srmalloy

I have to admit that having one of the primary debuffs require hocking a lunger at your target is visually disturbing, but I've gone with it.

I made a Dark/Plant Blaster where I recolored all of the Dark Blast powers to green and black, treating the -ToHit effect as toxins in biological attacks messing with the target's coordination in order to get a coherent theme for the character, naming her Toksichniy Podlesok (Токсичный Подлесок, 'Toxic Undergrowth'). Same idea.

It requires eight Empyrean merits to make a Rare incarnate component, so that gives you an equivalent value. It seems to me, though, that a simpler solution would be to eliminate only shards -- bumping the chance of a thread drop by whatever percentage the 1-to-5 conversion rate from shards to threads would indicate is appropriate -- and leave the Notice of the Well awards as they are. Then you add two new conversion formulae to the incarnate window -- a straight-across conversion of a Notice into a Rare incarnate component of the player's choice, and a conversion of two Notices plus 150 threads to make a Very Rare incarnate component of the user's choice. The old shard-based recipes would remain for characters who still have shards. This eliminates having to change the code that awards Notices for TFs; the functionality for the two new conversions is entirely new code, aavoiding having to go into the old code to change things.

I'm pretty sure that the 'hair baked into the hat' design was set before beta to control clipping between the hat and the character's hair, since all the hats seem to be positioned properly for a bald head, whether or not the hat incorporates hair -- there are a lot of hair styles that would either require moving the hat upward or would clip nastily through the hat regardless of its position.

As I understand it, there are two 'diveable' locations -- the Cimerora cave end room with the crossed walkways, as you say, and a pool on the north side of Grandville outside the walls. Neither one provides anything useful you can do with them, but they're there.

Ahh, but then you don't have the flashy but pointless idle animation of flipping the 'chucks around your body that every single martial arts movie where one gets used seems to have to include. And that's ignoring the fact that nunchaku are a crap weapon; if you hit something with a stick, you have the momentum of the stick and your hand and arm behind it. Split it in half with a flexible joint in the middle, and when you hit something with it, the part that hits your target hits with half the impact and bounces away; you can't put your strength behind it the way you can with a single stick. And you have to be careful not to hit yourself as you swing it.

There was a study some years ago - done in jest, but the results are real - of tinfoil hats that showed (for all you conspiracy theorists) that tinfoil hats actually increased signal reception in two bands reserved by the federal government

There are a number of similar buildings across the zones -- Kings Row and Steel Canyon come to mind immediately. The only reason that the one in Peregrine Island is the de facto center for mass ToT activity is that, with a 50 leading each team in the league, anyone can join without having to worry about leveling out of the zone range and having to go elsewhere. It's not special, just enormously more convenient than having to make sure all the league's team leaders are in the zone range and change them when they level out of it -- an artifact of the constraints on level and ToTing by zone.

Much more noticeable... as long as they're spread out; in the kaleidoscope of other effects on a team interspersed with NPC mobs? Not so much. I've got screenshots where you can barely tell the heroes from the NPCs in the glare of all the SFX; adding more visual tinsel to the characters isn't going to make it easier to spot the mezzed ones. The suggestion of making the HP bar in the team window change color is going to be much easier to make out during a fight.

It's not an exception -- they're named differently, which is the determinant. The former is "Luck of the Gambler: Recharge Speed", and the latter is "Huge Recharge Bonus". Another example, from the wiki: Blood Mandate has amongst its set bonuses both a "Small Increased Fire/Cold/AoE Def Bonus" and a "Huge Increased AoE/Fire/Cold Def Bonus". Both of these provide 1.88% to Fire and Cold defense; however, since they have different names, they are separately subject to the Law of Fives, and a character can slot this set up to five times and get both copies of the 1.88% bonus up to five times each (assuming no other sets with the same bonuses).

There was a bug, fixed fairly quickly after the release of the Titan Weapons powerset, where the weapons didn't scale to the character, which fo a time allowed small characters to wield absurdly big weapons.

I've also seen them going for the sewer entrance NE of the hospital in Skyway.

I would think that it could be done by adding "Symbols" as a category to the Back Options group, using the existing attachment point for backpacks and wings, since either of these would interfere with a symbol on the back, and you wouldn't have both. But that's just 'where does it hook to the costume'; there would still need to be the code changes to render them on the back.

And this nudged my memory, turning up an old Phil Foglio cartoon:

As far as I can tell, you can only have one 'event' happening in a zone at a time. I've seen it in Skyway when a team finished the penultimate mission of a Synapse TF, exiting back into the zone to find a zombie invasion, and Babbage never spawned. I don't know if they 'stack up' or not, but I've been ToTing in Kallisti Wharf several times during a banner event and had a zombie invasion pop up within seconds of the banner event ending.

There is a tree growing out of the brickwork wall on the east side of the university complex in Steel Canyon:

With the original (and current) Paladin event, it was fairly common to see three Paladins standing around in the park behind the building that the Shining Stars were held hostage in front of. Eventually the devs put a despawn timer on the Paladins so they would go away if no one defeated them; I remember playing 'tickle the dragon' with my Blasters before that to aggro a Paladin up out of the park and train him north to where the police drones at the road to Galaxy City would frag him.

Tell that to the Longbow Cataphract Essence or Banished Pantheon Ravager Essence standing on the portal. I ran into that situation the other day, and there was physically no way for me to click on the portal because it was inside the lore pet. It took another character zoning in with one of the big lore pets pushing the Cataphract out of the way for me to be able to click on the portal. The change the HC staff made to remove the collision box from the various portals makes a lot of things easier, but it allows a portal to be completely obstructed.

Put in a Celerity:+Stealth IO, and now you have stealth you can't turn off. Also, it's an auto power, so any IO with end reduction is wasted, which makes a third to two-thirds of the sets either worthless or inferior to slotting a regular Run Speed or Flight Speed enhancement. This appears to be a disguised way of asking for an additional place to slot the BotZ knockback protection and WG slow protection for Electric Armor characters.

An idle thought I had the last time I was cruising through Atlas Park -- it obviously can't be done for this year, but there are two big cauldrons full of candy on the east and west sides of the central plaza. It would give them a bit of a 'treat' flavor if you could click on a cauldron and (on, say, a five or ten minute timer) get a random small inspiration.

They're broken even more than that. On the missions where you have to save several items, they're always stacked at different 'depths' on the map. So you enter the mission, proceed until you find the first item you have to save, and defend it, then move deeper into the map to find the next, and clear the mobs around it... then the ambushes coming to attack it don't show up, because they spawn at the mission entrance and get 'distracted' by the first item you saved, destroying it before either heading in further or just milling around aimlessly. The items you have to protect need to vanish after you successfully defend them so they don't screw up the AI of subsequent spawns (figuring that doing that is simpler than reworking the mob AI).

The declaration from the devs, IIRC, was that with two animated 'capes' it couldn't be done with the existing cape code. But since you can have a regular cape and the Tech Knight belt with the buttcape option, having two flapping cloth bits isn't the restriction, so I would guess that there isn't an attachment point on the character models for the front cloth, but it should be possible to work with the existing model for the Tech Knight belt to make something like the fore-and-aft sashes work. I don't know how the costume rigging works, so it's just a guess, though.

The double moon was, I think, an attempt by the devs to account for the visual illusion of the Moon being bigger when it is close to the horizon, except that it didn't work well, but was left as is because fixing it was so low on the priority list. That the Moon is still much larger than it should be was concerning enough that I bothered to do the math to check whether it was close enough to be within the Roche limit (which I also did for Voss in SWTOR... yes, I'm a geek).

The moon has been rising South by West and setting North by East in all the zones for as long as I can remember all the way back into Live. What's equally disturbing is that, despite orbiting at right angles to the ecliptic, it's still always full. After I tried asking the devs about it, I decided to handwave it as fallout from the Rikti invasion -- the portal they sent their ships through warped the moon's orbit to what it is now. And for those who don't recognize the directions I used, they come from the 32 points of the compass (north, north by east, north northeast, northeast by north, northeast, northeast by east, east northeast, east by north, east, etc.), and being able to 'box the compass' (recite all the points in order) was a skill expected of a sailor. Yet another of the odd bits of knowledge I've acquired over the years. (And if you think that's a lot, for fine measuring there were quarter-points, and back in the Age of Sail a sailor would be expected to know all 128 of them.)

I have the same problem with Heather Townsend while doing her arc as a Flashback; the interface opens, but nothing will sell.