MTS

If we're talking about a strict level 10 build, the WS's nova form is a bit more useful than -def that you probably don't need at that level.

The one thing where I think a PB might edge out the WS, though, is enhancements. Being natural, a PB has access to level 13 damage SOs. A WS can only slot recharge SOs, which don't seem quite as useful given the available slots.

It seems to me that it happens if the power has started animating, but the target dies before the projectile is created.

Blazing Arrow does it a lot because most of the animation is the windup, played before the arrow gets launched. Power Burst has a drawn out projectile animation that gets created much earlier, so while targets often die during its animation, it doesn't get stuck nearly as often as blazing arrow.

Last year I got with a group of friends on one of our sorta min/maxed villain teams in their early 40s (I say sorta because we all picked ATs and powersets we wanted to play, but arranged them in a way to stack buffs and debuffs. No fancy builds or anything).

I think the difficulty settings were affecting spawn levels last year, IIRC. Anyway, we were set to Invinc as usual, and headed to grandville. Parked by some sets of double doors. Had all 8 click simultaneously on one door, then spam on the second to get it as soon as we were able to click again.

I'm normally not much into farming, but that was *FUN*. Many, many purple mobs, bosses, etc, spewing out of the doors at once into our ice slick/tar patch trap. With so many of them, it felt like they might actually have a chance to faceplent us before the fulcrum shift went off

Only did it for a couple hours, but I think we gained 2 or 3 levels and got a ton and a half of halloween salvage.

Actually, they do now.

Well, sort of sparkle rather than glow, but same difference.

Almost any of the invisible walls blocking off the trees in Croatoa are seemingly not completely solid. This includes the ones in the instanced copies of the Croatoa maps.

Also, any other places that this style of wall is used can be glitched through with relative easy. Off the top of my head, you can use this to get behind the counter of the tech store in Talos (that's where I first discovered the method below, by accident while running around waiting for teammates). Probably others as well.

There's no need to jump around trying to find the exact right spot. I've found that facing perpendicular to the invisible wall, and pressing the forward key with a quick double-tap will usually cause you to run right through it.

The Talk to PvP one is definitely a waste of a mission drop -- it doesn't take very long to just go do it. I drop it on principle alone. That and I've heard that dropping a mission sets a flag on the mission, so that if a particular mission gets dropped a lot, it gets brought to the developers' attention. That may not actually be true, but even if it's not, it should be visible by data mining, so it at least makes me feel better that I'm doing my part to report these "broken" missions

That said I can't remember the last time I needed my mission drop for legitimate reasons. I very rarely solo these days, either duo or a team of 5-6, so simul-click and +4 enemies aren't insurmountable. I think the last bugged mission I came across was a radio mission, either the bank or the pawn shop, that didn't complete despite defeating everyone on the map. Rather than burn the drop I just reset it and got more XP/inf/prestige.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Tina_Mac...in_lab_-_10:00

There you go

It does have a slightly different debriefing for succeeding -- at least it does now. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a retcon, and it tells you that you failed anyway due to circumstances out of your control

I reserve my mission drops solely for the "Go talk to the PvP zone person" missions. I hate those. With a passion. Now that PvP is either dead or at least dying, can we finally have those taken out? Please?

I've done it on an energy/ice blaster with nothing but knockbacks, ice patch, and chilling embrace. It wasn't fun.

If you're doing that one the slow way by waiting for them, IMO it's easier solo (as a controller) or on a small team. Otherwise you have much bigger spawns on a team, but the "fail" number remains at 30.

Once you get big enough that you can split into 2 groups, though, it's not so bad. Just have the damage dealers hunt them down early before they run for it, and leave a troller and/or tanker at the door to stop them.

I don't know when they did this or if it was intentional, but I just ran the cape mission today and the Time Capsule is making a different sound now. Instead of the regular "glowie" sound, it's kind of a low-pitched mechanical pulsing noise. A little freaky actually.

Yeah, but Maelstrom is a villain, isn't he? He just happens to be a Blaster who switched sides

That's kind of funny -- I always assumed that since I couldn't target them, they were simply decorative and part of the map geometry, not actual entities.

The one on the far left (on Pinnacle at the moment anyway, don't know if they're randomized) has the rings visible under normal light. I did notice that these targets are affected by AoE -- freezing rain put the "chilled" animation on them.

You mentioned the imps, so I summoned my animated stone over by them and sure enough, he started going to town on one. Even managed to stun it, heh. It had the dazed circles right over the 'head' part of the outline.

By targeting my pet and using auto-assist, I was able to fire off powers on it. Ice Blast, Fossilize, etc all worked. Stone Cages even got some of the nearby targets. The only anchor point defined on them seems to be just above the paper, on the hanging clips. All the mez effects and powers went to that spot.

I tried /assist to see if I could target it, and my target window flashed briefly before it automatically untargeted. So I did /assist$$info and got something interesting:

http://i361.photobucket.com/albums/o...7-00-27-19.jpg

It looks to me like these may have been originally intended to be usable, much like the practice dummies, which have a very similar faction and description. They probably never got finished, and like BackAlleyBrawler said, weren't worth diverting developer attention away from more important things.

EDIT: Oh, never mind, I just noticed that they were targetable before BaB changed them not to be. If there's any sort of flag to make pets ignore them, you may want to set that as well

Boooooo!

Terrain is rendered by the client, not the server. Collision detection with terrain for players is handled by the client as well. I *think* collisions with players and NPCs, while also handled by the client, are checked by the server and may be corrected by it, producing the jumpy effect when two players try to occupy the same space due to lag. Still, while it's not perfect, I prefer this to games like WoW with no player/NPC collision at all. It makes the game world feel a lot more solid and real.

You'll never run into empty space because the client will freeze until it loads the map, so if you don't have a fast hard disk and/or lots of memory for caching, this will cause annoying pausing. Teleport, especially on /energy blasters, is quite a bit faster than the superspeed cap and runs into this on lower end machines.

The Superspeed cap is already past the point where the server can keep up with spawning mobs and transmitting the information. I superspeed into presumably empty areas of the map all the time, only to have a large group spawn on top of me. This is most likely the reason for the run speed cap, or possibly algorithmic limitations on the formulas used to calculate continuous movement.

Fly and SJ caps are, as you mentioned, by design to offset the advantages of those travel powers.

The 5% hit cap annoys me, but I've learned to live with it. With streakbreaker, it's actually a little bit less than 5% on average. OTOH, the guaranteed 5% chance to be missed by enemy attacks has saved me in the past.

I can't say for sure, but what you've probably heard (I've heard similar rumblings) is things like:

"Who would want to invite a tank when you can get a brute?" (because brutes do more damage)

or

"Who would want a defender when you can get a corruptor?"

etc.

Except I hear the same thing for tankers over brutes (more survivable without expensive builds), defenders over corruptors (better buffs/debuffs), etc. So I don't think it will be as big of a deal as people are crying DOOOOM over, kind of like which ATs you have on a team isn't all that important already.

It's not an ice beam, that's all Johnny Snow.

Standard code rant applies. Putting the option in the UI is easy, sure, but right now it can't actually do anything. Since the difficulty implemented as per-player, and the challenge settings aren't directly connected to it, it would probably take pretty extensive changes to the difficulty code in order to do it. Add in a new communication protocol in order to transmit those settings to the server, and validate them. Then there's all the regression testing to make sure it actually works and doesn't break anything else.

Making changes in the code of an MMO, which involves hundreds of subsystems with complex interactions, and many thousands of users who are constantly banging on the system with all sorts of inputs and variables you might not have thought of, is never "easy".

QFT. With uninitialized variables, completely unrelated changes to the code can trigger them. They're often tickled by changes to address space layout, the state of variables set in a completely unrelated function (re-used heap or stack space), different compiler optimizations, etc.

They're about as close to non-deterministic behavior as you can get in computer code. Notoriously difficult to debug and impossible to predict.

I did that back when it first became apparent through statistical analysis that recipe drop rates were lower than they should be.

I've been noticing a slow rise in recipe prices since I16, likely as the supplies dry up. Once it was confirmed by Synapse I put all my market activity on hold, since recipe prices will likely fall once the patch that fixes this goes in.

Someone in a group that I play with a lot coined the term "Creepler Elves". I find it highly appropriate.

Not only that, but last I checked the central building in Grandville had the same hole as the instanced maps that you can TP out through. I'll have to see if it's still there and maybe /bug it again.

I did fly around under atlas park some a few issues back when there was a hole in the Vanguard base there. Kind of fun being on the other side of the war walls, even if the "buildings" aren't really solid. I wanted to find the upside down section of city hall, but I could never manage to get far enough down to find the inside area -- I think it was below the "floor" that TPs you back up to the northeast section.

Hmm, have never managed to do that one, but now that I know it's possible I may have to attempt it again. I can get behind the scenery easily enough (the invisible walls let you through if you jump at them at the right angle), but not actually outside the map -- always had the blue holodeck walls blocking the way.

I've gotten out of the instanced Croatoa sub-maps a couple times. The baby new year map is particularly easy.

I think they did fix the bug where teleporting just as you entered a mission would sometimes reset your location to 0,0,0. That one was fun. Discovered it by accident on the Valentines day mission -- my blaster ended up outside of the walled off area and got to wander around a spooky ghost town version of Sharkhead

Do you have the "Suppress Close FX" option turned on? If so, try turning it off and see if that helps.

Ran into something similar during open beta, but it was near the end of the beta cycle and it would sometimes fix itself once you were in the game, so the same issue probably exists in live.

That's because what you saw and what you typed are two different things.

The "Chain" category you saw is a category for a special set of powers, in this case the chain lightning attack (name escapes me) that Hami uses, which works by granting a power. It's similar to the "Accolades" or "Set Bonus" power categories.

When you typed [Chain], since there's no actual power called that, what it found was actually this:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancem...Defense_DeBuff

That is, a Magic/Mutant dual-origin enhancement named Chain, which was the first match for what you typed.