srmalloy

That's what a 'decayed' Ouro portal looks like. When they're active, they have a floating diamond in the middle, which is what you click on. After their active time expires, the diamond disappears, but the rest hangs around for some time -- during the Hami raids on Excelsior, you can often find 'decayed' portals in the area around the center from the people who left via them after the previous cycle that evening.

One of the things that commended CoH to me when I joined was that it didn't have PvP. The devs made a good shot at compressing the disparity between characters for the PvP zones, but the mechanics of exemping preserve an advantage for higher-level characters, although not to anywhere near the extent that a 'you're dumped in the zone at your level' MMO does. In my experience on Live, though, there were still gankers in CoH, although the imposed exemping meant that they didn't have a position of absolute superiority to gank from, and would often run if they started taking damage. That said, the jerks were a decided minority in CoH; in one of the rare times when I participated in PvP qua PvP, it was shortly after the release of CoV, and some friends of mine and I had appropriated the roof of the hero bunker in Bloody Bay as a hangout. We weren't going after any of the heroes, except for the ones who came up to try to dislodge us; it was a "we're here; what are you going to do about it?" challenge. An hour or so after we started, having gotten occasional assistance from other villains, we had to leave because of dinner being called; by that time, we were largely ignored by the heroes, as we weren't doing anything but camping on the roof.

I haven't tried the combination myself, but I'd put a Dark Armor/Titan Weapons Tanker up against Blasters for being an End hog.

When I tried this morning, it still said 'you have already filled out this form' and had no submit button. Oddly, I was originally able to submit two the previous day with Firefox and one with Edge after receiving the 'already filled out' message in FF, but I may have checked this morning before you applied your changes.

I think the anti-one-shot code was introduced much earlier, but not as a combat effect -- I remember there being a brief surge of jerk behavior very early in the game with players inviting other people to team, and using Recall Friend to teleport them to the top of a tall building, but just off the roof, so they'd fall to the ground; the code was tweaked so that an uninjured character could not be defeated by falling damage, leaving you at 1HP. Extending it to combat came later -- I remember having a Katana/Regen Scrapper one-shotted by one of the Praetorian AVs several issues into the game.

This has been my experience from other MMOs; in an MMO with open-world PvP, the overwhelming majority of the PvP-focused players seem to be придурки for whom the sole measure of their "leet skillz" as a gamer is how fast their level-capped combat monster in BiS gear can gank low-level characters fresh out of the starting areas who have no chance of even damaging them in return.

At least you get a 'defeat all' message. I'm not sure it's 100% true, but it seems like every single mission to "Check out Nemesis base" (or facility, or whatever) gives you a simple, concrete mission goal (i.e.,'look for clues')... and never once says that it's really a 'defeat all' mission, revealing itself only when it doesn't complete when you finish the displayed mission goal.

Knowing how the Rule of Fives works is important to understanding how the set bonuses group under the rule. And Castle's explanation of how it works -- a description of fact relating to the code -- is unrelated to your or anyone else's opinion of him based on his decisions regarding the development of the game.

A 'rare overlooked inconsistency' specifically cited by Castle talking about how the Rule of Fives worked by name, not by value. All of the Defense set bonuses have one positional and two typed, with the positional defense either first or last. The first (either the positional or both typed) have a value of 1.25% modified by the adjective (defining the tier of the bonus) , with the remaining being 0.63% modified by the adjective.

Go to an empowerment station in a base and craft a two-hour Grant Invisibility temp power, then go off to the PvP zone and grab your exploration badges. No need to fool around with a second build. And they're cheap -- the low-tier Grant Invisibility requires an Ancient Amulet, a Simple Chemical, and a Heavy Water.

The reason to draw the distinction is that there are some odd quirks in the bonuses for Defense sets. For example, among the bonuses for the Blood Mandate set is a "Small Increased Fire/Cold/AoE Defense Bonus" and a "Huge Increased AoE/Fire/Cold Defense Bonus". Each of these gives 1.88% to Fire and Cold Defense, but because they have different names, you can theoretically slot five sets of Blood Mandate and get ten 1.88% Fire/Cold defense bonuses.

This needs to die. Open up your combat attributes window and look at the damage modifiers, then look at the name of the bonus on the left side. That is what you can have five of. You could have four "Large Damage Bonus" entries, with two of them being 1.5% damage and two being 0.75% damage, which means you could only have one more before hitting the Rule of Five. This is how you can get 75% Recharge bonus using ten 7.5% bonuses - five "Luck of the Gambler: Increased Recharge" and five (IIRC) "Huge Recharge Bonus" (could be 'Ultimate'; I'm working from memory here).

They actually moved the XP from the spawned demons to the portals themselves -- originally the portals didn't give much XP, but after the change, any character with a fast-recharging hold could farm those maps for a ton of XP. You hold the portal and it stops spawning demons, allowing you to destroy it at your leisure. Destroy all the portals, exit and reset, repeat.

Trying to recreate Supermegatopia's Dr. Ghoti?

Back on Live, I tried asking for a new version of the "ichi" variant of the samurai pieces that had the lacing holding the kozane together added to the mask for the secondary color, because the lacing was historically normally a different color from the kozane themselves; nothing came of it.

All armor masks were men-yoroi; masks covering the entire face were sōmen, masks covering the chin up to the nose were menpō, masks covering the chin only were hanpō, and masks covering the forehead and cheeks were happuri. The yodare-kake throat protection was not always present (the name colloquially translates as 'bib', but literally means 'drool hang').

IIRC, this is an artifact of the cutscenes being stretched to fit the width of the window, with the cutscene retaining its aspect ratio; this results in the top and bottom of the cutscene to be clipped. It will happen to a greater or lesser extent with all extra-wide monitors

Oh, there's no 'risk' involved. I've done experiments with my AR/EM Blaster, flying toward spawns in short steps until a noncombat Snipe, with Boost Range active and a tier-4 Cardiac alpha (20% range increase), activates. The Snipe goes off... and I get return fire. There's no 'risk' -- if you can shoot at a mob, you will get shot back at, no matter how long the base range of your power is, and what range increase modifiers you have active. I thought this was an outlier the first time I took fire from a Malta Gunslinger for one-shotting the Sapper next to him back on Live, but then I noticed that I was pretty consistently taking fire from mobs at ranges where I needed Boost Range to hit them.

The appearance of "I AM CHAINMAIL MAN!" repeatedly in help and general chat, and sometimes in broadcast while the 1200 PST ship raid is assembling... and the appearance of CHAINMAIL GIRL since then...

I'm not sure that "the devs didn't do anything about it back on Live" is a good argument, considering all the warts they never addressed, going all the way back to the giant rework of Regen based on their internal testing that a Claws/Regen Scrapper (with just SOs, this being prior to inventions) could handily solo +8 content, where it turned out after all the changes were made that the internal test server didn't have the purple patch applied, so their test scrapper was hitting about 10x as often for 10x as much damage as it should. Which started the 'nerf Regen every update' meme.

We've already got imitators for 'CHAIN LETTER MAN' (or something like that) on Excelsior we don't need to have it metastasizing.... 😁

The only thing I can see about Archery that I think could be improved is the way mobs you use Rain of Arrows on aggro before you finish the animation, even when you're far enough away to avoid drawing aggro with any other attack until it either hits or misses, and even when you're fully invisible. The change to the 'flight time' made in HC made the power more viable, reducing the likelihood that the group would leave the beaten zone before the arrows landed, but with that version, mobs didn't aggro until after you'd finished the animation, slightly before the arrows landed. If I had to guess, I'd say that the only change was to reduce the flight time to zero, leaving the target aggro occurring slightly before the arrows hit -- which makes it happen before the animation finishes.

I think a big part of that is how the devs went from "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make PvE changes purely for PvP reasons" to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons", and then stopped talking about why some PvE changes were being made as more and more things got changed in attempts to 'balance' PvP.

It should only be the secondary color in the gaps between the 'crust' sections; I have several characters that use those costume pieces, and they all show the pulse animation only in the gaps.

Just a thought -- did you turn down your graphics settings and/or character detail?