srmalloy

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.

During the beta for the invention system, the Touch of Lady Grey proc was bugged -- twice, in different ways. The first bug was that, instead of doing negative energy damage, it did negative damage, healing your target. This was fixed, but went too far the other way, becoming "chance to one-shot" -- I had a character with it slotted who did 4.184e+13 points of damage to Jurassik with his opening shot, and there were others in the beta who got bigger hits with it.

As well as all enhancement boosters, since all of the purple sets that could be bought under "crafted enhancements" and boosted are now, for some idiotic reason, slapped with an attunement that prevents them from being boosted. Also, with the removal of generic IOs, it's no longer possible in most cases to enhance a single-slot power for one aspect -- you can't just drop an Acc in a power and boost it, because sets don't have a naked Accuracy enhancement in them. On the whole, your suggestion looks to strip a great deal of flexibility out of slotting characters; while having SOs available from level 2 means that TOs and DOs can be removed, and IO scaling should be looked at, overall, a major change like this needs to be broken up and examined in detail before consideration of whether any part of it should be implemented.

Echo: Atlas Park still has the origin contacts downstairs in City Hall, and if you are within their level range, they will give you missions -- or will offer to complete or abandon a mission you already have from their later version in the regular Atlas Park zone. The other Echo zones, though, appear to have been stripped of contacts.

I think it's a database or network lag thing; I had the opposite problem today -- I was logging in characters to get the box of fireworks, and on one of them, when I logged them out, the character list showed the character with the same number of days since last played that they had before I'd logged them in, as if the client didn't get the update on how recently the character was played. So it may be something as simple as a dropped network packet containing the update that tells your client that the character is no longer flagged for possible name reclamation.

I would like to see the target cap increased for FA; there are a number of ways for you to increase the beaten zone of the attack, but no matter how big an area you sweep with fire, you're only hitting a more limited number of targets compared to the other AoE T9s, particularly with them all losing their end crash, taking away one of the advantages FA had back on Live.

Although more than 10^13 points of damage may be the biggest single hit in the game, it was the result of a gross bug during beta, not in the regular run of the game, so I will argue that while it shows the limits of what the game can be forced to do (and I was amused to see that the game would transition seamlessly into scientific notation if the numbers got big enough), it's not part of the game as released to the public, so it doesn't really count.

Back on Live during the beta for Inventions, the 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage' proc was bugged. When it went off, it didn't do negative energy damage, it did negative damage, healing your target. The devs fixed this, but went a bit overboard in the other direction, turning the proc into "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot" -- when it went off, it did an absolutely absurd amount of damage. Curious, I took the character I'd slotted it into out to Crey's Folly when I saw the notification that Jurassik had spawned, and opened up with the attack that had it slotted... doing 6.481e+13 points of damage. Later discussion in /general and on the forums revealed that my hit wasn't the biggest that players had gotten from the rebugged proc, and I don't know what the maximum actually was.

I was parking a character in the Talos Island police station for the day job, and it suddenly occurred to me that there was a significant flaw with the offices. There's nothing urgent going on, yet there is a continuous loop of sirens blaring. How are the officers in the building going to know when something happens that genuinely requires their attention if there are alarms blaring 24/7? There should be a more subdued audio environment for the police stations -- perhaps the same loop that plays when you're near the police drones -- so that the police stations don't sound like they're in permanent crisis mode with no visible indication that there's anything wrong.

If the 'fix' consists of reworking the entire powerset to have different powers that work differently from the existing powers and reordered, I would rather see that as a completely new powerset -- "Gunnery" or some such. If you're going to 'fix' Assault Rifle, do it in a way that preserves the existing powers so that every AR character doesn't have to burn respecs to get their character back to even a semblance of what it was before the changes.

It's not the character of the missions; it's the fact that, playing redside, you start out as a legbreaker for street-level thugs, and work your way up to being a legbreaker for more important and more powerful thugs, and then to being a legbreaker for minor villains, and eventually become a legbreaker for Arachnos... but no matter how powerful you become, you're still someone else's flunky -- you never get to a point where it's you sending out flunkies to serve your ends. Admittedly, that would make for a much different game redside, with your acquiring increasing numbers of henchmen who can be sent out to carry out different types of missions, and how you assemble the teams you send out affects their chances of success, and the missions you complete give you access to gear to equip your henchmen to make them better at doing missions for you.

After noting, back on Live, that the plane of the Moon's orbit was shifted almost 90° (watch it -- it rises a little east of due south and sets a little west of due north, instead of rising and setting in the east and west like the sun), as well as the double-moon effect near rising and setting, I stopped being surprised by the handwaves the devs put into the sky.

Why should tanks be the only AT that can be instantly killed by an NPC doing this?

The problem is in more than your standing there after you loose; a more serious problem is in the' hold it' part, where you're standing there with your point of aim waving around like you're trying to hold too heavy a draw weight.

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." — Robert A. Heinlein

Ohhh. Let's create a mechanic that's exploitable right out of the box. Scenario 1: Use /holdback to lower your level until a contact talks to you. Get mission from contact. Enter mission. Use /letloose to revert to your normal level. Wipe out grey mobs. So we clearly can't allow /letloose to be used inside missions, only out in the world. Scenario 2: Use /holdback to lower your level until a contact talks to you. Get first mission of story arc from contact. Use /letloose to revert to your normal level. Steamroll the now-grey story arc, because once you have the first mission, the contact will keep giving you the arc missions, no matter how badly you outlevel them. Since the second scenario can be used even with my idea to have a contact in Ouroboros to scale you, the idea is unworkable due to exploitability. The only way to address that would be to have scaling hide your current missions, and be unable to 'unscale' while you have any missions open at your scaled level. Which is almost identical to the 'TF mode' that Ouro puts you in now, except that you can join teams or invite people to team.

It was the surprise of seeing the checkerboard pattern carried over to the light fixtures; I'd seen that the 'stock' warehouse lights were a generic metal texture, but had never noticed that it was different in this one mission. Kind of like back on Live when the devs' attention to detail poked me -- noticing that all the footgear options had different sole patterns.

Necroing the thread... I was running the Clockwork Captive arc the other day, and in the final mission, where the shop has these decorative checkerboard bands on the walls, I happened to be up near the ceiling, and the tops of the light shades have a checkered pattern, too; something I'd never noticed until this week, despite having run the arc on dozens of characters.

Every time when you have a mission that involves your clicking on the NPC standing by the open rear hatch of a helicopter, then running into the cargo bay of the helicopter to enter the mission, you exit the mission still running into the helicopter, and have to turn around and run out, sometimes blocked by people exiting the mission after you. Is it possible to turn the mission exit around 180°, so that when you leave the mission, you're running back out of the helicopter, not further into it?

Ahh, but the original description of the power: "The LRM Rocket is a powerful piece of hardware. It is very accurate and has a very long range. The impressive round can knock down its target. Like most sniper attacks, you must take your time to aim, so this attack can be interrupted. You must be level 47 and have two other Munitions Mastery Powers before selecting this power. " describes it as a "sniper attack"; I believe that it was only with the introduction of the Invention system that it was reclassified as Targeted AoE so that it wouldn't take Sniper sets.

As another illustration of this, I just completed the "Defeat the Kerner and his crew" mission in the Freaklympics arc, and the room with the Kerner had a Freakshow minion, a Council minion, and a Council lieutenant. I defeated the Kerner and the Freakshow minion, but the mission would not complete until I'd defeated the two Council mobs, even though they were definitely not part of the Kerner's 'crew'.

I'd be happy, as an intermediate update to the Citadel TF, to have him use some of his processing power to make a more efficient set of mission assignments, so you start by hitting Council bases in IP, then move to Talos Island for the remainder of the TF, instead of the constant back-and-forth that was clearly put in, back before the availability of Team Transporter and Mission Teleporter, to pad out the amount of time required for the TF.

I'm not sure how you would make it work internally, but I can see having the 'visible' part of the process be a contact in Ouro you can go to who applies a specialized form of temporal scaling to your character, locking them into an earlier stage of their life when they were a lower level, and you'd have to go back to the contact to have it removed. It would be necessary to adjust the code for determining if a contact thinks you're in their level range to recognize when a character is scaled and use their scaled level. As an afterthought, an amusing side effect of doing this would be to have any of your contacts that you've been scaled to below their level range give you the "you're not high enough level" spiel if you go to them, and "Who are you? How did you get this number?" if you try to call them, and not be able to use their 'store'.

Even if it was removed, the full text of Positron's dialog for technology and non-technology characters is on the old Paragonwiki page for Percy Winkler -- Talk to Positron. So it could be recovered and reinstated.

It's not just what hand you hold the weapon in; the animations for the attacks and idling tie into how the character moves, so it would be necessary to create a second version of all the animations in a powerset and all the possible secondaries where they interact with the primaries to allow you have your weapon in your other hand.