RikOz

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!

For my 37th level 50, here's Epic Gear (Battle Axe/Invul brute), now with legendary axe! Epic Gear, formerly known as Pwnmaster, is a warrior from World of Warcraft, who wound up in Paragon City after entering a portal cast by a noob mage who clearly screwed up. But he's making the best of it, finding that this "superhero" business is even more fun than his former "regular hero" activities. His superhero name is, of course, a reference to WoW's "epic" gear, which is identified by its purple title text. Now that he's reached max level, he has also obtained a legendary weapon, identified in WoW with orange title text. Given that he acquired invulnerability upon his arrival in his new universe, all that armor isn't really necessary, but hey, after all those years on Azeroth he's kinda used to it and feels naked without it.

That mission seems to randomly spawn the wrong "boss", more often than not. The last two times I've done it, I've properly gotten a Ring Mistress, but nearly every previous time it's spawned a Master Illusionist. There's another Harvey Maylor mission I've joked about: The mission objective says "Defeat all minions", but I have to defeat the lieutenants, too!

I get a chuckle when targets of my SS characters' Hurl do their dodge animation before I've even finished ripping up the floor. The odd part is that they "dodge", but are otherwise not aggroed. That is, aside from the dodge animation, they don't react to my presence until the rock actually hits (or misses) them. I've seen similar things with any kind of ranged attack. It's also puzzling when I pull up short, just out of aggro range, and the entire spawn turns to face me, as if they've seen me ... but then they do nothing until I actually attack or move into aggro range. Like we're just having a staring contest until I cross that invisible line.

I happened to get this mission last night. Dual Blades/Super Reflexes scrapper; T4 Alpha + T3 all other incarnate slots. Died on the very first portal, but I was set to +4 from previous missions. Dropped to +0 and restarted the mission, and managed to complete it. It was still very challenging and time-consuming, due to the number of Bosses. The number of mobs did seem excessive, though. What helped was quickly figuring out that I should attack the portal itself immediately so that, at the very least, no more mobs could spawn in. My method was to stand back out of aggro range of each group surrounding a portal, and manually target the portal before I charged in. Trying to target the portal after charging it was an exercise in futility. Making sure I had the portal targeted before engaging seemed to be key, and the portal itself is pretty easy to destroy (2-3 hits).

I think I probably already shared this one, but I have a blue guy too! Blue Manchu:

I'm on Everlasting. I'm mainly dropping inspirations into the mail, and retrieving them as needed later on whatever alt happens to need them. About the only time I send something and then immediately retrieve it on another alt is when I use my farmer to purchase and send a set of IOs to another alt. I also occasionally get a popup telling me I can't mail something because I'm at the limit of 20 messages in my Inbox, when there doesn't appear to be any such limit. I currently have 52 messages in my Inbox, and I haven't had any trouble adding more. But then, randomly, it will tell me I'm at this supposed 20-message limit, and won't let me.

I guess this isn't a "bug", per se, but I have lately been getting the following error: (There are outstanding pending global email transactions. Please wait a minute and try again.) I get this both when sending and retrieving items mailed to myself. When sending, the error appears in a popup window; when retrieving, it appears in the chat window as shown. It doesn't happen every time. It seems to be related to some sort of delay in the mail system.

Well, I finally got around to getting a villain to level 50! Jouleiana (Energy/Energy 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 Countess 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 that would allow her to focus dangerous energies into powerful attacks, and set out for revenge!

I do. Page 1 contains the ten characters I'm actively leveling to 50, so if that's what I decide to work on today, they're all right there, front-and-center. Pages 2 & 3 each contain the members of two themed SGs I created for myself. I keep each SG's characters together because I'm keeping all the members of each group leveled together. Pages 4-6 contain my previously-leveled 50s. Pages 7+ contain all the rest of my alts, organized by level in descending order. While yes, I can remember their names, I haven't memorized the exact order all 77 currently-inactive characters. And I often just want to go right down the list on a particular page. Doing so by searching from Page 1 would take even longer than clicking the appropriate page's dot. I want to be looking at the whole page to make sure I didn't miss anybody.

As currently implemented, logging out a character by clicking the "Quit to Character Select" button will return the player to Page 1 of their character list, where the first character on that page will be the one selected by default. This system was fine back on Live, when players were limited to, what, 12 characters on a server, and there would never be more than two pages of characters. On Homecoming, where we are allowed 1,000 characters per server, this system is ... less fine. As an altoholic with, currently, 137 alts (and I know there are at least a few people who have more), I now have 15 little page dots between the arrows on the Character Select screen: 14 pages containing characters plus the last blank page. Already, it's a bit of a challenge to pick out the page I want by counting dots. Assuming that the space between the two arrow buttons continues to increase as more pages are added, I foresee that my 24" widescreen isn't wide enough to accommodate 100 dots with the current spacing between dots, which suggests that at some point, those dots are going to have to get even closer together, making it even more difficult to precisely identify and click to the page I want. Now, I don't anticipate actually reaching 1,000 alts, but since it is possible, this challenge needs to be accounted for. With this in mind, I offer some "simple" suggestions (while understanding that "simple in concept" does not mean "simple to implement"). All of these together would be ideal, but even one of them alone would be an improvement. 1) Log out to the page containing the last-played character, with that character selected. This is, basically, what every other game does. Granted, most other games don't have multiple pages of character slots, but they at least have the "last-played character" selected. My reasoning behind this suggestion is that I suspect it is not unusual for an altoholic like myself to perform "maintenance" such as logging in a character simply to check auctions, and then logging that character back out and moving on to the next character on the list. Having to start at Page 1 and then click the appropriate dot and scroll to the desired page every single time can get tedious. Following on #1: 2) Eliminate the sideways page scrolling. The scrolling looks cool, and was fine when we were just flipping between Page 1 and Page 2. But now, by the time we're up to page 15+, the scrolling just makes what should be a simple task take longer than necessary. Instead of scrolling, just make it jump directly to the desired page when the player clicks the appropriate dot. 3) Highlight the dots at intervals. At some point, there will be enough dots that it's going to become increasingly difficult to count them to find the desired page. This can be mitigated by highlighting--with a different size, shape, and/or color--every tenth dot.