srmalloy

You can use the location modifiers with a number of other powers, too; I've got a few I use with Wormhole -- 'left:max', 'right:max', and 'back:max' are useful for pseudo-stealthing missions, because they just move mobs out of the way. 'up:max' is odd; while it normally causes it to rain mobs (they don't take damage on impact, though, unfortunately), it's got an odd bug in it -- occasionally a mob will have a Wile E. Coyote moment and forget that they're supposed to fall to the ground, and will just stand there high up, oblivious.

If you buy them off the AH from the "Attuned Enhancements" group, you can't; it is a rookie mistake to buy them that way, or apply catalysts to them, since they already function as if they're attuned. Buy them from the "Crafted Enhancements" group, then you can boost them

Borea, the first person you're sent to in the 'join the Vanguard' series; you get her as a contact when you exhaust Levantera's missions.

The character database from the original servers is not available, so there's no way to recover your characters from Live, even assuming that the HC staff would allow it to be done. As an indirect method, if you used the Titan Icon program to save your characters off of the servers in advance of the shutdown, you can use the build description in the files that it saved to create a new character and use your old build as a template as you level it up. There is even a tool that will extract the costume data from the Titan Icon saved character data as .costume files that can (mostly) be loaded in the Icon character edit screens.

...when the 20th anniversary event will be reopened during the month of the 21st anniversary? Heh.

Aaargh. No. Shards were part of a teaser for the F2P players -- they could start the incarnate process, but would only ever be able to populate their Alpha slot. To ensure this, incarnate threads were locked to only drop for subscribers, while shards would drop for anyone with their Alpha slot unlocked. This is why the Alpha slot boosts have recipes made with shard-based requirements, and with thread-based requirements, but the higher level incarnate slots only have thread-based recipes. The devs also used the shard-based components to hand out 'themed' rewards for some TFs, like getting a Hero-1 DNA Sample from the LGTF, or being able to buy a G'rai Matter with Vanguard merits. In addition to tweaking the thread drop rate to account for the shard drop rate and the fact that you need 5x the number of threads as shards to make components, none of the shard-based components have ready equivalents among the thread-based components -- if G'rai Matter is removed from the game along with the other shard-based components, what thread-based component would be thematically appropriate for you to be able to buy with Vanguard merits, or are you just going to remove one method of obtaining incarnate components without replacement?

It's not as convenient as just being able to save/load only the scales, and I don't know how well it would work, but given the structure of a .costume file, I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't. Change the scales of your character, save the costume, then open it up in a text editor, and copy the scales lines -- lines 3-16 -- from the file: Scale 25.49 BoneScale -0.5129 ShoulderScale 0.236 ChestScale 0.2179 WaistScale -0.2651 HipScale -0.2565 LegScale 0.008806 HeadScales 0.3, 0.39, 0.4 BrowScales 0.16, -0.52, 0.63 CheekScales 0.5, 0.42, 0.42 ChinScales 0.77, 0.32, 0.34 CraniumScales 0, 0, 0 JawScales -0.04, 1, 1 NoseScales 0, 0.3, 0.15 Now switch to each other character and save the costume -- you can re-use the same file name as a temporary -- then open it up in the text editor and paste the copied scales over the scales in the costume file. Save the file from the text editor, switch back to CoH, and load the costume file. This should load the costume you just saved, but with the updated scales.

I discovered something new in the game this morning; I'd just picked up Mystic Flight on a new character, and had gone to the Icon in Atlas to switch it to 'Minimal Effects'. While I was in the tailor editing screens, the character graphic shook repeatedly. When I exited the tailor screen, I found that there was another character (to be unnnamed) who had one of the "jump up, then slam your fist on the ground when landing" PBAoE powers on autofire; every time the power went off, I got the camera-shake effect -- and this effect was displayed even in the costume/powers customization screens. This is distracting from the process of customizing your character. Yes, I know you can turn off camera shake globally, but if you want to have camera shake on during normal play, but find it distracting inside the tailor screens, having to go into the options to toggle it off and on because one person suffering from rectocranial occlusion can inflict camera shake on everyone around them seems to me to be a case of the game world improperly spilling into the UI. Can the camera shake be disabled while in the full-screen tailor windows?

I was running a character around a zone this morning, collecting time capsules for the four badges, and had received a signature summons temp power of Manticore shortly before I got the last badge and logged out for a couple hours. I logged back in later... and Manticore reappeared. So I dismissed him, and zoned. He reappeared when I completed zoning. I dismissed him again, and checking the time, saw that it was around the time when Adamastor would be called on for another pratfall, so I dropped an Ouro portal and used it. He reappeared in Ouro when I did. I did a /releasepets, went around to the back, and zoned to Echo:DA. He reappeared when I'd completed zoning. I dismissed him again while flying to the Adamastor beatdown point, helped take him down, and went back to the portal, where I logged out again. I wonder whether he'll show up again when I log back in on the character tomorrow. This does not seem as if it's the intended behavior.

The kosode is unlikely to be implemented for the same reason that we're not going to get floor-length robes or dresses like the Tsoo Sorcererors and Carnival Illusionists have -- it's a completely different body rigging, and they don't actually have feet, so all the animations would need to be redone.

I have a bind for Meteor that throws up a popmenu, giving me the choice of a normal activation (use mouse to position the target point), straight down, or at my current target ('powexeclocation target Meteor'). I encountered a spawn of CoT on the roof of the building at the location of one of the time capsules in the High Park area of Kings Row (at [407.4 -10.0 -2585.3]), targeting one of them, and triggering Meteor using the third option. The meteor landed on the ground inside the building, under the CoT spawn, and did no damage to them. Is this behavior of Meteor WAI? It seems to me that the targeting of the ground under the building the CoT were standing on, rather than at the feet of the CoT mob, is a defect in the calculation of the intended target.

Depending on whose take on it you prefer, the followon is either today or tomorrow -- the 'Revenge of the 5th' or 'The Revenge of the 6th'.

I've been seeing individual mobs giving either lieutenant-grade XP -- 8337 points at level 50 -- down to minion-grade XP -- about 4k at level 50 -- but all the same, so an ambush will produce either ~24k or ~12k XP, with nothing seeming to be in between. Update: It appears that the legacy CoT and Rikti are giving 8337 XP, with most of the others only giving 4168 XP, but some give 8337 XP. Oddly, in the Clockwork ambush, the mobs give 5004 XP, the odd one out.

So you'd rather be repulsive than repellent? 😁

In the "Destroy the Cask of Djer" mission from Ephraim Sha, when you destroy the display case with the Cask inside, you are pushed/knocked back (I assume it's a knockback effect; the characters I've run the mission with have all had knockback resistance, so it's a repel effect) along with a debuff to movement if you try to run back to where the case was. The problem is that the movement debuff is non-directional -- you are pushed away from where the display case blew up, but if you try to move away from the splinter pile as you're being pushed, your movement is still debuffed, even though you're trying to move in the direction that the explosion is pushing you. This seems counter-intuitive; if you are trying to move with the blast of an explosion pushing you, you should move quicker, not slower.

I don't know if there's a way to single out the powered weapons for additional animation, but for the melee weapons with energy blades, I'd like to see an option for them, when 'sheathed', to have the blade turn off. For example, my Titan Weapons tank, with her weapon 'sheathed': It seems rather unsafe to be running around with a live energy blade just waiting to carve new furrows into your rump, but it would require modified animations for each of the energy weapons to show them turning off when sheathed and turning on when drawn; I'm not sure that the effort is worth the result.

I opened an extra tray on one of my characters to catch the anniversary temp powers as they dropped, and discovered that it was already full of powers that had gotten splatted there during the character's previous respec -- some regular powers, some P2W powers, and a bunch of temp powers, filling that tray and the next one.

The respawn time appears to be significantly greater if the ambush spawn is left standing than if it's cleared, though, which stretches things out for everyone else.

My first thought, which would have gone over about as well as a barbecue in a vegan community, was to give the ambush spawns a teleport ability that would lock onto the character clicking on a capsule and automatically teleport them to the character's location if the ambush spawn was still around when the character clicked on another capsule, so that if they clicked and ran, they'd be building up bigger and bigger ambushes until the alpha from the teleporting mobs got them, with the 'orphan' ambushes despawning as soon as the character is defeated. But it would have been funny to watch.

The PrintScreen key. Note that you can use the /screenshotui 1 and /screenshotui 0 commands to make your game UI show or hide in the screenshots; the UI is off in screenshots by default.

Ahh, so you're one of the people who abandon the ambushes, leaving them for someone else to clean up and delaying the respawn of the capsules.

Something I just happened to notice was the description for the Archmage badge: The badge for defeating the Phantasms, Dark Servants, and Illusionists summoned by the Carnival of Shadows Master Illusionists is "Illusionist", not 'Illusionists'; it needs to lose the terminal 's'.

It's too late to do this for the anniversary event, but as a recommendation for future events that have items scattered around the zone that you click on for rewards, with a possible 'ambush' -- change the logic so that, when an ambush occurs, the rewards drop when the ambush is defeated. One of the things I'm seeing with the anniversary event is a majority of players clicking on the time capsules to get the anniversary token, then zooming away to leave the ambush behind them for someone else to clean up, and if no one does, the respawn of the capsule is significantly delayed. I mean, the ambush for a solo character is three white minions, something which should not be a noticeable threat to a character; if you can't be bothered cleaning up your own mess, why should you expect someone else to do it for you?

Or look at all the powers that become ineffective in a fast-moving team with a /Traps controller. "Yeah, I've put down the Trip Mines, the acid mortar, and the Poison Gas Trap." "Well, we're three spawns down the map, so..."

The mass spawn events have been ugly for a long time. The initial problem is that targeting and attacks work differently if you are attempting to target mobs directly or targeting through a pet. Because pet targeting occurs entirely on the server, as soon as the server 'knows' about an arriving mob, you can attack it through the pet, sometimes even before it appears in zone. If you are targeting mobs yourself, then mobs spawning in become targetable before they appear, but cannot be attacked for at least a second after they appear. This puts an immediate severe hindrance on melee characters in a mass-spawn event; targeting through a pet will often target incoming mobs at some distance from the character, and by the time they move to within melee range, the mob has almost always been taken down by ranged characters targeting through a pet. Similarly, trying to target directly, the ranged characters targeting through pets will have had the opportunity to take multiple shots at the mob before it becomes attackable by the melee character. This handicaps the melee characters, resulting in them sucking hind teat for damage contribution, and in the case of Brutes, impairing their ability to raise and maintain Fury (and momentum for TW characters, due to not being able to get off a momentum-building attack).