RikOz

Okay, that's creepy :D

I've been bitching about this for a couple of years now. It started after one particular patch/Issue/Page, though at this point I cannot recall which, or precisely when. The first thing I actually noticed was that, all of a sudden, the snipers were suddenly spawning nearly 100% of the time with a Werfer Jaeger companion. You know, the other Nemesis mob that shoots poison gas bombs at you. Which event effectively wrecked the tactics I had come up with for dealing with snipers and their gas. (Stop advancing toward the sniper, wait for the gas attack, then move out of the cloud and continue advancing on the sniper. No longer effective when now the Werfer Jaeger just hits me with more gas as soon as I move.) The maps full of snipers are more recent; I just encountered that a few days ago. One map was all snipers until the last spawn before the named boss. The Werfer companions had decreased in frequency, though; I saw many more human minions. But this behavior isn't just confined to Anton Sampson's arc. I saw the same thing in Maxwell Cristopher's Nemesis arcs, and basically any Nemesis mission. I've seen that kind of thing elsewhere, but with damage types. For example, there is at least one Devouring Earth mission where, if I enter the mission on a character that does primarily lethal damage, 95% of the spawns are rock monsters, and if I enter the mission with a smashing character, it's 95% plant monsters. In both cases, the spawned mobs are particularly resistant to my damage type. Actually, I did encounter one mission that seemed to be modified by my AT. I did a DE mission on a stalker, and the map was 100% populated by those rooted plant monsters that don't move, and you can't attack them, until they see you. Brilliant! It seems to have been a recurring pattern with the original devs: almost entirely stop presenting the player with certain effects about the level they obtain a way to counter them. Like the way low-level CoT missions are just stuffed full of those demons with the -ToHit debuffs, but once you're a bit higher-level and can overcome those debuffs, the game stops bothering you with them, aside from the occasional BP Death Shaman or Tsoo Sorcerer. And notice that most of the toxic and psionic damage enemies appear at high levels, because most high-level characters are still quite vulnerable to those damage types. But I haven't played any stalkers recently, and am still seeing the overabundance of snipers.

Another of my older (character age-wise) heroes, Elektricheskiy Shok (Электрический шок) (Elec/Elec brute) Misha Yermakov gained his electrical powers after volunteering for a Soviet military experiment while he was in the army, in the late 1980s. After he completed special training, he was made part of an official team of Soviet super soldiers. After the USSR collapsed in 1991, Yermakov became a member of the Russian supergroup, "Valiant Defenders of the Motherland", where he adopted the codename "Elektricheskiy Shok" ("Electric Shock"). Eventually, Misha grew disillusioned with the direction Russia was going, and at age 50 he emigrated to the USA, where he continues to serve as a hero well into middle age. Aside from one costume with a brown trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat, worn over his old Soviet uniform, I've had him stick with the red & yellow of of the Soviet flag, which were the colors of his old uniform from the USSR--though he ditched the hammer & sickle chest emblem soon after arriving in the USA. But for this costume I've once again made use of the Blackwing pieces as well as some dark gray and bright blue, making this his most colorful costume and deviating from my usual preference for the classic 2-/3-color costume.

Okay, not technically a screenshot, but this was too good to not share:

Vidiotmaps just replaces the graphical map image. The various markers, like other players, NPCs, tram stations, special buildings, etc., are generated by the game itself. Vidiotmaps should not affect those at all.

Though the relevant mission takes place in an instanced version of the terrace (probably not the right word) in front of the building.

FAFO-Bot invites Sunderbot to ... FAFO!

From an ad in the back of a comic book?

Love the name :D

On the second screen, where you customize your powers. On the left, below the power lists. I imagine they put that there so that you can see the full-screen effect of powers, but it's also handy for screenshots.

Dr. Frances Solana (Mother Sun) when she's teaching biochemistry at Paragon University, and when she's conducting research in her lab: (Forgot to hide the UI on the second one, sorry)

How have I failed to notice the snow-capped mountains in the background until now?

I've started in on getting the members of one of my SGs, "Solar Angels" leveled to 50. This is a team I created on live, but didn't get the chance to level up before the shutdown. I immediately rerolled them for Homecoming, May 28, 2019, and my original intent was to keep them leveled together, so they were all at the same level (same thing I was doing with my other small SG, "The Extracurriculars". That eventually proved tedious, and I switched focus to getting other alts to 50 (49 so far!), and The Extracurriculars sat at 40 for a very long time, and the Solar Angels sat at 33 for an even longer time. When I got to them, I ditched the "keeping them leveled together thing. Team founder & leader, Mother Sun, is at 40 now, and earned her 9th costume slot, and where I was previously doing variations on the Valkyrie getup on her, I decided to go a different direction with this slot. So, Mother Sun, Rad Blast/Fiery Aura sentinel: She's a scientist who developed a super serum. In her civilian identity as Dr. Frances Solana, she's a frumpy, middle-aged woman, but when she takes the serum she turns into a radiation and fire-slinging hero. Initially, I had her grow to 8 feet tall, but I ditched that because being 8 feet tall and having those big Valkyrie wings made her feel unwieldy on many maps. So now she only grows to 6 feet.

Ever listen to a non-SouthernUS, non-professional singer sing a country song? They almost invariably do so with a wildly exaggerated Southern drawl. They're (usually) not mocking the genre, they simply think that's how it sounds. The same thing happens with people trying to imitate Geddy Lee, of Rush, who has a rather unique voice. The imitators end up over-enunciating every syllable and for some reason putting undue emphasis on every "ee" sound.

I'm not a programmer, so I'm pretty clueless, but I wonder if some new glitch has resulted in the player's location data being incorrectly propagated to the specific enemies in that room. Like, in my case at least, they didn't move until I actually attacked while standing less than ten feet from them in plain sight (close enough that they should have aggroed on me even without my attacking them), and then they made a literal beeline through the wall, which placed them in the hallway, where they apparently thought I was. I'll also note that this only happened with the mobs that were standing in the "main" part of the room. The mobs standing near the cubicles when you first enter the room reacted normally to my presence, it was only the mobs standing "around the corner" that flipped out.

Heh. Carnies (paraphrased): Carnie: That's not Captain Obvious, that's [playername]! Other Carnie: No duh, Captain Obvious.

I perhaps should have mentioned that I rolled this particular controller very shortly after Homecoming came online, so I didn't yet have the overall play experience that now allows me to look things over and plan ahead. (An example of how I've learned to plan ahead: Once I got some experience with getting exemped down in Ouro missions, all of my future alts started taking three attack powers ASAP--one at character creation, one at level 2 during the tutorial, and one more at the next power-selection level. And then taking Flight as soon as feasible. That lets me get exemped down to do Atlas Park mission-level, I'm not suddenly flightless and nearly powerless.) That controller was also a reroll of the only controller I rolled on live, where I didn't get to actually play her much before the game shut down. (I had the misfortune of discovering my all-time favorite game just a year or so before it shut down; I still managed to roll 93 alts in that time, but just ran out of time to actually level most of them, so many of them never even made it out of Atlas Park. I have since had a ton of fun with control tactics, but on an ice/rad blaster. Between her primary and secondary (and one epic pool power, I think), she has something like five different ways to completely lock down enemies.

I've been annoyed by this for years. Among my alts, I created a small, all-female SG called "Solar Angels". The leader represents the sun, and the other nine members each represent a planet in our solar system. They all have their respective planetary symbol on their chests ... except for Ms. Mars. Who is an actual Martian.

For me it's basically that I play entirely solo, and having to take a relatively ridiculous amount of time to defeat a single opponent just feels like a slog. Particularly when that enemy's friends are also beating on me and I have literally no defense, so half my time is spent running back from the hospital.

Oh yes, I deleted the one and only controller I've ever rolled by 5th level. FF/Illusion. With the limited number of powers at that level, I could attack, or I could defend, but not both at the same time. So I could turn on my personal forcefield, become completely untouchable, and then just stand there watching Hellions flail uselessly at me. Or I could turn it off and attack, and promptly get my ass handed to me. On the other hand, when I stop a mugging and that Outcast in Steel Canyon decides to leg it instead of fight, it kind of spoils my immersion when the victim continues to stand there cowering while the mugger is a hundred yards away and still going. What, scaring the mugger off isn't good enough? I have to chase him across the zone? Go on kid, he's gone. You're safe. Or rescuing CoT ritual victims in Perez. The victim will run off if you attack, but if you miss just one CoT, the victim will eventually wander back and resume being victimized.

Thanks, I saw that in a thread the other day and wondered, "What does that even mean?"

I always forget those mechanical prosthetic arms exist. I stumbled upon them and used them on one alt, and then apparently promptly forgot about them.

Ah, gotcha. I wasn't thinking of radio/paper missions in the same context as physical NPC contacts with repeatables.

I've noticed rather consistently, across all kinds of missions that, when two enemy NPCs are speaking, the "reply" consistently appears in the chat box before the "question". As to dialog appearing at inappropriate times respective to player/NPC positioning, I see a lot of instances of NPCs calling me out by name when they can't possibly know I'm there. One glaring example is the first mission in Mu'Vorkhan's DA arc. You enter a warehouse map, and you "hear" Scirocco calling your arrival "interesting", and Ice Mistral yelling for you to go away, she doesn't need your help. Except there's a giant garage door separating the entryway from the next room. In some missions I can rationalize the boss knowing I'm coming by just assuming one of the early minions managed to radio a warning before I punched him. But not the instant I walk in the front door and there's no line of sight on me.

Ah, so similar to my annoyance at constantly wasting attacks because my NPC "helper" keeps abandoning the guy he's fighting to run over and finish off my mob before my attack animation completes.