Monkey_King

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I'd like to do both, actually (and both my Brute and my Stalker use it!) But, alas, Aid Self isn't changing. Healing Flames, on the other hand, might get a boost.

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Aww, I use Aid Self too. But if you want to nerf it, restoring it to its original activation time would do the trick. It got stealth-buffed a while back, so the healing takes effect a lot sooner. I thought the longer activations time, coupled with its interruptability, balanced out.

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Oh, and the self rez... suxx0rs?

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It's no worse than Regen's self rez. It sees more usefulness mainly in groups, though. People tend to look down their noses at self-rezzes because they think they need to automatically make room for Fitness, and they don't even think about just how often even skilled players actually die.

I agree with the temp power suggestion made earlier. Cut down the duration to 10 or even 5 minutes, but make it a thing you can carry around with you, with a 1 hour shelf life.

As stated, you're looking at having to franticaly run back to your mission, hoping to make it across two zones, and then all the way through a mission map to the hard part inside 15 minutes. Imagine having a mission at the very back of Crey's Folly, and trying to run back and forth between there and the Brickstown base portal. Also, it's not very fair to people who decide not to take travel powers.

At one hour, you pretty much have to use it on your current or upcoming mission, so the temp power buffs retain their original intent. Further, if you're trying to run through a mission with an elite boss, you don't always know where or when you're going to run into the big bad, and it's kind of a pain to have to leave, run all the way to the base, then run all the way back. Why not allow for advance preparation?

I'm cool with the idea of empowerment buffs being essentially one mission only, but even with the game's minimal travel times, 15 minutes seems a bit harsh. But, better to start at "too weak" and buff as needed, rather than "too strong" and nerf it, right?

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I read that last phrase as you saying that LiquidX, myself and some others want to keep you from getting Isolator plus any number of other badges.

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Well, in the case of LiquidX, this is probably true.

This whole argument about whether you actually killed 100 Contaminated seems irrelevant, since the devs didn't (and as a practical matter, can't) datamine for any kill badges when they were first implemented. There were no doubt a few people who DID kill 100 of them while in Outbreak, and even then they're not going to get their badge.

People who deserve the badge didn't get it, and it's impossible to determine who those deserving people even are. I'm not at all suggesting Isolator just be handed out to every I1 character, mind you. A pain in the butt second chance sounds plenty appropriate, as it's only the dedicated badge collectors who would spend all that time fighting 100 Contaminated in the first place.

Reputation is divided among your team, just like XP, inf, and prestige. An 8 man team gets something like 0.25 reputation per player defeated, if I'm remembering right. Body counts I'm less sure about. If it's like the PvE kill badges, then 20 defeats by anybody on your team should count. Possibly it might have to be somebody you can earn rep from to begin with.

I would assume rough parity with the hero accolades. Different requirements, but the same basic reward. There probably won't be a Conspiracy Theorist badge, but maybe a similar accolade which gives a different silly useless temp power, and so on.

I don't care if it's hard. It just doesn't quite seem fair for longstanding characters to be forever denied Isolator just because they predated badges. Every single other badge, an old character can go back and get (or was around to obtain, like the Halloween badges), save Isolator.

There's people out in Siren's Call, spending hours getting Reformed on their heroes, and villains resetting the 'Destroy Hero Statues' fifty times to get Weatherman. Hard and tedious aren't going to deter anyone. Just as long as it's not hard, tedious, AND for a limited time only. Then things could get kind of ugly as people fight over limited spawns and the drama starts flying.

...Anybody else getting the feeling that Positron and co. are more than a little amused at the lengths people go to for these silly useless badges?

Cuppa's been trying, but she has yet to be able to convince the devs to throw us a bone.

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Out of curiosity...does anyone actually LET Aeon run? Just to sully the timeline even further I always do what I can to take out the runner first.

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He lets you win. Professor Echo pulls the same trick in the PTS arc; at near death he appears to kill himself, presumably activating his escape teleporter early.

Okay, so Echo is supposed to be the old man. That clears up quite a bit of confusion. I figured that dangling plot thread would get brought up again sometime in the 40-50 range. I wonder if this has anything to do with Seer Marino's cryptic warning that Recluse's victory might not be your own?

If you're under level 50, it'll work the same way it does in the other PvP zones. In Bloody Bay, if you're level 15, you still get XP for defeating even level enemies appropriate for a level 15 character.

RV will definitely raise you up to level 50. Warburg only puts you at level 38 because that's the last level where you get a new power below 40. They could just round everyone off to level 40, but I think that was a conscious decision so that the Malta in there would be scary to players.

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I am in a Catch 22 situation. My Tanker just hit Level 34 and I am earning 1/10 the Influence as I am Experience. I am in SG Mode so my SG can earn a Base and pay the ridiculous Rent!!!

I can no longer afford to play in SG mode. I didn't even have enough Influence this time to upgrade my SOs.

The Devs keep increasing the difficulty and now you have to choose between a base and keeping your Enhancements from going RED? When will this nonsense end?

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Leave SG mode for a while so you can earn enough inf. for your SOs, simple as that. Go back when you're maxed out. I always drop SG mode at 27 and 32 until I'm done shopping. Your SG only loses a level's worth of prestige from you, it's not going to hurt them that much.

I also vote 5th Column Mek Man, in the hopes that player input will influence your decision. What better way to celebrate two years with CoX than with the longest standing bug in the game?

Hey, we kid because we love. It's such a dumb, harmless bug, it's not really worth the time spent hunting it down, but that makes it no less funny every time it happens.

I'd love to see skills too, but do any of YOU guys have any ideas for a system that is both fun and fits into the design concept of risk versus reward? I'm sure they wouldn't have tried and scrapped half a dozen systems if it was easy.

This begs the question, though. What are they going to do with the universities? Is that where we go for "inventions" now?

Sorry to see you go too, Alexa. Hope your new destination treats you as well as we've treated you here! Good luck!

Too many people are leaving! Take care in your new job, Arctic, and I hope everything goes well for you over there. I'm going to miss your updates!

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Sorry for the poor image quality, but the video isn't exactly stellar to begin with.

http://niku.pyoko.org/covthugs.jpg

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Aww, you cut off the third minion on the right. It looks like the third guy is a pyromaniac type thug. He's different from the other two, wearing a gas mask, welder's goggles, and orange pants with a flame design on them. The big guy is your basic tanker type wearing a ton of chains.

Pity we couldn't see more of the Thugs in action. The big guy is probably going to use the whole suite of Super Strength attacks, and the lieuts have two machine pistols that they use to cool effect, but no idea what the little guys do. Probably pistols and baseball bats, and the third guy throws molotovs and/or explosives.

Hmm, so Thugs are something like a cross between a biker gang and old west outlaws? I can dig. Still, I wonder what they'll do to explain how a bunch of thugs could possibly be as effective as a group of trained mercenaries?

Loving the previews of Grandville. I really cannot wait to get into this zone. I'm almost afraid I'll miss half of the zone just flying up and down. I wonder if they'll put in some aerial foes, since vertical movement will be in such common use?

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Remember, you're the good guy. As far as us cynics are concerned you're the only member of this team with any real credibility. You I have faith in, Jack, not so much.

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This is extremely irrational paranoia. Why do you trust Castle and not States? They are both part of the same dev team. Do you honestly believe it's one white knight standing against a cruel and uncaring dev team, doing what he can to blunt an active vendetta against the player base? That somehow, Castle is a subversive element within the dev team, independently sneaking in fixes for us players under the nose of the sadistic, domineering Statesman? That the actions of individual devs occur within a vaccuum?

In all seriousness, take off the tinfoil hat. Take an good, long, objective look at the work environment that would have to exist for your paranoid scenario to hold any water. I guarantee that Castle is not making changes to the game code without consultation with the other developers, States included. You damn one member of the dev team, you are damning them all. A lot of hated decisions weren't even Jack's fault - the Phase Shift nerf was Positron's idea.

The real reason the endurance change went live even though they knew there were some resulting problems with endurance drain? The QA pipeline. There were other fixes in that patch that needed to go through, and it would arguably have been just as negligent to leave a multitude of other known issues dangling, when a fix was right there on hand, while they waited for another patch to make its way through the QA pipeline.

As Castle just noted, the devs are busy. Game problems don't just solve themselves, and apparently there's a lot of data to fiddle with and then double check to make sure no numbers accidentally got broken (one misplaced decimal can play serious havoc, as we all know). Sure, they knew about the problem - but they couldn't fix it in a timely manner, and those other bugs needed fixing as well, so the endurance drain 'nerf' was allowed through. That's development reality; you have to prioritize, and accept a margin of error.

Now, if you take issue with dev <--> player communication, that's something to argue about, although we already get way more communication than other MMOs as it is. But it's childish to continue to put on this ridiculous persecution complex, when it's plain that said persecution is all in your head. You just WANT to hate Statesman, without any rhyme or reason why.

And yes, I'm well aware that I said something about the futility of arguing with LivingHellfire a few pages back. But maybe shining some light on just how illogical these conspiracy theories are will dissuade some other people from donning the tinfoil hats and chiming in to agree. Take issue with some decisions if you must - I'm still not entirely happy about some aspects of ED - but try to ground your complaints in reality.

I get the feeling it's only the Stalkers complaining about one-shotting being nerfed. Surprise guys, now you'll need to develop better tactics than "eat 12 reds, stab the guy, then run". Any competent Stalker will be able to squeeze in that follow-up attack, but it should help insulate people from the bottom-feeders who seek out every concievable abusive tactic in lieu of actually learning how to stalk effectively.

Also, I'd suggest people just quit arguing with Hellfire. Statesman can do no right by him. He is firmly comitted to hating Statesman, the dev team in general, and every last decision they make that doesn't buff the AT that he personally plays, as do a number of others in the vocal minority. No rational argument is going to reach these people; just stop feeding the trolls.

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There's a lot of variables involved. You can very easily not get DW and still complete the story arcs, you know.

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I don't think so. It appears Anti-Matter is a little hard to get, but I just reviewed Maria Jenkins' arc. You have to defeat just about every single one of the Praetorians. Chimera and Black Swan are the only ones it looks like you can skip, and those might possibly be "defeat the AV" missions in disguise as well.

So at worst, that narrows it down to three.

I'm not sure how that happens. If you have Statesman's Pal and the story arc souvenier, then the only one you could possibly be missing is Anti-Matter, unless you did something dumb like go to the hospital right before your team took down the AV. You can't do Maria's story arc and miss any of the Praetorians. If you've double checked by trashing Anti-Matter again, might be time for a petition.

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As for Anti-Matter not counting... I thought the second time you face him he didn't self-destruct. So he'd be a reliable kill, you just need the proper mission. Maybe I'm wrong about that and always got lucky. (I'll add this to the issue list next update. He should either count all the time, or should have the "turn tail and run" code instead of "Anti-Matter has defeated Anti-Matter" destruct.)

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In the old days, I think he just exploded and disappeared. Now he does the special teleport animation (looks like a rez).

Of course, it would be best of it showed a message in the server log that said "Anti-Matter teleported away before you could get the killing blow. Looks like you'll have to wait for next time."

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I thought it was a fake Anti-Matter at least one of the times you fought him?

And silly me for suggesting people attempt to get Dimensional Warder at the proper level range. The story arc souveniers are a foolproof means of making sure you've trashed all the Praetorians, is all I'm sayin'...

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It does not reduce the amount of health regained by a Regeneration scrapper useing Reconstruction or Dull Pain. Which is odd because the power says specificaly that it will debuff the targets healing powers. It does not do so in any way in PvP. If that is a bug then please fix it. If that is a typo in the help then please correct every instance of it.

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That is a bug. The power IS supposed to debuff all healing; in PvE it will chop a critter's healing powers by fully 50%. Reconstruction and Dull Pain should be no different.

Note, however, that it's been reported that Weaken and Envenom (which gives your victim resistance to healing) are not interacting properly, at least when it comes to self-heals. The tester reported that a Freakshow actually recovered more HP with his self heal with both debuffs applied, than with just one sticking to him.

Odds are it's a bug with Weaken/Envenom and self heals in general.

Wow, bars for everything? Hooray for Positron! This is a dazzling amount of QoL concessions you're making for us here. Thanks again for the BP masks in Sharkhead! And in Bloody Bay, for that matter; it's a pain hunting the things in Talos.

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The real problem with Dimensional Warder is when you think you've killed all the Preatorians but can't tell which one is missing. I don't see how a sliding meter would help figure that out. Maybe we need a Personal Info tab with a listing of all AVs/Elites that we kill?

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Pardon me for asking, but why is this necessary? The Praetorians are all self-contained within two story arcs. Even if you blow past Tina Macintyre, the only one you'll miss is Anti-Matter. Everyone else you can get worry-free by going through Maria Jenkin's missions.

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Currently the count only incrementals if there is an actual rocket launched. i.e. the graphic of the rocket leaving the pad. It is possible to get the reward without the rocket launch animation happening (say it has recently happened for someone else). These are not currently being tracked or stored.

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Ahah! I'll bet that's why everyone's count is inconsistent. Oh well, I know for certain my Blaster has at least one legit launch to his record; it was right before CoV was released, and everyone was oohing and aahing at the missile launch. I bet the others were in the non-counting period, though.