RikOz

Yes.

Still happening. Had just gotten this character to 46 and logged out:

I mentioned the balance thing in my OP - the animation needs to be the same length as other snipes. The practical difference is that, when I snipe with Fire or Energy for example, the actual blast itself takes longer, and my target is affected for the duration of the attack. In other words, a DE lieutenant isn't summoning emanators or swarms while he's bouncing across the room from my Energy snipe. If I'm Fire sniping him, he's going "AAAAAAAAAAAAH! IT BURNS!" for the duration of the fire hitting him, not summoning things. And I can then hit him with a second attack (if necessary) the instant my snipe finishes, before he can get off his summons. With Archery, it's a quick poke that is over as soon as it starts, and then I just stand there while he starts summoning things.

Collecting exploration badges in the Praetorian underground: [NPC] PPD Suppressor: I love this assignment. I get to take out Resistance and I don't even have to get punched first.

I was getting it on characters 26-29: It wasn't happening to me earlier in the day with other sub-50 characters (but all higher than 30), and then just suddenly started happening when I got to this particular page of characters.

The Archery blaster has one complete ATO set and 5/6 of the other, and Sting of the Manticore in her snipe. SOs otherwise. Ice Blast sentinel has one complete ATO set and 3/6 of the other. Only other IOs are some procs for +Regen and +Recovery. SOs otherwise. Blaster has the Darkness Manipulation secondary, only really uses the DMG aura and the two melee attacks. Sentinel has only defensive secondary, obviously (Ice Armor). Pool powers other than Flight: Archer - Leadership: Maneuvers, Assault, Tactics; Munitions Mastery Epic Pool: Body Armor Sentinel - Leadership: Assault; Psionic Mastery Epic Pool: Mind Probe (rarely used, as things just don't get into melee range that often)

More likely, given that the guy we're rescuing is an auto mechanic, and the warehouse is supposed to represent his shop, the checker motif is a reference to the "checkered flag" waved at the finish line in auto racing.

Okay, I just got to make an very obvious, back-to-back comparison between Archery and other ranged sets. I have a group of characters that are a "team", and as such I'm keeping them all leveled together (as if they were actually working together and leveling up at the same time). I just got them all leveled from 39 to 40. My Ice Blast sentinel went from 39 to 40 in about half the time it took my Archery blaster.

I was very confused for a while when some of my alts started showing up with the little padlocks on their costume slots, telling me there was some error with the costumes. Took me forever to figure out that, on those alts, I had selected a power from Munitions Mastery, and I needed to select a rifle to use, despite not choosing a power that needed a rifle.

I recall one mission where I had to stop the bad guys from destroying a specific object. Alas, on this particular running of the mission, in addition to the regular mobs whose job it was to start attacking the object when you show up, the random mission spawning placed two other groups of mobs in close proximity to the object. So the instant I showed up, two lieutenants and six minions all started unloading on the thing, and it was destroyed and the mission failed before I could even start my first attack. As far as random hostage spawns, I would love to see, at the very least, the named hostages use the same model every time. For the others, yeah, it's odd when the "recruit" I'm rescuing from the racist 5th Column is a black guy. Or that hero alignment mission where the DE has abducted three heroes, and they are either overweight or elderly.

I just posted some stuff about Ranged Shot over here, before I saw this thread:

Archery's snipe, "Ranged Shot", needs some help. The problem is in the animation. There's this ridiculous delay after the shot is fired. Draw the bow, hold it, aim carefully, loose ... and then just stand there for 2-3 seconds, as if your character is looking to see, "Did I get 'em? Did I get 'em?" Other blaster sets don't seem to have this issue. I can snipe and then instantly start my next attack. As a result of this post-snipe delay, I may take out my first target with that one shot, but then I end up with the rest of the spawn standing on top of me before I can even start my second attack. Or, as I encountered over and over again in the Devouring Earth arc one of my archers just did, the post-snipe delay gives the lieutenants (who usually don't go down with one shot) all the time they need to summon their emanators and/or swarms and now I have to use considerably more attacks to finish them off, and of course I still end up with the minions all up in my face. I finally figured out how to stop their summoning: Hit them with Stunning Shot first, then a quick snipe. That prevents the summons, but with the reduced damage of the quick snipe, I need to shoot them a few more times, and once again that allows the minions to invade my personal space. Compare that to my fire blasters: I can snipe the lieutenant, hit him with a second finishing attack if necessary, then take out the minions--all before any of them get anywhere close to me. I can sort of guess the original reasoning for that post-snipe delay: the actual "shot" part of "Ranged Shot" is considerably quicker than other snipes, but they needed to make sure the actual full attack animation lasted as long as the other sets' full animation times. In that case, I would suggest removing those extra seconds where the archer is doing absolutely nothing from the end of the animation, and just make the pre-shot aiming part of the animation longer by the same amount. (I know, easier said than done.) The same problem exists, though to a lesser degree, with most other Archery attacks. The whole set seems slower than other blaster sets, without any extra damage to compensate.

Flaminatrix decked out for Christmas!

Energy Ellie's latest togs:

Captain Apple's 10th costume slot:

Yesterday I encountered these odd glowing orbs in random sections of the war walls in Brickstown. They look kinda white in the screenshot, but up close they were red. Never seen this before - part of the holiday or something?

Playing one of my Dark Blast blasters today, and saw the oddest thing happen. There were two enemies standing near a wall, on a warehouse map. I hit them with Umbral Torrent. Just after I defeated them, two more enemies came running at me, from the next room, showing the lingering effects of the Umbral Torrent power. They had been nowhere in my line of sight when I used the attack. I assume they had been on the opposite side of the wall when I fired off the Umbral Torrent. Is Umbral Torrent actually supposed to do that? I've never seen any other power go through a wall like that.

She could team up with Black Metal Barbie!

I've come up with a few tricks that are about 90% effective in taking out those Illusionists before they can phase shift. What always annoyed me most, though, were the Master Illusionist's illusions that persisted for way too long after the MI herself was defeated. Aside from the question of whether they were actually "illusions" or "summons", i.e. how does she maintain these "illusions" when she's unconscious?, there was the problem of those Phantasm illusions then summoning their own "Decoy Phantasm" illusions that can harm me, but I can't harm them back, and that would persist long after both the Master Illusionist and the Phantasm had been defeated. Particularly annoying on certain hero alignment missions where they're guarding a hostage, and I can't rescue the hostage until that Decoy Phantasm is gone, so all I can do is get out of range and twiddle my thumbs for the next three minutes until the thing finally despawns on its own. Thankfully, it appears that the HC devs have addressed that last issue, because the Decoys seem to go away a lot faster now than they used to. This right here! After a few Freak missions, I'm usually halfway through the next non-Freak mission before I remember that I don't have to wait around to see if they rez. One thing that bugs me about the rezzing is that it seems the OG devs sometimes adjusted the rez frequency on a mission-by-mission basis. For example, there's one hero alignment mission where Frostfire is partying with the Freakshow, and I've consistently noticed that the Freaks in that mission almost never rez. Oh god, I kept running into this situation where, when trying to talk to Peter Stemitz in Founders Falls, somebody kept blasting the hell out of me. I finally located him - one of those Comets consistently spawning on the roof of a building directly opposite Stemitz (behind you, if you're facing Stemitz). It was immensely satisfying once I remembered to check for the Comet there before talking to Stemitz - punching him over the side and then flying down and pounding him into the pavement! Regarding "make an entire class gimmick meaningless", I complained about this same issue with rogues in WoW. There would be an occasional tough monster that you couldn't sneak up on, because it had to be "summoned", and the act of summoning would take you out of stealth. So the monster would appear and spot you immediately, so there goes your basic class mechanic of "sneak up and hit them with an immensely strong attack before they see it coming" out the window. (On a more amusing note, I found it extremely annoying, from an RP perspective, when my rogue would stealth into a friendly shop, and the shopkeeper would immediately shout, "WELCOME, ROGUE!. Apparently, you can't be stealthy around friendlies.)

Found this pair in Brickstown. It appears to be a father and son, and the son is suffering through a series of "dad jokes".

I know how to use converters, and how to craft. I was mainly providing the info of my most recent encounter with this as just an example of AH behavior I've seen many times: Bids go through quickly quite consistently, unless there is one gigantic recent sale. Then they take hours or longer. Anyway, made dinner, watched a couple episodes of Sandman with the wife, checked back in, and got my IO. I had just respecced the particular character and had specifically given her four slots in Flight to accommodate that set, so I had been trying to get it quickly :)

Asking about this because this is not the first time I've encountered this situation. I was just purchasing the "Hypersonic" flight IO set off the AH. As per my usual purchasing method, I bid 100,000 inf over the highest recent sell prices that are shown. In this case, the first three enhancements showed "recent" prices of 2,000,000, so I bid 2,100,000 for each one, and received them almost instantly. Then I got to the fourth enhancement of the set, and glanced at the "recent" prices: Two sales for 1,000,000, two sales for 1,500,000 ... and one sale for a whopping 20,000,000 inf. Well, I'm certainly not paying that much, so just bid 2,100,000 again, which was well over the other recent prices. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. The AH still hadn't sold it to me by the time I logged out. As I said at the beginning, this is not the first time I've seen this happen. An item showing one successful bid that is grossly higher than, and out of line with, all of the others, and it takes forever for my purchase to go through when my bid is lower than that one ridiculous bid. So what's happening here? Is it the AH seeing that one person--possibly accidentally--severely over-bid, and deciding for itself that anything less than that bid should have to wait a while? Or are subsequent sellers looking at the outlier and deciding that they should now charge that much? EDIT: Actually raised my bid to 3,100,000 before I logged out. Logged in again after I posted this, and still hadn't gotten it.

I can say that one of the biggest reasons I finally gave up on WoW after more than ten years was the increasing tendency of the devs to force players into raiding and hard-mode dungeons. Like, I was fine with not having the top gear. But I was not fine with having my progress on professions stymied by being forced to run a dungeon. Or coming back after a several-month break, earning some new gear from ordinary gameplay, only to discover that this new and improved armor was cursed and actively trying to kill me, and I'd have to join a raid to get the materials to decurse my gear.

I have spreadsheets for each of the ATs I play. Primary powersets on one axis, secondaries on the other. So when I decide to roll, say, a new brute, I open my Brutes file and look to see which combos I haven't rolled yet.

I had this Ice Blast/Sonic Manipulation blaster named "Coldcore", but I wasn't really sold on the name and I hadn't written a bio for him. But I played him a bit this evening and started turning over "pun" names that would fit his powerset combination. And suddenly, I had both a new name and a bio to explain it: Tony Coldwell's mutation came with a downside. While it granted him the ability to control ice and snow, it took his hearing. But Tony wouldn't let that stop him - he realized he could take advantage of his deafness by employing technology to generate intense, focused sound waves that would overwhelm opponents with their sheer volume - a volume he was effectively immune to. He became ... The Deafroster!