Katie V

If you're running at +4 difficulty, somewhere between a quarter and a third of all opponents you face will be +5s.

Some of us like them, though. Personally, I've got an idea for breaking the new seven-active-mission limit that I'm itching to try out.

Will it work? Yes. Will it work well? Maybe. Will it run Ultra Mode? No.

I believe the Werewolf world accessed through the Portal system is a section of Boomtown, though I haven't spent enough time in Boomtown to figure out which part.

My claws/SR was soloing +4 bosses by 30 with little in the way of IO sets (a full set of Touch of Death, a full set of Red Fortune, and four-slotted Thunderstrike). 35% defense to melee and ranged, the scaling resistances, and the to-hit and damage bonuses from Follow Up make for a tough, high-damage scrapper.

Going Rogue has been split into three pieces:
1) The Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning powersets, available in March and April respectively to people who pre-order Going Rogue.
2) Issue 17, available in April, containing Ultra Mode, a revamped Positron Task Force, major quality-of-life improvements, and whatever other bits and pieces they're able to finish by then.
3) Going Rogue itself, available in July, containing the Praetorian city zones (with associated content), the ability to switch sides, and probably some other things that haven't been announced yet.

Jet packs would have required a new skeletal rig to connect up. Capes connect to the neck/shoulder node, while tails connect to the pelvis node. The raptor pack and zero-g pack connect to the center-of-mass node, but that's not really a suitable place to connect things: if you've ever used the raptor pack on a character who departs significantly from average (say, a hulked-out huge character), you'd see clipping issues that make the tail/cape clipping look minor.

Off the top of my head, Council flamethrowers, Fifth Column rockets, various Crey units, Red Cap bosses, and Malta. When you're alone, you can deal with AoEs by charging up to the enemy and punching them in the face, but when you're in a group, there are too many targets to do that. It's even more of a problem in groups because far more bosses have AoE attacks than LTs or minions do.

There's a non-obvious one I've run into on occasion: certain foes, particularly Clockwork, are extra-vulnerable to knockback. When fighting them, knockdown attacks will turn into knockback attacks.

Based on comments, observations, and my own experience, "Justice" is probably one to three racks of servers in a datacenter somewhere. When you enter a door mission, the server code will create a new map instance and put it on whichever server has the lowest load. Here's the part I'm not sure about: if I were designing it, each map instance would be in its own virtual machine, with resource limits to keep any problems from leaking out, so only people on the ITF with you would see lag. Starting up a new virtual machine has high overhead, though, so they may have gone with the option of leaving all map instances directly on the hardware. In this case, lag on your ITF will affect other map instances on that server, but won't affect map instances on any of the other servers that make up "Justice".

You're confusing two different things here. "Lag" is when network or server problems cause your client's view of the game world and the server's view of the game world to differ. This shows up in things like rubberbanding, timed powers lasting longer than they should, and powers taking longer than they should to recharge (you see this as an inability to use recharged powers). Nothing you can do can reduce server-based lag.

"Low framerate" is when your computer is trying to draw more than it can. It shows up as jerky animation, and in extreme cases, the feeling that you're watching a slideshow. Upgrading from your laptop will avoid low-framerate situations by increasing the amount your computer can draw.

Look up "too awesome to use" sometime. If you make a consumable too expensive, people will buy one for "emergency use", and then never encounter an emergency sufficient to overcome the psychological barrier for using it, negating any value as an inf sink. Instead, you want to set the price low enough and the value high enough that people will buy and use them like mad.

Say you priced top-end inspirations at 50k each. Who wouldn't buy a tray-full before trying something hard? How frequent are LRSF teamwipes compared to attempts at soloing tough AVs and EBs?

Or take your one-shot recharge as an example. I wouldn't find that too useful at 10 million inf: at that price, the only thing I'd use it for is recharging godmode powers during a tough, long-running fight, and I just don't get in very many of those. Drop it down to 100k, and my plant/storm controller will keep a stock on hand to quick-recharge Vines whenever stuff hits the fan.

The idea of buying merits is a good one, but I think you've set the price too high. An average player can generate about 20 merits an hour through TFs, or 8 an hour through story arcs. The price for a merit needs to be set in line with that. Based on inf per hour levels discussed elsewhere in the forum, that would be between 50k per merit (level 50 defender generating a million inf per hour, divided by the TF rate) and 3 million inf (dedicated farmer generating 24 million inf per hour, divided by the arc rate).

Instead of making merits purchasable, I'd make some of the merit purchases also purchasable with inf. 1 million inf for a random rare salvage roll, or 30 million inf for a random rare recipe roll should remove inf from circulation at a reasonable rate.

*All* the pets. You know how Fulcrum Shifted fire imps are considered borderline overpowered? Add Animated Stone, Singularity, Jack Frost, Phantom Army, Phantasm, Carrion Creepers, and Fly Trap to the mix.

Works just fine if you've got some way of getting up on top of the tree canopy. In my experience, super jump is faster, fly is slower, and I've never teamed with a teleporter on that TF.

What is it about the Spring Event and panty raids?

One-trick pony? I'd describe plant/storm as "always one more trick up your sleeve". SoC not yet recharged? You've got Vines and Spore Burst for hard control, Carrion Creepers and Fly Trap to tank for you, Freezing Rain to knock them on their backs, and Gale and Tornado to send them flying. Once you've disrupted the alpha strike, you've got Snow Storm to prevent them from attacking as often, Hurricane to keep them away from you (and provide a hefty to-hit debuff if you can corner them), and Strangler to lock down any particularly problematic opponents.

This is the big one. There are so many ways to break things: for example, combine the three toggle defenses from Quick Reflexes with the toggle resistances from Electric Armor and some of the heals from Regeneration to get a scrapper that can match a Granite tank for survivability, without sacrificing speed or damage. Or take the nukes from the blaster primaries and team with an Empathy defender for an AoE powerhouse. Or combine the Kinetics secondary with the pets from the controller primaries for a one-person team that can out-mastermind a mastermind.

"Bugged superjump"? Are you running into bug 18296? If so, the workaround is to disable keyboard autorepeat while you're playing CoH.

For anyone playing CoH on Wine, keeping an eye on the AppDB page for CoH is a good idea -- it's got a list of known bugs and workarounds.

Close, but not quite. The real reason, from BaBs himself:

There are two animation systems in City of Heroes: the skeleton system and the physics system. The skeleton system is used for most of your character's motions: walking, powers, reacting to attacks, and so on. It's cheap CPU-wise, but requires a good deal of development effort, since every action needs to be scripted. The physics system is used for capes, flags, and one NPC's hair. It's CPU-expensive because it's simulating the physics of cloth, but development-wise it's easy: describe the object and the forces acting on it, and let the physics simulator do the rest.

Animated hair could be done using the skeleton system, but it would be hard: one animation for each possible motion for each hairstyle, eg. an animation for "low ponytail hair during the transition from a rising jump to a falling jump while spinning clockwise", an animation for "high spiky hair during knockback", and so on.

More likely, animated hair would be done using the physics system. Development-wise, this would just need a physics description for each hairstyle, but the CPU requirements would be heavy. According to BaBs, each additional physics animation gives the same framerate hit as an additional player. For example, adding a hundred players to an otherwise-empty enviroment cuts your framerate in half. Giving those players capes cuts your framerate in half again. Giving them two more physics animations (eg. a buttcape and animated hair) cuts your framerate in half twice more.

It sounds like your client lost contact with the mapserver, but didn't realize it.

The Daedalus arcs take you out of Cimerora. Is this one of his missions?

Are we? I just picked up "Pinball Mistress" for a knockback-heavy storm/energy defender.

(For anybody interested, "Pinball Master" is still available, but "Pinball Wizard" isn't.)