RikOz

LOL, you've reminded me of the most epic moment I personally experienced in WoW. Back in 2009, during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, I was playing my fire mage and joined a random group to run one of the newish 5-man dungeons, "Forge of Souls". I can't recall the classes of the tank and healer, but the DPS were my fire mage, a balance druid (both ranged DPS), and a rogue (melee DPS). As I said, this dungeon had opened fairly recently, so none of us outgeared it yet, and it was a challenge. We struggled through to the end, and then the final boss gave us the smackdown. When the boss was at about 25% health, the healer got killed, and without the healer, down went the rogue, followed quickly by the tank. The druid and I, being ranged, were still standing, but I knew that wouldn't last long. The usual protocol in that kind of situation was to just take the wipe and try again. Well, not this time. For those who haven't played WoW, druids can fill any of the three roles (actually four - in addition to tanking and healing, they can do both ranged and melee DPS), though of course, each role requires different gearing and usually a different spec, and this druid was geared and specced for ranged DPS. But that didn't stop him. As soon as he saw the tank was dead, he shapeshifted into Bear Form, taunted the boss, and proceeded to tank (wearing, as I said, ranged spellcasting gear). And while he tanked, he simultaneously kept casting healing spells on my mage. So I just poured it on with my fire spells, and before much longer the boss was down. The credit goes to that druid - he went above and beyond.

Man, I'm almost 54 and still can't grow a beard outside of a goatee. And ... I just shaved my head. Well anyway, getting this thing set up is becoming annoying, and I hope it's just the server load that is causing it and it will eventually work. I got the client installed on this Windows gaming rig, but it keeps "timing out" every time I try to open the Web Control. So, I set up my username, HC_RikOz, and team number in the client itself (from the Advanced Control menu option). I requested a Passkey, which they still haven't sent me, despite two requests sent ~four hours apart. Looking at the Protein Viewer, after several hours the Status window still shows "Connection: Trying" and it's just displaying the Demo protein. Meanwhile, my old iMac has been sitting here doing absolutely nothing, so I fired it up and installed the client there. the Web Control connected on the first try, so I was able to enter my username and team number there and get things started. Firing up the Protein Viewer, the Status window already shows "Connection: Connected", though it seems to be still loading the protein. That's only been a few minutes at this point, though. So I have no idea why my 2-year-old Windows 10 machine can't connect, but my 11-year-old iMac hooked right up. EDIT: Looking closer, it seems my Windows machine is indeed doing its thing. It's just the viewer not wanting to work.

First mission of the "The Mysterious General Z" arc, "Stop the Sky Raider assassination". I'm running into an issue where the hostages I rescue, when fighting a Sky Raider Porter, and the Porter decides to teleport halfway across the map, think it's a good idea to go chasing after them. This seems to result in them aggroing everything along the way, and these aggro'd mobs all descend on me for some reason. In my current attempt at this mission, I had rescued two of the hostages and engaged a spawn of three Sky Raiders that included a Porter. Next thing I know, the Porter was gone, my two hostage pets were nowhere in sight, and out of nowhere I now have six more Sky Raiders beating on me. Even worse, since they were already aggro'd before they got to me, their respective Engineers had their forcefields up and running. So now I'm hemmed inside a circle of Sky Raiders with stacked forcefields. I can't land a blow, and I can't even move to try to take out the FF generators. So ... is there anything you can do to prevent pets from chasing after Porters? This is kind of ridiculous. ADDED: I'll note that I have done this mission successfully on other alts. It was just "bad luck" this time that the first two hostages spawned very near the front of the mission, so there were still a whole lot of Sky Raiders remaining once I'd rescued them. When I've done this mission before, they've tended to spawn much further in, so I had already cleared out most of the mobs, and increased the odds that any Porters would teleport to an already-cleared area and not cause this aggro problem.

Since this is apparently "working as intended" and not a "bug" ... it annoys me. Mobs in missions constantly spawning at +1 to whatever my notoriety is set at. Recently, I was griping about this in Help, and a GM spoke up and said that this was intentional, as a way to add a few "more-challenging" mobs to missions. That would be all well and good if it actually resulted in "a few more-challenging mobs". The problem is, there aren't "a few". When it happens, in many cases, the only mobs on the map that have actually spawned at the "correct" level are the named "boss" at the end and the "guards" in his immediate vicinity (the ones who are part of the boss's spawn). In other cases, it's maybe only half the mobs spawning at +1, but for some reason they're all front-loaded; that is, all or most of them are in the first few rooms, which can be a real downer on certain missions, particularly on a "squishy" character, coming out of the loading screen right into a crowd of yellow minions and orange lieutenants. All of this is especially miserable when it's a CoT mission, and you're facing spawns comprised entirely of ghosts - and they're all yellow and orange, and there's no way in hell you can overcome their stacking -ToHit debuffs because you simply can't carry enough yellow insps. When I'm doing Montague Castanella's mission to meet with Lady Jane, I either make sure I'm 1-2 mob kills away from leveling up so that I level up on the first spawn inside that mission, or I just set my notoriety to -1 before entering, because that mission always seems to spawn +1 no matter what, and I have to face an orange-conning Ruin/Madness Mage who immediately spams Holds and Sleeps on me that I can't resist at all at level 14. What really makes me sure that something is glitched about this is that it's extremely inconsistent from one character to the next. Observing this behavior over the careers of my 90 alts, I have some characters that almost never run into this, and others that experience it in literally every single mission. Whichever type of "luck" a character has, it persists between logins, to the point that I've got Notoriety permanently set to -1 on some characters just so they can get even-leveled missions. Permanently, or at least until they're high enough level to have more tools at their disposal.

Ah, okay, that makes a lot more sense. That was a TF I played through, not a "story arc".

This why I sacrifice defense and always choose attack powers at levels 2 & 4 (and sometimes 6, depending on powerset). There's an AE XP/Inf/Ticket farm I like that exemps me down to level 1, so taking nothing but attacks at 2 & 4 ensures that I have three attacks available when exemped down.

I made an interesting discovery yesterday: Positron hands out a level-15 story arc called "The New Recruits" that ends up awarding 60+ merits. I only discovered this because I was on my main running down the list of arcs in Ouroboros. I currently have 90 alts, at least 80 of which are heroes, and most of those are level 15 or higher. And I have never once been introduced, in-game, to talk to Positron as a "contact". Sure, I get sent to speak with him as part of the "Origin of Power" arc, but aside from that all I knew about him was that he had a taskforce. Since I don't really enjoy group content (I know, weird in an MMO), I'd never seen any reason to go talk to Posi. Toward the end of the arc, Posi clued me in to the fact Numina (I think) also has something for me. So, did the original devs just assume that everybody was going to flock to the TF as soon as they were at the appropriate level, and spot Posi's arc that way? Because otherwise, the natural flow of leveling via contacts is just gonna level you right past ever seeing his arc.

How did you get that quilted effect on the cape?

Yeah, figured it was something like that. It's the same thing with attacks like Sands of Mu, where a miss means you get to continue missing through the entire animation 😄

How about the mechanic that makes it so that, once an attack is started, it's going to finish, no matter what? It leads to some serious "suspension of disbelief" issues: * I defeat that Troll or Strongman an instant after he begins his Hurl attack. He falls down, unconscious ... and three seconds later this boulder comes flying at me out of nowhere. * I defeat that Family goon just as he starts his machine gun attack ... and his gun continues to fire, precisely on target. This is even funnier when I hit him with a KB - he's flying across the room, arms and legs going every which way, yet he somehow keeps his gun accurately aimed at me the entire time. Those are the kinds of attacks that should be interrupted/canceled upon defeat. * I defeat a Tarantula Mistress in one shot with an Aimed/Built-up snipe, yet she still manages to Blind me. * Other general effects that you'd think would be canceled upon defeat. Like illusions that persist long after the Illusionist goes down for the count.

Most of these click-to-activate things require that you've completely stopped moving. If you're running toward the clickable, when you "stop" your forward movement, you still haven't completely stopped. You stop moving forward, and then there is a brief "rock back" in the animation that is actually realistic: IRL, if you were running full speed and then literally stopped on a dime, you'd topple over forward, so your body naturally incorporates a little "rock back" when you come to a stop, to shift your body mass backwards a bit to counteract the forward momentum. If your volume is high enough, you can hear this in your footsteps when you stop: step-step-step-step-stutterstep. You're not fully stopped until that "stutterstep" finishes, so if you're clicking the instant your character hits the object, you're clicking ahead of the "stutterstep" before you're fully stopped. This goes all the way down to Hellions and Skulls - that one guy in the spawn with a shotgun whose only power is the KB/KD shot. You can literally watch these guys standing there doing absolutely nothing but waiting for that power to recharge so they can do it again. Combine them with the "slammers" (guys with sledgehammer), and you're spending the entire fight on your back. Then comes the Circle of Thorns with entire spawns of ghosts stacking -ToHit on you. I remapped it to TAB, so that it's my default tab-target.

Yup, I know how to get rid of it now, but at the time I was a raw noob.

Huh, that could be it then. I was a VIP subscriber and purchased a lot of superpacks to unlock costume pieces, but I don't think I ever bought a powerset.

For attack powers, I've noticed an annoying thing with some of my Fire blaster's powers (and only some of them) that the rooting remains in effect for a second or two after the actual attack animation is finished. It really isn't noticeable until a Carnie manages to get into melee range and dies at my feet, and I try to move away to get out of their endurance-drain death effect

It was? I totally don't remember it, and could swear I read that it was activated for the revival. Yeah, the animation always changes when holding weapons, but for some reason it seems much more blatant/pronounced with a staff. It could be because holding the staff in both hands prevents the arms from swinging independently, but the run doesn't look nearly as bad with a rifle (I have two female AR toons and one female Beam Rifle toon). But yeah, I totally do the "ESC" thing to "fix" the running.

I've noticed that, when my female Staff Fighting scrapper runs while holding her staff, she appears to be using the male run animation. Given that Staff Fighting never made it to live, I'm going to hazard a guess that the basic animations were developed for the male model and they ran out of time for tweaking them for females before the shutdown. Anything you guys can do with it? (For those who haven't noticed, there's a basic difference between the way men and women run - and walk, for that matter. Men's legs swing more or less straight forward, but women's legs swing forward and inward a bit, so that they're almost planting one foot in front of the other. This is both in-game and in real life, and it's simply a mechanical function of a woman's wider hips.)

Wow, that would be awful. For me at least, that would mean an almost complete inability to control my character. I'd be bouncing off the walls! Amusing anecdote: Back on live, on only my second day playing the game, somebody gave my character some kind of superspeed boost (IIRC, it was from that Mystic Fortune deck - I remember a popup saying somebody wanted to read my fortune), and I was freaking out because, as I said, I could barely control my character and seemed to be slamming into a wall every time I moved, and I had absolutely no idea how to get the damned buff off of myself.

Related to this is something that has really begun to annoy me recently: my characters having to stop and perform the casting animations for every toggle each time they come out of a loading screen. This is most noticeable on a toon with Dark Aura; I swear that summoning Death Shroud takes 5 seconds every time I get off the tram or walk through a door.

Gordon Stacy, after the final mission of the "Revenant Hero Project" arc: Second-to-last sentence, "...for brining closure to their loss." Should be "bringing".

Here are my 89th and 90th alts (I've now surpassed my alt count from live). I don't usually design all of their costumes at once, but I got a bit inspired and kept going after the first one. First up is my new villain, "The Ozonator" - the name is based on "ozone", in reference to his electrical blast powers; nothing to do with the "Oz" in my name. #90 is the heroine,"Ba'shix". She came popping out of a Portal Corp portal one day, wearing nothing but her weapon and a cloud of dark energy, as her species does not wear clothing. The black parts you see in the first costume are her skin; the "mask" around her eyes is a natural marking, and the crystalline "crown" is also a part of her body. The Portal Corp people, once they figured out how to communicate with her, were able to persuade her to put at least something on so as not to ... surprise ... the locals. They learned from her that the Council had somehow invaded her dimension and laid waste to her planet, and that she had managed to track them back to our Earth, where she now seeks vengeance.

Nice! I'm usually not a big fan of costumes with many colors, but this is really well done 🙂

I really hate when that room spawns on the "access 4 computers" mission in Faultline.

Hey, I've spotted Helloween several times! I tried to make both an Angus McFife and a Gloryhammer, but both were taken (and glad to finally meet one of them - excellent job on the recreation!) Hmm, I wonder if Hootsman is available... (sigh, no it isn't).

Are there any other metal fans here who have made characters inspired by your favorite bands? I've made a few! One of my favorite bands is a German band called "Iron Savior". They have been telling a continous, high-concept science fiction story over the course of their albums. The "Iron Savior" in the story is actually a sentient spaceship created to defend humanity. The name "Iron Savior" was already taken on Everlasting (so I'm guessing there's another fan out there), so I went with an alternate name for the ship that is used in one of the songs, and created "Savior Machine", and since I can't actually create a sentient spaceship in the game, I went with a giant robot and made him a Titan Weapons/Energy Aura brute: The same band inspired another character. Their song "Cybernetic Queen" is more or less about a sexbot. I took inspiration from lines in the chorus that say: "And as she burns in fire Melting down in sweet desire Her heart stays cold" and made her a Fiery Melee/Ice Armor scrapper. This is just her original form; as she levels and earns enough money, she is gradually replacing body parts to take on a more human appearance: Here is Jinjer, inspired by Tatiana Shmailyuk, lead singer of the Ukrainian band, "Jinjer". I've modeled her costumes on various outfits I've seen Tatiana wear in live performances. She's a Sonic/Darkness blaster: Sgt. Sabaton is modeled after Joakim Broden, lead singer of Swedish band "Sabaton", and is an Assault Rifle/Regeneration sentinel: And finally, Powerwulf, after German band Powerwolf, whose schtick is a church run by werewolves and vampires. His look here is based on the lead singer's look:

Here's a character revived from live in name only: "Missy in Action" "Miss Action", a Psionic Melee/Super Reflexes brute: The last costume is her "club" outfit - I typically use the 7th costume slot for my characters' "civilian" clothes.