RikOz

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.

Just found this on YouTube today:

Yes, but they never show up when I need them :D

As an entirely solo player, I agree with this. I do get a bit frustrated, though, with advice that says, "use thus and such an ability on them", because not every AT/build has that ability. My favorite example is complaining about sappers, and getting the inevitable advice to "use electric armor!" I'm like, "yes, I know electric armor is effective for defending against sappers, but the character I'm currently playing does not have electric armor". But that's the challenge: figuring out how to counter various mobs/abilities with the AT/build I'm currently playing. And sometimes it means accepting the limitations of a particular power set and understanding that you're just not suited to certain situations. There's one hero alignment mission I avoid if I'm playing a particularly endurance-hungry character, like dark melee/dark armor. (The one where you have to rescue a Longbow agent from Arachnos. A mission consisting of ambush after ambush after ambush is futile when fighting a single spawn consumes more than 50% of your endurance, and you can't take time to rest and recover because the next ambush is coming immediately.)

In my experience, the groups that usually fail to appear in radio missions are whichever group for which I have a "defeat 50" mission.

Tried out Betty Beatdown: Caucasian, female, black hair, two ponytails, heavy black eye makeup, superhero, chainmail, war mace, no cape, steel breastplate, chainmail miniskirt, steel boots I tried to refine it further, but Bing started telling me it violated their terms and conditions. Specifically, after it generated this image, I inserted "red and white" in front of "breastplate", and that apparently did it. I tried changing "breastplate" to "chestplate" and then "cuirass", but no go. And it seems to have ignored my "no cape".

I just made a new one, that is possibly rather pointless, and mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. I used to occasionally run Ephram Sha's repeatable missions and choose the "Huge Inspiration" reward, and I started to notice that I received "Furious Rage" (damage) more often than anything else, with "Back in the Fight" (endurance) seemingly the next most common. And some seemed scarce as hen's teeth. It occurred to me that the different inspirations might be weighted differently in the RNG algorithm, but my sample size was too small for my observation to mean anything. So I started seriously farming. I mean, not non-stop farming; I just made a point of having my characters who happen to be running DA content do a round of four repeatable missions each time I logged them in, and keep track of which inspirations they were awarded. I kept track in a plain text file, but decided to stick the numbers into a spreadsheet ... because a pie chart would be fun. I'm currently up to 1,404 Huge inspirations collected and recorded (small margin of error, since I'm surely forgotten to record a few here and there). 1,404 is still small in the grand RNG scheme of things, but it partly confirmed my suspicions, and definitely shows a trend in how things are weighted. The damage insp is definitely out in front, but endurance is in third place, slightly behind health. I'm rather appalled that Liberate is the most rare, behind Ultimate.

Oh, I will, eventually. I'm currently at 140 alts, and I've slowed down a bit on rolling new ones while I focus on getting the existing ones to 50, and getting my existing 50s incarnated out :)

Used the Bing thing to try to recreate Flaminatrix, my fire/fire/fire blaster. I like this one the best so far: Prompts: athletic human female, long orange hair, entire body made of orange flame, superhero, shooting flames from hands It seemed to have trouble with "entire body made of orange flame" - one image showed a skinless body with detailed orange musculature. The "costume" I'm trying to show uses the "Spectrum" costume parts which, combined with her various flame auras, make her look like she is actually made out of fire. So I don't want an actual fabric costume showing. But I suspect I would need to specify "nude" in there, so that probably doesn't fly. I added "Caucasian" and "large goggles", and got this nice one: Added, "orange and red costume" and "flame insignia on chest": Decided to add "cel shaded" and "comic book", and wow, this one came up with almost the exact chest insignia she uses on her non-Spectrum costumes:

When I'm doing my 10th alignment mission, I try to leave a few mobs unpunched (if possible) until after I've completed the mission. Then I'll run around and punch the leftovers, and I'll often get that morality mission to drop before even exiting the alignment mission. This is easiest when you can complete the mission in a large room with several spawns, because you can often get to the final objective without aggroing the surrounding spawns. If that doesn't get the morality mission to drop, I'll just go ahead and do any alignment missions still in my log (they're gonna disappear anyway after completing the morality mission). Alternatively, if I don't have any alignment missions left, I'll do radio/paper missions until the tip drops. Both of these alternatives are superior, IMO, to just grabbing a mission from a contact, because story arc missions often stick you into non-combat, "go talk to this person" missions, or street-sweeping missions where the mobs are too far below your level to drop tips, which wastes time if you're specifically looking for a morality mission to drop.

I just have individual spreadsheets for the ATs I play, to keep track of which PS combos I've already used and avoid duplicates. Here's my brute sheet: I have spreadsheets for blasters, brutes, scrappers, sentinels and stalkers, the ATs I play most often. Some of them need a bit of updating to take into account some new PSs and some PS proliferation

That's actually a replacement font from a mod, "Font_Large_Comic_Book", available through City Mod Installer.

A computer I found in the Midnighter Club: Alrighty then.

Dorotea Dagger (DB/SR stalker) has made it to 50!

The same thing happens a lot with various melee "spinning" melee attacks (such as "Whirling Axe"), particularly if they're used as an opening attack. Like, run into a mob and hit that spinning AoE; no indication of hit or miss, no damage done.

Is that chest piece something new? I don't recognize it.

I took a closer look at the Icon Employee in my base, and now I'm freaked out: He looks like he's wearing a skin mask! AAAAAAAAAH! Perhaps he used to work for Facemakers.

It's the name of a low-level melee IO set.

Level 50 for the 39th time with Angry Mama Bear (SJ/Shield brute) Three latest costumes:

My latest villain ... Scuttlebutler! (Psi Melee/WP stalker) Bio: "You're right. I did it."

Meskhenet (Energy Blast/Regen sentinel) becomes my 38th level 50!

I try that next time I fight those guys with my SS/Invul brute.

A'ight, nothing too exciting about this one. I just had to make her after the name popped into my head at work. Many many years ago, MAD Magazine did a bunch of fake personal ads, one of which was: F4M: Striking woman seeks man who likes to be struck. So here's Striking Woman (War Mace/WP scrapper): The chest detail is supposed be a tattoo.

Well, he does have the peripheral vision-blocking shoulder pieces!