srmalloy

For the third mission in Penelope Yin's task force, you go out to a cargo ship moored in the middle of the harbor north of Power Island and take a helicopter to the mission. If you use the Team Transporter power to carry your team to the mission, you're deposited atop the tail of the helicopter... standing in the circle of the spinning main rotor blades. This doesn't actually do anything to you, but it's disconcerting and feels wrong. Can the 'landing point' for Team Transporter be moved so that you arrive on the deck of the ship instead?

They're annoying, they're seen in several different factions, and they can appear scattered across various zones trying to ruin your day. Could we get a badge for defeating, say, 200 Snipers? These would include the Crey Special Agent Sharpshooter, Council Penumbra Elite Sharpshooter, and Nemesis Comets and Tirailleurs, and any other mobs with the Sniper flag.

Or 'doing a Fusionette', as I've watched her be suicidal in the 'Help Rikti Raid' mission from Levantera.

Heard in Pocket D: [NPC] Freakshow Raver: I love your knives. You know, you can use them on me later if ya want. [NPC] Knives of Artemis Raver: Right.

If you're only asking for this for the bulk-post/buy items, that's one thing, but can you tell me off the top of your head precisely which in the set "Positrons_Blast_C" is, and what the additional modifiers to the base name are for specifying whether it's a recipe or a crafted IO, and what level it is, and whether it is attuned? If you were in the game back on Live, and used the Sentinel+ program to archive your characters against the chance of restoring them, you'd see that the enhancement and its level occupy separate fields -- which makes parsing "item name" more complex, with the names being largely opaque to the user, all for the perceived benefit to you of being able to rapidly dump stuff into the AH.

Much more convenient -- after all, all you need to do is memorize the game internal name for every single possible item you could sell or buy, so that you don't accidentally post or bid on the wrong item. It makes things easier in the same vein as my joke about the new DoD password policy -- a minimum of 37 characters, with two lowercase, two uppercase, two special symbols, two numbers, two characters from each of four different Unicode character sets, no doubled characters permitted, and it can't be a password previously used by anyone in the DoD going back to the start of the requirement.

It's not really a typo per se, but it seems to me that some of the dialog doesn't really fit the NPCs saying it. From the "Save hacker from Tsoo" mission: [NPC] Tiger Enforcer: We gotta find this joker. [NPC] Dragon Enforcer: When we do, he'll be sorry. "Gotta" sounds more 'western street punk' than Oriental, and all of it together feels off. Of course, if this is all being pulled from random dialog files shared with different villain groups, there isn't much that can be done.

AR/EM, at least for me, works better; Boost Range gives you a chance to make Jack Emmert's laughable claim "Range is a Blaster's defense" more true (although it seems as if half the mobs have ranged attacks that outrange a Range Boosted snipe, which puts the lie to that claim), but it also gives you more standoff to make the base of your cones wider. And it's amusing to be able to snipe down two minions from "See that dot?" range before the rest of the spawn react -- the first one, they're just "Huh. Fred fell over", and they don't figure out that they're being shot at until you drop the second one. I remember back on Live being involved in an almost complete team wipe because of that; it was a mission full of Vahzilok, and we had a long corridor with two spawns of Abominations at the far end. I volunteered to pull using Snipe, and shot one; It went down. No reaction from the rest. I did it again; second Abomination down. The rest continued to stand around, fat, dumb, and happy. The tank on our team decided he didn't want to wait, and charged in, pulling aggro galore and proving that he didn't have enough Toxic protection... then the rest of them rolled over the rest of the team, and only us two Blasters in the back who bailed when the tank went down got down the elevator without a trip to the hospital.

Which is an example of how a seemingly minor change can have significant side effects. Assault Rifle is one of the most lackluster attack sets, but it had the distinction of being the only Blaster primary with a crashless nuke. All the other sets made you have to consider what you'd do to mitigate all of your toggles dropping when you used your nuke. AR, you hosed down a spawn with Full Auto, Flamethrower the survivors, then moved on to the next spawn. Now it's just another T9, and not a particularly good one, with its narrow cone and target limit.

I don't know if it's possible to add this to the "panicked NPC" code, but I would like to see the NPCs that you find running around frantically in missions, or during Rikti raids, zombie invasions, etc., have a check added to them to see if they're within (say) ten feet of a player character with the combat flag active, and if so, turn around and run away. It's severely annoying, particularly on melee characters, to be in the middle of a fight and have J. Random Civilian come running in out of nowhere and push you out of the way, continuing on with no acknowledgement of your existence, much less awareness that they just ran in front of a [insert attack here]. The civilians will already walk up to NPC villains, panic, and run away, so there is at least some miniscule awareness, but if it's possible I'd like to see them given enough awareness not to run into the middle of a firefight.

Ummm... That's not a passing breeze they're flapping in. Arachnos needs to change the menu in their cafeteria.

Ahh, but "2 defeat heroes" is fewer words than "2 heroes to defeat", and this is a mission from Efficiency Expert Pither, after all... 😉

It's also potentially the most painful, although it takes a combination of things you can't predict for it to be. When you cure one of the Lost, the other Lost in the same spawn will aggro on the newly-restored civilian, with all the mobs in the spawn with the same weapon firing together (if they have different weapons, the attacks are spread out due to different animation times). In the specific case where they all have shotguns, they all fire at the same time, and the game stacks up the shotgun blast sound effect for each shooter, which can be painfully sharp and loud with a big spawn. Incidentally, while it's a cheesy move for a hero, under the right circumstances, you can use the civilians to tank the Kraken -- curing one of the Lost near the Kraken will cause him to aggro on the civilian, diverting his attention until the civvie runs off.

They may have been overlevel when they finished; there are other arcs -- Stephanie Peebles in Striga is one, where if you're too high a level when you complete the last mission, you don't get the temp power normally awarded.

Without looking at the code, I'd guess that the ragdolling was a client-side function; if so, and limiting it could be done easily, then a "limit ragdolling" toggle could be dropped into the game options, so the people who want to see whole-body Linda Blair ripoffs can keep seeing them, while the ones who don't can dial it back.

Something I've noticed with defeated mobs is that they seem to, with a disturbing frequency, continue to ragdoll while lying on the ground, sometimes so much that they continue to ragdoll 'until the police transporter picks them up' (i.e., the body fades away). In many cases, this creates some disturbing visuals -- I've watched an Outcast lying on the ground do two complete 360° rotations of his upper body, and often see mobs' bodies folding up like a jacknife. Is it possible to put a timer on the ragdoll effect so that, once a mob's body hits the ground, it ceases to ragdoll after a second or two?

I have an Ice/Plant Blaster that is uncomfortable to play; she's got control out the wazoo, but it's like playing a Controller without Containment or the prospect of getting a pet at 32 to make up for the lack of intrinsic damage.

If you're doing a MO run and you don't know what the mechanics are, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing an MO run. The team leader, at least, should be familiar enough with the TF to make sure that the team can cover the requirements. As for handing out mission-limited temp powers, there are already several contacts who hand out temp powers for specific missions -- the flashbang grenades you get in KR to use against the Skulls, or the EMP Glove and Wave Scrambler you are given to test against the Clockwork -- that are taken back when you turn in the mission. Those are given only to the mission holder, though, so without a code change, to be able to revoke the temp powers from the entire team, either only the leader would get it, or the temp power would need to be issued on a real-time expiration basis to keep it limited to the TF.

I read your post, and had the 'Pink Panther' theme start playing in the back of my mind... "Pedant, pedant... pedant... pedant, pedant, pedant... pedant, pedaaaant..." Nearly had some coffee go down the wrong way. 😄

Something I did the other day just to see if it would work. Which it does, but it has to be almost the most inefficient use of powers available: DP Blaster shooting Cryo ammo to put out a fire.

I don't know where in the code it would go, but if you made a counter that incrememented every time they completed one of their own (non-AE) missions, and reset the counter on defeat, you could drive badges off the value of the counter as a way to encourage players to actually go out into Paragon City and complete missions. You would want to make TFs count as your missions regardless of who the leader was, which is probably an additional condition in the mission-completion code for incrementing the counter, so that you didn't discourage doing TFs for this.

I have Mids installed, but the "Click this DataLink" links fall over and die. When clicking on them, I get the expected "Open mids_build.mxd" prompt with Mids Reborn as the default choice, but when I accept this, I get the error "The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that is unavailable", with a file browse pointing to the folder where the install file was located. Selecting 'Browse' and picking the install file produces the error "The file xxxxxxx is not a valid installation package for the product MidsReborn" and then goes through three separate window closures to exit the attempt at import. Initially, I thought the problem might be that the installation file was "MRB Setup.msi", while the file dialog was looking for "MRB_setup.msi", but that shouldn't make a difference once the file was selected. Attempting to repair the installation failed; with 'MRB Setup.msi' not producing a UAC prompt requesting permission, and therefore failing for lack of rights. Uninstalling completely worked, then downloading a new copy of the MSI file and installing (default location) worked, and the program will open builds from my hard drive normally, as well as the 'copy and paste this text' block from builds in the forums, but still produced the same failure to recognize the installer as a valid install package when I try to click on the "Click this DataLink" links. Working a hunch, I uninstalled Mids Reborn once more and reinstalled it, selecting "Only for me" instead of 'for everyone" during the installation, and after starting up following installation, I clicked on a "Click on this DataLink" link in the forums, and the build opened correctly in Mids. Somewhere in the install for all users on the computer (not really needed, since I'm the only user), it fails to establish the proper setup to open the forum data links. It looks as if a workaround -- if you have more than one person using the computer with Mids Reborn -- is to make separate individual installs for each user, but I have not verified this.

The patron pools were also designed to be grossly similar to each other within an archetype, the intention being -- since it was originally a one-and-done choice for a character, with no way to change the pool you'd picked -- that the choice would be made for thematic or character-concept reasons, rather than a FotM pick of the 'best' pool.

Well, the brute-force way is to keep the separate thread and 'shard' drops, except make a 'shard' drop award a thread instead, and increase the chance of getting a 'shard' drop by a factor of five to match the relative value. This would mean that it's possible to occasionally get two threads at once as a drop, but it's a smaller code change than any other solution. Whether the devs go for replacing shards across the board -- and the shard-based recipes would still have to remain in the game because there will be people out there with shards in their inventory -- is out of my purview.

I disagree; the white text-input bar against the background of the account and password boxes is almost invisible; changing it to a color that contrasts better so that you can see which box has the focus would be a significant QoL improvement.