srmalloy

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?

This would involve all IOs having their values adjusted, since the values for set IOs are a function of the same-level generic IO. The simple fix - increasing enhancement values across the board -- just adds creep to the game without being particularly useful. The more complicated fix would be to decide what the enhancement value of a level-10 generic IO should be compared to an even-level SO, then scaling everything to the same curve currently used, with level-50 IOs retaining their current value. That would reduce the growth of enhancement value for each step, but make the middle level IOs better, since the scale would start higher. On the whole, I think this needs to be looked at more carefully, perhaps with some 'special' test builds to get some gameplay statistics, before any decisions are made. No matter how it's done, it's going to make a change as significant as making SOs available at level 2, and I'd rather it were thrashed out on test, rather than on live.

I've noticed that it at least feels as if Athletic Run is applying it inappropriately, too -- flying characters with Athletic Run on seem to be slowed to unslotted Hover speeds.

Movement suppression was added to the game to address the problem of jousting -- queueing up an attack power, then zipping past your target to get just close enough to it to activate the power, and continuing past the target one the attack finished animating to get out of range of a return attack, thereby making the attack with no risk. Some time after it was implemented, though, essentially all hostile NPC mobs were given at least one ranged attack (some of which outrange a Range Boosted snipe), and since mobs aggroed by an attack can respond instantly, running away isn't a defense any more. Which has led me to wonder whether movement suppression still has a useful purpose in PvE. In PvP, since players can't respond at the speed of the server, it still restricts the viability of jousting, but I don't see that it continues to serve a purpose in PvE with the changes that were made subsequent to its rollout. So I'm throwing this out for comment, to find out if there are things other people see that I'm not.

The only thing about silhouettes would be deciding how they should be partitioned for applying two colors to them. The lower set would be easy -- black is color 1,white is color 2 -- but the flat silhouettes could go a couple of ways -- border, gradient, etc.; on the whole, I think the lower set would look better, but the flat silhouettes with a border for color division would work just as well.

From a conversation with Positron at SDCC one of the years NCsoft exhibited there, the maps are made up of pre-made sections that are fitted together. Unfortunately, the map tool they had doesn't align the sections automatically -- if you've ever encountered a map that had a black wall across a corridor (but generally only from one side), that's an example of adjacent blocks not being aligned properly (this was a running problem with the new office maps when CoV was released). I had asked him about this in connection with the release of AE, wondering if it would be possible to have a drag-and-drop map editor for AE missions, but apparently the map blocks had to be aligned by hand, and they didn't have the resources to modify the map creator to do it right (a running excuse for Paragon Studios to not do things).

As I remember it described way back on Live, each member of a team gets completely independent drop rolls for each type of reward -- invention salvage, event salvage, (disabled) base salvage, enhancement, recipe, thread, shard, etc. -- while the drop rates are low enough that it's unlikely, it's possible for every character on a team to get a recipe drop from a single defeated mob. Making drops independent was a deliberate design decision on the part of the original devs.

And it can work the other way, too. The HC staff added 'pull' to Singularity; I regularly see mobs in MSRs getting pulled into the air in the middle of the bowl,and less often during other content. There are a number of powers that require the target to be on the ground. The moment a Singularity yanks a mob off the ground, Seismic Blast loses a power against it. Is this annoying? Yes; in the roil of power effects, it may not be noticeable that a mob is airborne. It can be caused incidentally by other powers, too -- a mob standing on the object produced by Propel is not "on the ground" for targeting purposes. Some holds lift the target off the ground. In a group that works together across an extended period of time, it's reasonable to expect the members to tailor their actions to work together to best effect. For the vast majority of grouping in CoH, a teammate could be 'Fred from the planet Fred' for all you know about them, and expecting them to tailor their abilities to your prejudices about how you want fights to go is setting yourself up as the arbiter of the One True Way to Play...

I'm not sure that doing more damage just from the knockback works, particularly if your target is resistant to knockback; that should be baked into the power. However, I support doing additional damage based on distance that your target would have been knocked back if their 'flight' is interrupted by hitting something. For example, if you hit a mob, and they would have been knocked back forty feet, but there was a wall ten feet behind them that stops them, they should take Smashing damage from the impact just as they would from a fall.

Normally, I wouldn't recommend any page from fandom.com, but the page it has for experience in CoH has a detailed breakdown of experience as it works in the game that I haven't been able to find anywhere else.

They'd probably get their knickers in a right twist at one of my Seismic Blasters, who has a level 50 Knockback IO in the sixth slot of Meteor until I decide how I want to slot it for the long run. It may be juvenile, but I find the visual of a dozen mobs hurled hundreds of feet in an instant endlessly risible. And watching Nemesis Jaegers turn into flaming comets hurtling across the landscape is always good for a laugh. I am thoroughly enjoying the change the HC staff made for blast knockback to be radial, not just away from the attacker; it makes a surprisingly significant improvement to the power effects.

CoH being one of the few MMOs that doesn't have the "You're literally forty feet from where you want to be, but because there's a 20' high obstacle between you and it, you have to go two miles out of your way to get there, because you can't climb or jump over it" map design fetish. I thought SWOTOR would be different, with the Jedi Force Leap, but while there are classes that can leap more than a hundred feet, even straight up, they can only do it if there's a hostile target to leap to.

That mission, like all the other 'Talk to the [zone] security chief' missions, is the "I've run out of missions to give you" or "You've outleveled my mission range" handout from contacts. Sometimes it was ugly -- you could get the "Talk to the Perez Park security chief" mission at level 6 and be told to go defeat the clusters of level 9+ CoT in the paths through the trees. They were there to encourage people to team, so they'd get introduced to it -- and since people would team up because they had the mission, too, it introduced them to the "You have completed a mission that you have, too" mechanic.

He's not really from comics, but Letterman from the Electric Company, able to transform the environment by changing the spelling of it. Stopping a thug by changing their gun to gum, for example. Of course, he'd be much nastier as a villain, turning a hero to zero....

This resembles how I thought 'Instant Healing' should have worked -- a toggle power that made all damage act the way Spectral Wounds does: you take all the damage, then after a short interval an enhanceable fraction of it 'instantly' heals back. Mechanically, it would mean that when you take damage, it would create a heal for part of that damage on a time delay. That means that you only 'instantly heal' each occurrence of damage once, as opposed to the current 'heal it again and again until it's gone' mechanic that has been Regen's shtick since it was introduced. However, barring going down to the initial hit, it has in the long run the same effect as either Resistance or Defense -- you sidestep taking a percentage of incoming damage, but only once per attack. It's a little better than Defense, because it would apply to each tick of a DoT, but not as good as Resistance, which takes its percentage off up front.

IIRC, back on Live, the devs instituted an (I think) seven-reset limit on missions to prevent people from keeping a mission like Unai Kemen's wolf farm and resetting it over and over again.

Well, that blows out the six-and-a-half page bio that БРИГАДИР's bio turned into... It's annoying working inside the 1023-character limit when you have Unicode characters in the bio, because each one is 16 bits wide, taking up two characters of space.

Or, sometimes, because your team leader (or active mission holder) completed the arcs, with the 'experiencing the world as defined by their choices' effect.

Don't forget the use of chalk and white lead compounds to lighten the skin, showing your status in that you didn't have to work outside in the sun and get tan (the same thing was done in China and Japan), so picking lighter skin tones is acceptable.