srmalloy

Okay, sure. Now, remember that animation time is partly determined by the amount of primary effect that a power does, so attacks that do more damage will generally have a longer animation time, which means that if you slot an enhancement that decreases the length of the animation, it should also decrease the amount of damage that the power does (cf. how combat snipes do less damage than 'slow' snipes). I'm sure you'll see lots of people rushing out to slot enhancements that lower the damage of their interruptible attacks just to get a slightly shorter animation time.

You will see an extraneous "Archon" in a lot of the early Council missions -- both "Archon Archon" and "Adjutant Archon" show up in the mission briefing, nav bar, and in-mission from time to time.

Proof that sometimes even Nemesis has to scrape the bottom of the barrel when recruiting. A mission to recover a track sample from a Nemesis hideout: [NPC] Dr. Ulecht: We can sort who betrayed whom out later! [NPC] Lt. Epstein: It's not as if Vredefort were going to barge in here or something! One application of Meteor: [NPC] Dr. Ulecht: Vredefort! We are betrayed! The Center will hear of this! [NPC] Lt. Epstein: I am not sure that this negotiation is truly secure. You have defeated Dr. Ulecht You have defeated Lt. Epstein Lt. Epstein's capacity for understatement is amazing.

In the "Defeat all villains in base" mission from Anton Sampson, where he sends you into a Council base that is being raided by Rikti, and have to prevent the escape of the end boss, the end boss says: [NPC] [BOSSNAME]: I mustn't be caught be these vigilantes! [REDACTED] will need my report! The name of the boss and to whom he needs to report to have been redacted to eliminate spoilers, but "caught be these vigilantes" should be "caught by these vigilantes".

She does have a body... Sort of. It's an elongated oval at the base of her neck. I happened to encounter her aground on the shore of the northern island east of War Witch, and got to see her whole body as she rolled over and dove into the ground. No limbs or tail, though.

The warwolves and Crey tanks have faster movement than other mobs, so they'd appear even faster if their movement was compressed.

And it took a certain minimum of player commentary to get things up on their radar in the first place. I remember at one of the meet-and-greet events at SDCC, when I asked Positron again about the problem with the Paragon City harbor buoys, and he said that they might have to take a look at it now that he'd gotten two comments about it... and I had to admit that I was the 'other one', bringing it up at the first NCsoft event at SDCC. Still, I suppose it's some sort of achievement to be the only person to bring up a significant visual problem with the game, even if it doesn't affect gameplay in any way.

Positron was good at coming up with different "we don't have the resources" excuses for why something couldn't be done. Sometimes it was because it was being done, and he just wanted to deflect people dogging them about when it would be released, but most often it was just fobbing things off onto the 'maybe someday' pile so people would stop asking.

If I remember Positron's description of what happens there, if you stun a mob when the server has already given it 'orders' to move somewhere, its movement gets interrupted while the "hit and stunned" animation plays, and its movement animation gets changed to the 'stunned stagger" -- but when all that completes, the movement that was already 'ordered' gets carried out, but because the stunning animation took time, there is less time for the mob to complete its movement, so its speed while completing the queued move will be faster. Finishing the queued action is why you can stun or defeat a mob after it activates an attack but before the animation completes, and if the attack isn't flagged interruptible, it will still go off.

Asked for several times during Live, and the response was always that it was back-burnered because of the animation and costume changes it would require, and they didn't have the art resources to do it.

This was how I funded characters back on Live, when the vendor value for high level SOs were better and the stores still gave you better buyback value for their own origin -- buy high-end Mutation SOs on the AH, run to the SubGenetics store in south Steel Canyon, and sell them there.

Due to an odd quirk of spawns when I was still new to the game, the first five Outcast bosses I saw were Bricks, which had me reading "Lead Brick" as lead the metal, and it was a while before I saw a "Lead Shocker" and realized it was 'lead' as in 'leader'.

IIRC, these are the same magazines you see on the tables in the entry room of the Terra Volta reactor building.

From the times I've gone into the Longbow base in Nerva to get the badge in the creature cage area, they're a bit of a laughingstock already -- the automatic gun turrets always pop up and start shooting at the Longbow, so even their own base defenses hate them.

Heard near Valkyrie and Positron in Steel Canyon: [NPC] Korey: I heard that Vredefort challenged a daemon to a rock-off and won! Which isn't particularly humorous without the additional knowledge that Vredefort is a Seismic/Earth Blaster. And proof that intelligence isn't a prerequisite for flunkies: [NPC] Enforcer Smasher: Don't mind the blood on this piece. [NPC] Stunner Chief: More of this stuff? [NPC] Stunner Chief: Ya keep bringing me crap I can't use!

I expect that any reopening of Galaxy City would have to wait for the availability of art resources to create a 'bombed out' version of the zone as a hazard zone to set the missions in. Then, over time, it could get the 'incremental reconstruction' that will be going on in Boomtown (which is also dependent on art resources). Just as an aside, looking at the number of different levels you can see tram rail at in Boomtown, and the monolithic triangles used in Skyway to hide level changes in the tram traffic, the equivalent in Boomtown will be massive, unless there's a major rework of the tram path.

On the occasions when I do peek, and find an oddball build, if I'm feeling particularly curious, I might send a tell asking "That's an odd build you have; are you doing it as a personal challenge, or have you found something strange in the mechanics that you're exploring?" If they're doing it as a challenge, that's their choice, but if they've found something different to explore, learning about it expands my understanding of the game. And I certainly don't know everything there is to know about it...

I have a Psi/EM Blaster that I recreated from Live that I enjoy running ITFs with just to watch the mobs popping Unstoppable, see my teammates' damage numbers lose a digit, while she's "Unstoppable? Pfft. As if", continuing to dish out hundreds of points of damage a shot. And with Boost Range, it's amusing to be able to snipe two mobs out of a spawn before they realize they're being attacked and aggro (the 'See that dot?' range).

The original devs cheaped out, and only paid for the same transformation technology that the Salusians from the comic Ninja High School use to transform themselves into humans...

I have one file that I load at first play for all characters; it's a small file that does things like unmap mouse autorun and swap the default 'turn' and 'sideways' keys, and is only about ten lines in length; it establishes common binds for a uniform base UI. Anything beyond that is character-specific.

You can also do this for functionally mutually exclusive powers -- for example, I would never take both the Flight and Sorcery pools, so I can create a bind in my 'load for all characters' bindfile that does a powexecname for both Fly and Mystic Flight, and the key will toggle whichever of the two the character has, ignoring the other.

I don't know if the HC staff has the art people/tools to do it, but you make a good point that the body bag carry is already in the game, even if the first thing the Abominations do when they aggro is to throw the body bag on the ground. You'd still need animations for picking them up and setting them down, and have to decide how to handle multiple hostages, how to work with Beast Run carrying someone, and how it would work for nonhumaniform Kheldians, though. Having the base 'shoulder carry' gives a start, but I suspect that that part will be the smallest piece of making it work.

The CoT on the KR rooftops have been getting a bit of a scouring from a couple of my characters; it may be juvenile, but there's something hugely giggleworthy about watching CoT get turned into high-velocity projectiles when you drop Meteor on them. Although the Nemesis Jaegers come in a close second -- they don't fly as far or as fast, but watching them fly away from the impact with a cometary tail of fire is just as fun.

I'm not talking about the hostages you rescue in missions and have to lead out, although a position check frequency increase would probably benefit them, too. I'm talking about the civvies you rescue outside in the zones -- for example, in PI near Portal Corp southwest of the water tank, if you're in the air when you rescue a scientist there, he'll turn and run up the hill to the northwest, and run most of the way up to the top even if you land immediately.

You could argue that the "X Times the Victor" badges from the Katie Hannon Task Force were this before people got the tactics down well enough to routinely finish the final mission.