agentx5

I am considering an Ice/Energy/Cold or Ice/Ice/Cold right now, out of curiosity, so I want information on this. Thus far from what I can tell there are downsides: There's no snipe attack, which kind of sucks. Blizzard is not a nuke. And Freeze Ray is rather redundant with Bitter Freeze Ray. I kind of wanted an ice blaster to contrast against my fire blaster, but maybe it's better to make an ice sentinel instead?

No, just rendering this one image takes quite a bit of time for the GPU to do all the ray-tracing, the game couldn't support this even if it wanted to. It's rendered from a free program called DAZ 3D, then Abobe Photoshop for the spell effects. It's definitely eye-popping to see the characters come to life when you put them in a render like this though. If I could find a way to get the texture or model files for recognizable CoH costume pieces, that'd be even more amazing! ~edit~ Unless you mean the characters themselves, in that case yes. Alyssa is a level 50 Fire/Nrg Blaster. Ynnea is a level 50 Emp/Rad Defender.

Exactly that, otherwise I leave the green circle around Hasten. Apparently what I'm writing and what I'm thinking are not in sync today.

GM_Miss suggested I post this here, albeit the image is much smaller on the forums. ( It was rendered in 5120x5120, then reduced to 2560x2560 for distribution, .jpg further reduces original quality unfortunately ) Alyssa Q'Uzixola is my Fire/Energy Blaster, and Ynnea is my Empathy/Radiation Defender; both are found on Torchbearer currently. The background seems fitting for some areas seen in CoH's Paragon City. https://i.imgur.com/LuE4cDM.jpg

That's hard to choose... #1 would be more and better hairstyles, and high-res face textures (only a few of them are higher quality, most look blurry). Once that would be done, my wish list would move onto things like more materials options, color options, more dresses, more shirts, better military uniforms, more hats. To give some examples of some of the possibilities with just more options to choose from (remember this game is Cryptic-made engine as well, like CoH) :

Can we PLEASE get rid of the stupid 95% clamp function once and for all. We have Defense%, Resistance%, Accuracy, and toHit% ; we didn't need to guarantee a 5% chance to miss for everybody. Those layers work just fine, just fine-tune if needed. It's quite frustrating as a well placed setup for an Assassinate on a Stalker and then your whole combo is ruined because the target moved. Or a blaster preparing a sniper shot that goes wide unable to hit the broad side of the barn. It's not "fun" it's just annoying and leaves the player feeling cheated. And it can also ruin a team strategy that was planned. Annoying things that aren't fun should be removed for Quality of Life reasons, IMHO. You know you've screwed up as a designer (again, I'm talking Cryptic long ago, not current HomeComing Devs) when you have to have a "streak-breaker" code to force a hit to succeed! I see this as an opportunity for HomeComing's team to shine and fix something Cryptic never should have created. You can still leave a clamp function in at 100% to give a guarantee nobody will ever exceed that in error, but a 5% guaranteed chance to miss no matter what is just stupid.

First, I really don't want to seem emphasis on solo with Empathy, honestly. That's not the role a Defender has on the team, IMHO. If you want to be a solo juggernaut, I'm thinking Brute or Controller or something. Second, I would LOVE having Empathy's Healing Aura be a toggle. Third, I would love it if [Fortitude] would give more of a damage buff. That's usually what has people clamoring for Kinetics over Empathy all the time, the damage bonus buff.

It's still something I want, but reading that thread it's clear the Cryptic developers that made those parts long ago really screwed up the model code, or were too lazy to split such costume pieces into parts.

Speaking as a blaster main (Alyssa Q'Uzixola), the goal should be synergy with your teammates. The most DPS I've done is when I'm paired with a Defender or Controller who is debuffing and buffing like crazy. That's actually what's fun about this game, there isn't a "best". Also I find -Resistance is harder to come about than -Defense, and -Res does more in end-game content than -Def. And finally don't discount the power of things like electric's -End draining effects. Remember it's a team effort. Since you and your friend are running together, you should really work on two powersets that synergize when put together.

Do we have an update on this bug? ETR? Status?

Take myself as an example, I've only been playing CoH for a few months. Literally. Ever. I think back when CoH was live I was into competitive TF2 league play (as medic & heavy primarily). I was brought here via referral of some other long-time friends who were already here. And then I can say I've encountered at least 4 or 6 other uniquely new players to CoH (not just returning players from when it was Live). So yeah, that's good news, no?

Thank you for fixing the Adamastor summoning bug, whatever it was!

Nice to know the crash reporting tool is helping simplify reporting for quicker fixes! That's VERY good news to hear! And congrats on finding the root causes to some old bugs!

Did this begin with the most recent patch?

Radiation Melee on Stalkers has been broken for months to my knowledge, and has not been fixed. @IIIXJokerXIII proved this with copious data of combat logs for devs to pour over and the conditions for each. But the only response was a curt/terse "Fixed." response when it clear hasn't been fixed, at least not for Radiation Melee Stalkers. I don't know about others. My point is whatever is causing this: 1. it's not easily apparent in the source code as to why 2. it highlights the possible issues with the Clamp() function itself, and why it'd be better if it simply wasn't used (for example, how Armor Class vs Attack Roll works) 3. it highlights a communication issue where this is not being taken seriously, while many many Stalkers get frustrated that certain attacks keep missing. It could be something just with Radiation, but I'm not sure. Dr. Discomfort, I hate to say it, I don't think the HomeComing staff believed IIIXJokerXIII either. But I'd strongly encourage sharing detailed combat logs with conditions (like show what the toHit was at the time, etc) so that way there's multiple people reporting the same issue. The more people report it, the less it can be considered as a possible one-off oddity.

You tell me where it'd fit on this map!

What did you think about the Inherent Power suggestion?

I don't want damage resist as a Blaster, I want to be killing them all faster than they can attack me in return. Hardcore offense. 500%. CAN HAZ MOAR DAMAGE NAO PLZ?!

Sounds epic, if you ever need a fire-blasting sorceress or empathy celestial on your side, hit me up in-game on Torchbearer. Usually on Thursdays and Saturdays (Friday's are XMoD nights with friends). Maybe it's just Torchbearer, but I've almost never seen a level 50 Peacebringer or Warshade, especially in raids or iTrials (no idea why not). And yes, I still stand by what Redlynne and I were discussing as possible options for improvement, namely with Cosmic Balance.

A guide of recommended tactics would help, or a few video clips put together to illustrate. I read what you are staying, and comprehend the words, but don't fully understand. I guess that's just that I've not seen that in action like you're describing it. Unfortunate, because it sounds awesome. This would be good knowledge to share, maybe?

1. That wasn't the discussion Redlynne and I were having. 2. Just FYI... Knockback isn't ALWAYS bad, it's situational. 2a. Imperious is a good example of bad knockback. Hitting lots of enemies who are clustered and scattering them makes melee characters want to scream, and even makes AoE-focused blasters or controllers unhappy. That's bad usage. But's it's not the knock itself that's bad, it's the usage & positioning. Going in the middle and scattering enemies everywhere is... just don't... please... 2b. I do however get behind the far back ranged enemy who is playing it safe, and single-target hit them with a magnitude 16 to 20 knock to toss them into the fray, hopefully right next to my melee teammates so they only have to turn and hit the enemy I just tossed. 3. Knock-up/Knock-down AoE is much better. 4. And even better is knock-to, negative-repel, is far better than AoE knockback away from a singular origin point in 3D space. But that requires a demonstration, so awhile ago I had created a video for this for a different Crytpic game (Champions Online), using another different game (i.e.: Dragon Age II : Force Mage powerset : Pull of the Abyss) but it fell on deaf ears due to lack of developers & money. But this video is still helpful to illustrate what good knock power design and knock-to/anti-repel looks like (start from the 2:00 minute mark to get to the point): Knowing how Cryptic codes knocks and repels, it's possible to make a "Pull of the Abyss" effect is just handled as a negative value repel function. (Champs did do it, but they did it for a gamble-box vehicle/mount power... *sigh* But it proved it's possible to use negative-repel values and have it attract to a point instead of repel from). If there's more "pull"/negative-repel than distance, what you see is what I jokingly call the toilet-bowl orbit/swirl (you can see a little of that in the video above), but that's a minor side-effect and WOULD be something valuable in all team-mob games with large groups of mobs (like CoH TaskForces/StrikeForces).

Ok that's a good point actually. I get what you're saying now, maybe I didn't understand what you meant before. Yes, having the team benefiting from sticking together around the Kheldian is starting to sound like a REALLY GOOD idea. And if that means more Kheldians leading teams, I'm all for it. It's win-win. I like win-win. :-)

Redlynne, I appreciate what you're trying to suggest, and I like that; but I feel you missed the main point of my post. I may have been too verbose, so let me be more succinct & clarify if I can? The goal (not to lose sight of it in these specifics) would be to buff the Inherent Power for Kheldians, called Cosmic Balance. There are multiple way we can discuss on doing that, but IMHO that would be the best thing because it would encourage Peacebringers and Warshades both to WANT to be on a team, as in it could be a reason you'd want to play the archetype, and something that'd make it stand out. Whether that's like Leadership pool powers with defense, accuracy, mez resist, whatever; ultimately what I feel would be most important and most impactful without being game breaking is to reward being a part of a full team. And that goal in turn is because teamplay is fun. So In that I think, we can agree that's a good idea, yes?

Sure why not, with one change if I may. I like the intent, but remove the radius part please for two reasons. 1. First, as a Blaster who moves a LOT in combat, I can tell you I'm often going to be 80 ft or so away at times. I mean heck, when I boost the range on my sniper attack it's 240 ft. And how often have we seen teams split up in combat. It's rare to see a team that sticks all within 60 ft of one another. Yes I know a divided team is often a dead team on +4/x8 difficulty, but it happens often. Most people just don't have situational awareness enough alone to keep any sort of tactical formation going on. In short, 60 ft isn't enough, that's my first point. 2. Second, as a person who codes stuff like this, there's two ways you can check this, and neither are great on server performance (and both can be sources of a memory leak if not handled very carefully): heartbeat check or interrupt check. 2a. Heartbeat works by having the computer(s) check conditions periodically, a time based cycle. It will have latency from anyone crossing in or out of the maximum radius in order to trigger the conditional. If you make it more responsive with faster checks, it lags resources down for client and server both. If you make it less responsive, then it can be frustrating with moving targets. 2b. Interrupt works "on trigger" conditions, and will require some new core coding functionality to make it function correctly and it increases the demand on server & client internet communications. More importantly I'm not sure if the CoH engine is setup with functions to actually be an entry trigger, and it will be the burden on the other player's client to inform the server and the other players that they've entered or exited the radius. Client-side interrupt checks are also prone to tampering and reverse engineering, although I doubt that's an issue in this specific context. It all depends on WHAT and HOW specifically to which method is the lesser of two impacts on performance, but this is much easier, if I may: Counter-counter-proposal: Not triggered by PBAoE radius, but simply a check that runs with all the other buffs checks (code efficiency), and sees how many teammates are in the active map, range independent. That way you get the benefit without any responsiveness latency or potential performance issues.

If I may offer a suggestion, from the perspective of a non-Kheldian player? If y'all are wanting Kheldians to be buffed in a way that more people would play them, why not just make their inherent power "Cosmic Balance" do more? That would also have the benefit of encouraging more teamplay, which in my experience is what matters more. I want to see Kheldians leading teams more, being kind of a go-to class/archetype for leading teams. And it's partly because for the Kheldian player, the reason for wanting more people on the team is that it makes them stronger where the team lacks. I mean wasn't that the original design intent? Maybe instead: 40% +Dmg 15% DmgRes 20% res(rech) -2 mag Not a major change per se, but would definitely make people take another look at playing a Warshade or Peacebringer on Homecoming Servers.