Fira

Just to be sure, Patrol XP ?

That clearly doesn't sound like something that would "bring in new players" that would "search for video games" though for quite a few reasons... However it doesn't really have to. Clearly most of people that end up on HC do so because they played on live and weren't aware yet they can play again. General coverage is all it takes for someone that hasn't to stumble on it by accident! If you ask players around in game, a lot end up today on HC literally that way, because they didn't know and stumbled on a video or article. Another factor is just overall community involvement : to put it plainly, you're more inclined to keep bothering playing the game knowing it lives in some fashion and you can go to the forums to rant about things. I'd imagine video coverage on mainstream platforms works in a similar way, if perhaps a bit more indirectly! But bottom line is, it's clearly still bound to have an impact.

Mind that there are a widespread rumors that both -Res and DoTs tend to make enemies run away and scatter. This would make Reactive an huge offender. As far as my personal testing goes, I can't say otherwise, quite the reverse... Actually failed an AE Arc finale with a GM and Time limit of 30 minutes completely because it kept running away every time i hit it and applied Reactive...

Prot Bot's Shield snapshotted with Clarion and disabled (actual solo standby def that way ends up 63.9% and 78.9% AoE, with Traps FF Gen, Maneuvers, and Auras) Same setup without Clarion Snapshot Also i wholeheartedly agree with @Maelwys - it's ultimately very much of a cheese especially considered current state of henchmen running around defensive mechanics, and the buff to resummon recharge. I'm especially concerned by the way it was presented in patch that, much like summon rate changes, seem to put it as QoL. This is not (edit: not *only*) QoL. It's a straight buff values wise, and a mega buff in practical contexts due to the former points. That's why I tried to point it out in focused feedback thread during beta phase. I'm 100% fine with any kind of balance change and direction, but am legit concerned that might have been wrongly done as a pure QoL change without regard to balance impact. Which is especially problematic given it further legitimizes the state of cheese henchmen exist in...

This tweak changes absolutely everything. I outright switched away from Barrier to Clarion Radial. Snapshot Clarion on the protection shield for 32.5% Def on everyone instead of 12.6% pre-update (*2 on T1/T3). Other benefits optional. They get this as soon as they spawn so that means in my case (/Traps, Auras) replacement bots landing with almost 70% Def right off, which matters for the simple reason that if they died to begin with it's almost always (p >= .09 +- streakbreaker) because ToHit shenanigans are involved and "softcap" is not enough. Pretty sure I've gotten away with situations I never would have before due to this change, notably when stacked Nem Vengs are involved.

Yeah MM pets can get stuck in some circumstances, usually following an in-map teleport. It can take a variety of forms: - Rarely they'll get stuck eg in geometry or fail to follow and you can dismiss them in UI - Often going too far or dismissing them in UI will make it look like it did, but they're still out there somewhere -- and manually dismissing them again with '/petcom_all dismiss' works - Sometimes they can get stuck in 'door sliding' mode notably with elevators, be ragdolled somewhere, or otherwise be AWOL and be unable to answer commands, in which case you have no choice but to /release_pets altogether indeed - Extremely rarely, again usually after teleport, some of them will get completely stuck off the map somehow in an unrecoverable way. Then you just have no choice but to rejoin the mapserver instance by zoning or relogging. I've only encountered that a couple times so far TLDR: You usually want /release_pets as mentioned above as it's a common'ish issue with teleporting and transitions

Been trying to use sub-50 builds for somewhat more, eh, comprehensive exemplaring for a while, and aside from making a number of Contact dialogues hilarious due to the Threat Level / Experience Level difference, it seems to also mess with Incarnates in a minor way. Factual Experience: Upon switching to a Threat Level 19 build while keeping incarnate slots equipped, you are still scaled to Combat Level 50. Upon exemplaring, via team or TF/etc, some passive incarnate characteristics do not disable following this. The passive portion of Hybrid is still active and you still get incarnate shifts from Destiny/Lore in locations such as Pocket D. My clueless shot at an explanation: I'd imagine the global enhance part of eg. Alpha is conveyed as a power properly and disabling the power due to level requirement disables it, but passives-on-actives must use extra logic which acts up there (you're not "level" 45+, so no need to disable them, right?) Couldn't find anything else that seemed to be affected by this. To be clear, the actual hybrid toggle (or anything else) is still unusable. As far as I can tell the worst "exploitable" case is having +10% dmg from Assault Hybrid at low level, which is hopefully no big deal anyway. It's probably still worth patching up eventually for coherency...

So far, played through as duo with a friend on 4x8 Vilainous, intending to check up on things difficulty wise, take time to explore the maps (6 hours.. lots of looking around, object finding and discussing) then 3x8 with a full team (much shorter) to explore usage in a team setting. If I had to try to write a short and honest review for Dr Aeon's SFMA Collection, I'd want to say that it clearly has by far some of the best content in the game in it. Even though there are some rough edges (some typos, way too much text even for SFMAs, some awkward details eg. textures, bit bumpy boss balancing) and continuity can get a bit convoluted, the scenes overall are impressive, with clear attention to detail, interesting enacted situations, actual boss fights unlike most rest of game, and almost everything in these regards is absolutely top-notch, with some insane ideas! (fitting!) - not to mention I'm a huge fan of Cap and the idea of pushing the Goldbrickers further, though perhaaaaps that's a bit far. However I'm still a bit sad for Dr Aeon and all the work he put into it, because his SFMA Collection could probably have been made into like one full SF and two Whole Signature Story Arcs with a bit more assembly work instead, and these would likely be the three best arcs in the game. But instead seems he hacked the AE screen to force playing the Collection in alphabetic order, in one go, with a team, and promising some DSO rewards or something, so it's a bit messy and people are just going to blindly run it without a care...

Oh yeah, i get that. It is really a nice change since it did take a long time and would be inconsistent, plus the bubble actually uses quite a bit of end and especially T2s are starved there My confusion is primarily regarding the fact that the MM and Protector Bots were previously only getting one bubble, not two, so it's a very high defensive increase for them

I'm a bit confused - always assumed that the T2 bots double-shielding was a bug, since they only do so to select other pets - and not the MM nor each other. Unless i'm missing something, given a shield currently hits 12.57% def on my MM @ 50 and with Nerve/Agility, that would mean MM & T2s getting basically 9.2% all def extra for free ? That ... really sounds like a bit much for something that is worded as being Quality of Life changes Edit: Don't get me wrong, i'm grateful for the fact it's more consistent, i'm just a bit confused by the effective increase

What 'bout out-of-contexts ?! Sounds like these guys really afraid of getting trapped into AE...

Edit - i'm guessing this was fixed here, though it's not openly said, nor mention of other lores. the data dump isn't up to date either i guess. BP lores remain absolutely broken from the -Res regardless

Hey, I'd like to share some thoughts and discuss - in the odd chance anyone cares about that. Something I heard of a couple times a while back (and you might have too), that always appealed to me, was this story of someone that would have henchmen talk back-n-forth in scripted fashion over pretty long conversation scripts, using self loading binds to progress through. It sounds like a pretty cool way to make henchmen more dynamic and a bit more, uh, present and lively. But I figure it's still ultimately something pre-scripted and you get used to. Is it possible to do better than that ? I previously set out to try and twist this idea onto some kind of dynamic combat feedback. Instead, you use /chatlog to dump combat logs, and an external app picks it up, parses it, aggregate recent data, and write bind files back to be used in-game. This would mean you can get your henchmen to react with snarky comments about combat situations (Ouch! You'll pay for that Paragon Protector Elite!) by periodically pressing the bound key. This proved a bit challenging to put together in full and i still don't have a full prototype for that, but it definitely seems doable. However some tinkering yesterday brought me a different approach for which i managed to do something practical - and this is why I'm writing about it. I'm sure there's many more interesting things that can be done around this and it's a cool subject to bring up. So instead, this one focused on a simpler aspect by using a bind you'd be constantly using anyway as mastermind: combat orders. Rather than just constantly going "By your command." couldn't these stupid robots be a bit more interesting ? Idea was as follow: use a similar system of chain-loading bind files to go through a sequence. Sometimes the file's binds will just perform the order. Sometimes it will add extras. In extreme cases, it might just do something entirely different. Then it loads the next one. To bring a semblance of randomness, you have to generate a very long sequence (thousands) automatically. In order to make the thing more interesting, i figured you could leverage the sequence to give the robots a bit more long-term life. So rather than just choosing from a single random pool of comments and edgy stupidities, you can split them up in, say, "moods", and have them transition from one to the other periodically. This can even be further exploited to introduce silliness such as malfunctioning robots that will do something else entirely. A quick example of what this early proto looks like ingame as you give orders (with an occurrence chance like 30-40% of the time) - back to back without pressing anything else. Lines added to explicit the 'mood' changes: [13:41] [Pet](Mekki)Vayu: Ready. [13:41] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Attacking. [13:41] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Engaging designated target. [13:41] [Pet](Mekki)Vayu: Navigation target acquired. [13:41] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Target location acquired. [13:41] [Pet](Mekki)Larry: Holding position. [13:41] [Pet](Mekki)Vayu: On the move. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Kirby: Moving toward target. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Ready. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Kirby: Terminating. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Henry: Moving to attack position. --- [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Henry: Engaging target. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Kirby: Plotting new course. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Henry: General Navigation failure. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Vayu: Movement order confirmed. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Marty: On the move. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Securing perimeter. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Kirby: Assessing nearby threats. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Kirby: Movement order overriden by safety systems. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Attack order corrupted. [13:42] [Pet](Mekki)Vayu: Plotting new course. [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: On the move. [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Henry: On the move. [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Henry: Plotting new course. --- [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Let em' come, i'm ready ! [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Vayu: Moving as ordered ! [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Henry: On the move ! [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Marty: I got your back. [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Marty: They won't be a problem much longer ! [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Kirby: I'm on it ! [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Kirby: I'm on it ! [13:43] [Pet](Mekki)Sagi: Engaging ! I'm sure there's many more cool things that can be done around this by playing with bind_load_file_silent. I figure some probably already have their own too. This is awful, awful early code, and not usable much, but still here's a quick look into the script/approach i used to generate bind files should anyone be interested into rolling similar things: https://github.com/fira/coh-moodbots I'd very much love to hear more especially if others have been doing similar things or had such ideas, etc

Simple thing but need to point it out, as that was the case on live too and always buggued me. Every time you change MapServer it toggles back off, which kind of takes away a good part of the point of it. I don't see a particular reason this would be intended other than probably being forgotten in however that stuff is sync'd back - that goes beyond the semblance of understanding i have. Relevant value seems to be Ents2 DisplayAlignmentStatsToOthers

Thanks ! So basically pre-generating nav meshes for AIbefore release ? I'd have thought this would have been a thing in live and most games, pretty interesting if such a design choice was made primarily for base fighting (Also to clarify per Don's answer, just reflecting as per current, I realize it's historical and obviously shard mergers would cause a lot of issues and aren't straightforward, I'm not particularly suggesting it should be done) Edit: Hell, double-thanks for fixing Reunion while I'm reading this

Only stumbling on that now, find it very interesting, helps understand some of the choices there - though I'd still argue shards are too many currently, not because of load but simply due to fencing players (I mainly play on Reunion which is bit special but player 'dilution' over time is quite palpable and i'd expect same on some others given player counts) Had previously briefly used and considered OVH services at smaller scale and it never looked like quite a competitive option there (among a few other things) but under that angle, scale and use case (clustering, multiple locations, etc) it definitely seems to make a ton more sense as middle ground between more bare alternatives, and overly expensive cloud-focused IaaS platforms as mentioned above I'm intrigued by the mention of "beaconizing" here and what it entails, there is a page on OuroDev mentioning usage but that's it. Is it like a pre-release generation step, or server side pre-caching ? What's so important about it ?

Oh... Alright... I see, thanks

Funny rare bug I encountered previously on Posi 1 3rd mission, and ITF last, and saw mentionned on helpchat a handful times. Sometimes upon completing a TF mission, nothing seems to happen for the actual TF state - that is to say you exit it and made no progress and are asked to do the same mission again. Happened again with Posi 1 3rd mission (MAGI Assault in Oranbega) just now, with a group somewhat struggling (it was good fun the first time, but redoing it bit ouch, so a third time...) - both times completing the mission had no effect on TF progression. In previous cases i believe this was a single occurrence. I'm bothering writing a bug report now because I noticed a few things that I'd guess are related and might narrow it down or explain: I was the Team Leader, but noticed after the fact that Positron was in fact in Inactive contacts Talking to Positron at that point would result in the "I want to talk to your team leader" generic dialog, even though, well, I was To clarify, I was both team leader (star) and active team member (according to team UI), and difficulty settings applied accordingly As we disbanded team and the last other member quit the team (which was the person that originally formed team, having passed star for level scaling), but remaining alone in TF team, the above went back to normal A potentially important note is that I was Rogue aligned. I've never seen cause issues in that context before, especially since this shouldn't count as a mixed team in this case, but who the hell knows...