Samuel_Tow

How in heaven's name did this even come about? What possible worth could taking people's 50s away from them serve, other than to irritate? I mean, sure, if people want to give up their 50s and say they ascended, good for them. Let them. Why take MY stuff?

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I think it just has to do with the fact that they're character stats that have always been static.

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That's likely a large part of it. I know character height is saved to costume files, so it's obviously written down with all the other stats, but it is never loaded when you input a costume file, not even at character creation when height is malleable. What's more, height sometimes goes wild and takes on random values after you load up a costume. If I had to hazard a guess, it's written in several different places, which would make changing it problematic.

Coding aside, there is also the problem of gender-specific badges, such as Man/Woman in Black, as well as all the tags that control $heshe $himher $sirmam and so forth. Granted, if they can deal with side switching, they can likely deal with that, but once again, we've never been given a good answer as to why that's not easily doable the same way BABs took the time to explain why powerset customization wasn't practical and why weapon redraw is the way it is. I wish he'd drop by and explain once. We'll pass it along

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I'm not sure how many people have been joining this game, but I can't see it being too high of numbers. CoX is a ghost town compared to what it used to be, so any penny counts. I.E. Costume packs.

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The game has always hovered around 150 000 people. Last I heard, we may have been a little below that. It has never been much over 180 000 people, and that was at launch. What HAS changed, however, is that few people loiter under the statue of Atlas, which is a change for the better.

Razoras, I may not be a fan of this thread or its silliness or the directions it's been going, but you dropping by with apparently the sole purpose of character assassination, regardless of whom it may be directed at, is probably the lowest point in the entire thread. At least the others weren't malicious.

Not cool, man. Not cool.

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Achilles will cause aggro when it fires, but if it doesn't fire there will be no aggro.
Also, Surveillance has a to hit check, so you may want accuracy in it so it doesn't miss.

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Found that out the hard way. I might want to go with Accuracy/Endurance/Recharge, as I found out I'd misplaced a slot and needed the fourth one. Thanks, guys.

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I find it much better to slot for recharge than Def debuff because I'd much rather get the debuffs more often (thusly increasing their uptime) than have the -def be redundantly larger.

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At 45 recharge and 20 seconds duration, it can potentially come close to being made perma. With my resources, that would mean three Common recharge enhancements. However, the third one would give me precious little benefit, especially on such a short counter (do I REALLY need it 2 seconds sooner?) for it to be worth it, so I'd say an endurance reducer and two recharges should be fine. I'm sure I can find a good home for the fourth slot. Like... An endurance reducer in Hover

I'm actually serious.

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Oi! One important question! I haven't used the actual power so far, but I HAVE used the Combat Scanner inventable temp power. This one doesn't have the debuffs, but has the scanning component, and every time I used it, it would open the Combat Attributes window automatically. Will Surveillance do the same, and if so, can something be done about it? Nothing worse than having that god-awful window pop up every 30 seconds.

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A Lysome
Undermined Defenses End/rech
Undermined Defenses Rech
Achilles Heel chance for resistance debuff.

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For the Inventions uneducated, what's that in equivalent enhancement values? Say, in compared to SOs or commons? I'm not really sure what those do

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If it were me targetting drone would also have some extra +to hit slotted in it.

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Well, the stuff I fight is even con or +1, which puts them at a worst case scenario of base to-hit of 0.65. With the ~14% to-hit buff from Targeting Drone base and 42.4% accuracy slotting, I'm actually overshooting the cap to ~123% before rounding. I lost my to-hit formula rig when I switched computers, but I'd say I'd need at least 15% defence on the enemy to start feeling the effects at all, and at least 20% to drop below the magic 90%. A lot more when we facto in Surveillance's defence debuff, more like 25-30%, which is actually around the level of things like Earth Thorn Caster Stone Skin, I believe.

What do you do with the to-hit buffs and defence debuffs on yours?

Here's an interesting question on Survaillance: how much do you think its defence debuff would be worth to an AR/Dev Blaster? I ask, because I intend to respec that into a Blaster of mine, and the power I'm replacing (sleep gas grenade) currently has four slots. I originally intended to slot Survaillance for Defence and Resistance debuff... Until I realised that there was no such thing as resistance debuff enhancements in the game. What I'm left with, then, is enhancing the power for defence debuff, but...

But...

Let's just say that this particular Blaster has Assault Rifle with its native 1.05 accuracy on all attacks, Targeting Drone (unenhanced for to-hit) and a single level 50 Common Accuracy in every attack, fighting even con or +1 enemies. Not only is he very accurate, he's actually overcapping the to-hit soft cap on anything that doesn't have huge amounts of defence, and even then I come pretty close to capping anyway. The power already has a 14% defence debuff, which is, frankly, more than enough for what I need without more slots.

So the question, then, is... What do I put in it? It costs 10, so I guess I could stick an endurance reducer in it. I'll be using it every 45 seconds, after all. I suppose I could put in a recharge, but at 45 seconds duration and what looks like a lengthy animation, how much would I want?

Just, generally, what do I do with this power?

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so... I've got this funny feeling she's not going to give you the satisfaction of posting in this thread.

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I really shouldn't. However, just this once: here you go. Hopefully I didn't blink during that one.

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Is it just me, or has this picture been taken sort of from far away? I can't make out the face.

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It's just a problem of anchor points, I've heard.

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They did the ground work with Crab Spider back packs, at least from what all evidence seems to point to. And while I know Jay is aware and this has been much suggested, I really WOULD like to see it soon. This is pretty high on my personal priority list, higher than new powersets, but not higher than new generic ATs.

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Wish I could share and impress. There's a reason I keep pictures off me OFF the Internet. Then again, I have a picture of myself on my desktop.

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I keep pictures of me off the Internet, too. It's not too difficult, since cameras start crying when pointed at me, and few people are so cold-hearted as to force them to actually take a picture. Except those yearbook photographers back in high school. Man, those guys were cold.

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Am I the rare gamer that likes the way he looks? I've got a messed up nose, I'm at *least* 20 pounds overweight, I've got a full head of hair but it's been likened to a grey afro, a troll-doll and/or a monchichi, and I STILL think I'm sexy.
I ain't skeered.

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Hey, I LIKE how I look However, how I look does not conform to the ideal of what I SHOULD look like, so there's little point in sharing. It just gives people a back door for nasty remarks, plus I like to keep the mystique that I actually look like Rasputin

But no, you're not alone. But liking one's self and sharing one's self on the net don't always go hand in hand. Of course, for a handsome devil (quite literally) like yourself, that may not apply

Generally, I find "Fish Mastery" to be by far the dumbest thing in the entire game, not to put too fine a point on it. Can I trade that for an Ice Stalker?

Wish I could share and impress. There's a reason I keep pictures off me OFF the Internet. Then again, I have a picture of myself on my desktop.

I love it when a suggestion is so good the developers go back in time and institute it

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I prefer redheads. Spicy!

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I've grown fond of my grey. I'm not dyin it for NObody!

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I dyed my hair gray in junior high.

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I wanted to dye my hair white, but my hairdresser told me that was actually impossible, and the closest I could get was platinum blond. That's not what I had in mind. Too bad, though. Should have done that when I still had long hair. Maybe I'll dye by beard white one of these days. I'm serious.

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(actually all of our stuff is one-way too, if you've ever gotten behind the walls it's just got a much higher detail level.)

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However, much of WoW is made up of a single sheet of height-mapped terrain, whereas our terrain... Doesn't really work like this. It's a lot easier to do this in a medieval setting, where you can have a wavy, grassy ground span in all directions and have trees hug its shape and shacks built into the slopes, with cities built on a flat plain with "building props." It's actually a lot like the old Earth 2150 Map Editor, if you've worked with it.

A contemporary city doesn't conform to terrain - terrain conforms to the city. A contemporary city also doesn't sport much in the way of open raw earth and what grassy parks do exist tend to be man-made (and so flat or stepped) anyway. You can't take a modern-day metropolis and "bend" it over a hill and a valley, as a city being built would have hidden any trace of the underlying terrain, anyway.

Most Fantasy MMOs are comprised of 95% "wilderness," 5% "locations." This allows them to be big, as wilderness can be relatively simple. City of heroes is 5% wilderness, 95% locations, meaning most of the game's land area is designed with intricate detail in it, not as just a flat plain with props on it. Even Croatoa doesn't really fit that description.

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Time to swallow my pride and drop the diff to 2, I think...

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I always forget about that. Everything I've said about the Sea Witch assumes difficulty level 2: Malicious. She might spawn as a full AV if you go too high.

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I'm guessing something like "storm the castle and the actual borders on the world map change! then someone else storms it and the borders change again! doesn't this feel like the world is dynamic and your actions have meaning? ...no? well, was worth a try".

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So... Wintergrasp?

We have the next best thing, though - storming castles (including the Storm Palace) and defeating massively big, massively strong enemies. Or... Not storming castles and defeating human-sized, massively strong enemies by ourselves. I just took out both Neuron and Anti-Matter in the same mission single-handedly.

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So hows about removing the Force Walls and extending the zones out to 'Ring Roads' of highways which can act as the zone borders?

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Two problems with that:

One is the plotline. We need the War Walls now more than ever, because the Rikti have established a partial portal back to their homeworld and are doing occasional raids on the zones. The only way they can raid is if they take down the war walls, but we're safe when they're up.

The other is practical. Making a new zone is not trivial. What you're asking for is making the equivalent of several new zones - I'd say AT LEAST three or four, to fill in the area between the zones as they are, and for what? Zone-less terrain isn't all that great, anyway. Not to mention all the limitations on zone preloading and how that interacts with speed of travel and so on.

Character height isn't actually stored and regarded like just another slider. In fact, it's not height at all, it's scale - a multiplier on a bunch of parameters that defines how BIG your character is without altering any proportions. That's why female and male models are not equally tall for the same values of the "height" slider.

The height slider is responsible for a great many things, chief among which is giving the character rig its dimensions and defining where certain... Things show up when you use powers. Some props and effects are indeed locked onto skeleton joints, such as how custom weapons are attached to the arms and follow the wrist's direction. Others, however, are not, and the easiest example of those are the various temporary jet packs, which have an absolute distance off the character's "middle." Some effects are furthermore animated to mimic model movement, but not actually attach to the model itself.

All the rest of the sliders are purely cosmetic. They're just different weights for certain parts of the model, but they don't affect the skeleton at all. The Leg slider does appear to affect the skeleton only cosmetically, as I don't believe it elongates the leg bones so much as it extends the feet PAST the ends of the bones. That's why characters with longer legs will sometimes cross their legs and bend their feet in an awkward, distorted manner. Make a long-legged female and do the typical leg-cross sit to see what I mean.

Why it's not changeable, I can't say. However, it's not nearly as trivial to fiddle with it as it is to fiddle with the rest of the sliders. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say because it's hard-written in several different places, or because it's written in a place that cannot be altered freely. In any event, it's a good idea that's often suggested, but the Developers have so far refused to even comment on it. The one comment I have was a third-person off-hand from a developer at a player event, which I probably should stop spreading around, because it's likely false or at least inaccurate. Suffice it to say that I would LOVE to alter the height of some of my characters, and I would LOVE not having to sweat over getting my height perfect at character creation because I know I won't be able to touch it again ever.

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i need an epic battle with real consequences..

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The whole game is an epic battle between good and evil if you take the time to look at it. The whole game is "end game" in the traditional sense.

What, exactly, do you expect to see?

The thread used to be fun, but somewhere along the line it took a turn into the twilight zone and collided into a wall at twice the speed of sound...

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There's plenty of qualifiers that go into the term sexy, of which intellectual prowess is but a small part. Because while I may find the mind of another enticing, there does exist the rest of the package that may prevent it from being more then a simple crush, or a hearty friendship.

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More complicated still, in that "sexy" does not equate to "appealing" in all, or even most contexts. Being the man of low moral fibre that I am, I am perfectly capable of finding women I despise completely sexy, but that doesn't make me actually like them in the slightest. On the flip side, I'm willing to put up with a LOT from a person I actually like as a person and, in fact, grow to like things that initially start out irritating me.

Then again, Arcanaville intimidates and impresses me. In that order.

It depends on the Flashbang. Mercs Spec Ops Flashbang is pretty much a stock AoE hold and I doubt it has any debuffs associated with it. I can't check City of Data on it, but I can't slot my Spec Ops for to-hit debuff, so I doubt it does. PPD Ghost Flashbangs, however, as entirely a straight-up AoE to-hit debuff, and a pretty solid one. Looks like around 30% or so. They do not, however, have any status effects associated with them. Take your pick, or combine them if you will

I noticed you also used a Wide Are Web Grenade. Now, I'm not sure what the... Mace Mastery? I'm not sure what the player power does, but PPD Equalisers use what I would describe as a Wide Area Web Grenade and what it does is make a big blotch on the ground that slows both movement speed and recharge speed on all who step in it. Worse still, while the patch itself lasts probably 10 seconds, the debuff it lands lasts at least 30 seconds, probably more. Not that it's terribly relevant, but it's an interesting observation.

As for numbers, I wouldn't know one way or the other. I'm not familiar with Control sets in the slightest, so I wouldn't know what to do with Control numbers anyway Do make some if you feel like it, but I'd say the set is good enough just on its own merits.

Yes, that's the change that finally convinced me to play a Stalker, so I spent a good deal of time looking into it Somehow I neglected to find out if the OLD mechanic was still in place, however. I'm glad it isn't. It was interesting, but really bad in practice. Too inconsistent.

At least the current mechanic just needs "people" in general, not people who had controls and used them, and only against the opponents they used control on