srmalloy

As far as I recall, back to when the Vanguard costume pieces were first made availabhle, the Vanguard jetpack back item was always entirely cosmetic; there was never an active jetpack power offered by the Vanguard, and I don't believe that there's any visible animation from the 'Vanguard Backpack with Jetpack' costume part when flying.

This is true only if you don't have a story arc open with them (the little yellow book icon in the screen shot the OP included). I've gotten new missions in the Clockwork Captive arc at level 25, well past the level range of the contact giving them. The story arc missions are all you get, but you should never have a contact go inactive with an open story arc.

The entry portal in Ouro can be used for 'board transit' missions -- it's common to use it for the last mission in Posi 1 because rezzing puts you back in Ouro right by the rear portal, letting you get back to the mission faster.

Is it any more a perverse incentive than the Defender inherent that gives them a greater endurance discount when their team is getting more heavily chewed up?

No -- you need to have a plan:

Other than 30-50 reward merits worth of Vanguard merits, sure.

That's why you took Vengeance, right? To get the maximum benefit from waxing your whole team?

Knives of Artemis, at least in Heather Townsend's arc in DA.

This is the same gross downside to the "Rain of Arrows" tier-9 in Archery before the HC devs tweaked it -- it was a location AoE with a long windup, so that by the time the time the arrows actually started landing, the fight had either moved out of the beaten zone or there weren't enough mobs still standing to be worth having used it on them.

The Seismic Blast power Upthrust can only be used on or near the ground. If you are on the ground, you slam your fist into the ground to start the blast; if you are hovering/flying close to the ground, you perform a foot stomp animation, recovering to a 'ready' stance. However, once you recover into that 'ready' stance, that remains your stance while flying until you activate a different attack or change zones, at which point your fly pose goes back to normal. Update: The bug is more serious than I'd previously seen. If you use Upthrust while flying, you assume a 'ready' stance, and your movement leaves you in that stance, unlike the normal Fly or Hover poses. However, if you turn off your flight, you drop to the ground, but remain in the same flying 'ready' stance, and you do not run, but skate along the ground in that pose.

Which may have contributed a tiny bit to the way "City of Hero" died in the Korean market, since the game doesn't allow you to use Unicode characters in character names, unlike chat, which supports Unicode. So while Korean players would have been able to chat in Korean, they would have had to use ASCII for the character names.

I imagine that rain in the regular city zones would be a "most/all zones" at once thing, because of the way weather tends to work, which might be an excessive load on the servers and clients; my preference would be to use it for 'atmosphere' in instanced missions -- primarily outdoor missions, but I could see the occasional winter mission where there would be snow in a warehouse or office map. Or special cases, like the rooms in the Frostfire mission where you have the ice slides or Frostfire himself.

They figured it out for indoors, as you can see by entering the tailor, hospital, or City Hall in Atlas Park; however, you still get snowed on if you're inside the wall leading to the Hollows, so it may just be an issue of not wanting to go through and do all the fiddly work to define exclusion areas.

Seen in Kings Row: [NPC] Skulls Girlfriend: You give me good reason why I should stay. [NPC] Gravedigger Slugger: Whaaat?? The Skulls Girlfriend dialog doesn't read right; it sounds as if it should be "You give me one good reason why I should stay."

With the winter event rolling around again, it occurred to me that it should be possible to have it rain in CoH the same way that the game makes it snow. Instant Snowstorm creates a visual snowfall around the character; this same visual effect can be set on a zone, as we see in Atlas Park during the winter event, where each character that enters gets the effect while they are outside. If a visual effect were created to display rain around a character, then it should be possible to apply this effect on characters in a zone or outdoor instanced mission to make it appear as if it's raining. It's not a wholesale fix -- it doesn't make the ground wet, for example -- but it would give a low-overhead way to simulate rain in the game.

I noticed something odd while grabbing presents. I had Build Snow Beast in tray 1, slot 8, and slot 7 was empty. When I opened a present and received Build Snow Beast again, the icon for the power moved to slot 7 -- the power was granted, and put in the first open slot, but because the power was already slotted in that tray, it was removed from its previous position. It's a bit of an edge case -- if I'd had Build Snow Beast in any of my other trays, it would not have been removed when I received it again, but having newly-awarded powers 'move' the power icon in your trays should be something to be avoided.

Isn't that the PnP Champions RPG?

You've always wanted to use the font Flyspeck 3 in an application, haven't you? 😉

You should take a look at the CDs of Solstice carols produced by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society -- "A Very Scary Solstice" and "An even Scarier Solstice". You should be able to find most of the individual songs on YouTube -- "Death to the World", "Awake, Ye Scary Great Old Ones", and others.

Throwing presents was a feature of the Winter Event back on Live for a couple of years before the shutdown, but I agree that spawning with it on their shoulder is a bug.

Ever since "absorb" was added as an ability which is boosted by Healing enhancements, the name was changed to reflect that they affect both types of effects.

There was a trick I used to do with floppy disks that had started reporting media errors -- you carefully pop the 'welds' along one side of the outer case , then open it and slide out the actual floppy media, then glue it back closed and print a label for the 'empty' disk identifying it as "InVisiCalc -- the first totally transparent spreadsheet program!" (which dates me horribly; for those who don't remember 40-year-old software, 'VisiCalc' was a spreadsheet program release in 1979 for the Apple ][ that died almost overnight in the market with the release of Lotus 1-2-3 in 1983).

I think the backslash key ("\") brings up the Menu dropdown, and then 'K' opens the costume window, so you can see (and pick) your costumes.

I'm not sure that a water park is needed -- if the HC development team can tweak the innertube so that you can spawn it on snow and make it steerable (but not driveable; basically, you go downhill), you could set up a new set of badges for the downhill runs for the snowtubers.

In quite a few of the missions against the Council, it appears that the determination of the mission boss' rank in the Council is being generated more than once -- once for the mission definition, and once for the NPC name. When this happens, you'll wind up with a mission where the mission text tells you to defeat, say, "Archon Archon bossname" -- I have one from Lorenzo DiCosta, "Defeat Archon Archon Ippolita and his crew". It's only the mission bosses, and is any doubling of 'Archon' and 'Adjutant' -- 'Archon Archon', 'Adjutant Archon'. 'Archon Adjutant', or 'Adjutant Adjutant'.