srmalloy

Depends on the environmental effects. Anything that affects the zone is difficult -- the first couple of Winter Events back on Live, the lakes in Steel Canyon were frozen over, too, but that was dropped for later events. However, if you create effects for a zone that are applied to the characters in the zone, that's easier. See how entering Atlas Park during the Winter Event gets you the Snowstorm effect, and the Instant Snowstorm power. You could do the same thing to create a rain effect in the zone as a visual effect, but making the ground look wet would require a reload of the zone geometry, since the game's not set up to allow you to change textures on the fly, and it would be difficult to make that happen as changing weather.. As long as it's something that's applied to the character, it should be able to be done; if you want something that affects the way the zone appears, it's going to take a ton of work, and is better suited for a long-term change, such as replacing Atlas Park with the 'Winter Atlas Park' zone model.

Someone put up "[Inherent.Domination]" in chat, and I idly clicked on it to open the power description, and noticed this amusing bit: At the end of the description, it reads "gain resistance to status protection". Shouldn't this be "gain resistance to status effects"? Seems counterproductive as the description reads.

Sure. And rewrite every single power animation, movement animation, and idle animation in the game to accommodate the altered character model. As well as all the emotes. And the animations for being affected by powers, like knockback, holds, etc. And every single upper body costume part, as well as -- if that's added -- different gloves for each hand. Not to mention the powerset changes. You can't make a Titan Weapons/Shield Defense Scrapper now, because the character's left arm is occupied with the shield. But with multiple arms, that's no longer an obstacle, but then you've got every TW animation clipping against the Shield visuals, so the dual-wield and two-hand powersets need another set of animations to work with the Shield visuals.

Or mutated out of all recognition. I think that, had NCsoft been able to figure out a way to do it that didn't immediately kill the game due to player exodus, we'd be paying for 'special' individual costume pieces on a character-by-character basis, usable once, so if we wanted the same piece in multiple costumes for a character, we'd have to hit up the cash shop for each one (at least, judging from the way they -- and the other Asian companies running MMOs -- run the cash shops in other games, where the point is to milk players fast before they tire of the game and move on). However, if they'd been able to do that, it's also likely that the game wouldn't have been shut down. Still, that feels like a "we had to destroy the game in order to save it" scenario.

You can make the argument that it 'encourages' more tactical awareness to make all the players in a team keep track of the condition of their teammates; however, I see it as an underhanded effort to force 'trinity' team composition into the game, essentially requiring at least one team member to have an 'organic' rez power -- i.e., dedicated 'healers'.

See what happens if you don't have a properly-filled-out 27B/6?

I think that what the OP wants is an 'ablative' option for increasing TF difficulty -- where, if a team member goes down and either can't or isn't rezzed, they're done, either until the mission is done or kicked from the TF depending on the leader's choice of difficulty. Another way to go about it would be a 'cannot re-enter mission' option, although that would punish people with bad connections who DC.

If you have a choice between a blast powerset that does X amount of damage and a powerset that does the same amount of damage with the same End cost and activation times, but also heals a random teammate for some amount of damage, which one is objectively better? If you add functionality to a powerset, in order to keep it balanced against the other powersets, it's going to have to lose functionality elsewhere.

The two I remember off the top of my head are SE Steel Canyon at the door on the SE side of the big building where the zone 'floor' drops hugely, and Talos Island on the west side of the upper level near the theater.

Specifically, anchored debuffs remain active until the body of a defeated anchor mob vanishes. In the case of mobs that don't leave a body when defeated, like CoT spirits, the debuff shuts off immediately on defeat.

I've got a better idea. Before you ask for a huge buff to MoG, spend some time playing it in its original incarnation: 1. Heals you to 100% 2. Drops your HP to 10% of normal 3. Gives you high Resistance and Defense to all forms of damage except Psionics. Basically, the original form of MoG was "Make me hard to hit and damage, except for taking 10x damage from Psionics". MoG has already had the biggest drawbacks to it removed, and now you want to have the remaining drawbacks eliminated.

Feel free to download the game source code and rip out the code for incarnate shards yourself, then, if you're so adamant that they be eradicated from the game, or write in the additional functionality you want them to have.

And, to maintain balance, both the damage done and the healing provided would need to be significantly reduced, as you are basically rolling two powersets into one, creating a character with three powersets. We would immediately see whines about how badly nerfed the powerset was, because you were so gimped trying to solo with it because of the crap damage, and they were unwanted in teams because they didn't contribute enough in either damage or healing to justify having one on your team instead of a DPS or healing character.

Back on Live, only the Alpha slot was available to non-subscribers; having a currency not available to them which was used for the other incarnate enhancements isolated that effectively, and the conversion inequality emphasized the advantages of subscribing, and reduced the effect of people accumulating large amounts of shard-based rewards subscribing, quickly converting their stash to threads, and letting their subscription drop after they unlocked the higher incarnate slots, since a character didn't lose them if you unsubscribed -- you just wouldn't be able to upgrade them.

Threads have to drop faster than shards in order to have roughly the same acquisition rate for incarnate components, since everything is five times as expensive -- a common component is four shards, but twenty threads..

I would fire up Paragon Chat periodically, but I could never stay there for more than about fifteen minutes; it just felt like the zombified corpse of the game.

The problem is that this reverses a previous change that was made back on Live by players complaining that their minions were standing in damage patches and getting wiped out from it.

I won't swear to it, but I seem to remember that any effect that gets applied to the Engineer (aside from basic aggro trigger) will interrupt the FFG summons. But better than interrupting them is to confuse them, making the summoned FFG friendly, protecting you and your team.

The PORTALS themselves, on the other hand, are a good source of XP; back on Live, I would farm the six-portal room with any character that had a good hold -- lock down the portal, and it doesn't summon XP-free Behemoths.

Given his history, I don't want to be in the same county as Dr. Aeon's toaster if he's been fiddling with it; it's likely to explode without warning if you use the bagel setting or the like.

That's why I suggested having to select the character from a dropdown; making vault storage account-wide has a ton of problems associated with it, not the least of which is how many slots it should have. Making it a separate code block specific to the Vault Reserve isolates it from the base or salvage-window access.

Subject to the 18-object limit for base storage items. As an alternative, if the interface for the vault storage at the vault locations (i.e., not the one you can put in your base, or the one you access from the 'vault storage' tag on your Salvage window) were altered to have a dropdown for character name and allow you to access the vault storage for that character... It gives you access to all your alts' 'personal' storage and gives the vault locations a reason to be kept around besides having the PAP perm-costume vendor there.

Go over to the bar and get yourself a couple of Cement Mixers.

Throwing out for comment: With SOs being available starting at level 2, it makes the low-level IOs -- basically everything below 25 that isn't a global or proc -- significantly worse than SOs. Should the enhancement values for IOs be revised so that they start out more competitive against SOs when they become available at 12, scaling up more slowly with increasing level to the same percentages that level-50 IOs have now?

Actually, it would probably be a tiny bit of work to add the 50k to the end-of-mission reward you got when you went back to Coyote, before he sends you to AP, and similarly for redside and goldside.