I don't see how the simulations themselves should award inf directly. That ship has, unfortunately, sailed while the game was still live; it's way too late to make that kind of a sweeping change, which should have been done shortly after AE was introduced to the game. The only thing that the AE simulations should give directly is practice using your abilities (i.e., XP); anything else depends on Aeon Entertainment providing additional rewards (i.e., tickets) to encourage people to use their services.

Doesn't always work; I've used ctrl-Tab and gotten a mob forty feet away from me instead of the one right in front of me. The tab targeting in the game is squirrelly, but not broken enough for me to report it as a bug, particularly because it's not readily reproducible, because the precise set of conditions where it occurs is virtually impossible to duplicate. Virtually all of the time it's an annoyance, not something game-breaking, so with more than forty years of experience being on the other side of bug reporting, I'm not going to drop something in the lap of the programmers if I can't demonstrate a way to consistently reproduce the problem.

Yes, the summonable target dummy you can get as a reward for an optional side goal during a high-difficulty Aeon task force.

The tab targeting follows an abstruse internal logic; you can be standing next to a hostile mob, but the tab targeting picks a mob way off in the distance because it's the 'next' target according to the server's internal target list. So you can't always tell from using the tab targeting whether the 'bud' is a pet. And with the movement logic of the 'real' buds varying between running for the hills and jumping back into the scrum of bud killers, you can't use a bud's moving in any given direction while the league is killing buds to distinguish between the genuine buds and the pets. The only way to tell for sure is to try to click on it to target it, which can, due to lag, fail to select a hostile bud immediately on clicking, so when the 'bud' dashes off without being selected and disappears into the cluster of players, Lore pets, and visual effects, you don't know if you just didn't click accurately enough, or it was a pet. Their presence adds unnecessary confusion to the bud phase, where the point is to eliminate all the dropped buds so Hamidon will respawn. And the suggestion is not to 'remove' them from players, but to disable the power in the two zones where its use makes completing the cleanup from a Hami raid more confusing.

I've participated in a number of Hami raids where people in the league are running around with Hamidon Bud pets out; this results in confusion during the bud phase, where you can't tell whether tab targeting is just picking a target way off in the distance rather than the bud right in front of you, and you can't tell for sure without mousing/clicking on it to tell whether it's a 'real' bud or a pet. I'd originally thought of asking that Hami Bud pets be counted as "live buds" for the purpose of preventing Hami from respawning, but it was pointed out that this opens the door to griefing, by people who leave their bud pets out specifically to keep Hami from spawning for the next run. As an alternative, if the Hami Bud pets could be configured to not be summonable in the Hive or the Abyss, that would solve the problem as well. A similar problem I've seen happen is when someone summons an MDC into the bowl during an MSR. Eventually, the MDC will capture the target, both for players and pets, and while lore pets, MM henchmen, and players can change target to a real one, once a (say) Fire Imp targets the MDC, its player has no way to tell it to ignore the MDC and target something else except by dismissing and resummoning it. This will result, depending on where the pets are when they change target when their current one is defeated, in all of the non-controllable pets eventually winding up targeting the MDC again. Unfortunately, I can't think of an easy solution to this issue, as there are some missions where nothing happens for some time, and an MDC would provide a distraction.

Would we have to sit through a thirty-minute animation sequence for his powerup, though?

An event message for the new Labyrinth of Fog shows up in chat as Visage of a giant monster has emerged within the Labyrinth of Fog. To be more grammatically correct, it should be "The visage of a giant monster...

And if it is done before your character reaches a level at which you've replaced all of their enhancements with IOs, you suddenly have a character slotted with enhancements they can't use. Pass.

It's annoying to be falling back to the style of the old "pets die in elevators" time, and having to reselect my chosen anchor to fire the power off again. I'll have to see about setting up a custom bind for it to make it faster. And while I expected it to happen this way, each of the Incandescence usages in the Hami raid I just participated in knocked off Shifting Tides -- being ported up to the monsters, being ported back to the collection area, and being ported to Hami. I don't know if this is just due to the time it takes me to click on 'accept' for the teleport prompt, but I've been particularly leery about auto-accepting teleports since early on Live, when some people got their jollies by teleporting lowbies to a point just off the roof of a tall building to watch them fall; unfortunately, all your henchmen automatically 'accept' every teleport request, even if you have 'prompt for teleport' turned on.

I don't know whether it will stack with another Tide Pool from a different character, but I've verified experimentally that when you drop a new Tide Pool, the old one vanishes. This means that we're not leaving warehouses and office buildings a meter deep in water, but it limits the utility of being able to put a Tide Pool behind you to slow ambushes while using it offensively.

Targeted toggles have long had a feature where, if the anchor moved too far away from the caster, the toggle would shut off. As I recall, this was done to reduce the magnitude of the swarm of mobs that could come rushing in if a player dropped a targeted AoE on a hostile mob who panicked and ran off, aggroing everything in sight back to the caster. I've found a case where this causes an annoying condition due to map design. With my Necro/Marine MM, I've been dropping Shifting Tides on my Lich, keeping the buff in range (I had been using Barrier Reef as an anchor, but it despawns periodically, requiring a resummon and reapplication). However, as I'm sure people are aware by now, multi-floor map instances -- labs and offices -- have each floor as a disjoint section, and your character teleports from one elevator to the one on the next floor when you click on the elevator. Well, the floors are separated by a sufficiently large distance that Shifting Tides detoggles every time I enter an elevator, forcing me to stop and reapply the toggle, akin to the way Controllers used to have to resummon their pet(s) every time they went up or down an elevator. This also occurs when entering or leaving an instanced mission, although it causes a much smaller degree of disruption, because I often dismiss my zombies while I travel to another mission, just to avoid having a string of zombies trailing behind me. Do people consider detoggling on elevator use within a mission a sufficiently unwanted behavior that it should be reported as a bug?

This bug has been posted as an issue on the Github page here. When importing the "build.txt" file exported from the Homecoming client using '/build_save', a character with Marine Affinity can have a power vanish from the build as imported. My Necro/Marine MM had taken "Power of the Depths" at level 30, and the 'build.txt' file showed it as Level 30: Mastermind_Buff Marine_Affinity Call_Depths When the file was loaded into MidsReborn, this power was missing completely, with the powers taken at level 32 and later moved up one selection, leaving the level 41 power selection blank (character is 43). After starting to open the issue on Github, I wondered if the problem was simply that MidsReborn wasn't looking for the right power name. I tried changing "Call_Depths" to "Power_Depths", after the same style of abbreviation used for other powers. This also failed to import. However, changing "Call_Depths" to "Power_of_the_Depths" (the full power name) imported properly. This means that it is not a completely broken functionality, and there is a workaround.

You just need to do some digging into images; there are plenty of wide-blade seaweeds, in various colors from green to reddish to brown, so you can just handwave it as generic 'seaweed' instead of getting finicky about the genus and species.

Use the plant chest detail, you can color it brown, a pale green to dark green, a pale red, and even some purples, and call it seaweed -- you can find all those colors if you look online.

I exported all my characters from Guardian using Titan Icon before the shutdown, so I can open the saved character file and copy out the character bio if I recreate the character. Unfortunately, when a character bio involves a lot of Unicode, I usually have to do a lot of transliteration and editing. For example, the first part of БРИГАДИР's origin story (up to the flashback) before abridgement to make it fit: … Калибрование… Один… Два… Три… Базовые системы онлайн. Чек памяти… Переданный. Кодовые модули… Нагруженный. Просмотр окружающей среды… Угрозы: Ноль. Эксплуатационный БРИГАДИР. A crate buried in the depths of a dusty, forgotten warehouse is a lonely thing to wake up in. Even when you're a robot. БРИГАДИР ('Taskmaster') was the prototype for a robotic officer, the director for a squad — or a platoon or company — of robotic infantrymen. But the Soviet researchers had built better than they knew. The Ministry of Defense wanted a soulless combat manager that would direct equally-soulless shock troops into frontal assaults with no consideration for casualties; what they got was a cybernetic Napoleon critiquing the tactical failings of the officers who tried to order him into action. When he decided the orders he'd gotten were practical, he could carry them out flawlessly. When given orders he decided were ill-conceived, he would as often as not completely disregard those orders and undertake a different objective, or at best disregard the battle plan he was given and implement his own. Finally, it was decided the problem was fundamental to БРИГАДИР's design, and he was deactivated, crated up, stuck in a warehouse, and forgotten... where he was lost for more than a decade, until, during an earthquake, an automatic threat sensor restarted his systems.

I have an ongoing issue doing MSRs with my Necro/Marine MM; despite having all my henchmen on Defensive/Follow, I'll regularly see one of them drop to half HP, and when I click on them in the pet window, I'll see them halfway up the bowl chasing some random Rikti while I'm down in the middle of the healspam passing out buffs, and they're just outside the range of my heal. Doing missions, even though the zombie horde rushes forward into melee while the Grave Knights and Lich hang back, I can usually position myself where the buffs hit everyone, though.

I have a fair number of characters with Russian or ex-Soviet backgrounds -- Ядерный Огонь, БРИГАДИР, Черная Молния, Удар Молнии, Совня, Стальная Дева, and others, eventually building up a headcanon of various heroes, villains, and hero and villain groups (Народная Армия, Красный Угроза), the state-sponsored hero groups being largely disbanded with the breakup of the Soviet Union, causing a diaspora of heroes to other countries. I also did some digging when writing up backgrounds, using real Russian research institutions where I could, like Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова (the I.M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry); this let me build loose connections between the backgrounds of different characters to show them as coming from a common culture, rather than springing out full-blown with no connection to anything else. Unfortunately, because Unicode characters are two bytes wide, they chew up a disproportionate amount of space in the 1023-character limit for a character background, which limits what can be inserted for flavor. One of the characters, БРИГАДИР, wound up with a background that spilled way over the 1023-byte limit, and I wound up continuing his background as a text file that currently sits at six and a half pages, stuck on my not being able to write a combat scene I'm satisfied with. He was my first MM back on Live, a Bots/Dark -- an experimental director for combat robots that became sentient and was shut down and packed away in a storage bunker after he started ignoring the direction of the officers defining his mission plan when he could see more efficient ways to accomplish the mission goals; the Ministry of Defense wanted a soulless combat manager that would direct equally-soulless shock troops into frontal assaults with no consideration for casualties, and what they got was a cybernetic Napoleon critiquing the tactical failings of the officers who tried to order him into action.

In Anton Sampson's "Defeat all soldiers in office" mission, part of the Mass Duplicity arc, after rescuing Lisa, I'm supposed to take her to where she hid the ledgers. The target arrow displayed on screen for this, however, is on the first floor, pointing at nothing, rather than the nav bar's indicator of it being someplace else (it looks as if it's simply a case of not being in the correct position for the elevators): Update: The red circle with white border marker was in the correct position on the second floor for the location I had to take Lisa to, although there is a secondary (albeit beneficial) bug that has been around since Live -- when a "take NPC to mission goal" target is on an upper level of a room, it is only necessary to draw the NPC under the goal location; only the horizontal position of the NPC is compared against the goal location, and they can be several 'floors' above or below the goal and still count.

At the end of Anton Sampson's first mission, you get the following message in your chat window: After calling your contact, you receive instructions to talk to Phillipa Meraux, the counter-terrorism specialist. This is impossible at this stage of your relationship with Anton Sampson, because you do not have his cell phone number at that point. If the mission text had some reference to a way to message Sampson with what you discovered, it would address the issue, but as it is you're told that you do something you can't have done. This has been a standing problem all the way back to the early days of Live, and the original devs apparently thought it was a sufficiently minor issue not to be worth fixing.