RikOz

What's wrong with this picture? Stupid Gunslingers. Perfect timing, internet:

I've been very happy with the CyberpowerPC gaming desktop I bought in early 2018.

Does my "Captain Buruma" count? She's my magical girl version of Captain Underpants:

A snake! A snake!

NPC chatter in the Faultline AE building: "She was in his street clothes"?

(I started this in Bug Reports, but moved it here after considering that this might have been a deliberate change) I've recently been running into what appears to be a new "issue" where, while doing a mission with clickable objectives, if I defeat the last enemy on the map while there are still clickable objectives that have not been clicked, the mission will go ahead and complete anyway. In one way, I can see how this makes sense: There is nobody left to try to stop me from clicking those last objectives, so it saves time to just say "checkmate", assume I've clicked the last glowies, and declare the win. However, this creates a problem in at least one scenario: the "Intern" day job bonus. This day job awards a large inspiration upon mission completion ... unless, of course, you don't have an empty inspiration slot. So, when I have this day job bonus active, I make a point of deleting a small insp before completing the last objective, to make room. There are problems with that too, of course - if the last objective requires defeating enemies, say, to rescue the last hostage, or even just the last mob in a "defeat all" mission, there's always the chance that that last mob will drop an insp, thereby refilling that empty slot and again blocking the day job reward. The last mission I ran had two objectives: rescue # hostages and defuse # bombs. So I made a point of leaving the final bomb until after I rescued the last hostage. My idea was that, after rescuing the hostage, I would delete a small insp, defuse the last bomb, and get my large insp reward when the mission completed. Alas, I defeated the final mob, he turned out to also be the last mob on the map (i.e. I hadn't missed anybody), and boom, the mission completed and I didn't get my large insp. As I said at the beginning, this seems to be new behavior - I only started noticing it 2-3 weeks ago (on multiple characters, not just the one with Intern active), and the nature of the change makes it appear deliberate. If it's always worked this way, I simply never noticed before, for some reason, and so "my bad". In any case, rather than "fix" this mission behavior (because it's still a good idea), perhaps you could modify the Intern day job mechanic so that it gives the reward upon completing and exiting the mission. Clicking the "Exit" button would serve as confirmation that, yes, I'm done here.

EDIT: This is actually sort of a copy of a screenshot I made in WoW, with my draenei fire mage standing in front of a wall of fire inside the Sunwell raid, saying, "What? It was like that when I got here!" (imagine it in an indignant Eastern European accent). Alas, I can't find that one. It's probably over on my Mac.

Looking through this thread, I find myself wondering if other people experience the same thing I do when designing a costume. I'll try out different combinations of pieces, and reject them because "that looks silly". Then I come here and see somebody else has chosen that same combination, and it looks awesome.

There seem to be a number of waypoint issues in the Rogue Isles. One in Mercy seems related to the building you mention. If you log out in that building, when you log back in every mission you get wants to point you right back to that building's door. In Port Oakes, I've discovered that, when I set a thumbtack on the map (usually to give me a waypoint arrow for exploration badges and plaques), the arrow keeps directing me to the Abandoned Lab entrance. This is regardless of where I set the thumbtack.

In my case, at least, I don't think it actually has anything to do with the game itself. It's happened to me several times over a span of months, and as I mentioned it simultaneously affects watching full-screen video in my web browser. It's why I think I must be inadvertently hitting some key combo that is specifically affecting taskbar behavior.

Armor-Alls? 😄

Reminds me of these ladies I came up with back on live, "Los Colores", triplets from Argentina. From left to right, "Colores Secundarios", "Colores Primarios", and "Colores Neutrales". All three different kinds of blaster. I created each on a different account so that I could log them all in together. Getting this screenshot required one instance of the game running on my Mac, and two instances running on a Windows laptop, and then about a minute to pose them together and get a couple screenshots before the instances on the laptop crashed. (Ambient lighting in AP made Primarios' pure red hair look orange, and Neutrales' white costume dots look pink.)

The thing I like about the CoT shoulder pieces is that they're big and prominent, but still conform nicely to a character's shoulders. A lot of the bigger, more armored shoulder pieces are designed to work with the chest or chest detail from the same "set" and end up positioned in such a way that they don't clip that chest/detail, even when the chest/detail is not present. For example, I love the look of the Olympian Guard shoulders for their smooth, clean lines, but unfortunately then can end up looking silly when not combined with the Olympian Guard breastplate chest detail and the helmet because they float in odd positions. They look particularly weird on an otherwise unarmored female character.

I originally did that myself, when I first got this computer. I was a Mac user for 22 years before finally switching to Windows 10, and I was simply accustomed to having a menu bar at the top of the screen. Unfortunately, it turned out that there are a lot of 3rd-party Windows apps that simply assume that the taskbar is in the default location (at the bottom) instead of checking to see where it actually is, and I soon got tired of windows opening with their title bars hidden under the taskbar. I don't like autohide; I didn't like it in Mac OS X either (with the Dock), but native Mac OS X apps were a lot more stringent in respecting user settings.

Nope, I thought of that too, but that's one of the things I don't actually see any setting for.

Nope, just one monitor. I think it just affects the game world, not the windows, but I'd have to look again to make sure.

I've noticed that, every time I click an item in my base storage (salvage racks), my base lighting changes slightly. Now I wonder if this is the game interacting oddly with my night mode settings in Windows 10.

I guess this is more of a Windows question than a game question, but it affects my game. From time to time I run into this problem where my Windows taskbar wants to pop into the game every time I try to click something (like the chat/emote button) at the bottom edge of the screen. It's clearly a Windows thing and not a game issue, because when this starts happening in the game, I also notice that going "full screen" on a YouTube video leaves the taskbar visible. I assume that I must be inadvertently hitting some key combo that is causing the taskbar to intrude, but I can't see anything in the Taskbar Settings that would relate to this behavior, and in any case the "setting" isn't permanent because rebooting my machine stops this unwanted behavior. Any clues as to what is triggering this so that I can try to avoid it?

I posted this in the costume thread, but thought I'd share it here as well for any who don't follow that one 🙂 Jouleiana, an Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation blaster! Juliana Omlin was an engineer on a Crey Industries project, researching ways to use fiber optics to transmit energies more powerful than mere light and data. When a hero came rampaging through her workplace, a piece of exploding equipment left Juliana blind, and the released energy permanently altered her skin, leaving her bright pink. Once recovered from her other injuries, her mind was still as brilliant as ever, but now she held a deep hatred for so-called "heroes". She accepted an offer from Crey to have her right eye replaced with an experimental optical implant that interfaced with her undamaged optic nerves and restored her sight, along with providing other benefits. She returned to work, but her anger toward heroes only grew deeper. One day she stole materials from work and built herself a suit. The outer mesh of the suit is a dense fiber optic network that works as a transformer of sorts, amplifying the energies produced by the generator on her back. The network feeds the energy into her custom gauntlets. Her gauntlets release this energy in destructive streams and bursts, as well as giving her physical attacks considerably more power. The gauntlets also interface with her cybernetic eye to provide precision targeting.

I like full clears as well. When I'm doing tip missions, I'll try to leave some enemies for after I complete the last objective in hopes that a new tip will drop before I actually exit the mission.

I rolled a Kheldian back on live, and abandoned it fairly quickly. Not so much because of the powers, but more that I put a ton of time into designing a costume only to find out I'd need to be in squid form to do most things.

That reminds me - I think they missed a few things when they increased merit rewards for story arcs. There's an odd bit of dissonance when I get 13 merits for Montague Castanella's mostly very easy "cure Lost" arc, but only 6 merits for the Talos Island arc involving my character's duplicate, with a quite difficult Protean fight at the end of it.

Fifty levels and 14 veteran levels later, I finally came up with a backstory for my main, Flaminatrix, a fire/fire/flame mastery blaster. It probably could use some expanding, but for now I'm keeping what fits in the bio window. "My name is Taryn McKinley. I had a pretty normal childhood, except for my overachiever, taskmaster mother always on me about how if I keep doing this thing, or keep not doing this other thing, I'm never going to accomplish anything. And then I had the misfortune of hitting puberty. I discovered I was a mutant when my powers suddenly manifested and I set the house on fire. God, she's never let me forget that! "You can't even gain superpowers right!" she screeched. "Well, now I'm a Big Damn Hero. Incarnate, even. I've saved the world several times over. Are you happy now, Mom?!"

Here's the initial costume for my villain, Jouleiana, an Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation blaster! Juliana Omlin was an engineer on a Crey Industries project, researching ways to use fiber optics to transmit energies more powerful than mere light and data. When a hero came rampaging through her workplace, a piece of exploding equipment left Juliana blind, and the released energy permanently altered her skin, leaving her bright pink. Once recovered from her other injuries, her mind was still as brilliant as ever, but now she held a deep hatred for so-called "heroes". She accepted an offer from Crey to have her right eye replaced with an experimental optical implant that interfaced with her undamaged optic nerves and restored her sight, along with providing other benefits. She returned to work, but her anger toward heroes only grew deeper. One day she stole materials from work and built herself a suit. The outer mesh of the suit is a dense fiber optic network that works as a transformer of sorts, amplifying the energies produced by the generator on her back. The network feeds the energy into her custom gauntlets. Her gauntlets release this energy in destructive streams and bursts, as well as giving her physical attacks considerably more power. The gauntlets also interface with her cybernetic eye to provide precision targeting.

My years of playing WoW led to me feeling the same way about what I call "mechanics for the sake of mechanics". Stuff that is put in there just for the sake of putting it in there, regardless of whether or not it makes any actual sense. Like one raid boss whose laboratory had an exploding floor. Why would that even exist? "Yes, I choose to do my work in a room that has been constructed in such a way that hellfire randomly explodes from the floor." And then the accepted strategy for dealing with this mechanic (as well as many other mechanics with different encounters) was to "stack". "Stacking" meant to literally stack everybody on the same physical spot, that one spot where they'll be safe from the damage or other negative effect. A true metagame strategy that relies on the fact that there is no character collision detection in that game and multiple characters can simultaneously occupy the same physical space. It completely destroys any sense of verisimilitude. Goldside is also unfriendly to serious altoholics. Back on live, I got one alt all the way through Praetoria to level 20, and in hindsight I think I only managed it because it was still very early in my "career" (I only discovered the game a year before sunset), so I had few alts at that point and it was easy to devote the necessary time to that one character. When I came back for HC, I had 30+ alts almost right out of the gate, due to resurrecting/rerolling a bunch of my old characters. And so right away, my attention was divided between a lot of different characters. So when I rolled a new character goldside, I'd play him for a couple levels, and then play with a number of my other alts, and it might be two weeks before I got back to the goldside alt again. By that time, I'd lost track of where he currently stood in relation to all the double-double-agent stuff going on, and the ensuing confusion made it very difficult to just log him and pick up where I left off. I ended up deleting him and just rerolling him blueside. It was after that that I resurrected my original Praetorian character from live, and just rolled her straight to blueside and wrote a bio about how she can't remember how she got her powers, but she has a vague impression of having once existed in a different world but can't recall anything specific about it. In any case, my only combat-related "difficulty" issues in the current game are more limited to low-level mission content, rather than level cap stuff, and also happen need nerfing rather than buffing: The overwhelming prevalence of enemies with abilities that low-level characters lack the tools to counter. Examples: Vahzilok toxic damage, CoT ghosts stacking -ToHit. The CoT thing seemed exacerbated during the first few months of HC, as the CoT maps were overpopulated with those ghosts - at least it's what I was seeing. I certainly understand RNG, but a months-long streak of maps populated almost entirely with ghosts and just a scattered few of the human CoT mobs seems like an oddly specific, overly-long streak of bad RNG luck for one player across multiple alts. The standard advice of "eat a yellow" becomes less than useful when you end up needing to eat them so often that you're out before you're halfway through the mission. In any case, that particular "streak" of ghost-overpopulation ended rather abruptly and the map populations became more balanced after one of the patches, which does make it seem that something was actually "off". There is also the way maps seem to spawn at +1 to whatever my actual notoriety setting says, but doing so with no discernible pattern. I'll run one character through an arc, and every mission spawns +1. Then I'll run the same arc on a different character, at the same level as the previous character, and everything spawns matching my notoriety setting. The only thing that seems to consistently respect my notoriety setting is the named "boss" at the end of the mission. If I'm set to the default +0, the end "boss" is always a yellow-conning lieutenant with white-conning lieutenants, but on some alts everything on the map before him was yellow minions and orange lieutenants. On too many low-level alts, I have to drop to -1 just to get maps to spawn even-level (and then I get a white-conning lieutenant "boss" at the end). It's just weird when the end "boss" is the easiest kill on the map.