srmalloy

BINGO! That was the last cell I needed on my card of "features that have been requested so many times they've become tropes".

"...made worse due to lack of access to many powers" ...if you wait until you've leveled to 50 and only then go back and do his TF. Run it at level or close to level, and you don't even have those powers whose inaccessibility you bemoan. Whining about not being able to use powers you wouldn't have had at that level is bootless.

We know that it can be done, because Kheldians were tweaked so that, when changing forms, unavailable toggle abilities were suppressed rather than detoggled. There are quite a few missions, like Heather Townsend's personal story, where you enter the mission, take Heather's form, and all your regular powers are disabled, toggling off. This requires you to restart all of your toggles when you exit the mission, which can take a bit of time for toggle-heavy builds, and while the game code does appear to try to despawn mobs right outside a mission door before you/your team exits, that doesn't always work; having your toggles suppress during the mission and reactivate immediately on exit would close a (possibly) unintended window of vulnerability.

Which does more damage depends on the bow and crossbow. But, yes, there are differences -- reflex bows are faster to shoot, while crossbows take longer to 'reload', but can be kept cocked and loaded so you can shoot your loaded shot faster, and you don't require constant practice to maintain the muscle tone (this last a handwave for a superhero game). You could game it by having an automatically granted power, "Load Crossbow", that grants the 'Loaded' status to a character, with all of the crossbow attacks requiring and consuming Loaded, but going off much quicker than equivalent Archery attacks. So you'd use Load Crossbow, then you could carry it around loaded to whip out and shoot quickly, but then you'd have to use Load Crossbow again before you could use another attack.

Assuming that you can move and attack in the horrendous lag... 😁

I just noticed that the Cold Domination power "Heat Loss" has a disjointed power description: The high-level description, and the power icon, indicate that it's an AoE power, but the 'Effect Area' in the detailed description says 'Single Target'.

Oh, that takes me back to the early days, when we'd pull gags like carefully opening up a floppy disk, removing the media, gluing the cover closed again, then putting on a label identifying it as "InvisiCalc -- the first totally transparent spreadsheet program", then making jokes about being able to get it running on anything, like an actual toaster...

A couple of days ago, I had a character in Peregrine Island who ran across a bizarre collection of mobs -- Frostlings, CoT, Nemesis, and Rikti all jammed together in a watchtower: I don't know if this was just the spawn generator breaking, or someone having fun with Wormhole (most likely fun with Wormhole, given that it's not a present location to spawn the Frostlings), but it was entertaining to see.

I was searching through one of my base's enhancement storage units, and it occurred to me that the stock alphabetical sort order still left a lot to be desired for picking out the enhancement(s) you wanted, and thought about a small filter dropdown, à la the Auction House listing, to allow you to select a category of enhancement (i.e., Resist Damage or Ranged AoE damage) and show only the enhancements that matched the selected category, with only a single category selectable at a time, a 'clear selection' option to return to showing all enhancements in the storage, and the selection resetting when the window was closed. Would it be possible to add this sort of filter without breaking something else?

Dread Pirate Roberts #153946 (ask me about franchise opportunities in your area)

I was doing the "Investigate the DPS readings" mission from Tina McIntyre, and ran across this interesting NPC: I'm not sure whether this is a case of 'working as intended', with a fuller range of NPCs changed into 'Crazed' for the mission, or the mission populating with an improper selection of NPC models, and picking a police officer model instead of a random citizen model. Update: From the clue received after rescuing Dr. Calvin, it appears that it was a wide-area "affect whoever's there" thing, so it's not an improper model selection, just a cop in the wrong location at the wrong time.

And this is one aspect that I still snicker about, one of the few things that SWTOR did better than CoH -- I've had rescue missions where I had to bring the rescued NPC back to a specific location, and I would be able to just hop on my speeder bike and zoom off; the game would always pump the NPC full of whatever the universe's equivalent of hypermeth was, because they'd be running along behind me, fully keeping up with me on my speeder bike. It was pretty humorous at times to see them running frantically to keep up.

"Two weeks" -- the universal programmer's jargon for "When it's ready; go away and let us work."

Even with the ready availability of flight temporary powers, there is a corner case where being able to spread flight to your team could be useful, which is why I suggested breaking Group Fly up into 'Pet Fly' -- Group Fly as you describe, only affecting your pets -- and 'Team Fly' (or, better, 'Grant Flight' to parallel the Stealth Pool's 'Grant Invisibility'), which affects teammates and is a cancelable power.

This is a running peeve of mine, that your pets are automatically "accept teleports" regardless of how you are set; there have been a number of times where I've been playing one of my MMs on a team and been in the middle of a fight when one of my сволочь teammates uses ATT or the incarnate group teleport, and suddenly I find myself alone, хуй in hand, as my pets disappear.

I was mildly annoyed, logging in at 1720 Pacific, to find that the New Years' fireworks box distribution had already ended, with /servertime showing 240101@0123. I would have expected the timing of the distribution to at least have been driven off of local time at the physical location of the servers, not GMT; if I had known the day would be rolling over at 1600 local, I would have made a greater effort to cycle characters through before then. Still, the boxes of fireworks are at best a cosmetic reward, so their absence isn't really significant, but it would have been nice to know in advance that date/time-restricted activities were driven off GMT, not EST/EDT (or some other timezone).

Group Fly gives flight to everyone in the power radius, whether they want it or not, unless you've gone to Null to disable the effects of Group Fly. That is what the hate and discontent is about. A character -- virtually always an MM; with the ready availability of time-limited flight powers from the S.T.A.R.T. vendor and other sources (like the Posi 2 TF), there's little need for a character to take it for the purpose of allowing the rest of their team to fly) -- takes Group Fly to enable them to bring their pets along with them while they're flying, and the fact that it spreads to their nearby teammates whether they want it or not is largely a "Nicht mein Zirkus, nicht meine Affen" situation, with the attitude of the person with Group Fly almost always being "Well, if you don't like it, go talk to Null and disable it", which can be perceived as making everyone else go out of their way to avoid inconveniencing them in the slightest. I don't have a second account ready to hand to try it on the test server, and I've never been in a position to try it on the live servers, so I don't know if disabling the effect of Group Fly on you at Null the Gull also disables its effects on your pets; if your pets are not affected by your choice at Null, then this creates a clear uncontrollable negative effect from someone else using Group Fly. Is there anyone who can readily test this? One option -- certainly not the only solution, and possibly not the best one -- is to tweak travel powers so that they automatically spread to your pets: for example, if you take Fly or Mystic Flight, your pets following you automatically get Fly; this would remove the need for Group Fly except to allow you to 'gift' Flight to your team, which as I describe above is rarely necessary. Another option is to break Group Fly into two powers in the Flight pool -- 'Team Fly', which works exactly as Group Fly does now, and 'Pet Fly', which only affects the character's own pets; this would retain the distinction between taking the Flight pool to get Fly and the pet flight, and taking the Sorcery pool for Mystic Flight and Translocation, but not getting the group/pet flight choices, and allow MMs to pick a power that lets their pets fly with them, without forcing the power choice on others..

They've been doing that since launch, in the original Atlas Park zone even before it got moved to Echo: Atlas Park when AP got a revamp. Also, if you stand around in the lobby the 'main' building of Portal Corp (the one at the base of the 'U') and watch through the windows, you'll see NPCs wandering through the walls there, too; this has been happening since the zone was rolled out.

But there's already a perfectly good animation for EotS; you just don't see it unless you're flying. If we have the option to make that animation standard for both flying and grounded activation, that would address my issues with the 'breakdance' animation perfectly.

I've never been fond of the 'breakdance' animation for Eye of the Storm from the Staff Fighting powerset, but I recently noticed that, if your character is flying/hovering when the attack animates, they perform an animation for the attack that doesn't have them spinning around on their back like an idiot. Can we get the 'flying' animation for the power made selectable as the default animation for all cases?

This benefits a character only if they want to get TFC by running the TFs only when they're the WST; there's nothing stopping a character from getting TFC in one day by running the required TFs one after the other. And there is nothing stopping you from running the TFs when they come up as WSTs after you've already got TFC. To my mind, this is asking the HC staff to 'solve' a 'problem' that's a non-issue.

Except for the people who seem to be convinced that the $loc coordinates are unique, so you get posts in LFG like "Kronos at [x y z]", and they don't understand what's wrong until you post back that you're rushing right off to Firebase Zulu to fight the Kronos, because that's clearly where it is from their message.

Exactly. Just recruit a smaller team and set difficulty to max team size.

I was throwing it out as something to create an alternative to the WLs just standing around chilling waiting for the players to show up to beat on them, and make it more like they were actually 'wreaking havoc'.

When people are running around opening presents, they get a 'Naughty' result and spawn some hostile snowmen. If they're in a large enough group and unlucky, they'll spawn a Winter Lord, and the message "A Winter Lord is wreaking havoc" will go out as a zone message. But when you find it, the Winter Lord is just standing there among the other snowmen in the spawn, not hurting anything. Now, I know that there are NPC-destructible objects in the zones; in Kings Row, for example, you'll occasionally see something like "Gravedigger Assailant has defeated Car" when an NPC has done enough damage to an environment object to destroy it. I don't know if it's possible, but it would enhance the immersion if, when a Winter Lord spawned, it would be given some sort of random-walk path through the zone where it would attack the destroyable environment objects it passed by, so that a) it's legitimately 'wreaking havoc', and b) isn't waiting in some static location for heroes/villains to show up to beat it into the pavement.