EvilDeathBee

I'm scared to ask how many emails were in your inbox....

I liked the ambush bug which caused all of the standard mission ambushes to spawn at the faction's lowest level. When you were working on a level 20 Clockwork mission, for example, you would be ambushed by a crowd of level 1 Sprockets. Normally very low mobs will scatter if you attack them, but since it was an ambush, these little guys would gamely try to defeat you.

Then of course there have been a few times ambushes spawned the other way. I remember getting wasted by some level 40 Croatoa ghosts, for example.

And remember how ambushes used to lose aggro all the time and end up hanging around for hours griefing lowbies? You would be minding your own business in King's Row and suddenly get nailed by a group of level 47 Carnies left there by another character who may not even have realized he or she spawned it.

When the Hollows was first introduced, spawns used to materialize right on top of you. You would be sprinting to a mission door (in the far corner of the map, obviously) when a full 8-man spawn of trolls (+7 or +8 to you, of course) would fade into view around you and immediately aggro.

There was also a funny (in retrospect) bug that would instantly fail a mission if you hit a running mob with a knockback power. I think that was around issue 6 or 7.

When the last graphics upgrade was done in issue 7, the devs introduced the layered costumes like suits and dress shirts, and reworked mobs like the Family, who had the original costumes. There was a bug that caused the different layers to materialize at different distances, so as you approached a spawn of Family, they would look like they were wearing their underwear and as you got closer, their suits and hats would appear. Tsoo Sorcerers would do the same thing. It would look like an easy spawn of maybe five or six Ink Men, but half of them would turn out to be Sorcerers when you got close enough for their robes to render.

Best of all though was the Rikti Drone bug. They'll never top that one no matter how hard they try.

The troll thread was pretty funny, but I think I'd vote for the Kill Skuls thread first.

I was also very fond of the thread Statesman started to explain the changes in I5, in which he more or less equated the challenge of a game to getting killed a lot. What followed was about 2000 pages of people flaming him, threatening to leave, arguing that the changes were good, blaming the changes on goths, and later on a fairly interesting discussion on the game's overall design. It was like several slow-motion train wrecks superimposed on the same film.

I'm also nostalgic for many of Pilcrow's suggestion threads back in the day.

I only think it's funny that they dealt with a farm by removing a timer. That's definitely a switch.

Nice!

My understanding of the Epic pools is that they more or less took one power from each of the other four ATs and built a theme around them. The same was done with the patron pools for villains. So a Blaster Epic, for example, has one Controllerish power, one Defenderish power, one Tankish power, and one Scrapperish power. Eventually they added a fifth power to each one, but that was the original idea.

I think that what they'll do for patron powers will be to take one power from each of the villain ATs (and vice versa for the villain epics), picked to eliminate any possible duplication. So a Blaster will get a buff/debuff from a Corrupter set, a hold from a Dominator set, a pet from a Mastermind set, and some sort of defensive powers from the Stalker and Brute sets.

Then what they'll do is check to see if that matches anything that is already available for Stalkers or Corrupters and port those sets over directly, swapping out one or two powers if necessary.

The resulting sets won't be exactly the same as what is available now, but they will end up being close enough for the most part.

I used to obsess about this, but I pretty much gave up when they added patrol XP.

I do occasionally turn off XP if I want to hold back a character long enough to unlock a special contact (mainly in CoV where I am still exploring the mid to higher levels), but otherwise I simply have too many characters to play 600 hours on all of them.

I figure I can either skip some of the low-level missions or skip the high-level ones that they don't get to play because they never got high enough.

I'm not sure it was ever the "conventional wisdom" that all of those powers should be slotted for resistance. If it is, it was probably a rule of thumb for Dark/Dark that got out of hand. That combination can cap its defense with just Darkest Night and a few attacks, so it makes sense to slot Shadow Fall for resistance instead.

Other combinations don't necessarily have the same luxury. If you're a few percentage points away from the cap after all other available -acc and +def bonuses are taken into account, I agree it makes more sense to use Shadow Fall or Steamy Mist to put you over the top than to try for a few extra points of resistance.

Also, Shadow Fall offers psionic resistance if I'm not mistaken, which is fairly rare in the game. If you're teaming with an Invuln tank or something, he might be more glad for the extra psi resists than for any extra defense you can give him.

Another vote for skipping the rez. They can be handy powers, but they tend to be a low priority in just about every set which has them. I teamed almost exclusively when I was levelling up my Empath. I did take Resurrect on that character, but it was easily my most seldom-used power from the primary.

You'll run into the odd team wipe as you play, but in those cases you won't be able to rez everybody in as little time as it would take to go to the hospital anyway, so don't worry about them. As everyone else has said, the occasional defeat here and there is easily fixed with a couple of awakens. Carry a few of them around with you if you like, but don't worry about anybody giving you grief over not having the power.

Other than playing with your monitor brightness and contrast, I'm not sure.

In addition to what the posters above have said, I would move the extra slots in Resist Physical Damage to Temp Invulnerability and Unyielding. TI and Unyielding have higher base values than RPD, and generally the stronger a power is when it is unslotted, the more bang for your buck you get when you invest a slot in it.

I would move the three extra slots in Rest over to Dull Pain to max out the recharge on that power, and I'd drop one damage in Haymaker and KO Blow in favour of an Endurance Reduction.

I can't tell if Swift has a Running Speed or a Flight Speed enhancement in it, but I thought I'd mention that it will take both.

At level 32, you're probably going to want to take Unstoppable, which is your god-mode power. You'll also want Rage, which will dramatically boost your damage. You may have to drop a power to get both. I would probably drop Hover, but that may depend on what you want the character to be doing.

Check the Guides section of the forums for more info. Invuln/SS is a fairly popular combo, and there are several good guides written for it.

Very pretty, but I am not going to put together a brand new computer this year just to see nicer water effects.


I am not.


I mean it. I'm not going to do it.


...


*sigh*

I'd also add Hero Corps.

It's strongly hinted in the history plaques that there is some goings-on between Hero Corps and Crey, but that whole story is left dangling. I'd like to see it fleshed out a little bit more.

I'll second Spanky Rabinowitz, Sebastian Frost, and Tub Ci.

I have Jump Kick on several characters, but I think they are all Controllers. With Containment, the advantages of filling up a decent attack chain at low levels can outweigh the potential benefits of a tiny bit of defense. (I have several controllers with Flurry for the same reason.)

At higher levels, when you have all your goodies at your disposal, I can see respeccing out of it and not looking back.

I think that it is Combat Jumping's low endurance cost rather than Air Superiority's knockdown that really makes Jump Kick a white elephant. If CJ's added Defense cost as much as Hover or Stealth, people aiming for SJ might be more likely to take the attack. As it is, you have a choice between nearly free Defense which stacks with just about everything else in the game, or a relatively minor attack. Considering how many people scramble around for Invention recipes to soft-cap their defense, it's hard to imagine them not taking CJ to help out.

I might vote for Issue 4.

Most of the Architect's users may not have been using it for what it was intended for, but at least they were using it. The Arena has been under-utilized since it began.

More importantly, if the Architect was poorly implemented, that is even more true of PvP. If they had held off on implementing PvP until issue 6 instead of trying to jumpstart it early the way they did, the changes that eventually came in Issue 13 might not have been necessary.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. In retrospect, there are quite a few Issues that could have been vastly improved on: the contact system in the Shadow Shard, the way ED was handled, Base rent and the prestige system, and so on.