srmalloy

An entirely different feeling than what I got from Paragon Chat, which used the CoH client as the front end to a chatserver; you had all the character design, and could run/jump/fly around, and speak and use emotes, but it always felt to me like the reanimated corpse of CoH -- all of the framework, but nothing of what made it live. I couldn't spend more than ten or fifteen minutes logged in before it just made me more morose about its fate than I'd been. Fortunately, I won the bet I'd made with myself (that at least one of the devs had kept a copy of the game code), and found Homecoming shortly after it became public.

If the Council built their robots out of the same material they use to make the damned bell that keeps on ringing even after you defeat the robot, they'd be a lot harder to take down.

Yesterday, while a team was building to take out Jurassik, one of the team members commented that they wished they could earn Jurassik's tree-and-car weapon for a Titan Weapons character. Since the model already exists, would it be possible to create a shrunken character-sized version for TW characters?

There's another bug with defeat credit, but it's range-based. I haven't done the grunt work to find where the limit is, but if you have a Blaster with a primary that includes a snipe, and Energy Manipulation for the secondary, sniping at or close to your range limit with Boost Range active will show the defeat in the chat window, but you won't get defeat credit for the defeat badges. I discovered this by accident while hunting DE emanators in FF with an AR/EM Blaster; she would sit in mid-air at extreme range and pop a minion in a spawn with one or more lieutenants, wait for them to drop the emanators, then snipe just the emanators, leaving the other mobs in the spawn so she could come back and farm the spawn again. After taking out some thirty emanators, I checked her badge progress, and it hadn't moved. I verified that it was a range-dependent problem; if she shot from within basic snipe range, the defeat would get counted. I've been bitten by this on occasion any number of times since then when I didn't pay attention to how far out I was shooting from

It was back when Cryptic was still developing the game; Jack Emmert had posted on the forums "small concern=small tweaks, don't worry regeners"; then the changes were announced. I believe that Geko, who was the Powers guy at the time, posted a video from the test server showing a Claws/Regen Scrapper one-shotting +12 mobs as justification for the nerfs; after the community rallied together to show that the numbers the video presented were possible only without the purple patch, his response was "Oooops, you guys are correct"... and then the Regen nerfs rolled out a couple of weeks later, as if we hadn't proved anything. To get the specific posts, it would be necessary to scrape the Wayback archive.

Despite all the saltiness over the Regen changes, though, there was a general admission that Regen did in fact need to be reeled back some. The hate and discontent that it got was due to it being applied on the basis of bad assumptions and that it felt as if it had been given a 'small tweak' by a blindfolded spastic with a fire Axe.

I've forgotten how many times I received the "Talk to the Perez Park Security Chief" mission at level 6 or 7 and autocompleted it before remembering that it just accepts the "defeat 10 Circle of Thorns in Perez Park" mission, where the spawns are all 5-9 mobs at least two levels higher than I am.

There are already enough powersets that have multiple "usable only on allies" powers for them to rail against; I don't see any particular problem with giving them more to whine about.

It should also be pointed out that the nerf, and its magnitude, was an overreaction based on bad data -- the devs, testing on their internal test server, found that a Claws/Regen scrapper could solo +6 spawns for an eight-hero team, a declaration that the players claimed was grossly inflated. The changes to Regen were made and deployed to Live before the devs discovered that their internal test server did not have the 'purple patch' applied, which meant that, in their testing, the Claws/Regen scrapper was hitting about 10x as often for 10x the damage that it should have been, a difference that would have seen the scrapper falling quickly to the first spawn. Despite this admission, the changes to Regen were neither rolled back nor adjusted in light of the bad data used to justify the changes.

I would go with a 3:1 conversion, as long as it was a random conversion within type (i.e., Hami-Os to Hami-Os, D-Syncs to D-Syncs, etc.).

Which could justify a badge, say, "Like Banquo's Ghost" (I passed on "What does it take to kill you? Wood stick in heart?" as too wordy) for defeating Romulus after completing the ITF.

Let's see... Exploration badges: in the tunnel NW of the tram, near where Matthew Habashy sends you to the Hellions safehouse in disguise; in the center of the exit from the tram; between the legs of the statue in the lake; downstairs in City Hall in the M.A.G.I. office where Azuria stands now; in the bookshelves to the left in the G.I.F.T. office at the end of the hall there; on top of the portico on the north side of the little warehouse E of City Hall where the parking lot for the AE building will be; on top of the cubist sculpture in the plaza SW of where the gate to the Hollows will be; and at the foot of the stairs up to Ms. Liberty.

And Echo: Atlas Park, for a further five merits.

If you do a Hami raid and pick reward merits at the end, that gives you enough to buy ten Enhancement Boosters; two 50+5 EndMod IOs gets you only a couple of percent less than three 50s do, which means that you lose almost nothing by moving the third slot into Reaction Time.

From the HC wiki: "This enhancement grants a 7.5% reduction in status effect duration, which may be stacked up to five times to provide a maximum reduction of 37.5%. This enhancement also grants a one-time, non-stacking 25% regeneration rate bonus." SeraphimKensai and Zepp are correct; the regeneration bonus is unique, so multiple copies are pointless, although stacking one with several five-slotted sets of Titanium Coating for its 10% regeneration set bonus is a suitable win.

The Remember Account Name setting controls whether the account name is saved between instantions of the client. When you get mapserved and dumped back to the login screen, your client has not exited; you are still running the same instance of the client, and the client retains the account name you signed in with. What you want isn't "make the Remember Account Name setting work right", but a new setting that would change what the client does with your account name after you sign in. Or perhaps a setting that protects the account name like a password, so that the account name displays as asterisks.

While I can see the point if it's truly uncontrollable, I don't think that it's in principle any different from some of the mechanics in other missions, such as the timing on taking down Siege and Nightstar in the BAF trial. Before a badge was created for this, though, I think it should be handed to the Test server; the ITF completing with Romulus alive (or rezzing after TF complete) should be trackable, and being able to reproduce the situation should be the determining factor. But I agree that just creating the badge without knowing whether or not it's just a freak occurrence would not be a good idea.

As opposed to, IIRC, Neutron Bomb, where you hold the glowing ball up over your head, then lob it at your target, and they take damage while the ball is still flying toward them. There are several odd timing quirks in the game.

From my experience, where I see a noticeable speed change after leaving combat, Sprint does suppress in combat, just not to the same extent as SJ, SS, or Fly. What is more disturbing is inappropriate suppression -- if you have Athletic Run active, it significantly suppresses flight speed, despite having no flight component itself; both Fly and Mystic Flight suppress to well below unslotted Hover speeds with Athletic Run active, and that component of the suppression goes away if you turn it off.

Ecce Macdonaldus senex, qui fundum habet, E-I-E-I-O Et in hoc fundo nonnulles boves domesticas habet, E-I-E-I-O Cum 'moo, moo' hic, cum 'moo, moo' ibi Hic una moo, ibi una moo, ubique una 'moo, moo' Macdonaldus senex fundum habet, E-I-E-I-O

This is something that I first suggested way back on Live, and a couple of times here -- make IH a toggle power that makes incoming damage act similarly to the way Spectral Wounds does: when you take damage, it queues a heal to go off a second or so later that heals an enhanceable fraction of that damage. The heal could either be a straight enhanceable percentage of the damage taken, or a fixed percentage plus an enhanceable percentage. So if you had it slotted to heal 50%, and you took 112 points of damage, you'd take the full 112 points, then a second or so later you'd heal 56 points back. Because it would only heal incoming damage once, it makes it equivalent to other defenses (Resistance absorbing a percentage of incoming damage, and Defense dodging a percentage of incoming damage) making it easier to balance, instead of just healing the same damage over and over again until it's gone.

Just now in Pocket D : [NPC] War Witch: You need that finger? Yeah? Then stop poking me.

I had taken a character to the tailor to adjust the colors of their Hasten to match their Radiation Armor colors, and discovered that the tailor wanted to charge me 54,000 influence for nothing: Katana does not have any customization options; all of the power visuals are fixed and unchangeable -- all you can do is change the weapon in the Costume tab. There are no changes that you should be being charged for, yet the tailor wants to hit me up for 6000 influence per power for doing nothing. I tried using the 'Revert' button to the left of the powers, but the charges remained no matter how many times I clicked it.

They don't stack for selling, but they stack for buying; you can buy ten EoEs and they'll only take up one slot.

I took that route with my Psi/EM Blaster Umstvenniy Ulan ('Умственный Улан' -- 'Mental Lancer') who volunteered for a 'total cyborg' program after an accident during a mission that left her paralyzed; she went through several increasingly-sophisticated bodies, disdaining the use of cosmetic alterations that would make her look more 'natural'. Her current body uses the 'cyborg' costume pieces; it's not a particularly innovative appearance, but it conveys the sense of a body constructed for functionality, not esthetics: