RikOz

I was that way with dungeons in WoW. There was this common attitude in that game that, before you join a group to run dungeons or raids, you'd better have "done your research". Which meant, of course, watching the YouTube videos posted by the elite world-first guilds so that you would know, and be prepared for, everything in the dungeon/raid. Nah, not me. These are "roleplaying" games, and I liked to approach that stuff the same way I would if I were a real live adventurer: I don't know what's in there, but I'mma go kill it. And I never got a group killed by being "unprepared". Then again, I may have been better than most at quickly evaluating situations and coming up with the best (or at least non-detrimental) actions in response. I mean, I don't think it takes too much brains to notice, "hey, I'm standing in fire, I should move out of this", but apparently it's less common than I thought.

Yeah, the weirdest one I've seen was a spawn of three Warriors in Talos - I punched the first guy, and one of his buddies took off immediately, and took forever to come back. I got tired of waiting, moved on and cleared two more spawns before that runner finally came back. The logic I don't get is the teleporting behavior of those Tsoo Sorcerers and Sky Raider Porters. Just because I don't understand how it makes any kind of good combat tactics to teleport away at the beginning of the fight, and then return to take me on alone after I've kicked their friends' butts. It's actually kind of funny when I have them targeted - I can see that they've teleported three rooms away, and then see them immediately running back to me.

AE actually kinda came to my rescue recently. I'd been having this aggravating internet problem where my connection would drop for just an instant and come right back up. Except it was just long enough to make my router have to go through its whole handshake process with the modem. So every few minutes I'd get dumped out of the game ("Lost connection to mapserver"), which made trying to run missions or join teams pointless. One time I had that alignment mission to apprehend a couple dirty cops who were hiding out with the Carnies (my least-favorite enemy group), and three times in a row I fought all the way to the back of the map, approached the first dirty cop, and my connection dropped. So, just for something to do, I was spamming one particular XP farm, simply because it was very quick and I had a good chance of being able to actually complete it before my internet went down again, and also because it was so non-dangerous that I was unlikely to die if my connection dropped while I was in combat.

And there are far too few of them. There were a handful of AE story arcs I really enjoyed back on live, but unfortunately they have not returned the way some of the "top" arcs came back. Those arcs I especially liked were more lighthearted and humorous. I remember one where you teamed up with an alternate-universe Albert Einstein, and another pretty hilarious arc where you had to stop Arachnos' efforts to smuggle dihydrogen monoxide into Paragon City (it was based upon the real-world dihydrogen monoxide hoax). I seem to recall playing some of the arcs that did get resurrected, back on live, but while I thought they were very well done, they were a bit too grim for my taste. I've also encountered a few that looked interesting, but they were marked for "levels 45-53" or some other high-level range, meaning I can't really enjoy them on a lowbie toon. I do still recall the time back on live when I stumbled into my first fire farm, not realizing what it was. Zoned in, immediately died, chose a different mission.

From what I've seen, they'll flee if you drain their Endurance so much that they can't attack, or you slow their Recharge so much that all their attacks are on cooldown at the same time. On the other hand, I've seen mobs, the same level as me, haul ass immediately after I punch their buddies, and I don't see any logic in that (other than "doesn't want to get punched" logic).

Flaminatrix's new level 50 costume, making use of the "Spectrum" pieces (sorry she's translucent - she's got the IO set that gives her stealth while flying).

Seems to be fixed 🙂

Hey all - For the last couple days Firefox is warning me about this site:

Simple costume, but I think it's pretty cool-looking. Had some fun with the bio 😛 Bio in English: Dark Scorpion was created in a laboratory in the dark deserts of the underworld, to punish transgressors who do not respect the rule of law! Scorpion's native language is Google-translated Esperanto.

Cool - I noticed that garden while flying, but I didn't check for stairs. Stairs get you inside it?

For what it's worth, World of Warcraft added a Stan Lee tribute NPC to Stormwind City after he died. His name is "Stanley", and he's clearly modeled to resemble Stan Lee. He wanders around the city and says, "Excelsior!"

I don't know exactly how "hidden" this is, but a few skyscrapers in Atlas Park (at least) have ground-level doors marked with a stair sign. Clicking on those will take you to the building's roof.

It was extremely annoying that time I was doing a Malta mission on my fire/fire blaster, and my Aimed/Built-Up opening snipe missed on six consecutive Hercules-Class Titans (or whatever the big Malta mechs are called).

Yes, because we all just love not being able to enjoy the colors of our carefully-crafted costumes! I especially love the way the night lighting strips all of the yellow out of any metallic costume pieces, turning one of my character's orange-and-yellow costume into red and white!

I kind of unintentionally established a pattern for myself when I created a Super Group called "The Extracurriculars", which is just a group of ten of my own alts sharing a particular backstory. It's a group of former students of the Galaxy City International School for Superpowered Girls. Their school was destroyed in the Shivan meteor event, and they had to escape in a hurry, and so their initial "costumes" were more or less just whatever they happened to be wearing at the time, or threw on in a hurry. the backstory then has a number of these students officially forming a team, and once they had the resources (mechanics-wise, at level 10) they each designed a "proper" costume. These were simple out of necessity, so were just your basic spandex costumes. As they gained more experience and acquired more resources (level 20) they improved their costumes to make them more suitable/protective. That has ended up being the pattern I follow more or less closely with most of my alts, where those who weren't already part of some related organization start out in mostly improvised, homemade costumes, and then those costumes evolve and improve over time. Those who were part of some relevant organization (the military, a security firm, a government agency, etc.) often start out in a costume that is modeled after their former "official" uniform/clothing, and then evolve from there.

That would require having fingers first!

In the Battle Axe power set, the "Chop" power is consistently performing the "draw weapon" animation every time, even when the weapon is already drawn. Checking more closely, this is only happening when "No Redraw" is selected in the power customization.

I've lately been running my low-level alts through a particular AE XP farm to quickly get them to level 12. The "mission" itself exemplars you down to level 1, and you get a room full of level 1, "orange" bosses to beat down. Today I did this on another alt, and these bosses were all "yellow" to her. I discovered that I had apparently set her Notoriety to -1 at some point and had forgotten. In any case, she finished that farm with 372 tickets, and then I reset her notoriety back to the default +0. But then I wondered what would happen if I set her "Solo Bosses" to "Yes". I changed that setting and ran the mission again. Okay, it turned all those "orange" bosses into "red" elite bosses. Cool. Finished the mission, only to realize that the mission awarded me no tickets at all. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I got XP and Inf, but no tickets. Also no drops of any kind, so I'm pretty sure that I didn't inadvertently click "Standard Rewards" instead of "Architect Rewards" when starting the mission. Anyway, I'm not sure if what happened was a bug, or if that was actually what was supposed to happen, but I'm throwing it out there.

Say what? Does this only apply to TFs? Because when I go to my SG base after dying in a mission, I emerge in the zone beacon location. I was moaning about the distance from the Faultline hospital after dying in one of those missions at the south end of the zone behind the dam, but then somebody informed me that, in the old days, there was no hospital in Faultline and you had to travel from the one in Skyway.

LOL - You've reminded me of "Sprint" animations in WoW. As we all know, a person's posture/stride when jogging isn't the same as when sprinting. So since WoW's "rogue" class is the only class with a "sprint" power (in normal form anyway - I'm not counting druid animal forms), and some races cannot be rogues, Blizzard did not bother with creating separate sprint animations for those non-rogue races. The result is that, if those races somehow benefit from some kind of temporary speed buff, past a certain point it just looks stupid because the character just uses a speeded-up jog animation. I specifically noticed this during the Warlords of Draenor expansion. You had a mine in your base, and while in the mine you could get a speed boost by drinking "Miner's Coffee". Each cup granted a +10% boost, and you could stack this by drinking more coffee. I think +30% was the point where the models would switch from "run" animation to "sprint" animation, except for races that had no "sprint" animation.

Yeah, the war walls seem to do nothing to stop the Rikti's bombing runs, or stop them congregating in Founder's Falls, Crey's Folly, etc. To actually be effective against Rikti, there would need to be an energy dome, not walls. I mean, even in the real world, city walls were rendered mostly obsolete by gunpowder artillery, and airplanes just sealed the deal. The real explanation, of course, is a gameplay explanation: gotta have some way to physically separate the zones, but then there of course needs to be an in-world lore explanation, and here we are.

As I discovered after some experimentation across multiple alts, the initial Shining Stars missions are actually much easier if you start them at level 5, when you're introduced to Twinshot, than if you wait a couple levels. Due to the XP buffs, I had been hitting at least level 8 before talking to Twinshot (I like to play the Matthew Habashy stuff to completion, all the way up through the end of Aaron Thiery's missions, before talking to Twinshot). Somebody in another thread where I mentioned this pointed out that there are different "tiers" of enemies, so perhaps the "tier" incremented somewhere between levels 5 and 8. There's also the point of the "beginner's luck" buff, which is going to be lower at 8 than at 5.

In the New Praetorians arc that starts in Brickstown, ol' Wossname, the Praetorian rebellion leader, at one point hollers something about Paragon City clearly being some kind of fascist regime, just look at the war walls.

I'd be happy if there was simply a way to tone down the blazing blue light from the war walls. Like, replace that swirling blue light with, say, a mesh that is more or less invisible from a distance, so it stops being a major feature of every screenshot.

I read somewhere, back during live, that the members of Shining Stars were supposed to represent different player types: Grym: The player who basically just recreates his character from a different game. In the case of Grym, WoW's "Cataclysm" expansion had just introduced the worgen (basically werewolves) as a playable race not long before the Shining Stars arc was added to CoH. (I totally get this - my first CoH character, Flaminatrix, is a fire/fire blaster who physically resembles my WoW main - who is a paladin - while having the powerset of my then-#2 WoW character, a fire mage.) Dillo: The hardcore roleplayer who never, ever breaks character, right down to constantly speaking in an incomprehensible dialect. Flambeaux: The female player (or male player playing a female character) who always tries to be the center of attention, and uses being a female to score benefits from other, male, players: I don't recall what player archetypes Proton and Twinshot were meant to represent.