Katie V

Let me guess: you tend to play with fast-moving teams.

Some of us prefer a slower, more deliberate playstyle, and Devices is good set for that. Cloaking Device's 35ft stealth lets you ghost most missions if you're careful, stacks nicely with Smoke Grenade, and lets you pick your battles in almost all situations. Caltrops keeps opponents out of melee range, and combines nicely with Trip Mine to catch fast-moving target such as the Halloween werewolves. Ever one-shotted an elite boss? Trip mines + hasten + recharge has the potential. Gun drone by itself is fairly useless, but summoning one is a good way to draw a mob across a minefield while remaining cloaked.

I agree that Time Bomb is useless.

That makes it absolutely perfect for one of my characters, completely inappropriate for another (but she'll never admit it), and something the rest of them wouldn't be caught dead doing.

You say it works perfectly? Does that mean that you've got the bloom and DoF effects that NVidia users can't activate?

Agreed. Checking my characters, I've got: Quenya, English, English, Japanese, Arabic, Latin, Russian, Middle English (nice thing about archaic terms: you can say things that would get you generic'd in modern English), Spanish, heraldic terminology, English/Quenya, and Greek.

The only one I had trouble with was the Latin name: in hindsight, I should have expected that someone in the past five years would use "Panthera Tigris" as the name for a tiger-themed scrapper. I wound up using a junior synonym instead.

The oldest I can find is the first map of the "new area" (now known as Asgarnia), which I made by running along the edge of the border fence taking screenshots of the minimap, then splicing them together in Paint.

Also, your cooking skill seems to have fared better than my firemaking skill (I was in the top 50; now I'm #377,513).

Probably my favorite thing from Runescape was when someone found a glitch in the map that would let you climb up to the second floor outside the walls. I parked a number of spare accounts up there, and would occasionally amuse myself by having one of them wander around the upper level of Varrock, confusing the newbies and being mysterious. It's too bad they all got moved to Lumbridge with the upgrade to 3D.

One *temporary power*. It might be near-immunity to smashing or lethal: awesome, practical, and you're likely to use it up the next time you face an epic boss solo. It might be near-immunity to cold or fire, and you auction it off to someone doing the Frostfire mission. Or it might be ten shots of auto-hit PBAoE knockback, and you use it as a panic button to get five seconds' respite from being pounded on.

This is hard: SecondLife's been working on it for over five years, and there's *still* a hitch every time you cross a server border. At least they've gotten rid of the bug where you desync if you cross two borders in short order. As much as I'd like to see a zoneless map, I'd accept faster zoning (say, a one-second "passing through tunnel" animation) with on-demand loading of graphics resources.

Another thing I'd like to see: mission types that work with outdoors maps. The current missions don't adapt well. "Find X" and "Defeat X" missions are boring: you fly up outside aggro range, run a search pattern, and swoop down every time you find a target, or you run a ground-level search pattern, defeating mobs every time they aggro on you. The Croatoa story has a couple of good outdoor missions because you know where the mobs you're fighting are going to be (you don't look for them, they come to you), but I'm not aware of any others.

Your suggestions fall solidly in the "too awesome to use" category: once every 50,000 or so mob defeats, you get a one-use "I win" power. I'd go the other direction: a greater variety and frequency of crafted powers. They'd drop often enough that when you use one up, you can count on getting another soon. They'd also be powerful enough to be worth using: attacks that can one-shot a minion or put a solid dent in a boss, armor that gives five minutes of near-immunity to one damage type, and the like.

It's actually quite hard to create good random content. I've been playing around with the idea of creating a massive-world game, and even something as simple as generating a small town is hard: you'll often wind up with something that looks like someone vomited a bunch of buildings on the landscape. I suspect our current set of maps are the result of randomly generating thousands of maps, then selecting the best of them and hand-tuning them to work well.