srmalloy

...he obviously wasn't trying hard enough... 😁

Oil Slick Arrow is vulneable to this on the docks at the southeast of Peregrine Island. I know from reporting players back on Live using it as an export that it used to be possible to get through a gap in the geometry to get under the northern dock, which allowed you to attack any mobs standing on the dock with impunity, so I expect that the location targeting is tagging geometry under the paved surface of the docks.

I think the OP's posting is more about how the game render limit causes mobs to disappear when there are lots of figures in a tight area -- MSRs, the various invasions, Hamidon raids, etc. -- anywhere you have a full league, or most of a league, and can find yourself attacking a mob that, because another mob has teleported in closer to you than the one you're attacking, fades out and disappears because the client is at its render limit (this appears to be separate from the game-engine quirk that allows mobs teleporting in to be targetable but not attackable, while allowing them to attack while protected from being attacked). Unfortunately, this is built into the game engine and is difficult to tweak. Over time, I've conceptualized two possible ways to address this: 1) Add a flag to the rendering that forces the one mob your character is currently targeting to be rendered if it is within render distance, regardless of the other mobs within render distance. This would allow you to continue to attack a target even if additional mobs arrive that would otherwise push your targeted mob off the render list. 2) Add an entry to the graphics options for 'Mob Render Bias', with values 'Nearest', 'Hostile', and 'Friendly'. 'Nearest' is the way rendering works now. 'Hostile' sorts the hostile mobs ahead of friendly mobs for render order selection, so that in mass fights like an MSR, your league members may not be rendered, but you won't have hostile mobs fading in and out. 'Friendly' would sort friendly mobs ahead of hostile mobs, basically the opposite. So if you were running a character focused on attacks, you could select 'Hostile' and always see the hostile mobs, and if you were running a character focused on support (i.e., healing), you would always see the friendly characters in your group. Which one, if either, is a viable option would depend on how readily changes could be made to the way the game engine renders nearby mobs, and how much work would be entailed in the process.

If you reply to a post that is not on the last page of a multi-page topic, the forums will occasionally fail to jump to the new post, and just leave you with your reply window open, with no indication that your entry was posted to the topic, encouraging you to hit the 'submit' button again, resulting in a double post.

It's sort of pointless to make the argument in a superhero context, where you can handwave access to all sorts of super materials, but 'boob armor' has a number of inconvenient structural issues, and exists only to perpetuate the "Look! Teats! See, I'm female!" trope. Compare Bo-Katan Kryze's armor from 'The Mandalorian' with Captain Phasma's armor from 'The Force Awakens'.

Unfortunately, there are aspects of the game lore that swept through play and disappeared, never to be seen again. For those of us who played through it back on Live, we can remember the falling out at the top levels of the 5th Column that broke it into the 5th Column and the Council, with scattered mass battles between the two in various zones, with the Council seemingly triumphing over the 5th Column and replacing them all over Paragon City, and it was only much later that we found out that the 5th Column had gone deep to lick their wounds and rebuild, eventually pushing their way back into the city, where the animosity between the groups continues to be seen in zones like Steel Canyon. In my opinion, it would be worthwhile to create content that showcases the animosity separating the two groups, with a story arc that feeds you clues about the original breakup of the 5th Column, with an Ouroboros-only arc that puts you back in the middle of that breakup -- being on the edge of the street fights between the 5th Column and the Council, investigating a 5th Council base and having a Council team invade to attack everything inside, infiltrating a Council base shortly after their victory and seeing the new Council banners but crates and other decorations still showing the old 5th Column markings because the Council didn't want to go to the expense of repainting everything when they could just use it up.

The issue I have with automatically-scaling content is that it eliminates a practice seen in comics -- you're unable to defeat a particular opponent, you go off and get better, then come back again and defeat them this time. If all content scaled to your level, if you were unable to defeat, say, Requiem at the end of an arc, the only option you have is to rope in some other heros to help you. And if the content that you're hung up on is tagged as a solo mission, well, then, you're SoL -- your only option is to autocomplete it.

The game is quirky about what constitutes a 'safe location' -- the universities are 'unsafe', the Midnighter Club is 'unsafe', the police stations are 'unsafe', but standing on top of a tram station where you can have an ambush pop up at any time is 'safe'.

It's hard to convey sarcasm unequivocally with just text, and certain conventions like "@BEGIN(Sarcasm) [sarcastic remark] @END(Sarcasm)" were niche usage even before they largely fell out of use.

It's not the defeat all missions themselves, but the missions, like most of the ones you get from Anton Sampson, where the mission goal is "check out Nemesis Base", where the mission doesn't complete until you defeat everything in the mission -- but the mission goals never update to indicate this. This is part of the problem I have with redside as a whole -- your character is a legbreaker. You start as a legbreaker for street thugs, and work your way up to being a legbreaker for more and more powerful patrons, until you become a legbreaker for Arachnos and Lord Recluse -- but no matter how high you go, you're still just a legbreaker. You don't get the opportunity to be a villain in your own right. Another one that continues to annoy me is a mission where the mission goal is to "defeat all [description]" -- i.e., 'defeat all Freakshow' -- but when you enter the mission, not only do you find both Freakshow and another group fighting in the map, but the other group is also hostile to you, and you have to defeat all of them as well to complete the mission, instead of having them decide "They're on our side" and become friendly.

I think it was one of the "Journeys of McGill Feighan" novels by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. that had the delightful aphorism "The enemy of my enemy is my fall-guy".

Goldside also has the entertaining 'feature' that you can c*ckblock yourself if you're playing a mole character (loyalist and undercover as resistance, or resistance and undercover as loyalist), where if you do missions in the wrong order, you can eliminate a contact before they pass you to the following contact in the series, choking off your progress.

In that regard, he's similar to the guards at the gates to/from hazard zones, where the interaction box has you more-or-less groping their crotch to trigger the interaction.

An entirely new powerset -- called, say, 'Power Blast' -- could be made copying Energy Blast in its entirety, except for not having knockback in any of its attacks (and perhaps with a default color change to distinguish it from EB). That would address that one powerset, but there are enough powers in other powersets that doing this wholesale would be impractical. There are both unique and non-unique knockback-to-knockdown IOs already in the game, and using them for the odd knockback-doing power in other powersets is viable instead of mirroring an entire set to make one power knockback-free. However, if this were done, I would want to see the stats for the powerset locked down hard, with any claims that the resultant powerset was 'underperforming' automatically rejected.

Just curious; in powers that do knockback, is there something stopping you from slotting the Sudden Acceleration KB->KD IO, which isn't unique, since the fact that they do do knockback is the feature that is being railed against? Or is it only being able to get the benefit of one set of set bonuses from Overwhelming Force that's the real issue, and turning KB to KD is the straw horse used to argue for the enhancements in the set being stripped of their unique status? How many powers do knockback but have the knockback unenhanceable, and therefore can't take Knockback sets?

But his skills can't compare to those of a master of the ancient Korean martial art of Shit On You... 😁

Not just that, it implements a known exploit category, where a player creates a character with an AT/powerset combination known to be easy to level, gets them to level cap, and 'respecs' into an AT/powerset combination that's difficult to play well before level cap. With the ready availability of leveling tools, including AE farms, and the 1000-character-per-server pool, you can make the arguement that the ability to do complete AT/powerset changes is already in the game; it just costs you all your levels, so you start off as a new level 1 character with the AT and powersets you want.

I see. You choose a powerset that you know has knockback baked into virtually every attack, but it's apparently enough of a rude shock and surprise that it actually does, in fact, incorporate knockback into virtually every attack, and that you have to devote an enhancement slot for each power to have it not do knockback is a punishment for somehow having been forced to choose that powerset with all of its unwanted knockback, because it requires a style of play that's different from what you wanted.

that's how it works now; any KB of mag less than 1 is knockdown, and the KB->KD IOs apply a multiplier of, IIRC, .001 to the knockback magnitude of the power they're slotted in.

They get really crappy mileage, and if you've ever ridden in one, you'd realize how cramped they were on the inside; riding with a Stone tanker with Granite on is like playing Twister with a rock wall.

What if we've already rated you "boastest"?

"The secret compartment of my ring, I fill with an Underdog super energy pill."

Balance. If you give the ability to, say, go to Null and turn all your knockback into knockdown, and regard this as an improvement to your powers, then what do you give to players with non-KB powers to give them the ability to make a similar degree of improvement to their powers?

Depends. Alaska Airlines, for example, makes their management periodically eat the food served on their flights, so that they're aware of the quality of what the passengers are getting. Other airlines don't bother, and wind up serving food that compares poorly against hospital food (and having worked at a Navy hospital for thirty years, I'm very aware of the quality of the food the galley serves.)

You mean, like the arena combat mode where you select your 'team' from the NPCs that you have unlocked with your Gladiator badges? Who would have thought that it might be there already... Well, except for pitting AV-level mobs against each other, but that's a difference in degree, not in kind.