RikOz

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!

It is also odd, with the skyscrapers, that nothing ever happens higher than the 5th floor of those buildings.

Just yesterday, while doing radio missions in IP, I got a mission to rescue somebody who had been kidnapped by the Circle of Thorns. This led me to a door on Admiral Sutter's ship, and after clicking on the door I found myself in the blue caves. I also got sent to the front door of the bar right next to the police station in Atlas Park. Upon entering, I found myself on the 5th floor of that 3-story building, had to work my way down to the 1st floor, occasionally rescuing a hostage whom I had to lead back up to the 5th floor so that they could exit onto the street.

So the name I came up with for Alt #125 requires some explanation, as I'm fairly certain that absolutely nobody will get the reference. Waaay back when I was a wee lad, some time in the 1970s, I was watching some now-forgotten "variety show" on TV. One the bits involved a small choir singing a rendition of the patriotic (USA) song, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" ... except that they had replaced nearly every word of the song with a similar-sounding name from the phone book. The result was amusing, but it was so long ago that I only remember the opening line. "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" became "Elmer Janke Toutle Dundee". And so ... Meet Janke Toutle Dundee (TW/SR brute)!

Heh. I just noticed yesterday that my stalker who uses ninja stance "hits the ground running" when I turn off flight. Click off flight, and her legs start running before she hits the ground. Looks pretty comical.

Right? I have it on all of my alts. I've used it to completely fill up my base Insp collectors (sorted by type!)

I got Psychologist on all of my alts just as part of exploring First Ward and getting all of the other day jobs there. It's time consuming, but with over 100 alts it wasn't a big deal leaving characters parked there for extended periods. My "system" went something like this: 1 - Zone into Eltentown via base teleporter, zip over to the outside of the north wall to read the plaque there, then go back inside and log out. The next time I log in that character, I've earned the Survivalist day job badge. 2 - Go east and collect all the badges and plaques in the Free Fire Zone. Log out on top of the tram station or the D.U.S.T. building. When logged back in, I've got the D.U.S.T. Ranger badge. 3 - Move away from the D.U.S.T. buildings, log out atop most any other building. Log back in a few days later, and earn the Scavenger badge. 4 - Fly down and get the plaques and exploration badges around the church/cemetery. If I don't already have Mortician from Striga or Sharkhead, log out there. Receive Mortician the next time I log in. 5 - Grab the "mid-town" badges - the plaque on a standalone broken wall, a badge at the sunken Cole statue, and a badge at the top of the tallest building in the center. From the top of that building, fly down to the badge inside the dead Hami seed, fly south to get the one in the rocky hills, the fly west to the hospital. Read the plaque, grab the badge, log out. Receive Psychologist upon login. Note that there will need to be about 5 days between logging out and logging back in, for the day job badges to be awarded. Again, not a problem for me, with 100+ alts - I had multiple alts all doing this at the same time. I would also, after logging back in to get Psychologist, teleport back to my SG base and immediately take a portal to Night Ward to grab all of the exploration badges there. (Fun: With no plaques* to read, I could grab the House Hunter badge inside the mansion, and after exiting the mansion I could fly a route that let me hit every remaining badge without stopping.) *There are a couple plaques in NW, but they don't count toward any badges, so I didn't bother stopping to read them after the first time.

I've been told I've played a character for several thousand hours a few times.