srmalloy

In the 'rescue the homeless people' mission you get around levels 6-9, what I generally try to do is clear the captors for each hostage, but stay far enough away from them (with stealth if I have it) as I go deeper into the sewer map until I clear the last room, then turn off any stealth and head back to the entrance, sweeping by each hostage as I go to trigger their follow logic. Depending on the map layout, I may be able to reach the entrance before the ambushes show up, or duck far enough into a side branch that they run past me without aggroing, but in any case, it's only one trip out, not three.

The early-game example of this being Lady Jane, who will happily run off and engage any CoT she sees after you rescue her and are trying to lead her to the chest.

'Loan' is both a noun and a verb -- the OED says that it has been used as a verb since about 1200AD -- so 'loaned' and 'lent' are equally correct in that case, although 'loan' as a verb has largely drifted out of British English. The only significant difference between the two is that 'loan' can't be used in figurative instances (i.e., "Friends, Romans, countrymen, loan me your ears' is improper).

Except for staying in the stance when you attack, this is the same bug I reported for using Upthrust from the Seismic Blast set when airborne; you complete the attack animation, but fall back into the combat stance and then fly around in that stance until you activate another power, turn off your flight power, or zone.

This would be a recurrence of the existing issue with how damage and resistance enhancement work -- if I'm remembering the original issue correctly, damage and resistance were the same stat, just applied differently, because there was no power that could enhance both damage and resistance. The exploit that turned up from this was slotting HOs that enhanced a slottable aspect of a power, but the other component of the HO would act as an enhancement even if it wasn't normally enhanceable.

I went a little differently, setting them up as popmenus: // Ice Storm Menu "Storm" { Title Ice Storm Option "Ice Storm &1" "powexecname Ice Storm" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation down:max Ice Storm" Option "Target &3" "powexeclocation target Ice Storm" } //------------------------------------------ // Blizzard Menu "Blizzard" { Title Blizzard Option "Blizzard &1" "powexecname Blizzard" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation down:max Blizzard" Option "Target &3" "powexeclocation target Blizzard" } So I create a macro for the popmenu -- "/macro Strm popmenu Storm", for example -- and then I can click or hit the key for the macro, and I get three options -- '1' works like the power does normally; I designate a location with a mouse click; '2' drops it centered on me (and straight down if I'm hovering over mobs); '3' drops it on my current target.

If there is to be a display of incarnate status in the character list, I would prefer to have something like a row of boxes with the header "A J I L D H", and the box in each column having a green background if the character has unlocked the slot, and a number in the box giving the tier of the boost equipped in that slot. If you wanted some additional chrome, make the background for the Alpha, Lore and Destiny different if there is a tier-3 or tier-4 boost equipped in those slots, so you'd be able to see at a glance which characters were at +1/+2/+3.

Perhaps, but if so, he didn't understand the mechanics, because he would have capped his debt long before he hit 62 defeats back-to-back.

That's why you make the badge for destroying X number of spawned portals (with the additional caveat that portals that despawn because the Communication Officer that spawned it is defeated don't count; you need to destroy it while the Comm Officer is still fighting; this may involve tricky coding, because the game isn't set up that way); you have to wait for the portal to spawn and then destroy it. Or make the badge for destroying some number of portal-spawned reinforcements, which would mean you'd want to keep the portal -- and its creating Communications Officer -- alive to hold the portal open so more reinforcements could arrive.

It's not really a zone geometry error, but in south Steel Canyon at [-3814.8 -0.0 2039.1], the pier supporting the E/W tram track right before it jogs north often has a spawn that appears in the concrete pier base; the spawn location needs to be shifted a bit so that there aren't mobs inside the pier:

When I saw that the HC total was 799, I had to load up the page and make the 800th vote...

That's a game engine artifact. If a mob has movement queued, and it gets stunned, the stun doesn't interrupt the movement, so they'll stagger off in the 'stunned' pose at whatever movement rate they normally use -- which, for the Crey tanks, is significant. I think that getting stunned should interrupt any queued action including movement, replacing it with the slow 'stagger' movement, but I suspect that changing the movement code for that would be an ugly dive into what is likely to be a pile of spaghetti code.

With the accidental change to the soapbox texture that various mobs stand on, and the winter event changing all thrown objects to presents (making some fights look like Santa's sleigh exploded overhead), it occurs to me that there's an opportunity to add some amusement to the event -- change the soapboxes out for presents. Since so many hero fights will leave discarded present boxes lying around, it's reasonable for NPCs to snag one if they need a box to stand on when orating.

'Venom Trap' for the one in the Poison set, perhaps, to avoid the redundancy of 'poison' in the name of a power in the Poison set, and to reflect that it's the one with a damage component.

Citadel even more so because of its "Independence Port! Talos Island! Independence Port! Talos Island!" mission location alternation, which made it a particularly nasty slog on Live back before the availability of Team Transporter, especially when the IP missions were in the southwest corner of IP. Reworking it so that the first couple of missions were in IP, then the next few in Talos, and the final missions are on Striga where the Council have a big presence, would be more coherent.

Actually, I find that by the time I'm ready to make my T3 Alpha, I'll have run a WST and have the eight shards (or four and a G'rai Matter, depending on the type) to be able to use them to make the T3, saving the Empyrean merits for the higher slots or the T4.

I had taken my Rad/Atomic Blaster to Eden to defeat enough Paragon Protectors to finish out her Infiltrator badge, and ran into a clear demonstration of a fundamental problem with Countess Crey's Revenant Hero Project. I was flying above a spawn, and sniped down the Paragon Protector in the spawn. The Medic in the spawn rezzed him, and he flew up after me. I blasted him down, and he fell back into the spawn... where a Geneticist rezzed him. He came up again, and was sent back down... and another Geneticist rezzed him. This went on and on, with the three rezzers always having one of them with their rez up. Eventually, the entire spawn disappeared, but not before I had gotten 62 defeats toward the Infiltrator badge from the one Paragon Protector. You have to admire their determination, if not their brains. I kept expecting the rezzers to do something like "Okay, Frank; you've had enough tries, you're done. Take the medi-port and go back to the lab." and stop rezzing him, but it took the entire spawn going away to stop it.

Doing the same thing with my Psi/EM Blaster, the ones that she doesn't one-shot seem to be all Rad or Psy, although most of them don't survive long enough to show which flavor they are. There is another bug that I've noticed with this character, and it appears to be a consequence of being too effective. Her Psionic Lance has a base range of 210 feet, and Boost Range adds about another 100 feet to that, but when she's attacking from just inside her max range when Boost Range is active, defeats don't count -- almost as if she's too far away to get credit, even though I see "You have defeated Paragon Protector" in the global window and "You hit Paragon Protector with your Psionic Lance for 1426.06 points of Psionic damage." in the Combat window.

Ummm... Lusca is a hexopus, with six tentacles, not eight; that would make the total 11, not 13. Also, the length of the fight is dependent on the team/league you have fighting; I was in a league of nine total heroes taking Lusca down this evening, and we almost spent more time waiting for it to resurface than on killing each tentacle. It would require special mechanics -- which is in itself an argument against it -- but if you're going to increase the merits you get for defeating Lusca, I'd prefer to have the game 'bank' two merits for each tentacle you help kill, with the merits you bank for the tentacles awarded if you help defeat the head. So if you got in at the start, and fought all six tentacles, you'd get 12 merits when you help defeat the head. You leave without helping defeat the head, and you get nothing. Join after two tentacles have been defeated, you only get 8 at final defeat. Wait until all six tentacles are down, then jump in and hit the head once (and I've seen people do just that), and you get nothing, just the XP fraction for the damage you did.

Seen in Pocket D=: [NPC] Dancer: I just love to dance. My body can't help but just move, you know? I like...do it for the endolphins. What a rush! That should be "endorphins", unless the point is to make the dancer out as being somewhat airheaded.

There is another reason why Babbage won't spawn, but it's not a regular enough occurrence to be coded around. If there is a zone-wide event like a zombie invasion or a Rikti assault, Babbage won't spawn.

Heard while standing around in Talos Island: [NPC] Van: Nice to hear about a task force on working in Steel Canyon. Makes me feel safer. The 'on working' feels as if it's either missing something or badly worded.

There's also the blueside mission in the blue tunnels where you encounter two Rikti, Stern and Krantz.

It depends on how the RNG works and how a program uses it to produce random numbers. For example, many system-level RNGs produce a pseudo-random 32-bit integer. One of the more common shortcuts used by coders unfamiliar with how RNGs work to get a limited random number range is to take the generated integer and MOD it to the range they want. This can inherently create bias. For example, if you have a RNG that creates a four-bit random integer from 0-15, and you use it to get a 0-9 number using MOD, you get the following results: RNG Result RNG Result 0 0 8 8 1 1 9 9 2 2 10 0 3 3 11 1 4 4 12 2 5 5 13 3 6 6 14 4 7 7 15 5 Note that 0-5 appears twice each in the result, while 6-9 only appear once each. Now, this is a very simplistic example, and one that would be guarded against by any decent RNG library, but it shows how not paying attention to the generation and subsequent calculation can distort the return.