srmalloy

It's only a cosmetic issue, because they will still offer missions, but I've noticed that the Valentine's contacts will sometimes fail to show the yellow "Mission Available" icon over their heads: I've seen this with both Jessica Duncan and Sigil. As you can see in the screenshot, Jessica is missing the yellow icon, but her contact window shows the "Ask about available missions" text. This appears to occur once per contact -- once you have taken and completed their mission, after you turn it in, the green 'completed mission' icon turns into the normal yellow one and doesn't vanish again. Since you can still get them to offer missions, it's only a minor annoyance, harking back to the early days on Live when the contacts didn't have any indicators over their heads.

And in the Navy, if you're selected for promotion as an officers, you can be 'frocked', which means you can wear the rank insignia of your new rank, and get all the responsibilities and privileges of the new rank. but don't get the increased pay until the promotion actually processes through BuPers.

Endurance Reduction in your attacks will benefit you more than Endurance Reduction in your armor powers.

This takes me back to "The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army" #61: 'If one soldier has a 2nd Lt bar on his uniform, and I have an E-4 on mine It means he outranks me. It does not mean “I have been promoted three more times than you”.'

That basic concept works fine for a power that has a single effect. However, for a power with multiple effects — like a hold or immobilize that does damage — enhancing "power" increases both effects; you no longer have to choose between increasing the effectiveness of the hold and doing more damage. Both effects improve in lockstep. This makes powers with multiple effects overpowered relative to powers that have only a single effect, and will require every single power in the game to be gone over for rebalancing. This will have the immediate effect of jerking over a significant fraction of the characters already built — for example, characters built around, doing more damage at the expense of control — and nerfing their damage output just to save you from the unspeakably horrible inconvenience of getting an enhancement drop you can't use.

I'd suggest another one, "Idiot Ball", but we have far too many examples of both players and NPCs grabbing it to need it added as an explicit power...

That's a vertical misalignment of the 'ground' polygon. You usually can't do anything with it, but it can be annoying when NPCs exploit them — there used to be a tiny gap in the geometry in the plaza at the north end of FF that's between the exit to Talos and the row of buildings south of that; if you were getting the upper hand on a 5th Column spawn there, they could run away, jump down through that tiny gap, run SE under the map, and jump back up through another tiny gap in one of the fenced-off planters on the west side of the plaza south of the Midnighter building. And then show up shooting at you when you'd forgotten about them and moved on.

It's not whether I would, but whether it could be misused, and figuring out how to design the power to prevent it. Look at the original teleport ally power — the devs didn't intend for it to be used to teleport someone to appear five feet out from the roof of a tall building so they would take falling damage on impact, but there were a number of griefers in the early days on Live who got their jollies by doing just that. Contrast that with the use of "powexec_location up:max Wormhole" — it teleports a spawn directly over you at a significant height, but the teleported mobs take no damage when they fall to the ground (and in fact aren't even aggro'd by it); the devs coded the power to prevent it from being used as a damaging attack.

I typically wait until I get a level or two up on the mission if I've got it on a squishie, but I enjoy his monologue because I always hear his voice in my head as the voice of the Heavy from the TF2 "Meet the Heavy" video.

I don't think it was towards people who've played characters through to 50 normally PLing their alts, but towards the people who joined the game, immediately dived into the AE building, and came out as 50s who would ask "How do you get to Steel Canyon?" when invited to join a Posi TF — the "AE babies", which likely included the people coming from other MMOs where the progress to level cap is a mostly content-free grind, and the game doesn't really start until you reach level cap, who don't understand that the story in CoH is woven through the whole leveling experience, who powered their way to 50 only to discover how little actual endgame there was.

Been there, done that on Live, with my Bots/Dark MM, and that was the only time I was able to beat the mission solo.

Go to Echo: Rikti Crash Site and ski Mt. Rikti (fly or jump onto the high side of the force field encasing the mothership, and you can slide down the slope to the other side).

Note that it's the name of the bonus, not its value, that determines the count. So if you had three 1.5% "Medium Health Boost" and three 0.75% "Medium Health Boost", the Law of Fives would mean that you wouldn't get one of the lower-value boosts. See the Law of Fives explanation on the wiki.

I'll autocomplete to speedrun Mender Ramiel's arc to unlock your Alpha slot. Deliver the message, jump to your base and craft a Grant Invisibility at a empowerment station, exit to Steel to talk to Positron, use your invisibility to skate to Trapdoor and take him down, then exit Ouro to FF to the Vanguard base in RWZ to talk to Lady Grey, jump back to Ouro to autocomplete beating up Hero 1, back to Lady Grey to turn that in, pick up an HVAS if I'm on a low-damage character, then back to Ouro, skate invisibly to the minotaur, take it down, watch the boring cutscene, and done.

It doesn't matter whether or not it was suggested as an exploit; determining whether something is capable of being used as an exploit is one of the concerns of game developers. Once it has been determined to be a possible exploit, the impact of it being used as an exploit needs to be assessed before a final judgment is rendered.

And while you're at it, tell Ascendant to get off the phone...

Making something difficult is no substitute for making it impossible.

Boost your purples and PvP IOs (you want 50 PvP IOs for this), and attune your other sets IF you'll be playing lower-level content where you'll be exemp'ed down. If it's a farming character that's always going to be running at 50, go ahead and boost everything but ATOs and event IOs (i.e., winter sets), which you'll still catalyze to make them Superior. Which common IOs you boost depends on which ones make a noticeable difference (i.e., two 50+5 Recharge in Hasten).

You run into diminishing returns if you boost Hasten three-slotted with level 50 IOs (three are already into diminishing returns, and boosting to +5 caps out at, IIRC, 101%), but two are 84.8% by themselves and 94.1% with both boosted to +5, which is only a couple of percent less than three unboosted 50s.

If I knew for certain how getting the server to shift the position of a mob could be used for a combat advantage, I would have listed it; that doesn't mean it can't happen, and it's better to proactively block a potential exploit than fix it afterwards with a patch. The game returns the same "target blocked" message for both mobs out of LoS and mobs with their targeting point behind geometry they're stuck in. But I don't know if that happens on the client or the server. Meanwhile, the mob buried in geometry is unable to move normally, and that is definitely on the server, but I don't know if the server does more than fail an attempt by the mob logic to move. Both need to be on the server for the server to identify a mob as stuck — when you use the "unstick_npc" power, the server would have to check that a single-target LoS does not exist to the targeted mob, and validate that the mob can't move, which would require a number of move checks in different directions.

"Please, continue your petty bickering; I find it most intriguing." — Data

And the mechanics are in the game for confetti...

The problem I see with this is that it breaks the way targeting works — while it could be coded to work only on "target blocked" mobs, that leaves the possibility of it being used on targets that aren't stuck in a wall, just around a corner; given the fact that the game doesn't auto-reposition stuck mobs, I don't think the game engine can identify a mob as being stuck in the geometry, and I don't think it can tell the difference between LoS being blocked due to the mob's position relative to the attacker, and LoS being blocked due to the mob being physically in the geometry. It would be a complex coding problem to keep it from being misused.

However, it's a good lead-off attack when your target is oblivious. My Ice/Ice Blaster, when running Heather Townsend's arc, will use it on the higher rank in a spawn, then the other, fast-triggering, hold on the other mob in the spawn before taking them apart. Not as reliable as my Grav/Traps Controller's 'lay down mines, then Wormhole the spawn into the mine field' tactic, but quite a bit faster.

Let us rather discuss how this would be animated, and who would be doing the work to create the animations, since there are no existing character animations that could be repurposed for the abilities in this powerset. It's easy to talk about what the powers and their effects would be; it's considerably more difficult when none of the character animations exist, with the lack of animation resources available to the HC staff.