ThunderCAP

Martial Arts Taunt paired with Shield still "growls" to me, the same happens probably with any other power (apart from Psy Melee, which changes the taunt, that was the only exception). It's growling like a Lion both with animation effect and sound effect, it's the same as if you choose Savage melee but it doesn't make sense. Why would all shield users roar? Cap.America doesn't roar ^^. From the quote it seems like you fixed an error to make it the "normal taunt" it should be, but I don't think that you choose a growling sound and cat animation as normal taunt, right?

In the beta I see the Shield Taunt still "growling" (both audio/visual animation) like Savage Taunt. I thought it was fixed instead, shouldn't that be related to the quote? I was waiting for this taunt to finally get a fix... so I can create a non-lion character with shield finally.

Oh finally you're linking BuildUP to cancelled animation issues. All clicky buffs, including Hasten, Rage, BuildUP, Aim, Conserve and similar stamina/regen/damage ones, cancel animations for very long, possibly for the duration of the buff (most time they do, rarely they don't). I tried to report this several times in several different forms for a couple of years (while I tried to understand it further, so I wasn't as certain one year ago as I'm now instead, several characters/tests later). There are some rare powers/attacks that are not affected by the bug, but the majority are. It doesn't matter how or when you click them, if you use your mouse or an automatic macro or the green circle auto-spamming them, or if you're standing still or running or attacking, when those buffs activate you will have something like a 75% chance to stop getting animations (not sure about ranged, but I checked the melee ones with different chars and with friends too, the latter didn't notice till I made them notice they were playing without animations here and there... people nowaday concentrate far too much on big numbers and math and the skills-bar... it's one of the reasons I can find for this huge bug to get ignored for so long by the community). This huge bug goes unnoticed for several reasons. First there are many peoples that concentrate more on damage numbers and skill-bar than actually watching the animation of the character, peoples who blindly click the attacks and watch the screen, the character movements, are fewer that you may think. My own friends noticed the bug only after i told them about it just cause of those reasons. Another reason is that your character was entirely fine and animated till about level 30 (now 25 after the latest updates) cause BuildUP/Conserve powers are not available at low levels so it gets vastly ignored (most people keep creating new characters, which are well animated till then). For testing reasons you may want to use a Super Strength tank and activate Rage all the time, you will see the majority of time you're creating air-explosion but not actually punching anything, it's like you make peoples explode with your mind. There are some attacks that are immune to this bug, for example in Super Strength while the old animations are always affected, the new ones are not (never, immune to the bug). The pool powers are affected too, some sets are more affected than others, but the majority of the attacks have the animation cancelled by BuildUP and similar, if you want to test it I suggest using Super Strength and putting the old animations or use a pool power attack or a mastery attack (you will see it shoots lasers/lightning etc. with no body animation).

Forcing low-level attacks (tier 1-2) to be taken (and spammed) in all sentinels builds is a bad idea and it always was. We just got that removed from tanks and you want them back to sentinels. I'd say to devs to just make the inherent passive as it should be. Enough with these clicky and bugged buffs, more so if they are weak and not worth the constant visual distraction from the action. Bugged, cause if you use auto-macros to activate them it will affect your animations for several seconds, randomly not going out, that's tested from me several times and reported several times (rage, energize, build up, hasten, all of the clicky buffs cause that when activated by macros), so macros are not an option to transform into "passive" things that should simply be passive from the get go. There were some other developers in the past that said something like: "if something is meant to be passive, just make it passive". The players have enough strategy in the builds and positioning and rotations/vs/precision(conscious strategic attacks aimed with precision to some specific targets), no need to add fake layers that are just a distraction at best or annoying at worst.

Hi, Power customization files saved in the beta are not working on the live server, from yesterday (before they did). The file gets ignored in live, even if the game recognizes that the file exists when you try to rewrite upon it with the same name, but in the list there is none and you cannot load it. I managed to load one by doing a manual copy-paste of the file's content into another. Thank you.

This is Shadow Maul from Dark Melee. Same as Flurry and Sands of Mu. Can we please adjust this "effect's height" issue anytime in this century? Isn't that just a value to change (maybe copy the value from other powers effects height when flying)? I'd like to play Dark Melee with a flying character and here it is how it looks while hovering/flying, the effect is completely and evidently dislocated. Let's wait 500 views?

Marine, I just reported this on a different topic, it would be great if you also share your experience there (also the part where you noticed a difference with Savage Leap, which I didn't test, I saw a difference with Shield Charge instead, so your experience would be valuable and a real addition):

I think you fixed Spring Attack damage and in the process you broke its knockdown... making the power worse, it's very delayed now (not istant). You made Spring Attack do the damage-only at begin, then after a while the enemies fall (which is hilarious). I used it very often in the past as dash+"early-defense-knockdown"+taunt+DMGprocs for recharge based tanks/brutes (perfect for invulnerability dudes that are already recharge-based cause of DullPain, more so if you get Martial Arts or similiar sets which have an useless aoe of 8 radius so little that it gets 2 enemies at best for brutes, while Spring has a decent area even for Brutes -15 vs 8 radius- and it becomes a good initiator...). After this bug not anymore. HOW TO reproduce the bug It's very evident, and it's also very easy to test it. But If you want to clearly see the difference "before/now" you can create a character with both Shield Charge (that was mechanically identical) and Spring Attack, and you can test it even with low level enemies that you one-shot (no need to look for specific ones), since the difference is visible even then: Shield Charge will make the corpses knockback istantly with the damage, while Spring Attack will only do damage, the corpses will just fall on the ground where they are (since they're dead already they cannot be knockbacked anymore so late). REASONS to fix it 1) VISUALLY it loses all the "impact" feeling, instead of an human missile now it's like you miss the hit all the time, the knockdown has become a visual hindrance where enemies just faint after a while by themselves. 2) MECHANICALLY it loses the "defense" AND "movement" reasons to get the power. Spring Attack would need some more love already, but if you teleport in a pack of mobs and they still stand and shoot you all at once... you understand that it's like I slowly walked there and got shot by 40 mobs. (it depends on how fast the enemies are, but still..). So I think you fixed a bug that made Spring Attack lose much of his damage (not the main reason to use it, imho, just one of four and easily substituted by more damage in other powers) and you implemented a bug that's even worse and made even me (one of the few players that still used it) delete the power from my builds cause it lost all its utility-side. SOLUTION If for any reason you have troubles in fixing the bug that you just implemented, you may check the Shield Charge values, possibly copy/paste part of it into Spring Attack, since it's mechanically identical apart from damage, recharge time and animation. You may see in S.Charge how to put knockdown and damage both early but if you need to choose one, knockdown should come first and damage afterwards. Personal Note Please when you "fix" a power, test it afterwards at least once in game (this is a video-game not a board-game, animations are important and there are far too many powers with broken animations that make us skip entire sets till we feel forced to create that one character that doesn't have evident bugs, it heavily limits our customization possibilities which are the strong point of City of Heroes), this particular bug also breaks the power's gameplay so it should get even more priority, but there are also other visual bugs that I reported and are still there after years, Flurry's height while hovering for example and similar attack in dark melee).

Could this "less lag" have a chance to finally and completely resolve the animation/cancelling that's spreading like a sickness or is that related to specific powers and therefore it's a bug client/related?

Now a word about pools in general: the greatest minds or the experienced persons in a specific field (masters) are not common. That doesn't mine all pools, just public/massive ones. You don't take a random person to make a game, you take the person that mastered a specific field or a person that made you think he's got a great mind. The more public-pools you do to take decisions, the more errors you will make. It would be different if you only got experts in the pools or you use those only to receive more info/opinions. In fact pools should give you more info, but never take final decisions directly, that's for leaders or masters (which should also take responsibility for their final decisions because that changes and improves the decision it self). In this specific case, it's not completely bad cause I'd guess that most players would also be comics experts, and you're asking which word sounds better in a comics environment (superhero game), yet recently I think public-pools are getting overestimated by society so don't do the same error as the majority and be careful about that. More info: OK Direct Decisions: NOT OK Better if experts-only in most cases (not all).

Invisibility. I won't repeat the great reasons of who spoke before me, but I will add something for the stealth voters that seem to prefer it for its versatility, cause it's not, it's the less versatile of the two terms. Being stealthy is a way to reach the state of being invisible, invisibility is the goal for a ninja and doesn't matter if you reach it with cosmic powers (bend light), psionics (control other minds) or with training (being incredibly stealthy), invisibility is the final goal and the one that takes it all. Invisibility is a word that can be used for ninjas too, stealth instead seems an understatement for whoever already reached the invisibility state, in a way or another, granted or obtained by sweating. Batman: “Invisibility is a relative thing, Superman. All it takes is practice, and a matchless knowledge of the city.” —John Byrne’s Man Of Steel #3 As we know, Batman doesn't have any superpower and is sort of a ninja, but he is so good that can foul even Superman's senses (he constantly does that). The Invisible Woman (which can count on cosmic power and great training) is still not at the level to foul Superman, cause the cosmic power doesn't help at all against him and hers training is not enough alone. Being incredibly stealthy as Batman is the greatest invisibility you could ever achieve in fiction, there is no super hearing or telescopic/micro/thermal vision that can detect a person able to use your mind and habits against you (and he doesn't need psychic powers to enter your mind so there is no real counter, the only real one would be to reach his intelligence and training levels). The power in City of Heroes comes from the old Invisibility, it's not at "stealthy-only" level, it doesn't make you just good at not being detected, it makes you disappear completely (or very close to that), it gives you the same mastery as Batman or (less) the Invisible Woman. So whatever ninja in City of Heroes with that power would actually be so good at being stealthy that he reached the invisibility's state (to not be seen thanks to incredible training, or superhuman abilities). A simple (human) detective would be stealthy, but not invisible. A ninja would be invisible and take that power in City of Heroes. A powered-up person would be invisible (not just stealthy), and so in City of Heroes too.

My bad, apparently I was one-shotting dudes with half barrage even... it was just that causing the missing 2nd hit 😕 I didn't figure out I already had that much damage in the test server without enhancements.

I just edited my first post with some more info (the "Just in case:" part) and possibly improved the details in all the parts. I was using Electric Armor and a tanker with Energy Melee in both servers (public and test) with different customization colors.

In the public server you can see 4 numbers of damage when using barrage, in fact it hits 2 times and each time it does smash and energy damage, therefore for each hit you see 2 numbers (like all the rest of energy melee powers) with a total of 4 damage numbers for Barrage's usage. In the test server Barrage is doing less damage then Energy Punch (it shouldn't) and in fact it's doing only 1 hit, half of what it should do, and you can see only 2 numbers (1 smash and 1 energy) like all the other single attacks, while being instead a two-punches attack. I just tested on both servers and the difference is evident 4 numbers vs 2 numbers, and in the public server Barrage does more damage compared to Energy Punch while being lesser damage in the test server (I know Energy Punch got improved, but it should still do less damage then Barrage in total, plus the 2 hits problem remains also for impact effects and sounds, all should be double). Just in case: I was using Electric Armor and a tanker with Energy Melee in both servers (public and test) with different customization colors. Please let me know if you cannot reproduce the bug and need help or a proof, but I highly doubt it since it should be easy to spot that's doing just 1 hit instead of 2 (2 damage numbers instead of 4).