srmalloy

A level-9 character is still getting part of the low-level to-hit boost, and taking a power two-slotted with even-level Damage, that's a 66% damage boost. A level-50 character exemped to 9 has the same power five-slotted with a damage set giving 96% damage boost; factoring in the exemplar scaling, it gets reduced to 21%.They will likely have an extra attack or two, but assuming that they have 96% damage boost for their attacks, they're doing 73% the damage of a native level-9 character. Exemp down to 2, and your level-2 character with a nice shiny level-5 damage SO is getting a 38% damage boost, while a 50 exemped to 2 (using the same values as above) is getting 4% — doing just 53% of the damage the level-2 character does. The exemplar enhancement scaling worked more or less okay for balancing when sub-level-10 characters were running around with TOs, but now that characters can slot SOs straight out of the tutorial, exemping down to low levels gimps the exemped character in comparison. Analyzing the scaling and deciding how the scaling factors should change will be complicated, but I think that it does need to be looked at -- how much the other enhancement values associated with slotting most of a set (for the level-9 example, ca. 12% Acc and 8% Recharge and End) affect the balance complicates the determination -- but the point of exemplar is for the higher-level character to be somewhat more powerful than the low-level one, not the other way around.

Just remember that radians are cursed. A unit circle has a radius of 1. One radian is the arc subtended by a distance along a circle's circumference equal to the radius. One radian is about 57.3° A unit circle therefore has a radius of about 57.3°

No, because it does the same thing to every ability the character has, as long as it can be affected by the type of enhancement the particular Alpha boost gives. This would allow improving individual abilities. I'm not convinced that it's a viable option, but it's not replicating the functionality of the Alpha slot.

If something like this was going to be implemented, I'd want to see the touchpoints go geometrically - 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, etc. -- to reduce the number of extra slots, and probably cut them off around five, to prevent them from getting hugely out of control.

"99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs. Take one down, patch and rebuild, 125 little bugs in the code."

You're also guaranteed to get a dropship spawn in the instanced raid, whereas it's possible to complete an open-zone MSR between spawns of the dropship.

You misunderstand. If we're going to revert influence/infamy/information to the original concept of what it represents, instead of being just an abstract currency, then AE missions should award only XP and tickets; defeating mobs inside AE missions, and AE mission completion, award no inf at all. You can defeat millions of opponents inside AE missions, and it won't affect your reputation in the 'real world' one bit.

If, and only if, crawling into your electronic navel to destroy thousands of enemies that exist only inside the AE simulation system gives no inf regardless of the character settings. Someone who disappears into the AE building at level 1 and doesn't come out until level 50 is completely unknown to the populace around them; they should have neither clout nor resources. Spending time defeating virtual opponents will teach you how to use your abilities better, so there's no problem with gaining XP, but you're not doing anything to help your reputation, so you get no inf from it.

Oh, it's pretty, all right, and so are the other images I've got, but they're all predicated on the premise that you're never going to change your network configuration and never going to have a switch go out. Oh, sure, you start with everything laid out neatly... And then, after some switch replacements and a complete reorganization of the network architecture, you wind up with

And tanks don't do that any more, mostly because the Controller(s), Defender(s), Corrupter(s), and Dominator(s) on the team fling out their AoE immobilize or hold the instant a new spawn is encountered, at which point there's diddly and/or squat the tank can do to group up the scattered mobs for AoEs from the rest of the team.

He's hiring the wrong people, then..

The one I recall hearing about after the fact was the two-minute Hami raid. It exploited a quirk in the "Find source of Freaks' weapons" mission that gave the Nemesis Staff temp power to the character that opened the appropriate crate, rather than being awarded to the mission holder on completion. So an assembly line of 'enter mission, find crate for temp power, exit, reset' was run until there were enough people with the Nemesis Staff temp power -- and this was back when it was AoE and recharged faster -- to fill the Hive, and they just ran in and blew Hami down with a hail of NemStaff fire.

She can be selected, you just don't get her as a contact. I suspect that she gets put into the 'possible contacts' list if your character does the Night Ward exploration badge trick to get access to the Midnighter Club early, without doing Montague Castaneda's arc, because you don't seem to get offered her as a contact if you don't have access to the Midnighter Club.

This was the route that people took who hadn't learned the trick of going to Kings Row and running to the tunnel to Independence Port, then making the short run from there to the IP tailor. The run across KR was much lower risk, and the short section in IP was usually clear.

Wes Schnabel will give you missions as long as you're level 10 when you approach him. The moment you ding 11, though, he cuts you off.

If they do that, I want to see the default landing spot for Team Teleport to the 'Rescue Robert Alderman' mission of the Penelope Yin TF changed -- right now it drops you on top of the tail of the helicopter that's the entrance to the mission, right in the middle of the rotor blade circle.

This is a design feature of virtually every MMO; increasing travel time means that you spend more time in game not actively earning XP, which stretches out the time you spend getting a character to level cap. For subscription games, this means that you are paying more. This was something that drove me up the wall in SWTOR, where the world maps were designed so that you could be sent somewhere literally a hundred feet from where you were, but because there was an unclimbable barrier in your way, you had to go a mile or more around out of your way to get there. And the Jedi classes that had a Force Leap ability could leap across a hundred-foot gap or straight up... but only if there was an enemy at the other side to attack with the jump.

What makes it hard to understand is that you get the "You have defeated X" message, and you get the XP and inf for the defeat, all the way out to the maximum range you can attack from... but the badge credit cuts off at 212 feet. It should all be triggered by the defeat of your target, and if you're being told you defeated them, and getting XP and influence for the defeat, you should be getting badge credit, too.

I remember when the devs went through and tweaked the costume and skin color palettes, and it was indeed to prevent the creation of 'nude' characters. I also remember the flailing in the forums when it was demonstrated that, with the right chest colors and the correct lighting, you could tell that the body models had nipples.

Well, that would answer the question of whether a nearby teammate would suffice to get credit. Pity.

Or pick from a more extensive palette, rather than having to just rummage through a bunch of colors stacked on a pallet...

Feh. And pets don't count. I was tooling around Striga with a Demons/Plant MM, designating targets for my demons and flying on to the next target, and I don't get defeat credit unless I'm within 212 feet of the target at the time they go down.

On Striga, at [-3708.1 -0.4 -2037.0], there is a tree with its base floating in mid-air:

Just now, I found that a level 50 Exploit Weakness Damage/Range IO won't move into the AH. Reflecting on this, since all the Damage/Range IOs are binned into a single slot inside the AH regardless of level or attunement status, that's the expected behavior

I had taken my Seismic/Energy Blaster out to Boomtown to work on her defeat count for Council War Walkers, and was sailing around the base with Boost Range up sniping out the walkers. After two orbits and fourteen downed walkers, I checked her progress bar, and it hadn't moved. I wasn't getting defeat credit for the walkers. With Boost Range up, I could shoot from over 270 feet out. If I wasn't getting credit at that distance, where was the limit? 200 feet gave credit, 220 didn't. 210 did, 215 didn't. I finally narrowed down the limit to 212 feet -- at that distance, defeating a walker gave me credit toward the badge count; at 213 feet the defeat isn't counted. Given that I was able to make longer shots with my AR/EM Blaster back on Live, although I have no recollection of whether I was getting badge credit for defeats at that range, I have to wonder how long this limit has been in the game, and the various ways of getting around it that I'll have to experiment with as opportunity presents itself. For example, if I'm shooting from 250+ feet away, will having an invisible teammate near my target give the team, and therefore me, defeat credit? However, that doesn't change the fact that a single character defeating a mob with no assistance from any other source of damage will fail to get credit for the defeat if they're too far away from their target. Boost Range lets a Blaster snipe from well in excess of 200'; you should be able to get defeat credit as long as you're the one shooting.