srmalloy

There is a remnant of this still visible in the game. Open your contacts window and look at the progress bar for each contact. There are two vertical lines across each progress bar; you didn't get the contact's phone number until you filled the bar to the first line, and they wouldn't offer you their full set of enhancements until you filled the bar to the second line.

My first was an AR/EM, too. I built her as an experiment to see if Jack Emmert's claim that "range was a Blaster's defense" was true, and until every mob got handed a ranged attack it was mostly true. Unfortunately with that change, instituted to deprecate hover-blasting with impunity, too many mobs got attacks that outranged a Snipe with Boost Range active. Still, it was fun to stand on the platform near Imperious in Cimerora and snipe mobs in the courtyard across the valley to the north.

The Banished Pantheon spawn at night; during the day, the area is a ghost town -- even the Warriors and Freakshow don't extend their spawns into the area during the day.

I made a popmenu for my Arch/TA Blaster for this: Menu "SlickBurn" { Title Oil Slick Ignite Option "Oil Slick Arrow &1" "powexecname Oil Slick Arrow" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation down:max Oil Slick Arrow" Option "Target &3" "powexeclocation target Oil Slick Arrow" Option "Light &4" "targetcustomnear Oil Slick$$powexec_name Blazing Arrow" Option "Fire &8" "powexecname Blazing Arrow" } This would go into a 'Location Powers.mnu' file in the game folders, and then I'd create a macro for it: /macro Oil popmenu SlickBurn So then, to use it, I click the macro, select 1 to do the normal target-location pick, 2 to drop it at my feet, or 3 to drop it under my current target. Once the slick is down, click the macro again, and 4 targets it and fires Blazing Arrow, with 5 as a backup if I get distracted.

The full form of this required a flying /Devices blaster. While the tank was running around aggro'ing the map, the blaster was in the dumpster setting trip mines. When the tank called out that they were headed to the dumpster, the blaster would fly high up into the air. Trip mines have a hidden weakness -- if the blaster who set them is too far away, they won't trigger. So now the tank jumps into the dumpster, and the aggro'd mobs follow them, while the trip mines just sit there. CoH has a collision-model quirk -- NPC collision is checked only horizontally, so if a mob jumps right on top of another mob, it just lands overlapping the first mob; this allows all of the aggro'd mobs to fit into the dumpster with the tank. When the tank decides that they've got all they're going to get into the dumpster, they call for the blaster, who dives back toward the dumpster; when the blaster gets within the activation range of the trip mines, they all go off, killing defeating everything in the dumpster but the tank. This would result in everyone's enhancement tray instantly filling, several hundred thousand points of XP, and one of the funnier demonstrations of the limits of the game: if you were too close to the dumpster when the trip mines went off, you would get a Windows pop-up from the game engine with the error message "Too many effects to render".

It's been that way back to Live. Most of the time when you get a delivery or misdelivery to a different faction, you get sent to an instance where the recipient is, but a few still want you to go to the other side.

Don't forget that it was also the time of limited-lifespan pets, and pets that died when you passed through a door or used an elevator, so perma-haste was as much a tool to let you resummon your pets at each new floor as it was to getting multiple sets out.

This was why you learned the skill of jumping up the side of a building using the window ledges.

Ahh, that brings up memories. A line from Spider and Jeanne Robinson's novel Stardance: "Tact? I've always understood that to be a mutual agreement to be full of shit."

But wouldn't creating a 'cleric archetype make CoH more accessible to people coming from other MMOs, for whom the Holy Trinity™ of tank, DPS, and heals has been so aggressively beaten into their brains that they can't conceive of an MMO where the character roles aren't so narrowly defined? On the other hand, creating an archetype that is intended to be Heal/Melee regardless of powersets pigeonholes that archetype much more narrowly than any other archetype in the game. The gripping hand is, do we really need such a specialized archetype when several of the existing archetypes can be built to specialize in healing if the player wants to?

And there are no other powers in the game for which some aspect of the power is unenhanceable?

Situations like this are one of the reasons why I like taking the Sorcery pool and Mystic Flight; being able to use Translocation to jump past NPCs stuck in the doorway is gold.

It must have; the Freak Chopper was on the ground, and I heard the crackle as it began to rez when I threw Shadow Maul, then I watched orange damage numbers trail up from it as it did the 'float into the air spinning' rez animation, then it fell over again. I get similar oddities in Nemesis and RIkti raids and zombie invasions; when I'm attacking directly, I can sometimes target mobs that haven't spawned in yet, but can't attack them until they complete the spawn-in (and in most cases, fire off an attack before becoming attackable, or despawn without ever becoming attackable), but if I target through a pet, I can attack mobs that aren't yet visible or are still spawning in. I suspect that this is controlled by the fact that the targeting for pets is all done on the server, without the lag of sending packets back and forth to the client -- and similarly, for cones and targeted AoEs, additional targets are picked by the server once the attack fires, again without the need to pass packets to the client. So I could fire my cone attack at a valid target, and have the server decide the mob rezzing next to him is also a valid target, even though on my client he hasn't finished the rezzing animation and the packet saying he's a valid target hasn't arrived.

Actually, any AoE power that has the rezzer in the area of effect will hit them; it's chancier, because it's harder to ensure that the rezzer is in the right spot to be affected. However, it does feel good when it happens -- I remember fighting some Freaks on a Dark Melee Brute, and I happened to have a Freak Chopper rez into the area of my Shadow Maul as I triggered it on his neighbor, dropping him again.

Have some Madeira, my dear...

Add a modifier to AE content that disables any increased inf scaling. This would allow the creation of new XP 'buffs' for the P2W store -- 75% XP/125% inf, 50% XP/150% inf, and 0% XP/200% inf. Disabling these three inf multipliers in AE content prevents a recurrence of the level 49 no-XP exploit.

Feeling a bit like this?

IIRC, the volume scaling for the glowie sound is a distance function built into the code that specifies the distance at which the glowie sound will have zero volume -- the code doesn't know how loud the glowie sound is, so it can't do a 'reduce volume by N dB for every 10 feet of distance' function that would allow louder glowie sounds to be heard further away, just fast conversions on full volume to zero based on how far away the original devs wanted glowies to be heard.

And some of the lesser NPCs are beginning to become disenchanted with the situation: [NPC] Skulls Girlfriend: I wonder when it gets real fun. So far all they do is rip off purses and fight each other.

I can confirm this with the extra loud sound I installed through the modder (not sure which one, as I'm not at my home computer to check).

Or the periodic emails purporting to be from banks I've never done business with advising me of urgent problems with my account, and to click here to log in and correct them. Ignoring the red flag that they rarely have my actual email address in the To: header (how anyone can believe that an email with 'undisclosed-recipients' in the address field is addressed to them specifically is beyond me), they typically rely on overlookable spelling changes, like the sender's address of "[email protected]" in the phishing attempt I received yesterday, to make the email appear legitimate.

Just call the Not At All Suspicious Airline Booking Company, and we'll not only get you the cheapest air fare, but relieve you of the crippling state of possessing surplus funds in your bank account!

Endlessly amusing, in missions against the Sky Raiders, to confuse the Engineers before they start summoning their FFGs.

Or the summoned Behemoths in the 'portal room' in Oranbega maps. You had to be a bit careful doing it, though -- once you triggered a portal, you needed to back away so that your Burn patches didn't frag the portal.

I've lost count of the missions where the briefing text -- and the mission goals in the navy window -- give you only a narrow concrete goal, but the mission doesn't complete until you clear the map. Just yesterday, for example, Colleen Nelson sent me to rescue the bodybuilder Leon Natale, but after freeing him, the mission didn't end until I'd defeated every Council mob in the base -- a requirement not stated anywhere.