_Synchrotron_

Base Repricing
1) How will the repricing of bases affect you personally?
Not dramatically - we have sufficient prestige for our current base. If we wanted, we could use the new pricing structure to make a larger one.
2) Will you dismantle your base to gain the additional prestige from the repricing?
Parts of it, perhaps. Certainly nothing that takes salvage to build will be dismantled. And the large, complex decorative rooms would be a lot of work to rebuild.
3) How long would this process take you if you were to engage in this practice?
tens of hours.
4) What are the positive and negative concerns regarding repricing?
The huge time-sink involved in rebuilding a base to extract the prestige is (and will remain) a constant, nagging reminder that we're "wasting prestige" by not starting over. The positives are that future additions will be less costly.
5) How will this feature affect you long term and short term?
Long-term, it'll lead to a larger base. Short term, not so much. I'm inclined to ignore it, to be truthful.

Base Salvage Exchange to Invention Salvage
1) What is the negative effect on your base for this feature implementation?
Base salvage had little or no personal value - the same cannot be said of invention salvage, particularly expensive salvage (which may or may not be rare) - this will (in some cases vastly) increase the cost of base items, and I would expect will increase the cost of salvage overall, as demand will rise with no increase in supply.
2) What is the positive effect on your base for this feature implementation?
None whatsoever. It's an unmitigated negative, as far as I can see.
3) How long will it take you to adjust to learning this new system?
Not long - the current system involves hunting down the right table to make what you want, finding it's requirements, and then amassing them to build the item. Same steps, different stuff.
4) What side effects to this system do you currently see from transitioning the old to new system?
Salvage bins now contain things that players can personally use - this means it's not "safe" to put valuable things there unless you trust everyone in the SG, or highly restrict access.
5) What security concerns do you have regarding this change?
The aforementioned change to using invention salvage.

Additional Notes:
The pricing issue is more annoying than anything else. It requires us to spend real time we could be spending playing the game, or expanding the base, just to get things back to where they are - it feels like a waste of time, and it feels like there ought to have been a way to determine the savings, and just grant the prestige (I'm not saying that there is an easy way to do that, but that is seems like there ought to have been).

Adding account-wide storage would allow people to move salvage (and recipes? and enhancements?) between their characters without requiring open-access SG level storage. Then it wouldn't be as limiting to "lock down" the SG storage. Barring that, I think the base salvage change is going to cause a lot of trouble, for no benefit whatsoever.

The credit for the nifty angle and layout of the piece goes entirely to HPS - I wanted her flying, and they said "we have this neat idea..." It came out spectacularly, and they were a breeze to work with. Not to mention getting the art in record time. Of course, the problem with that is now I want another one already...

Yay - she looks grand, and I'm tickled that Synch lives in the Lego universe now

Yes, Synch may have been the last one out the door, which makes me both happy, and a little guilty that I got mine at long last when others didn't. I only had the one in the queue. Kudos to the artists trying to make things better for the people who got disappointed - it's a really grand gesture.

I did finally get the print today (7/10), so perhaps there's hope for some of the remaining artwork.

Soon!(tm)

While the TIMELY investigative staff gave Crey a run for their money, neither has figured out who she is, where she came from, or where she got the armor...

Thanks for the artwork, Foo - I love the way it came out.

Here's Synch by Brandon. I miss the old Blue King comics, and having Brandon do this one is a neat connection to that version of the CoH universe - and it turned out great!

Synchrotron

I'll submit the piece of Synchrotron Gill Bates of MMOArt just did for me:
Synchrotron

It's done! I'm very pleased with the way this came out. Thanks Gill!
Synchrotron

Here's something I put together in the costume creator; You may want to change the color scheme...
ArmorMan!

Or perhaps an invented temp power?

I'll take 40, for Thunderbird: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...hunderbird.jpg

Since fly gets faster as you level, any chance of boosting it's initial speed, even if the "top end" can't be upped? By the time you're level 40ish, Fly isn't nearly as pokey as it starts out to be.

I do think that fly should be able to hit it's in-game limit with three SOs, even post-ED.

Global:
@Synch, or @Synch2

Heroes:
Synchrotron, level 50 radiation/radiation defender
Quantum Field, level 50 forcefield/electric defender
Quantum Aurora, level 45 peacebringer
Sable Fox, level 36 archery/devices blaster
Nytestar, level 35 energy/energy blaster
Kaleidoscope, level 33 illusion/empathy controller
Winterhawke, level 29 ice/energy blaster
Gravitic, level 27 gravity/sonic controller
Kinesthesia, level 20 kinetic/radiation defender
Thunderbird, level 11 storm/electric defender
Andromeda, level 8 sonic/energy defender
Nightingale, level 5 empathy/sonic defender
Enchantress, level 2 mind/radiation controller
Falcon, level 2 sonic/devices blaster

Villains:
Specialist, level 33 robots/traps mastermind
Tsumi, level 17 ninja blade/ninjitsu stalker
Polaris, level 6 ice/cold corruptor

Hmm. lots... but there are more slots available!

The other change from "the old days" is that mission XP bonuses are much higher than they once were, as is per-mob XP past the mid 20s. Both of these things mean fewer enhancement drops/level, which results in less influence/infamy.

And in CoV you don't get the reward from rescued civilians - it all adds up (or doesn't, in this case).

I truly dislike the Arena - Defenders just aren't fun to play there, and I love playing Defenders.

Last night, on the other hand, was fun - I redid my rad/rad defender, managed to get our team of three into the same instance of Siren's Call, and had fun. Laggy as all get-out, of course, but between the chaos and the PvE mobs, I actually lived long enough to be a Defender.

If the battles when it goes live are like that - where you can live long enough to actaully use some of your powers, then I think it'll make a fun addition to the game - something I strongly doubted would be the case.

Of course, being stubborn, I'm still not entirely convinced that it'll be that way on live - but at least now it seems that it can be fun. Which I didn't think was so before.

So, kudos to the development team - it seems like all their hard work has not been wasted...

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Newspapers? For heroes?

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Sure!

Jewel of Hera on display - curator expects "no unusal security problems..."

Bippy to accept key to city - "Although the Zig let Dap Dap escape, we're sure that he wouldn't dare interrupt the ceremony..."

Lecture at Founder's University "The Occult and You - an immortal perspective", by Akarist

All of those seem like perfectly normal headlines for Paragon City - but I suspect you could hang a mission on them anyway

Archery's accuracy bonus is real, and it does help. The question is wether it helps enough in comparison with other secondary effects.

I suspect that the answer differs for blasters and defenders, since most of the other secondary effects are boosted for defenders. (and Fire's DoT, which isn't, is boosted by the same damage enhancements you're slotting anyway)

Take electricity, for example. On my electric blaster, the end drain isn't really a useful effect - I'd gladly trade it for a 16% bonus to hit. On my FF/elec defender, however, the end drain is somtimes the most useful thing I can do - and a 16% accuracy bonus would make a poor trade for it.

I'm not certain, but I doubt that defenders get a bonus on the accuracy "secondary" for Archery...

I've got my Archery/Devices blaster to 31, and I'm having a grand time playing it. It's a superb blaster when dealing with single targets or small groups. Where it dies a horrible, grisly death is when it gets attacked by a large # of foes.

The long animations leave you very vulnerable to being swarmed, and then killed. My energy, ice, or electric blasters can flee (um... extend the range...) much sooner in that sort of situation, and are much less likely to die because of it. They can also do a "running firefight" without being caught, which isn't usually an option for my archer.

Aimed Shot's endurance usage makes it my own personal Sapper. Either it needs to do more damage, or use less endurance - something's messed up there.

I'd like to suggest that Archery, like the defender Radiation Blast set, have a small amount of it's damage penetrate defenses. That would give the set a meaningful secondary effect, as well as help mitigate the near-ubiquity of lethal-resistant villains.

Or perhaps he's found out all he needed to know about Paragon City's heroes, and is off to his real employer to spill the beans, so to speak...

OK, I am not a developer, and I'd prefer they datamine for the badges as well, but let's not go overboard. There are several valid reasons why they might decide not do to it...

a) They don't keep records from all the way back in issue 2 - this would mean that some people wouldn't get the badges, and others would, so no go.

b) The people with the expertise to do the mining have better things to do - like get CoV out.

c) Something about the shard TFs makes it impractical to datamine for their completion.

I'm sure you can come up with others. Even if it is possible to do, it seems to me likely that going through every mission by every player since issue 2 came out could be prohibitively expensive.

So, dissapointing, yes. An insult from the developers? Please. If it were feasable, they'd have done it. That they haven't means it's not. If you did the TF you know it, and if the badge is of such overwhelming importance, well then it's worth doing it again. (although, man, some of those do take forever... sigh.)

I still contend that a defense bonus that only applies outside of combat is of no practical value.

I think a much simpler and more straightforward solution is to put the defense bonus at it's "suppressed" value, and leave it there. Much easier for everyone involved, and much less confusing to explain.

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"The blood of Mu shall rise, and it shall wash across the ocean and the land. The power that lies dormant within these humble rocks cannot remain so forever."

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Hmm. The Blood of the Black Stream, perhaps? One wonders...

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* Prior to Update 2, I completed the Numina Task Force. I have been assigned all of the other Task Force Badges (having completed all of them) but still lack Numina's.

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Were you part of the team when Jurrasik was defeated? Did you recieve a reward when Jurrasik was defeated?

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I, too, did the Numina task force shortly before Issue 2 went live, and I do not have the badge for it. Until now, I'd assumed that was because the TF had been changed. I was present for the entire task force, and (I believe) I got an award when Jurassik fell. I certainly was keeping space open in my enh. tray, as I wasn't sure he wasn't the end.

I suspect Portal Corp is about to open a portal to what will become Firebase Zulu. The gateway on test is the center building of the Portal Corp campus, and last I looked on the live servers, the bunkers/sandbags, and troops are notably absent. While we've been given the in-game explanation for the disaster in Eastgate, the Shadow Shard and Firebase Zulu have gone without explanation... so far.

Love the suspense, by the way...

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In other words if you are not an AT or build with resistance to status effects you are not allowed to solo at high lvl?


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That's what the Inspirations are for! To help the solo player!

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Last time I relied on the discipline inspirations, I popped 3 of them against a Rikti Chief Mentalist, and was promptly chain-stunned into next week. Perhaps if we could purchase the higher-level inspirations, they might be of some use, but as-is, relying on the low-level discipline inspirations as a means of survival is a guarenteed trip to the hospital.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but the existing purchaseable inspiration is simply not it.