RikOz

You've reminded me of another thing I was wondering: Are all those generators and computers actually necessary, in HC, to power everything? Because that stuff takes up a lot of space. My one small base is more or less what you described, it has one medium-sized room off of the entrance room that holds everything I need. Part of the space savings comes from it being the base for my villains, and so it really only needs one teleporter to cover the redside zones. My blueside bases all need at least three. I've also figured out that I really don't need so many salvage racks. I've realized that I almost never use them. My characters store rare salvage in their own personal vault space and just vendor all their common/uncommon salvage. So one thing I can do to make downsizing easier is sell off all of the salvage in the racks. Then the only items I actually have to move before deleting/shrinking the room are my inspiration storage units. Everything else can just be deleted and then replaced in the new, smaller space.

Heh. I have similar complaints about the random nature of scrappers' "critical strike" ability. My scrappers seem to roll the big crits when their opponents are already one hit away from defeat anyway. So many of those crits just seem wasted, when they would have been much more useful early in the fight. It's a large part of why I prefer brutes over scrappers.

Possibly the best positioning of a glowie I've ever encountered: I noticed, while fighting Warhulks with Fiery Melee, you can actually see the fire inside the glass bubble where the operator sits: I was trying to capture the above effect during an earlier fight, but he asploded just as the screenshot triggered. I thought the resulting capture was pretty spectacular, and regret that I hadn't gotten my UI out of the way beforehand:

I have four SGs, and of course a base for each one of them. There's nothing fancy about any of the bases; they're more or less "utilitarian" for my purposes, since I'm the only one who sees them. Alas, as time has passed, I've found I'm only really happy with the last one I built. The reason I'm happy with it is that it's ... compact. It's compact because I learned from my mistakes with the three previous bases. Simply put, I greatly overestimated how much space I was going to need in those first three bases, and so I'm stuck with multiple gigantic rooms that are mostly empty space, and stupidly long runs from one room to the next. My question is this: Is there any way to shrink a room without having to move everything out of it first?

I have two Psi Melee toons, a Psi/Elec scrapper, and a Psi/SR brute. The brute has turned out to be so much fun that she's my most recent alt to join the "over level 40 club" (only 12 out of 116 alts). She's a reroll from live, though in name only - on live she was a Fiery Melee/Regen brute that only made it to level 7. Though her lack of leveling on live probably had more to do with the fact that I rolled her not long before the shutdown announcement. Utterly love playing her, but, like any other psionic character, Banished Pantheon zombies are a challenge. No brain means psionics don't work well.

I'm up to 116 alts. I keep them sorted by level. That's easy to do - when a character levels up, I just move them up the list to join my other alts of the same level. The exceptions to this sorting method are two "concept" SGs I created, "The Extracurriculars" and "Solar Angels. There are 10 members of each SG, so each team fits on its own page in the list, and don't move. I keep all of the members of each SG at the same level (to represent them leveling up together). Extracurriculars are all currently at 37; Solar Angels are currently at 31. I have two other personal SGs - one blueside that is the catch-all SG for my heroes/vigilantes, and another redside for my villains/rogues. Several of my earliest alts (and most of my 50s) are members of a fifth SG, which is composed of members of another online community (though I think only two of us are still active players). Each alt handles their own "finances" for the most part, though my "main" will occasionally mail Inf off to help out other alts. I'll mail certain IO sets to my @Global that are most useful in a certain level range, once a character no longer needs it. For example, the flight IO set that grants stealth while flying is very useful for characters spending time in Founders Falls (damned snipers!), but not as useful outside of that zone, so an alt with that set, once they hit 40, will mail it off for the next level 30-39 alt to slot. My level 50s who no longer have a use for Catalysts will drop those in the mail for lower-level alts to make use of. I pretty much play entirely solo and so, with a few exceptions for "concept" reasons, I only play "DPS" ATs. In order of preference: brutes, blasters, scrappers, sentinels, stalkers. No masterminds - I've never liked "pet" classes in games, at least not those that summon crowds of pets. That goes all the way back to my playing a necromancer in Diablo 2 with a herd of skeletons. I think it's because I'm a bit claustrophobic, and get tense when my character is surrounded by a crowd (probably part of why I also don't enjoy team play). Anyway, my goal is to eventually have alts of every possible primary/secondary combination for those ATs I play. For this purpose, I have spreadsheets to keep track of which combos I've already used, to avoid duplication. My exceptions to my "DPS-only" rule are one tanker, a couple corruptors, and a dominator. My "Extracurriculars" SG originally included an Ill/FF (FF/Ill?) controller, which to date is the only character I've deleted. I discovered quickly that she was absolutely useless in solo play, at least at low levels. I mean, pick one: offense *or* defense, but not both at the same time.?

Scientific fact: Placing an ordinary chair in front of elevator doors will cause those exiting the elevator to be shifted into an alternate dimension.

Completely coincidental combination of NPC lines in Brickstown that made me chuckle: [NPC] Panhandler: Extra change? [NPC] Elda: I feel much safer with you guys around. (Elda was actually talking to a PPD Shell)

I think they have. I've now been on HC three times longer than I was on live, though, so I'm not always certain which lines have always been there. Is the 5th Column guy in IP saying, "I make this uniform look good!" new?

Vazhilok line I hadn't seen before: [NPC] Reaper: A pretty face, yes. But it's what's on the INSIDE that counts here!

Talk about brazen! This Skulls Girlfriend just completely ignored me while rifling that purse!

I love it - he has a similar color scheme to my elec/elec blaster, Fuseweld: (She also has the spine thing)

Alt #116! I heard a Spanish phrase that I realized would make a great pun name for a female villain. I'll leave it to you to translate and hopefully get the joke. Presenting my new Savage Melee/Willpower scrapper, "Playa del Mal"! Simple costume to start, as I do with all of my alts.

One of Bocor's missions, redside. Fighting "Duke" Mordrogar. As I approach him: "It is here! Soon we shall free its master! Nothing shall stop us!" As I fight him: "Feel the flames of Duke Mordrogar! Your pitiful powers are nothing to me! My flames shall not falter! You will burn! You will ALL burn!" After I've defeated him: "Oh. Whoah. Okay, I give up."

I like it when I find those spots with nice lighting: And sometimes, the NO-lighting:

I did that with my villain-turned-hero. Though I originally rolled her as a villain (both on live and for HC), her backstory said that she started out as a hero named "Blue Violet" (violet the flower, not violet the color), who worked together with her sister, "White Orchid". While I never actually designed that original hero costume, I imagine it being blue & white. As a villain, though, she altered her name to "Bruised Violet" and went with dark purple & black. When she eventually worked her way back to hero status, she discarded the "Violet" and renamed herself "Blue Celestina" (celestina is a blue flower that grows in the Dominican Republic, her country of birth) and returned to a mostly blue costume, with some black and white here and there.

Well, it used to be that belts were actually worn around the waist, because that's where the waistbands of pants were (hence the name, "waistband"). The "belt around the hips" is a more modern thing. If you look at Golden Age superheroes, and even some Silver Age characters, you'll see the higher belts.

I think some of these Council recruiters have been smoking something. Here's one behind a warehouse, trying to recruit some boxes: And these guys are busy haranguing some junk cars:

Mandy Manslapper is considering filing a trademark infringement suit against Malta for jacking her color scheme for their stupid robots. Or maybe, instead of slapping them with a lawsuit, she'll just slap them.

Goldbar has become my ninth level 50!

New song from Grailknights, with action figures!

Belated thanks for the responses! For some reason, I didn't get any notifications of replies :( I did spot a "sort of" gaming chair with fold-up arms while I was in Office Depot the other day, though they wanted $200 for it, which I don't have to spare at the moment. But I'm going to remember they have it and try to grab one when I can.

I got hit on by a cougar once, in a bar. She started giving me this "I know I'm a lot older than you ..." line, so I asked her how old she was. She was actually three years younger than me (45 to my then-48). Nice-looking woman, and clearly DTF, but I turned her down. She was too damned drunk.

Actual jetpack in action! (video included at the end of the article)

It didn't take me long, while leveling a villain, that the Rogue Isles are a terrible place for speedsters. I wasn't playing a speedster - I just looked at the layouts and realized that trying to play one there would really suck.