srmalloy

It's not 'nothing'. The new license explicitly gave WotC full rights to use any content created under it for any purpose, which would have allowed them to take anything 3rd party publishers created and sell it as their own, and it imposed a 25% fee for companies making over $750,000 on OGC content, with the fee based on revenue, not profits -- the profit margin for game companies is typically less than 10%, so the terms would wipe out their profit, and make them lose more money the more sales they had.

It's all pets, actually; it has its limits, but you can target through a pet during an invasion and be able to attack mobs you would be unable to attack on your own. I have my suspicion that this is due to the pet logic being entirely on the server, letting them get targets the moment the server enables them, while a character attacking involves several handshakes with the server, delaying response.

It already does. Try to target a rezzing Freakshow, and you'll see that they complete their rez animation, and a second or two past that, before they're even targetable, much less attackable. And mobs spawning in during things like the Nemesis and Rikti raids are even worse -- mobs will spawn in, become targetable, in many cases fire off their own attack, and only then do they become attackable. And targeting is further complicated by the mobs that spawn in, become targetable, and then despawn without ever becoming attackable, wasting your time trying to attack mobs that are invulnerable.

Proof of the detrimental effect Superadine has on rational thought: [NPC] Torvald: Give drug now. [NPC] Mr. Mann: As usual, your violent tendencies complicate the simplest of matters. Haven't you learned? When you take hostages, masks show up. (My tank gets close enough to the bosses to be spotted by them) [NPC] Torvald: We smash you up good! [NPC] Mr. Mann: Heroes, naturally. Attack!

Changing this requires reworking the upper and lower body definitions. Right now, with a very few exceptions, all textures and patterns applied to the body apply to one side, and are mirrored onto the other; this is why costume parts and patterns are symmetrical. There is nothing defining the other half of the body; it's just a mirror of the one half that's in the database. There was already a structure in the database for asymmetrical arms, and the HC staff extended that to gloves, boots, and shoulders -- the low-hanging fruit. The body will be much harder to do.

Reading the wiki page on exemplar effects on enhancements, I noticed something that contradicted what I'd believed -- "set bonuses are always on, even if the power in which the Set is slotted isn't activated, and even if that power is greyed out due to exemplaring!" I had been operating under the assumption that if you didn't have the power, none of the effects of its slotting -- including set bonuses -- would be active. Finding out that set bonuses continue to work within the slotted IO level window makes the choice of sets a more subtle process, and increases the benefits of attunement.

...then your target moves before you finish activating the power and isn't in the cone to be affected. CoH is not a twitch game; don't try to make it one.

Tell that to the lone level-12 Controller or Defender on an eight-hero team that suddenly finds themselves, solo, facing a spawn of CoT sized for the whole team... and finds that going back through the portal just makes things worse.

And they've improved their enchantments, too -- how many people remember, back on Live, when going through a portal on an Oranbega map would sometimes pop you out of a randomly-selected portal on the map, potentially scattering teams across the entire map?

I'd also like to see more groups get properly-themed maps -- the 'check out Nemesis base' missions in generic lab maps, instead of wood paneling with brass accents and steampunk equipment, or even going back to a Victorian esthetic, like the Crossness Pumping Station:

Now I have the mental image of characters frenetically shambling down the street at high speed to the accompaniment of "Yakkity Sax", à la the Benny Hill show...

Taking the 'main armament' from the Crey 'tank' mobs and swapping them in for the ranged attacks on the Praetorian Clockwork would be a good way to go about it -- certainly Crey already has production lines for the weaponry, so it's just a matter of integrating them into the Clockwork frames.

Dendis Moore, Dendis Moore, riding through the glen Dendis Moore, Dendis Moore, on his horse Concord Steals from the poor, gives to the rich Stupid bitch!

Now, on the other hand, having Praetorian clockwork appear as scenery, some partly disassembled, in a story arc, then clearly-prototype Crey copies (at first nonfunctional, then perhaps semifunctional, and finally a few functional), where you get dialog through the arc from Crey staff bitching about how their project isn't getting the funding they deserve because of some other big thing that's drawn the Countess' attention, and they've only been able to make a few functional ripoffs new models, then finding out that Crey has, due to some oversight or shortsighted maneuver, drawn the attention of the Praetorians, who are mounting a (supposedly) covert operation to take back data that Crey stole, leading to a final mission where, like the Halloween "Whispered Rumor" tip mission to recover the Malleus Mundi, you recover this data, then have several choices for the disposition of the data Crey stole, with different badges and rewards for your decision. Giving the data back to Crey might get you a few charges of a Crey mob as a pet, selling it back to Crey or to the Praetorians might get you inf, keeping it to use its information might get you a rare recipe, destroying it might get you a piece of rare Tech salvage, etc. And this gives a lead-in for making a second arc where you trace down the rumors about this 'other big thing' that Crey is working on, whose content I leave as an exercise for the student.

So you're using a tool that attempts to drive the UI to do something faster than it was designed to do, and even though it worked in the past, it's not working now, so it must be a bug in the game that you can't overdrive it the way you used to, even though you have no evidence that anything has changed. "I used to take this turn at 90mph, but when I did it just now, I skidded off the road and wrecked my car! There's something wrong with the road! I'm suing the city!"

You can blame Disney and the Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Act Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. I don't know how the argument would hold up in court, but the way that changes to the term of copyright have been applied retroactively to works already created and under copyright would seem to me to be a violation of Article 1, § 9 and 10, which prohibit Congress and the states from passing any law that applies ex post facto. Under this reasoning, there is no impediment to passing a law extending the term of copyright, but the term of copyright for already published works wouldn't change -- if you publish a work when the copyright term is 28 years, extendible for another 28 years, then a year later Congress passes a law extending copyright to 1000 years, your work still enters the public domain a maximum of 56 years after publication.

@BEGIN(Sarcasm) Because, as we all know, there can only be one definition for a word, so the other usage "to pursue or approach stealthily", as when hunting, is completely irrelevant. "Run" has more than 600 definitions in the OED, but, like 'stalking', only one of those can be the real definition; all the others are improper use. @END(Sarcasm)

West side of the island, on the roofs, particularly the south warehouse complex (the building west of the triangle arena there); you can find a dozen or more snakes sleeping on the roofs in twos and threes.

The problem is that, when this happens, you're killing your accuracy, because you can't hold a consistent aim point. And since the snipe needs to be more accurate because of its longer range, having it jumping around works against the concept. I can see how you'd be pushing yourself in practice to be drawing more weight, but when actually out fighting villains, you don't want to be handicapping yourself.

The issue is that, if your arrow is wobbling that much when you're holding full draw, your nock hand is moving around, which means you have an inconsistent draw, either because you're drawing a bow with too much draw weight for you to hold, or your muscles aren't conditioned to the effort of the draw. And since this is presumably your primary activity, the latter should not be the case. The arrow should not be bouncing around as you aim. If that means the animation is mostly you standing there 'doing nothing', well, so is the AR animation for Snipe.

The problem is the order in which the prices drop. If the people doing IO conversion for sale can acquire the convertors they need easily from their own play, that tanks the value of convertors without putting any pressure on IO prices, so they have no incentive not to list them for the same prices they are now. Only after the rest of the player base, unable to make enough from convertor sales to pay the unchanged IO costs, turn to directly buying recipes from the merit vendors, leaving the people doing conversion sales with unsold inventory clogging their AH slots, will they have any reason to lower prices. And with the sunk cost of listing items in the AH, any general price decline will be sporadic until enough people get convinced that they're not going to sell at the current listed price, and take them back to relist, accepting the loss of the listing fee. So the decline in IO prices will be slow and extended, while the drop in income will be sharp and quick. Leaving the people with billions in inf sitting fat and happy while the rest of us scrape to get by in comparison.

And what do you expect that this will accomplish? With 10x the number of merits available, the people who use large numbers of convertors to change cheap IOs into the expensive ones will be able to acquire all the convertors they need from their own activities, tanking the value of convertors on the AH. So what you're looking for is making it easy for the farmers, while screwing over the players who don't farm. And with no longer being able to acquire the inf through convertor sales to buy the set IOs they need, players will take their increased stash of merits and turn to the merit vendors to buy the recipes for the sets they want, tanking the value of IOs on the AH, which means that the people doing IO conversion to put the desired sets up on the AH will see their income tank as well. In the long run, after an extended period of volatility in the AH, prices for IOs will stabilize at a lower level, with only the farmers coming out ahead in the changes.

Have to be four -- point of origin, direction of effect, angle in degrees, and radius. Back before the HC staff improved AoE knockback to have radial effects, the direction of effect would be used both for the centerline of a cone and, with the point of origin, determine which direction knockback occurred (since it was always away from the shooter, even if you landed a location AoE behind your targets).

It depends on the mob's reaction to your attack. As people have seen, mobs that get attacked have an 'instant' response controlled by the server that will go off unless you one-shot your target (and sometimes even that's not enough -- I've forgotten the number of times where I've sniped a mob and taken them down, only to have them shoot me with their pistol or whatever after they hit the ground; this may be due to a perception quirk, where the mob notices me before the snipe goes off, and starts to shoot back, then gets defeated by the snipe, but their attack completes). With the example of the DE above, if the mob's first response is to drop an emanator, the drop happens at the location of the mob when they get hit, before any knockback is applied. Summoning The Swarm, on the other hand, is a pet summons, and the pet doesn't appear until the end of the animation, so if their first response is to summon The Swarm, if they get knocked back, the summon will happen where they land.

I think that the "narrow cone" AoEs like Penetrating Shots were the devs' attempt to do this within the limits of the game engine -- if the game engine only supports single-target and sphere/cone AoEs, there may not have been a way to do it without rewriting part of the game engine.