srmalloy

Mystic Blast makes a decent single-slot power if you have a power pick you don't have a good choice for (i.e., nothing you can pick to use for a LotG mule), drop an Acc/Dam IO or HO into it and boost it to +5, then use it only when its powerup triggers. The only drawback is that it has a relatively slow animation, but with the augmented damage it's worth keeping as a fallback.

There are other cases where the draw distance priority for objects in the game are screwed up. One that's easy to see is the way the large sailboats are rendered. You can approach them fairly closely, and only a thin wedge of the luff from the foot to the head is visible: But if you keep getting closer, you hit a point where the server decides that it should render the whole sail, and suddenly the rest of the sail pops into existence: Some time ago here, and also back on Live, I submitted requests for the draw-distance settings for the sailboats to be looked at so you didn't have boats floating around with partial sails up, but it seems to be a sufficiently minor issue to not be addressed, like Paragon City's continuing violation of the IALA Maritime Buoyage Standard (but that's a different and particularly geeky failure on the original devs' part).

The star destroyers and TIE fighters were firing green blasts, the Rebel ships red blasts. The hand weapons are a different category; I think that it's "Legends" now, but there was a lore explanation that there were different grades of tibanna gas for blasters, and you got different bolt colors from different grades of gas, and the Empire didn't want to pay for all of its troops to fire the more expensive ammo when they were all expendable anyway.

The problem I see with having a shield automatically moving to your back when not in combat is that this would likely be a customization for the powers, not for the characters, since you are changing how the powers animate, which means that you'd have to have a 'stowed out of combat' customization option for each power in the set that normally puts your shield on your arm when active. And biostem's observation about how a click power would interact with this is another consideration.

And it's likely way too late to do anything about it this year even if it's considered a sufficiently big problem to warrant addressing, but putting down a block Group Fly suppression field at the murder motels could kill off the 'flying AFK Bots MM' crowd in the middle of the courtyard that I've seen so many complaints about, as the bots would all remain on the ground where they're continually vulnerable to attacks from the ToT mobs, and the AFK MM player could come back to find that their pets have been dead for an hour or more, and they haven't been getting any XP.

After repeatedly getting door missions across the street from it, I posted a suggestion to turn on ToTing in Dark Astoria so the murder motel there could be used to spread out the mobs at the Peregrine Island site. It wouldn't be as popular, since a) low-level characters would have to be able to make their way across an Incarnate-level zone to get there, and b) it's a fair distance away from the hospital, unlike the 'out the door and across the street' return from the PI hospital, so it would presumably be less heavily-swamped. But I don't know whether the HC staff will be doing it; I'll have to wait and see.

But he's late to the game...

And even within one choice of powersets, you can get radically different playstyles -- my Grav/Traps Controller plays completely different on teams than she does solo, because when solo she can take the time to lay down a minefield before Wormholing a spawn into it, with her Singularity grabbing any survivors, but on teams the "gotta go fast" fixation virtually eliminates any ability to take the time to set up 'thin the herd' minefields before the Scrappers and Brutes are wedged into the middle of a spawn.

I know; there are lots of people that just accept the default configuration for power customization. For myself, I always go in and tweak the colors for Ice and Cold to look more frigid (and somewhat more transparent in the process), just like I customize the powers for any character with a Radiation powerset to remove the utterly-wrong green color (which became the popularly-believed color of radiation because of its association with the color of the phosphor in radium-paint illuminated dials), replacing it with the proper blue color of Cherenkov glow. Similarly, I'll often adjust the colors for fire effects, using the black-body color distribution to shift the effects toward the blue end of the spectrum to represent hotter flames (I also joke about how, in Star Wars, you can see that the Imperial laser blasts are more powerful than the Rebellion laser blasts, because the Imperial blasts are green, while the Rebel ones are red).

And movement suppression in PvE seems to be an artifact of the original devs saying "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons", then changing it to "We won't make PvE changes purely for PvP reasons", then to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons", then stopped talking about it entirely as more PvP-centric changes spread back into PvE. The initial justification for movement suppression was to counter jousting, where you could queue up an attack, then boom past your target close enough for the attack to trigger, which because of network delay wouldn't happen until you were well past your target, and if your target only had melee attacks (or only short-ranged attacks, you would be out of range and they would be unable to attack back. And in the initial implementation for PvE, I can sort of understand it, even though it does run up hard against how superspeed is used in the genre. And movement suppression only changed how jousting was done in PvE, not eliminated it; I had a Katana/Regen Scrapper with Super Jump, and I got pretty good at attacking the Sky Raider Sky Skiffs by queueing up an attack, then jumping past them; Movement Suppression didn't abruptly halt his momentum, so he'd carry on the jump and land a fair distance away, wait for the suppression to fade, and repeat the process until the Sky Skiff went down. And with the sweeping "give every mob in the game a ranged attack" change, the original PvE justification is no longer there -- no matter what mob you're making a jousting run against, they've got a ranged attack that, with their response being entirely server-side, will be queued up for them to shoot back the moment you aggro them, so unless you one-shot them, you'll be taking return fire from them, and likely from their entire spawn. I don't see that there is any real remaining justification for movement suppression in PvE (I try to avoid PvP wherever possible, so I can't judge there); it's an artificial mechanic that I feel has outlived its original purpose.

And if you could get a properly-proportioned mini-mode, then it should be possible to do the same thing with the various mini-pets that use the same mechanism so you get normally-proportioned figures instead of Funko Pop knockoffs. I realize that using the existing body scale functions were the easy way to implement the mini-pets, which is why the pets that don't have a human rig (Kronos, GWW, etc., and even U'kon G'rai and Adamastor) look like shrunken versions of their full-size model and the others look like people with disproportionate dwarfism, but these are non-combat pets; they don't need rigging for a full range of animations.

This is what I did with Toksichniy Podlesok, a Dark/Plant blaster; I recolored all of her Dark powers to variations on black and green to suggest that she's firing various plant-based toxins at her targets, with the -ToHit being the effect of the toxins on the target over and above the direct damage.

From the wiki: /option_set DisableLoadingTips [0-1] should control it, but the option is reported in that wiki page to be nonfunctional.

And the visuals for the secondary effects? Cold attacks switched to fire that leave little 'frosty' halos around your targets? Water blasts with the radiation afterglow indicating the debuff? Psi blasts leaving their original 'dark' aftereffects?

That's feedback on the website. That you are having problems logging in may be a design fault with the website or a connection issue causing packet loss. In any event, it is not a bug in the game, which is what this subforum is for.

I'd bet it was a case of there being a fault when the background image was being transferred to your computer, so it had an error and automatically renderd as all black, and when you tried again this morning, the cache had expired, so it reloaded from the server.

Nahh... bureaucracy itself can be its own brand of eldritch horror that they can exploit to its fullest...

Remember, though, that the defense against resistance drain is Resistance, so a target with 90% resistance resists 90% of that -30, making it -3 Resistance.

And MMs have to be somewhat proactive about henchman control -- they're stupid enough to go in after the lab equipment and die in the blast.

This sounds as if it belongs in the 'Website Suggestions & Feedback' subforum.

You can see the effect for yourself. Take a blaster with Fly and go to AP, shoot a random solo Hellion, then fly off and note how fast your flight speed unsuppresses. Turn on Athletic Run, and do it again; your flight speed will be suppressed more severely and for a longer time than with Athletic Run off.

This is the room cluster often leading to an elevator where you have rooms to the left and right before the hallway turns left, with the right room having stairs curling back to a walkway over the hall to the left room, with the lower hallway making two right turns before a door to the right, then another right and a left turn? There's usually a spawn around the left turn, with another in the room to the right, and when you have hostages you need to rescue, they can spawn in the right room to the left of the stairs, and in the left room in the back left corner and/or on the elevated walk to your left, with another possible hostage position in the back left corner of the third room. The spawn locations are pretty standardized, and you get used to where you need to look.

Maurits C. Escher, of course...

A while back I discovered that there's actually a fourth level in the 'pool room' — from the entrance, go to the left side ramp to the lower level; when you go down the ramp into the main area, angle to your left, and you'll drop off the ramp, where you will be able to get under the ramp you were just on, where there is a '+' shaped area between the lower pools and under the walkways of that level. I found out about it when there was a lieutenant stuck down there as the last mob of a defeat all mission. Update: I happened to get the pool room on a Council map just now, and was able to screenshot the entrance to the real bottom level: And even more entertainingly, although it wasn't a 'defeat all' mission, I found a Council mob there, in this bottom area under the lower pool level:

Numina used to be much longer, back really early in the game when people would run the defeat [group] missions as a team, taking the whole team to the zone under the more-or-less mistaken premise that, as a group, you'd clear the defeat count faster -- which ignored the travel time. Of course, it did have the advantage of the old Faultline, so finding the Vahzilok there was enormously easier, but that's only one zone.