Hopeling

A 30-day AE license has appeared on beta a couple of times, but it has never made it to live, nor even been focused on for testing. I couldn't tell you exactly why, though.

There's no way to get AE access a la carte, at least to the best of my knowledge. Sorry :/

It's more the passive-aggressive "how dare somebody else not form this trial for me" comment at the end that's annoying, not just that somebody is unwilling to lead.

Since a large fraction of the board's users are apparently guests (right now, 3223 of 3727 are not logged in), I wonder if a bunch of people ended up here from somewhere else somehow (news story in Europe leads to mass googling of some strange topic for which a CoH forum post ranks highly, or some such?). Or even just the forum bugging out and counting too many people, since it was having problems then. 30k players on the forums in the middle of the night sounds crazy, even if the servers had crashed and rolled back to 2004 - I mean, that's like 25% (?) of the game's players, I'd be surprised to see that many people logged into the game simultaneously at prime time on a new Issue release day.

Enhancements are counted as part of the cap. Mids will show this on, say, a Defender with Fulcrum Shift, but that's not quite proof since Mids isn't the game, so here are some numbers from in-game:

Scrapper, Crushing Blow, base damage: 112.86 (before averaging in crits). Scrappers have a cap of +400% (5x base damage), so if enhancements are included in that cap, it should max out at 112.86*(1+4)=564.3 against an even-con enemy with 0% smashing resist, and I'll need ~270% of damage buffs to get there.
My Crushing Blow has 128.8% total damage enhancement (thanks to Musculature Core Paragon). If enhancements are not part of that cap, it should max out at 112.86*(1+4+1.288)=709.66 against an even-con enemy with 0% smashing resist, and I'll need 400% of damage buffs to get there.
If ED-bypassing enhancement is outside the cap but regular enhancements aren't, it should cap out at 112.86*(1+4+.3)=598.16, and I'll need ~300% of damage buffs to get there.

I set my mission difficulty to +1 (so enemies would be even-con despite the alpha shift), hopped into a Nemesis tip mission, and hit a Dragoon with a Power Analyzer Mk III (to make sure Dragoons have 0% resist; they do).
I popped 4 large reds (+210%) and Build Momentum (+62.5%), plus set bonuses (4%), bringing me to 276.5% total damage buff. Walk up, bonk a Dragoon with Crushing Blow. Combat log says 564.29 damage.
Build Momentum wore off, I popped another two large reds, bringing my damage bonus to 319%. Hit another Dragoon. 564.29 damage.
Used two more large reds, damage bonus reaches 400% and turns blue. Hit another Dragoon. 564.29 damage.
Okay, so it's .01 points off the calculated value, but that's easily within the realm of a rounding error. The important part here is that the damage was the same in all three cases.

The power's damage stopped increasing a good ~130% before my damage bonus stat turned blue, which only makes sense if the full enhancement value counts against the cap.

Also jeez, yeah, this is on the wiki, common knowledge, and exceptionally easy to test. If you're not sure, take fifteen seconds to buy a bunch of reds and hit something, rather than spend two hours waiting for someone to provide evidence for you.

If there's anything more exciting than the Terra Volta trial, it's the Terra Volta trial without several of my favorite powers.

...at least they've got the schedule up ahead of time, though, rather than waiting until the last possible minute to put up the new month...

Freebie Friday runs from 4pm Thursday - 4pm Friday (Pacific time). Last week's was extended because it was special, as the announcement said.

I do agree that the timeframe is not very clear and all too easy to miss, but it's the same place this week as it has normally been.

As I say in every thread about this, moving Horns into the Ears category (or Detail 2, or whatever) shifts the problem onto a different group of players (those that want to use horns together with non-human ears), but doesn't actually fix it. And adding new anchor points is maybe excessively difficult due to the anchor point thing (I'm no more an expert on that than anyone else in this thread, though). The best and most practical (?) approach seems to be the one Diggis mentions - copy the relevant pieces to multiple categories, so you can choose horns from detail 1 or from detail 2.

I have no idea if that has problems of its own, though; it might require significant work too so that you don't have two sideways sets of horns growing out of your ears, or some such disaster.

Codewalker also has a workaround until it's officially fixed, though:

Right... that is definitely how Alpha works. It doesn't actually address any part of the question, though.

I haven't checked every power's info, but the passive regen boost on my Melee Partial Core Graft says "Ignores buffs and enhancements", so it seems probably intentional that that part, at least, is unaffected by Alpha powers.

Since the Tanker proc checks once per activation, rather than once per target hit, it does not have the areafactor penalty. Or so I had thought, anyway.

As usual, his ideas are way too drastic to ever actually be done, but he's not working for Marvel in the first place, so who cares?

I think he has some very interesting ideas. It's also interesting to see some really dramatic power/appearance/etc changes and realize that the basic essence of the story and characters is unaffected.

I dunno about getting one in every issue, but we are now five issues into the Incarnate system (i19, i20, i21, i22, i23) and have six slots, so averaging about one slot per issue sounds plausible.