srmalloy

This will be useful for a side project I've been working on -- creating small popmenus for location powers, so that I can add macros to my characters that have them to make them a little faster to use. For example, the Rain of Fire popmenu gives you three choices -- '1' fires the power as normal, giving you the stock targeting marker, '2' toebombs it, locating it at 'down:max' (puts it at your feet if you're on the ground, or straight down if you're flying, such as working the monster wall in a Hami raid), and '3' centers it on your current target.

Given that the design predated the split from the 5th Column (Steel Valkyries), it wouldn't be original with the Council.

No single-target ranged attack, but every Blaster ancillary pool has an AoE attack: Cold Mastery: Ranged AoE slow Electric Master: Cone damage Fire Mastery: Location AoE Force Mastery: Targeted AoE Munitions Mastery: Sniper AoE

We shouldn't get hung up on foolish consistency. After all, the base portals to Echo:Galaxy City were removed because the base portals aren't capable of sending you across time, just space. Never mind that, when defeated, you can teleport to your base to rez from Cimerora or any of the Echo zones, then teleport back using the base entrance portal.

I don't think PEGI cares what the game has you gambling with; if it 'teaches gambling' it gets the PEGI-18 rating.

Now, if you'd just cut your slats for each wood from a single 8-inch-wide piece, you'd have had a much smaller amount of error, since the cuts to make the slats would have trimmed each one, and could have gotten it dead on with a tiny bit of edge plane work.

It would need to be added as a 'standard' channel with its own tab in the default chat configuration, and even then you'll have people who keep flogging requests for a farm in LFG because "nobody listens to the Farm channel", and if you don't make it part of the standard chat configuration, no one will use it because they don't know how to set it up, or again "nobody listens to the Farm channel".

What is more disturbing about the PEGI ratings is that they conceal more than they warn. One article (here) describes Overboard, which has PEGI-12 ratings for "Mild Violence, Suggestive Themes and Use of Alcohol" -- but because there is a scene where you can play blackjack with another character, the game gets a PEGI-18 rating for "Gambling", and the PEGI-12 ratings aren't displayed at all. A VSC Games Rating Board spokesman stated "The purpose of the descriptors is to explain the issues that led to the rating in question, rather than to highlight all content that’s present in a game, it’s inevitable that raising a rating will lead to the loss of any descriptors that relate to material that would have been acceptable at a lower rating." So potential buyers, or parents overseeing the games their children get, are denied information about the game because only the highest rating is displayed, even though one of the lesser ratings is one that they would be concerned about -- essentially deciding for everyone else that a single rating for one small aspect of a game is all anyone needs to concern themselves with.

There is a built-in formula for what enhancement values an IO gives, based on the stat type and the number of stats the IO boosts. If you have a Taunt/Recharge IO, each aspect gets 26.5% at level 50. Change it to a Taunt/Rech/End IO, and by the established formulas, each aspect gets 21.2% at level 50. No matter what you add it to, adding an enhancement aspect to an IO is going to reduce the enhancement value of each aspect of the IO. You'd do better by arguing for the creation of new Taunt sets that had EndRdx built into them, the same way that new Endurance Modification sets were added that had Damage built into the sets for powers that did both damage and endurance drain/transfer. That way you'd get the effects you want without affecting all the people who already have the existing taunt sets slotted.

Early on after the release of AE, it was possible to create missions with boss or higher mobs that didn't actually have any attacks -- you've probably seen the bug report post about Cimeroran Immunes Surgeons not giving XP; this was a change implemented because they have no attacks, so you could create an AE mission crammed full of Immunes Surgeons and blow through them with no more risk than having to work to overcome spawns full of healers (and if you had high enough DPS, particularly AoE DPS, this wasn't a problem). People started to advertise in chat for people to pad out teams to get the maximum-sized spawns for these missions, and the devs imposed keyword filters on chat to make any messages soliciting for these missions simply not appear, so the players started using euphemisms to get around the keyword filters. 'Meow mission' was one of those euphemisms. I'm just personally tired of the rampant star-ducking for it, where I'll see a dozen or more "LF DFB" or variations on it from different people, with no one stepping up and actually starting one, or the person who'll spam "LF DFB" every thirty seconds to a minute for fifteen minutes, when they'd likely have a full team quickly if they announced 'Forming DFB, send tell'.

Being able to apply filters to a channel for yourself would be nice -- for example, tell your client to ignore any messages in the LFG channel with 'farm' or 'DFB' -- but these should be strictly client-side, or we'll just get the same situation as back on Live before the devs stomped on the the various broken AE opponents, and tried to ban specific terms in chat, so we saw euphemisms like the "meow missions" pop up. Telling your client to hide messages is one thing; trying to get them eradicated everywhere is a lost cause.

This whole situation needs to be flushed.

The problem with a bind or macro is that the boss labels are different for each enemy group -- for Freakshow, it's 'Tank' or 'Super', except when it's a named boss like 'Killdozer'; for Council, it's 'Archon' (and named bosses virtually always have 'Archon' except for AVs); for Outcasts it's 'Lead', again except for named bosses; and so on for all the other groups. It's not viable to have all these different binds, when if we had something like "/target_rank_next boss" it wouldn't matter what enemy group you were fighting.

Having the arrows be poorly rendered is, at least for me, a much more miniscule problem with Archery/Trick Arrow/Tactical Arrow compared to the draw animations, where the arrow wobbling around while you hold it at full draw is exactly what you shouldn't be doing -- if your aim is shaking that much, you're either pulling too much draw weight, holding it too long, or over-tightening your bow arm muscles -- all of which are mistakes that a hero specializing in archery shouldn't be making. I would like to see the shake removed -- the animation time is fine, just stop waving your gear around -- particularly for the snipe.

Rather than be able to convert threads to Empyrean merits, which I recall was asked for back on Live as well, I would prefer to see a new aggregate item -- say, 'incarnate fabric' or 'incarnate mesh' to suggest something made up of threads -- that was a 100:1 conversion and could be mailed to your alts like emp merits.

It depends on the character; I'm finding that Translocation in Sorcery has a number of 'off label' uses that can be very fun. For example, the end ruined-office 'room' where you go up the stairs, turn right, go to the corner, left down the stairs, left again up the stairs, and a final left down stairs to the end room has a hole in the wall before the first stairs that you can teleport through, then pop off a T9 nuke.

You see it fairly often in the low-level missions, where the contacts seem to be pushing you into Perez Park -- I've seen missions for Hellions, CoT, and Skulls where the contact suggests that you can find your victims targets in Perez Park, but doesn't require that zone for defeating them.

Really? That happens to me fairly often, although I don't remember doing it for a 'defeat X [group]' mission that was part of a story arc -- a random street-sweep mission like "hit the streets and defeat a few Circle of Thorns. Anywhere you find them is good, but I recommend starting in Perez Park" will accumulate credit in door missions, but "defeat ten Council in Steel Canyon" won't; you have to be in the right zone to get credit, and door missions, even if the door is in the zone, don't count as being in the zone.

The speed and damage delivery of attacks is part of the power design. Proton Volley was designed as a limited Dot -- it delivers four pulses of damage across its duration. If the first pulse of damage doesn't defeat the target, they can attack back before all the damage is applied. There are other, more serious issues with how effects are applied to mobs that should be addressed before looking at damage application -- how Stun works is perhaps the biggest one. When you stun a mob, it doesn't interrupt any queued action -- and I have personally seen a mob I attacked get stunned, assuming the 'wobbling around' body animation as it dashed at high speed more than fifty feet, lept to the roof of a building, and disappeared from view, all while stunned. Stun should interrupt any queued action, replacing it with the "I'm stunned" stumble.

I've noticed that the 'last mob' indicator doesn't seem to update all that often, and when you move close enough to the mob's actual position to be able to see them, the game can draw the new mob position indicator without erasing the old one, and sometimes moving close to a 'historical' mob position indicator will erase that one and not draw a new one until you move some. So it's useful but annoying.

For me, it depends on the circumstances of combat and the travel power. I remember that, back on Live, I was able to navigate the little caverns (blue, brown, 5th/Council) with SS running; my twitch reflexes aren't that good any more. Indoors, SJ can usually be left on; SS and Flight can be more of a pain than a benefit with the way Suppression makes "How fast will I move?" such a crap game, but even when I leave them on, I'll drop them as soon as they become inconvenient during a fight.

At lower levels, before you get any sustains, quite often -- even Sprint, for some End hungry builds.

The 'new' version of the Paladin event -- with the Shining Stars being held captive and having to clear out the Psionic Brass Conduits before you could defeat the Paladin -- worked sort of half-assed; once it triggered, it ran fine, but it would only trigger once after a zone reset. Which meant that it happened once after the weekly server reboot, and then never again until the next reboot, or when a new instance of the zone was spawned. The GMs, if asked politely, could spawn KR2 for people wanting to get the badge, but that required someone to poke the server. They tried lowering the zone cap in KR to try to make extra instances easier to spawn without GM intervention, but that was still annoying to arrange. As a stopgap, instead of removing the event altogether, they put back the original Paladin event, which had years of functional testing ensuring that it worked. It's not as simple as the 'new' one, but it doesn't remove it entirely while a fix is being worked on.

The point they were making is that, at level 19, they received a level 30 recipe drop. Normally you don't get drops higher than your level unless you're in a team and SK'd to a higher level. Artillery is a 30-50 set, so it shouldn't be appearing in the drop tables at level 19.

Aaand... I've gone back and added pseudo-HTML <sarcasm> tags around my text for the people who don't recognize it. You lose an immense amount of flexibility when you can't use tone of voice to carry meaning, and have to whack them upside the head with visual clues.