Bardon

I've made Sandmage, a Water/Time corr. I played around with the power colours to make them look like sand and it's very convincing.

I must admit, I'm getting heartily sick of this. We in Oceania are copping the outage right in the middle of prime-time once again.

I work in Change Management on massive, 24/7 systems where people can literally die if the information isn't available and correct - let me quote my mantra, tailored ever so slightly for this situation:

There's nothing like good Change Management and Quality Control.

NCSoft has repeatedly demonstrated that they have nothing like good Change Management and Quality Control.

I must've done something wrong installing the new cursors, on my laptop (running Win7) I get the following error message:

"Bad rawInfo size of 128 bytes for cursor texture or icon 'cursor_select' of 16x16 size"

All my cursors are a black square when I get this.

I know this isn't an option you've listed, but if you're looking for an AV-Killer Thugs/Poison rocks.

Gang War can actually be quite effective, if you're got the three Leadership toggles running. Additionally, if you're /Dark the AoE Heal can keep them going despite their squishiness.

My Elec/Ice is just shy of 26 and he's a blast to play. The two sets work well together, and to be honest I've never had any problem with the blue bar.

I say go for it!

Edit: On a team with my SG I leaped into melee range against Black Swan. Dominate+Power Boost+multiple end-drainers had Swan running on empty so quickly the teamchat got rather funny.

Thanks for the clarification Ocho, but to be honest it just sounds like "Nothing's going to be done about this, it's just the way it goes and you people happen to be the ones who suffer every time. <shrug>"

Is there *nobody* actually doing change management at NCSoft?

What's really driving me into frustration is that there's apparently nobody doing testing or quality control at NCSoft. If we released software into production that hadn't passed full regression testing, we'd get handed our walking papers. Taking down the servers three nights in a row at 9pm? I'd never work in Quality Control again.

I agree with tanstaafl, no OS should have an issue with patching software and defragging - to be honest, a server's filesystems shouldn't *need* defragging. Before anyone asks, I've been the lead tech in the quality control division of a large international corporation with over 30,000 internal users and far more than that external users running massive online 24/7 internet applications so yes I *am* familiar with what's possible. It appears that the concepts of 'clustered servers' or 'virtual servers' have skipped NCSoft's attention. As a trivial example, VMWare lets you shift a running application to a new VM on the fly without interruption, including apps in memory.

Regardless, now we're getting hit with a third night IN A ROW of maintenance. Of course, we Oceania clients get stuffed around again. At least it's for something beyond their control, not software that was released without proper testing....oh wait!

This is not what I pay my subscription for. Given the amount of extra maintenance they've had to do for this Halloween event, it's clear that this has not been sufficiently tested. I agree that the current issue on the live servers needs to be addressed, but the proper place to catch bugs is before they are deployed to the production environment!

This new maintenance routine has been worse this week than the old one. Thanks for showing us how much you care about Oceania, NCSoft!

You can add me to the list of those happy we're down to one prime-time interruption per week.

Except this week, when we've had two nights in a row, Wed & Thurs. Surely the patch release could've included the weekly reboot/maintenance?

I created a new Necro MM last night.

Every time I leave a mission, my zombies went blue-outlined and no longer belonged to me. I couldn't issue them commands, I couldn't dismiss them, I couldn't resummon - nothing. They still followed me, mind.

On occasion when I got into a fight they'd suddenly revert to my control and show up on my active pet list. Not always, mind.

Logging out and relogging didn't seem to fix it.

Highly frustrating!

I have an Ill/Kin in the high 40's and I find it a good combination. I'll admit that I chose my Illusion as it doesn't require micro-managing and therefore made a good match for Kinetics. I've seen too many people taking a high-maintenance primary for controllers and adding Kinetics - it's very hard to keep on buffing the entire team with SB & ID and keep up your primary mezzes/controls as well.

So I'm quite happy with Ill/Kin and it does indeed kick butt very nicely. YMMV of course.

I've played my plant/rad controller mainly solo, and he's just hit 38. He's the only squishie that I feel comfortable running at diff 4 solo. Does that help?

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Actually, what I'd like to know is how they're going to address the major imbalance this creates between MM's and -recharge powersets in PvP and MA arcs, or even that they realise what a major change this is in that regard.

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I'm assuming that when Castle said:

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Trust me, no one here was happy about this decision, but in the end, it was the only way to go.

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This is one of the things he meant. The only positive is that this effects ALL pet users, red side or blue side, and if your pets can't be debuffed, that means your enemy's pets can't be debuffed either. Clearly there's still an imbalance since MMs rely more heavily on pets than any other AT, but there's no reason to assume the devs are unaware of the impact it will have on PvP. Or even that they haven't commented on it.

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I'm afraid we're just going to have to just agree to disagree here, as you seem to be missing my point especially in your final comment.

I don't see how you can state that the devs have commented on the imbalance this brings to PvP, because they haven't said one single word about it! You're assuming that Castle might have implied that in the blanket statement you quoted, but everything with a redname next to it regarding this issue discusses the impact on pets NOT the impact on -recharge sets affecting (or rather, not affecting) pets.

I don't think it's unreasonable to question whether they've considered this issue, given that they haven't said a single word about it.

I'm not assuming that they haven't commented on PvP, I'm stating as a fact:

There is no redname post in this thread or anywhere else here that mentions the effect this will have on PvP OR the imbalance this brings between -recharge powersets and pets and what, if anything, they're planning to do about it.

I will gladly stand corrected and quite honestly, I'd be very grateful if you can find a post anywhere on these boards regarding the impact this change has on -recharge sets vs pets by a Dev.

In summary: This change will detrimentally affect any -recharge powerset in PvP against MM's. I would like to know what, if anything, the Devs are going to do about it. There is to date no information on this question.