RikOz

I always find it hilarious when I KB an enemy through one of those sliding glass doors on an office map, and I can see the guy standing there glaring at me because he can't get to me because he doesn't know how to open the door 😄

Yeah, I had the motorcycle, but a new player won't have access to that.

I forgot to mention my inspiration for my main, who is a fire/fire blaster. I came to CoH (live) straight from WoW. In WoW, my two main characters were Eilyssana, a human female retribution paladin, and Svelexi, a draenei female fire mage. In games that give me the option, my first character is pretty much always a redheaded female. So when I created Flaminatrix, I made her a redhead and made her look as much like Eilysanna the paladin as I could. However, I don't think Titan Weapons was available yet, and I couldn't make her a 2-handed weapon melee character like my paladin (Katana wasn't quite the same concept), so I based her powers on those of my fire mage. Thus, her "inspiration" was a combination of my two main WoW characters.

Indeed. You had to be level 40 (out of 60) to access ground mounts in the early days of WoW. Flying mounts weren't introduced until the first expansion, and then you had to be level 70, but still couldn't fly in the pre-expansion zones (mostly because those zones were never designed with flight in mind, so would look terrible from the air) When I started playing in 2008, with the launch of the second expansion, ground mount access had been lowered to level 30. With the third expansion, ground mounts were lowered to level 20, you could now fly in the "old world" due to it being remodeled, but you still had to wait until 60 to fly. Those access levels remain at 20 and 60 to this day.

Yeah, I agree that picking a static door for each mission would be an unnecessary extra effort, given that, for the majority of missions, it ultimately doesn't matter which specific door on which specific building the mission happens in. For buildings, the only real reason I could see to specify a particular door would be those missions that name a specific company. Like, the DE are attacking a Yellow Rose Cosmetics office, and it makes sense that Yellow Rose's office isn't randomly moving around the city. But when the mission just mentions "an abandoned office", the mission could point to literally any "office building" in the zone, yet the same handful of buildings keep getting used while others are mostly ignored. For missions that are truly meant to be random, your idea of a list to choose from makes sense, but if that is being done in-game, it would seem that each mission is assigned, say, a "range" of door IDs to choose from, rather than the entire list of suitable doors, and whoever was selecting that range of IDs was being "lazy" and just kept selecting a few from the top of the list. I was recently working a villain through Sharkhead Isle missions, and became convinced that there is one, and only one cave entrance on that island, because literally every cave mission sent me to the same door. I did later confirm that there are multiple cave entrances, but that was by randomly seeing them while doing something else, not by being pointed to them by missions. If I were designing the system, I would set up each zone like so,: The "Forbidden" Doors: No mission maps can be accessed from certain, specific doors, unless the mission specifically involves the relevant building by name. This list would include the doors of City Hall, Icon, Hospital, AE, Vanguard HQ, Vault Reserve, or any building that counts as a Day Job location. Basically, any building that players can already enter freely without spawning an instance. This already seems to be the situation for these buildings/doors. Then, separate lists of doors by type: Office, Warehouse, Sewer, or Cave (door types, not map types, as "Office" doors can open into both "office" and "laboratory" maps, and "Cave" doors can open into any kind of cave/Oranbega map). Each of these lists would include every door of that type, except for those that appear on the "Forbidden" list, and upon mission acceptance, the game would randomly select a door from the entire list. If necessary, the list of available doors could then be limited by further exceptions. For example, in zones with a large level range, exclude doors that are in a part of the zone that is too high-level. So, say, don't send a level 10 hero to a door in Steel Canyon North where they're likely to be ganked by level 19 Outcasts or Tsoo as they approach the door. This is accomplished by the door IDs themselves including a code corresponding to their location's level range. Of course, there are some zones/doors that should be excluded from certain missions simply for logical reasons (like the mission that has the Clockwork attacking a recycling drive - nobody in their right mind would hold a recycling drive in an unsafe, collapsing building in Faultline or Boomtown, yet that mission has sent me to both of those zones) but that is outside of my original question. If these random missions are, indeed, supposed to be selecting a door from the complete list of appropriate door types, they there is probably a fault in the RNG algorithm that is resulting in some door IDs being ignored.

The 7- 8-year-old comments on that video are hilarious 😄

There's a popular WoW news/discussion site called Blizzard Watch. One of the main writers on the site is a guy named Matt Rossi. In 2013, Blizzard added a certain open-world boss to the game, and this boss's loot table included a set of epic plate shoulder armor named for Mr. Rossi: Rossi's Rosin-Soaked Shoulderplates. Rossi has been farming that boss, on multiple warrior characters, every week since, and last I heard, the item still hasn't dropped for him.

Very few of my characters are directly inspired by any specific superhero, and sadly, my all-time favorite, Green Lantern, can't really be implemented anyway. Costume-wise, though, my comic fandom starts way back, and so the roots of most of my costume ideas start with the classic "tights". That's just what I see in my head when I think "superhero". My toons will make modifications as they level, represented in the different costume slots, but almost all of them have that "tights" costume sitting in the 1st or 2nd slot. Usually the 2nd slot, because the 1st slot is usually an "improvised" costume, homemade for when the character is first starting out. Then they get their professionally-made tights as soon as they have the "resources" (in RP headcanon, anyway) to replace the homemade suit. Thereafter, as they gain more resources and experience modifications are made. As far as "concept", many of my characters start with inspiration from some non-superhero source, maybe from some other entertainment source, or maybe even from some random "joke" thought I have, and then my brain starts thinking about how I can translate that into "superhero". Two of my characters, for example, were inspired by TV shows I like. One is inspired by "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend", resulting in "Creyzee Ex", who is a former Crey employee, originally designed to look exactly like those martial arts-using, short-skirted, female Crey mobs. She was fired by Crey after claiming to be the Countess's lover (which, of course, the Countess denies). Another favorite show is "iZombie", so I rolled up eZombie - an escaped Vahzilok experiment with electrical powers. For a "joke" character, I thought, "How about a 'tribute character?" That ended up with a character who looks as much like Jack Black as I could make him. I dressed him like his wrestling character from Nacho Libre, named him "Mendacious D", and gave him a bio that reads, "This is the greatest superhero in the world. This is not a tribute."

Discounting doors that are always the same for specific missions - like the 3rd mission in Montague's arc where you rescue that Rikti is always through the same door - how does the game select which door to attach to a mission? I'm mostly talking about randomized missions, such as radio/paper missions, or alignment missions, or just any general non-arc mission. For these, I start noticing that the same doors keep getting used over and over and over. We've all had those situations where we exit a mission, get the next mission, and get sent right back through the same door we just came out of, and now that warehouse is a Council base, There are literally thousands of clickable doors in the game, and yet missions keep sending us to the same buildings, and the vast majority of the doors go completely unused.

I can confirm the mobs in objects. Just did this mission myself, and had to resort to standing next to the artifacts until my PBAoE aura prompted the Freak to pop out.

Actually, one had none, and another had two. The one with no ATO had a pile of Merits in it, though. I was going through a Malta mission once, on an office map, and encountered something like five of those Hercules Class Titans as I proceeded through the hallways. I used my snipe as my opening attack on each of them, and it missed every single time.

This doesn't exactly qualify as a "typo", and I'm not sure if it can actually be easily fixed, but ... In the mission immediately following the one in my previous post, "Find David Hazen's Missing Journal", the floor numbers at the elevators are mislabeled. Here is the first set of elevators on the first floor of the mission map. The mission appears to start on floor C2, and the elevators go down. Taking that elevator down, I naturally arrive on floor C1: Traveling to the other end of this floor, however, the elevators are now labeled "Floor C3" Taking them down, I arrive once more on Floor C2. This floor is also flooded with water, which is odd, since it's not the ground floor: The elevators at the end of this floor are also labeled "C2", but they're unusable, so I need to take the stairs: And finding the unusable elevators on this floor, they're labeled C1 (and the water here is even deeper): This C1 is indeed the lowest floor of the map. So it would appear to me that the very first set of elevators should be marked "C4", and then the next sign should read "C3" to match the sign at the other end of the floor. (And yeah, I know I'm probably the only one who would notice this.)

Part of the Dark Astoria storyline, with the Dream Doctor, turning in "The Choice of Hope Part 5: Twisted Memories": First paragraph, third sentence: "Hate, [player], that makes us forget what why we love our friends, our family." The "what" in that sentence is extraneous.

My all-time favorite, from a random Skull in The Hollows: "No, I didn't call you stupid. I said your comment was an oxymoron. It's a rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are put together. Am I the only one who reads the books we swipe around here?"

Yes, the RNG goblin is mocking me. I have something like 87 alts at this point, and they're virtually all scrappers, brutes, blasters, sentinels, and stalkers. Mingled in there are one corruptor, one dominator, and one tanker, all created that way purely for concept rather than actual combat role. I'm pretty much exclusively a solo player, so I prefer damage ATs. I was the same way in WoW. So I likely won't be rolling many "support" ATs any time soon, at least until I've come up with toons for every possible PS combination for those five damage classes (I have spreadsheets for this!) and I don't foresee ever rolling a mastermind, for psychological reasons*. So I have purchased a handful of SuperPacks hoping to obtain some useful ATOs. I've gotten five so far: One for Kheldians One for Widows One for Masterminds One for Corruptors One for Dominators It's as if the RNG goblin surveyed my account, saw what I needed, and then gave me something else. (Before anybody decides to "explain" RNG to me, I mean this post to be tongue-in-cheek. I realize my sample size is very small, and that there are more ATs I don't play than ATs I play.) * Masterminds and psychology: I'm mildly claustrophobic (not professionally diagnosed) and I've found that, even in games, I hate having a crowd of creatures around me in close proximity. I first noticed this when I tried playing a Necromancer back in Diablo II - I couldn't stand having that crowd of summoned skeletons skittering along with me. In WoW I had a couple Beast Mastery hunters, and I could deal with the one pet they had, but when a feature of the Legion expansion granted a second pet, I dealt with it but didn't like it. I don't even like hanging out in areas crowded with other players. So a MM just doesn't look attractive to me.

How to Find the Ruins Exit out the front door of the dam, into the main part of Faultline. As you come out, look slightly to your left, and find the elevator on the other side of the big gap: Make your way across that gap (I usually fly, but I don't know if you have flight) and go just past that elevator. See the big pile of rounded boulders, and the bare tree? The entrance to the tunnels is the glowing red bit amongst the boulders: I recommend donning the Arachnos Disguise before entering (I don't know whether or not you can get another one from Agent G if the first one expires - if necessary, abandon the mission and then reacquire it, and that should get you a new disguise). Without the disguise or some form of stealth, you'll need to fight your way through the tunnels. In any case, once you're in the tunnels, just follow the yellow mission arrow and it will lead you right to the doors you need to enter. There are three of them in the tunnels proper, and then a final one into an actual Arachnos base. When you've finished that one, you can just exit out the other end of the tunnel and pop right over to the back door of the dam (yeah, you'll be on the other side of the dam by that point). Hope this helps! EDIT: I just recalled that you're actually given the Arachnos Disguise on the previous mission, so abandoning and reacquiring this one isn't going to get you a new disguise, if that even works at all. Anybody know? I've run almost all of my alts who are at the correct level through the Faultline story, but I've never dealt with needing to get a new disguise.

Mission from Jill Pastor in Skyway, "Work on Newspaper Article", after accepting the mission: The second sentence, "Those areas have are overrun." - The word "have" should be removed. (I'm going to guess that the sentence originally read "... have been overrun", somebody decided to change it to "... are overrun", and didn't completely delete the old words.) This mission is not part of an arc, but is one of the "leadup" missions offered before "The Vahzilok Pollutant Plot" arc is offered.

Story Arc: "A Path Into Darkness Mission: "Search base for clues" Archon Phillipo, the "boss" at the end of the map, says, "You have learned to much. It will cause you an unfortunate end." That should be "... learned too much."

In Perez Park, speaking to the Reconnaissance Officer next to the closed Galaxy City gate: "Emercency" should obviously be "Emergency".

A few of my more recent creations: Tom da Bomb, fiery melee/radiation armor brute: eZombie, savage melee/electric armor brute - he's an escaped Vahzilok creation who has retained just enough of his mind to understand "Bad guy bad!" He attacks other Vahz mobs on sight. X-Out, a villain; fire control/energy assault dominator:

On that topic, I have never seen, in-game, an explanation for Frostfire's face-turn. You're just arresting him in one tier of alignment missions, and then in a higher tier he's suddenly a good guy. With Miss Thystle, you get some hints that she's having a change of heart and wants to give up her life of crime, but I haven't seen the same for Frostfire.

Hmm, this might explain why, the last time I played my AR/Dev blaster, she actually felt dangerous.

What zone is this? I don't recognize it!

For almost every female character I create, I drag both the Legs and Hips sliders all the way to the left, then move the Physique slider a bit to the right to beef them up a bit. The default long legs/wide hips results in female characters looking bowlegged when they run, or at least looking like they have a huge thigh gap, which I find visually unappealing. My adjustments mitigate that somewhat. I think part of the problem is that the animators tried to make the run animation "sexy" instead of "realistic". Actually, it's pretty apparent that they lavished more attention on the female run animation than on the male animation. Males just clomp along, which is why I'm more likely to give them capes so I don't have to see the terrible run animation.

This is more or less what happened in WoW in 2010, when the Cataclysm expansion came out. As part of that expansion, they completely revamped the 1-60 leveling experience, and incorporated the new expansion's storyline into the leveling experience. So as you leveled 1-60, you'd come across quest lines that were directly related to the big bad dragon that was trying to destroy the world. In other words, the basic game world was now set in the same timeframe as the latest expansion. Then, at level 60, you'd head off to Outland and play through The Burning Crusade expansion content, effectively traveling a few years back in time. At level 70 you'd move on to Wrath of the Lich King expansion content, which directly followed TBC chronologically. And finally, at level 80, you'd shift back into the "current" timeline and get back to chasing that big bad dragon you heard so much about for the first 60 levels. It's been 10 years and four more expansions, and they still have done nothing to address this chronology problem.