Basilisk

Ok, I saw this as a thread title under the market forums, and it had absolutely no relation to the idea that popped into my head as a result.

The idea that came to mind was a window added to the market where you could drag a recipe from your inventory. The market would then search and automatically bring up the listings for any salvage needed for that recipe so you could bid on it.

Ok, so it's probably a lot of work for something that can be done manually, and would probably add even more load onto an already overworked market server, but I think that should the devs find the time to put it in, it would make for a nice little QoL addition that would limit the amount of window juggling that I do whenever I have a lot of stuff to craft.

First and foremost, I would say that the random salvage needs to be outlined. I have no idea what a level 20-40 arcane salvage drop will give me. Each time I'm looking for a specific piece of salvage, I'm stuck looking it up on Paragon wiki. To make it a lot more user friendly, I would change it to say something along the lines of "Select this to receive a random drop from one of the following- Alchemical silver, yada yada yada..." I'm pretty sure if people knew what they were likely to get up front, they would be more likely to select it.

Good to see he has some goals in life...



No! Not James Woods!



Riiiiight...



Ok, here's a tip... You want to avoid insulting people? Try to stay away from the word ****.



Well. SOMEone has self-esteem issues!



All I have to say is: Word.



This guy and the first one should get together some time for drinks. I bet it'd be fun times.



ALSO SHE IS 16 YEARS OLD! AND AN ALIEN!



See, and this is why it's important to accessorize! People notice!



I'm still not sure exactly what a supersonic scientist is, but it sounds fast.

I’m lying on my bed, looking at the picture. In forty-five minutes, the man who will be my father will be stabbed in the back by a beastly creature with scales and fangs. I almost looked him up after my father died, just to get one more minute with him. But on that night when I sat crying on my father’s lap, he made me promise never to go find that other him. That he didn’t regret anything that had happened, and didn’t want to risk anything that might prevent his life with his family.

Now, though, he was gone. And in forty-five minutes, the last chance she had to be with the man who would be her father would be left to die, and sent back through time, to marry a cute nurse and have a daughter who would become a super-hero.

Now, I’m angry. There’s one and a half minutes until the man who will be my father is stabbed. Tears of frustration stream down my face as I slash the one handed troll with all of my might. Deep scarlet blood seeps into the creature’s T-shirt. Behind me, a gun with a bent firing pin clicks uselessly. As the first troll collapses, I hear scuffling of feet, and the other troll runs away. I let him go.

In ten minutes, the man who would be my father is dying in a warehouse. I run. I estimate I’ll get there in 9 minutes. A man on the street corner flags me down. The side of his face is bruised. He tells me that Trolls kidnapped his young daughter, and took them to their warehouse, where they were stockpiling Superadyne. In nine minutes, savage claws will rip a young man’s flesh. In two, I will be on the rooftop of a warehouse, going to save a young girl from Trolls.

I wipe away the tears, and go to a box where I hear a young girl crying. She gasps and goes quiet when I come near. I kneel beside her and tell her it will all be ok, that I’m here to save her. She looks up at me and smiles a timid smile. One minute ago, A young man was sent twenty-five years into the past. The girl reaches for my hand and asks:

“Are you a hero?”
I smile a small smile that she can’t see through the thick fabric covering the lower half of my face.

“Yes, I’m a hero.”

One year ago, and I’m standing in the morgue. I’ve been asked to identify the body of a man believed to be my father. He was found under an overpass in Skyway City. Witnesses said he had overheard a group of Trolls threatening a young woman. The woman got away safely, and he had managed to knock out three of the drug-addicted creatures, but Trolls are tough. A forty-five year old man is no match for a group of super-human beasts. The sheet is pulled back. I can barely recognize the face of the man who has raised me for nineteen years.

A quick spin embeds a sword into the side of the troll behind me. He staggers back as the blade is withdrawn. Another gun is leveled from the troll just joining the mêlée. The troll I had stunned begins to collect his wits. An opportunity presents itself. A canister of gas sits on a table beside him. With a flick of the wrist, one sword is thrown across the room. The troll dodges it, but it was never meant for him. The sword bites in to the thick rubber pipe leading from the canister to another container. Vile yellow gas sprays out, catching the troll in the face. He gasps reflexively, taking a gasp of the gas into his lungs. He immediately starts coughing, which only draws in more of the poison. In eight seconds, he will be dead.

I am ten, sitting on my father’s lap as he tells me more stories about his past. I ask him why he stopped. His face grows dark. He tells me a story about going into a warehouse. A warehouse with trolls. As he fights them, a villain appears. A beastly creature with scales and fangs. He tries to fight it, but it’s faster than he can predict. He turns his back, and the creature disappears. When next he sees it, it has plunged savage claws into his back. The story scares me. I start to cry.

I slide out of the way of a fist, slamming down from behind me. The one-handed troll is trying to attack me. I’m down to one sword, but it’s still more than he has. I sidestep another punch. My free hand strikes through an opening in the troll’s defenses, hitting his injured side. The other troll is back up, and running to recover his gun.

I’m ten, and crying on my father’s lap. He gently grips my chin to make me look at him as he wipes away tears. He explains that it’s ok. That the adrenaline from the attack sent his powers into overdrive. He was thrown twenty five years into the past, where he was found and brought to the hospital. They were able to help him get better. One cute nurse took an interest in him and a year later the two married. But on that night, his powers died, never to come back.

Thirty-nine minutes ago, and I’m on my bed still, tracing the outlines of my father’s face in the picture. I remember him telling me stories of his life as a hero. Of how he would fight Trolls and Freakshow, Outcasts and Hellions. He always seemed to miss it. But his powers had disappeared a long time ago.

Three years ago, and I’m putting on my costume for the first time. My father looks on me proudly, but nervously.

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

I smile, though he can’t see it under the thick mask that covers the lower half of my face. I tell him that I’m doing it to fight injustice, to help people who can’t help themselves. I don’t admit that I want to let him relive it all through me. I don’t even admit it to myself.

Two minutes from now, and a hero walks into a warehouse filled with Trolls. In another 3 minutes, he will be dying from a wound to his back.

Now, I stand over the troll whose gun is useless in a corner. The flat of both swords smack hard against his temples, stunning him. A one handed troll sneaks behind me, planning to grab me in a bear hug. A fourth troll appears around the corner, alerted by the noise. In ten seconds, he will be dead in a cloud of chemical vapour.

A heartbeat, then a crash as the world explodes below me in a halo of glass shards.

Seven minutes ago, I was talking to a man, listening to him tell me about this warehouse. The Trolls had been using it to distribute their Superadyne. Now as I fall through the remnants of the skylight, I can feel myself submerging in an acrid fume of chemical vapour.

In three seconds, the first troll will be laughing at me. He says something that I can’t hear. I’m already on the move.

I land. For an instant, everything is quiet but the tinkling of glass as it shatters on the hard warehouse floor. As the shock wears off, a stupid leer crosses the troll’s face. He begins to laugh.

“You in trouble now, little girl.”

I don’t hear him. There’s another heartbeat and my swords are out, biting deep into his midsection. On most people, the wound would be fatal. It merely incapacitates the troll. It doesn’t matter. He’ll be dead in a few seconds from a bullet, fired by one of his own men.

The troll looks at me, disbelieving, but I’m already on the move, avoiding the gunfire that will start in a moment. I flip over the injured troll. Semiautomatic weaponry clicks as they are primed to fire. Hot flares of ammunition rip past me, tearing up polished concrete flooring. It also thuds sickly into the body behind me, still not yet fallen from the wounds he had received. Trolls are tough.

I deliver a hard kick to the now-dead troll, sending him across the room and crashing into his armed allies. I follow hard behind

Forty-three minutes ago, I’m lying on my bed, staring at a picture my father. We smile at each other through our window in time. He was a hero once, too. A mutant, with the ability to see into the future. It’s a gift he passed on to me.

One of my blades flash through the air, severing the hand of one of the Trolls and making him lose his weapon. In thirty seconds, he will be attacking me with his one good hand.

In five minutes, a mutant with the ability to see into the future will be fighting a villain well beyond their skill. Savage claws will plunge into a back that is unable to avoid, despite the warning that had flashed before clairvoyant eyes mere seconds before.

A troll levels a gun at me. Bullets pass through the place I had been mere milliseconds before. One second later, my foot contacts the troll’s wrist, throwing the firearm against the wall. When one of the trolls tries to fire it later, the weapon will not respond, a bent firing pin clinking uselessly against brass.

My problem with Gauntlet is that while it does help with aggro generation, the end result is nothing that can't be done by brutes sans-gauntlet just as easily. All it takes is a good taunt aura and an AoE or two. With the aggro cap as low as it is, a good brute can survive a capped spawn almost as easily as a tank. It sort of leads to a feeling of underachievement when you look at a brute and say, "Ok, he just took on the same spawn as me, and killed it three times faster."

What I would like to see is something done to gauntlet that would allow the tank to take better advantage of the fact that they do still have better survivability than most brute or scrappers. I have proposed in the past a buff to gauntlet that works a little bit like defiance, but adds to the tank's aggro cap rather than to his damage. So, on top of the small aoe taunt, each attack would give a boost to the tank's aggro cap for something like 5 seconds. A tank who is sitting around taunting would then have a cap of 17 enemies. A tank who is actively fighting might be mobbed by 20 or 30 at a time instead. The fact that it's on a short timer limits the ability for the tank to map herd. Plus, there's usefulness to the solo player which isn't afforded by the current Gauntlet.

So I should be forced to endure some little tin-plated dictator running about swaggering his e-peen on a team or suffer the consequences just because you've chased away your potential playmates? Or be punished because of a personal emergency? Thanks, but no thanks. I play this game to have fun, not to fill your little quotas.

Oh, and your little plan to make people join teams? Yeah, that'll just be a bunch of unhappy soloers sitting about to get their rewards when they could be playing the game they pay for.

Tell you what, you pay my $15, you can tell me how to play. Until then, keep your sticky little fingers out of my pie.

I'd like to get into the queue before it gets so long that you get bored and give up. :P

Dark Basilisk
and a closeup

Servers: Infinity, Victory, Justice
Location: Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
ISP: Shaw

Infinity, Victory: Have been noticing sudden sharp spikes in lag. One minute I'm playing along fine, then the next I'm mapserving.

Justice: No problems in Gameplay, but the market is not working right. I try to drop something on the market, and it doesn't take. No messages saying it's too busy to process my request, it just disappears from the market. I had to "Claim" a purchased IO about 10 times the other day before it would actually get into my inventory.

Makes me wonder what the relationship between the Devs and Jack is like nowadays. I mean, a lot of them did work with him day in and day out for the better part of a decade, I would assume. If the opportunity arose, would Matt and Jack get together for beers to catch up? Or is Jack now "the enemy", and fair game to a cyanide tablet in the water bottle when he's not looking?

...Not that the devs would ever do that.

My girlfriend says no. That I'm a teddy bear in real life and that's nothing like the berserk brutes and tanks that I usually play. As much as my masculine pride is on the line, here, I've got to agree. While I'm certainly a master at aggro generation when I want to be, I'm a lover not a fighter. When things get tense, I'm usually the one to defuse it with a well placed joke or insightful comment. I've never even been in a real fight.

Still, if you want to get more abstract about it, I'm a very direct sort of person. I don't appreciate fancy things, and I'd rather my stuff works well than looks good. It's why I like playing melee classes. No fiddling about with buffs and debuffs, just jump in and start hitting things until there's nothing left to hit, or said things reduce me to road pizza.

I have a second account, but I've stopped renewing the payments on it and am letting it go inactive because of financial reasons. I used it a lot for influence transfer and occasionally to PL myself or to provide myself with a heal-bot. Oh, and to pad up a group to start TFs. Done that too.

But, it got less and less use as time went on, and after returning to school, my income became, well, nonexistant. So it was the first thing on the chopping block.

Ok, good to know that I'm an idiot. I swear I read through that announcement 3 or 4 times and I still missed it.

*hangs head in shame*

(tl;dr version: In light of the possible auto-exemplaring with the "super sidekick" system, it should be possible to earn XP while exemplared.)

After reading the Super-Sidekicking announcement, I am psyched. However, I noticed one thing in the thread that kind of annoys me: the auto-exemplar.

It's not impossible that I'm helping a friend run a mission and I have a character 1 or 2 level higher than them, so we just crank the difficulty up a notch or two and we can rock and roll. White cons to me, orange to him. Auto exemping kind of kills that. If I'm in my 30s and 40s, I want as much XP as I can get at this point.

Being forced into getting only inf rewards while exemping because you're a level or two up on the mission runner doesn't seem like a smart move. Essentially, we're moving into a place where only the highest level character on a team can have their missions run because otherwise part of the team will have to go without. I understand why they're doing it- A character 2 levels up from the mission holder could run missions set to invincible and PL a whole team. They say they're working to fix some other issues like this, and that's fine.

This is more than just a "whine about the new system that isn't even out yet" post. However, given that we may be headed for a system where we may be forced into an exemplar situation due to an untimely ding, or where I'm a level 36 running a friend's level 35 missions, I'd like to put forward a suggestion to review the rewards handed out by the exemplar system.

When the exemplar system first came in to being, debt was still a significant penalty. It started at level 5, had a higher debt cap, offered more debt in missions. Fast forward to I15, and debt is a reasonably rare thing, between Patrol XP clearing it while you're away and helping to absorb it when you die. I don't feel too insecure in saying that very few people still use the Exemplar system to clear their debt.

The other option is for the inf rewards... Ok, so there's still some merit to this. Still, selling recipes or salvage at WW/BM will probably net you better inf over time than inf drops from exemping.

As it stands, I think the biggest uses right now for the Exemplar system are to put yourself in a favourable level range for salvage and/or recipe drops (i.e. BP hunting in Dark Astoria), or as a way to team with lower level friends with a character who is more desirable (i.e. Bringing a high level Rad defender to help with an AV)

Frankly, I don't feel I should have to cut off my nose to spite my face when bringing higher level characters to play with lower level characters, particularly if there's only going to be one or two levels' worth of difference between to the two. So, what I would like to see is standard XP and inf rewards to an exemped player, delivered at an appropriate scale.

Therefore, a level 48 can fight alongside a level 12 and get XP commensurate to a white con minion when he/she defeats a white con minion. This probably means extending the XP/Inf rewards table for numerous groups, which I'm sure is non trivial. Furthermore, in order to prevent farming very easy low level enemies for good rewards at high levels, these enemies would probably be given XP/Inf rewards that are unfavourable in comparison to level appropriate enemies.

Feedback, suggestions, insults?

I agree that the difference between Tanker and Scrapper Defences is too small, which leads to a sense of lacking a place for Tankers. While Scrappers may not be quite as good at holding aggro, they can manage the incoming damage just fine, plus they can hold aggro well enough in most cases to supplant the role of a tanker. The problem is primarily the availability of large IO bonuses to Defense, which can take a scrapper over the softcap without significant difficulty. However, nerfing IO defence bonuses hurts everyone, not just scrappers. Nerfing base defence of scrapper would make them more or less untenable with just SOs.

I like the idea of an increased aggro cap. It would give Tanks a way to further differentiate themselves from Scrappers. If possible, though, I would like to see it tied in to Gauntlet. For instance, using an attack gives for 3 seconds +3 to the Aggro cap (adjust numbers to taste). It would add solo usefulness to Gauntlet, plus an ability to grab more aggro onto yourself, but that you would have to work for. A pure taunt-bot is less effective than a Tank that's actively attacking, and you can only herd a large group so far as your aggro cap boost sticks around.

I'm going to admit that I stay away from almost all social networking sites. Basically, If I have something to say, I say it here, on my SG's private forums, or talk directly by phone, SMS, Steam messenger or e-mail. And given my join date as compared to my post count, you can see I don't typically have a lot to say here.

Basically, it boils down to a lack of interest. My deviantart site hasn't been updated in forever, since I just don't care to write up what's going on in my life. I've had the occasional desire to try out Facebook, or Twitter, but realistically I know that I'll tweet once or twice and then promptly forget about it. And you know, I'm fine by that. I'm not James Bond, or Malcolm Reynolds, I don't have interesting things happening in my life on a daily basis. When it boils right down to it, I'm not far off from this guy:



(Let me just state for the record here that unlike that guy, I am fluent in French)

And you know what? I'm fine with that. If I have something important to say, the people who need to know get called. Or e-mailed, or whatever. The people who don't, well, don't. I don't hate Twitter. I don't even dislike Twitter. I am completely and totally ambivalent about Twitter, and it'll take one heck of a lot more than being able to know that War Witch had Chef Boyardee for lunch, or that Paula Abdul quit American Idol to get me off this fence. Somehow, this makes me a luddite.

Whatever.

(Oh, and as for the "newspaper" issue, I'm all about digital newspaper subscriptions. All the news, none of the paper.)

The only character I've used it with so far is Mysterious Figure, my Dark/Kin Corruptor. He's supposed to be this demon who is possessing a character from an old black and white spy movie, so his basic costume is a 6' guy in a trenchcoat and fedora. I decided his third costume would be his "true" form, so I went with the huge bodytype, maxed height, and went for a sort of gentleman demon look (With a generous amount of help from the Magic booster.)