Goliath Bird Eater

One other little thing that can make a huge difference is disabling your auto-attack if you have one enabled. On my Crab spider main, I have Arm Lash set up as auto to deal with enemies that get too close. During the closed beta, almost every time I got nailed by the Nanite attack once I'd figured the general strategy out was because a flying sword or one of BM's henchmen got in range of Arm Lash, and I was unable to get out of the way in time.

It's a bug as far as anyone knows. Nothing in the closed or open betas indicated that it was intentional. You do still have the bonuses, of course; they just don't show up on your info window right now.

Deborah Gibson's acting wasn't too bad in Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus.

Besides, it WAS an Asylum film. These are the people that brought us Titanic 2 for crying out loud!

Go-Lie-Ath-Burd-Eet-Er

I know; it's tricky, right?

I'm thankful for inherent Fitness on my VEAT. Mainly because it allowed me to add Tough, Weave, Leadership: Assault, and Arctic Breath to my build!

Incarnate Goliath is copied over and sipping hot chocolate in the ski chalet.

I was able to craft a Cardiac for my main after purchasing Gr'ai Matter and running a single ITF. After one LGTF and another ITF yesterday, I was able to craft a Cardiac Radial.

The flavor text for all the new hazard/trial exploration badges is just great. It really helps to flesh out the backstories of the zones, and is even quite grim at times. Like, there's a radio antenna in Dark Astoria that broadcasts/used to broadcast all sorts of things after the zone was take over: cries for help, inhuman languages, beastly roaring, etc. And those that were able to find the signal and listen to it either died or befell some tragedy. In the Northeast corner of Boomtown, there's a storage container said to be full of corpses used by the Vahziok for their experiments. Hamidon is made out to be some sort of primal, god-like being when you travel through Eden.

Kudos to the writer(s)!

If I remember correctly, the Apex TF gives 40 merits and 2 shards. Can't recall the merits for Tin Mage, but I'm pretty sure it also awards 2 shards upon completion.

Nice. Thanks Beef & Blonde!

What a crappy thing to wake up to.

I mean, 84 is a nice run and all. But still, he had such a huge impact on my sense of humor being what it is ... yeah, this sucks.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone at Paragon Studios! My next celebrating of the holiday won't be until next year when I'm back home in the 'States, so make me even more jealous by consuming much stuffing, ham, sweet potatoes, casseroles of all sorts, veggies, pies stacked to the moon, and of course fried turkey (Positron knows the ONLY right way to cook a bird )! Fill your bellies, enjoy yourselves, then come back and give us the gift of Issue 19.

A preemptive "happy Thanksgiving" to everyone else as well! Go eat a lot of carbs then pass out watching the Macy's parade.

Thanks for the update. It's appreciated, although we pretty much already knew that I19 still needed to have a few sizable bugs squashed before it went live.

What I really want to thank you for is just communicating at all. I don't know if there was some sort of new guideline brought into effect severely limiting developer interaction on the forums, if things are just really that busy at PS right now, or if there's some other reason or combination of reasons, but developer communication has been noticeably lower lately. Even during this Issue's admittedly short closed beta, there wasn't a whole lot of interaction between developers and testers. I know that we're usually spoiled when it comes to developer interaction, but things have just been rather quiet as of late.

If I was lead designer and could go back to CoH's development, post-introduction of ATs, I'd do 3 things differently:

First, I'd either fully commit to PvP as an integral part of the game, or fully commit to not having it at all. If I committed to having it, I would have had the powers system designed and balanced with it in mind. This means that a good bit of flexibility in character builds would likely be lost, but at least everything would operate under the same rules and hopefully be more or less balanced.

Second, I wouldn't pull all but 14 developers from my existing moderately successful MMO because I'd been approached by Marvel to begin preliminary work on an MMO for them. Essentially putting one of your creations into maintenance mode when a big name comes knocking with ideas, promises, a publisher with a past of flaking out on MMOs, and little else is a bit of a dick move and not very well thought out. Sadly, it's become Cryptic's MO. I could be totally wrong, but I'm of the belief that had CoH continued to have a decent-sized team and resources post-CoV/Marvel, we'd be a good bit ahead of where we are now. We might be in a totally different place thanks to alternate ideas that would have been produced, but we'd still be ahead overall.

Finally, the last change would require knowledge of future events. ED to be specific. I would absolutely have implemented some sort of diminishing returns when it came to enhancers. I honestly don't know how anyone thought that most players wouldn't maximize their damage output in a game where combat was really the only thing to do at first. The mechanics would be somewhat different so as not to hit an artificial brick wall at 3 SO enhancers.

I'll be switching my Crab to a heavily-defensive build with I19. Including double-stacked Assault to boost my damage, I'll be running 8 toggles. Added to this are permanent Spiderlings and Serum, and near-permanent Arachnobots. Even with the Performance Shifter proc and a bunch of recovery buffs, I'm still going to burn through a lot of End. So I'll be going Cardiac, with eventual upgrade to Cardiac Radial to boost my Res.

NOTE: On the overview page, you should be able to click on "Alpha" and go to a page which lists all the Alpha abilities. Unfortunately, the link is incorrect and you just get a 404 when you try.

Here is the right link, courtesy of Positron's Twitter feed.