RikOz

Tried out the "Stylize" option on Openart.ai. Original image: A couple results:

So today I just inadvertently discovered that these doors in Perez Park function as base portals: They're all well out of range of being able to click on the actual portal over there.

Heh. The best joke/pun like this I've seen was the bad guys in the iZombie show working out of a funeral home called "Shady Plots".

Level 50 #48: Tabitha Target (Archery/Dark blaster) She's from Scotland.

Heh. I ran into that a couple of years ago. My screenshot software writes to PNG format with no apparent way to change that, and I was just cropping and uploading the PNGs. I ended up having to go through my entire upload history, download everything, convert everything to JPEG, and then reupload. Pain in the ass, but it sure recovered a lot of space.

Thanks, that must be it, since that was the mission. It's odd, though, that it came and went during the mission, and when I checked my buff/debuff icons, I didn't see it. And I've done that mission many times before, and don't recall seeing this visual effect.

Anybody know what the hell the green effect is on this character? She's an archery/darkness blaster, with no powers colored green. This effect seemed to appear randomly on her while in a Crey mission, and lingered after exiting. It didn't appear at all in the next Crey mission, though the second mission didn't have the more heavily-armored Crey mobs that appeared in the first mission. There are also no icons under my character meters that would explain this, as far as I can tell.

I'm getting better cityscape shots since I found a mod that removes the war walls.

Here I go again: Level 50 #47, Rayusha Razor (Claws/Willpower brute). She's from Ukraine. When I originally rolled her on Live, her name was Raisa, which I think was Gorbachev's wife's name, and the only female name from that part of the world that started with "R" that I could think of off the top of my head. When I rerolled her on HC, it occurred to me that "Raisa" was more of a Russian name, and I wanted a Ukrainian name, so I did a bit of "research" and found "Rayusha". I had a costume all ready to go for when she hit 50, but I think I designed it in 2019 when I originally rolled the character on HC, and didn't like it any more. So I made a new one.

I've never been able to get a look I like with those pants. But you've done a masterful job here!

Even more fun is one Indigo/Crimson mission where you have to turn something in to Indigo, and she has six paragraphs of stuff to tell you after the turn-in, but a Malta ambush, including a Sapper, shows up before you can finish reading it. So you have no choice but to dismiss the window and defend yourself, and once that window closes there's no going back to finish reading it. Anyway, my list. Some of these are petty, but they annoy me. In no particular order. Ignore the numbers. 5) Having to go through the entire respec process when all I want to do is drop one single power and replace it with a different one. This just happened to me today, after I came to the conclusion that my level 50 energy/energy sentinel really should have learned Tactics instead of Evasive Maneuvers. 4) Speaking of Energy Blast, I think I've finally figured out exactly how its "random" Knockback works. Is the target enemy standing over there? Your first attack will KB him out of range of your next attack. Is the target enemy all up in your face? Knockback? What knockback? 3) The inability at level 50 to just "deactivate" contacts. Like, why is Archmage Hellewise still sitting at the top of my contacts list at level 50? The amount of time I've wasted on my multitude of level 50s running off to First Ward to do nothing except a tutorial to learn how to use the Path of Shadows/Path of Light to hop between FW and NW, just to get her off the top of my contacts list. Or Belladonna Vetrano who wants me to play through Emperor Cole's Personal Story. Particularly annoying because I have no idea what that mission is wrapping up. Ideally, I love if they could just stop automatically adding FW/NW contacts to my list. I don't want to do FW/NW on every character. Then there's the 18 days of every-three-days autocompletes per character just to get Unai Kemen and Harvey Maylor off my list because I'm not interested in six separate "defeat 50" hunt missions. I like their story arcs and non-story missions. Once I'm done with those missions, I'm done with those contacts. And those PvP zone contacts that appear when the only reason I was in a PvP zone was to collect the exploration badges. 2) Fighting Freakshow on an open-world mission map on a scrapper. It's not the rezzing. It's the rezzing and then immediately running away. 1) Any open-world mission map where new enemies spawn in areas I have already cleared, and the mission is "defeat all". There are at least a couple of the "Hydra Man dimension" missions that do this, and I've seen it happen in certain mission that happen on that long narrow city block map. I'll include "patrolling mobs" that wander around some of these maps. I'm convinced they're deliberately placed into the map to make it less likely the "last mobs" markers will appear to help find that last hostage. The thing that makes me suspect this is that, when I'm lucky enough to actually spot these guys, they're in the fire escapes, not on the ground like every other mob. Or climbing trees. Because Hydra Men are clearly built for climbing trees. Bonus Annoyance: Missions that identify and target your main damage type. This is too consistent in certain missions to be coincidence/random chance. I first noticed this in many Devouring Earth missions. When I do these missions on a character that does smashing damage, the mission will be filled 90-100% with the plant monsters. Lethal damage? Rock monsters from one end of the map to another. Then I started noticing that, if I was doing a Council/Nemesis/Malta mission on a psychic damage character, the map would be stuffed with robots. Related to this is the number of DE missions I've done on stalkers and found the map to be full of those plant mobs that you can't target until they see you, so you have to de-stealth to trigger them unless you happen to have some sort of of non-targeted AoE thing to throw at them, like Caltrops.

Wat? No.

Thanks :) I don't precisely remember how I came up with that array of credentials; it involved some light "research", probably on Wikipedia.

Heh. One of my characters, "Heartbeat of America", is a cardiologist who gained electrical powers after a bizarre defibrillator accident.

I'm curious as to why the character model is censored in a couple of those screenshots.

Kinetic Keisha (Kinetic Melee/Regeneration scrapper) has reached 50! Had some fun with the "double cape".

I did something similar with a fire/fire scrapper of mine. He's a character who has a bit of 1960s psychedelic vibe. Alas, I can't really show the effects with a screenshot of the character himself, as what I did was apply multiple colors directly to his powers so that every fiery power uses a different color combination. Like so: So when he's fighting, he produces a riot of color.

4th member of The Extracurriculars, and 44th overall level 50, Energy Ellie (Energy Blast/Mental Manipulation blaster)

Honestly, TW's animations are such that there ought to be bisected enemies all over the floor.

Another new level 50 (#43)! To celebrate, Beatriz Brasil (Staff/Bio scrapper) is all dressed up for Carnivale!

Can't find it now, but I saw a photo of somebody's Thanksgiving lawn decoration. It was an inflatable Santa lying on its side, with an inflatable turkey sitting on it and holding a sign that read, "Wait your turn, fat man!"

I've been engaging in some self-inflicted incarnate solo grinding. For my first several level 50s (who hit fifty 3-4 years ago), I just got them to T3 and decided that was good enough for me since I don't really do group content. So since I wasn't gonna bother with T4, I just converted all of their subsequent Empyrean Merits into Reward Merits, which I used to buy boosters to sell on the AH (those things were going for 1-million+ at the time). A few months ago I got the itch to actually get them to T4, but by that point they had enough veteran levels that future Emp Merit rewards were down to like 5 every three levels, and that wasn't gonna cut it to buy all of the Very Rare components. So I just started grinding the first two DA arcs (Heather and Mu'Vorkhan) every day to get the component rewards at the end.

The things that happen when you don't get the name you wanted. Get an idea for a villain named "White Devil". Unavailable. Notice that sentinels can take Storm Blast now, and that set includes a "Hailstones" power. So, in keeping with the devil theme, try the name "Hail Satan". Unavailable. *sigh* End up with "Hail Czar" (Storm Blast/Electric Armor sentinel):

Huh. Logged in a couple characters to re-read these set bonuses, as well as the "proc" IO in the Winter travel set, and am now completely baffled as to how I came to the conclusion I did. I was absolutely positive that at least one of those descriptions said it reduced the duration. That's it. My brain has officially stopped working.

I've no idea how doable this is, but ... I've been looking at the Slow Resistance granted by a couple of the Winter IO sets (and possibly some other sets that I can't think of right now), and have noticed that this "resistance" takes the form of "reduced duration". IMO, reduced duration is not especially helpful in this case. Reduced duration makes perfect sense for resistance to status effects like Hold, Immobilize, Sleep, etc. Effects that completely stop you from moving or, in every case except Immobilize, attacking or performing other actions. Slow, however, does not seem to be classed as a status effect. At least my characters who have a secondary PS toggle that protects against status effects don't seem to resist Slows any better than my characters without such protection. The reason I say Reduced Duration is unhelpful/useless against Slows is the fact that, when in a mission that has enemies with Slow attacks, those enemies appear one after another after another after another. In other words, having the Slow wear off faster is not at all helpful when the effect is almost immediately applied again by one of the mobs in the very next spawn you encounter. The best example of this is the Tsoo Blue Ink Men. Those guys are usually the majority of enemy mobs, often 2-3 per spawn. Not to mention that, in non-cave missions, spawns are typically so close together that the Slow effect, even when reduced in duration, does not have time to actually wear off before you encounter the next spawn. I would suggest that Slow Resistance would be much more useful if, rather than reducing duration, it would reduce the percentage by which the player is Slowed. The same way Damage Resistance reduces the amount of damage you take from an attack. And, particularly at level 50, where one encounters most of these Blue Ink Men, Slowing me still doesn't stop me from defeating every mob with two or three punches. Making the mission as a whole take twice as long is literally the only practical effect these Slows have. You can't even head-canon the idea that slowing the player down gives the bad guy more time to complete his dastardly deed, or at least make an escape, because (nearly) every every mission has you arriving "in the nick of time" anyway, regardless of how long it takes you to get there. Reducing duration is also useless against Slow effects like Caltrops, since the effect immediately ends when you move out of the caltrops' AoE anyway. I'll end by saying I do greatly appreciate the change from a few patches back that made it so the Blue Ink Men's Slow attack no longer stacks when hit with it multiple times.