Ms. Mesmer

First, the Halloween Event does have unique factions. The Fir Bolg, Coven and Unseelie Court were all developed first for Halloween events. Fir Bolg were fleshed out with the missing Lieutenant and Boss ranks for Croatoa, but debuted for the first Halloween event, and the Coven were the template for the Cabal, but have some notable differences in costuming and coloring, debuted then as well. The Unseelie have all of the main ranks, and are completely unique models, though mostly made up of particle effects.

On a related note, the Winter Horde are just lightly retextured Hydra, so if you call them unique, the Coven are even more unique (if that were truly possible) with their different Chest and Legs garments.

I think the root of the problem was the retcon of who Maiden Justice was. When the information about the signature characters was first coming out, we learned that Ms. Liberty was the granddaughter of Maiden Justice. In Issue 1, we got a contact named Maria Jenkins whose info said that she was the retired Maiden Justice. Then it all got changed, Maria was no longer Maiden Justice, and Maiden Justice turned out to be Statesman's wife, making Ms. Liberty his granddaughter, and putting a whole new angle on the relationship between their Praetorian counterparts.

They've always (at least as far back as I first encountered them, about June of 2004) done the Clockwork "wind down" sound when they were defeated, which I've always found odd. I don't recall them having any other robotic sounds, though.

The Trick or Treat mobs drop both, but should honestly be on the Magic-only table. The real kicker is that they drop solely Sci/Tech DOs and Tech SOs, which is ludicrous.

And now we have confirmation from those at HeroCon. Tyrant did indeed kill Stefan Richter of that world upon finding the Well of the Furies. I had hoped that we would know one way or another after HeroCon, and now we do.

BaB just said above you that while you are in the grey areas, you can still only access the market for your native side. Once you fully swap, you use the one for the other side. At no point does anyone have access to both. The real devil is in how well you can transport things bought from one side when you're just a hair away from swapping completely to the other. Those people who play at the edges of grey may become the true masters of the markets.

from the introduction of the mission dropping feature to mean that arc bonuses would mark the final mission of any arc that has one as undroppable, but they may not all cross the "well above average" threshold.

Interrobang

If you define problem as design decision, then they certainly haven't. I don't agree with the decision to only have a 10% chance of him spawning once Eochai is defeated, or with the decision to limit it to level 20+ zones, but it is either working as designed or working the same as it has since 2006, so the Devs see no problem.

Since absolutely nobody has been able to produce any kind of substantiating evidence for this theory, I'd say that we don't "know" it at all. I remember a Dev (probably Manticore) saying that if Arachnos existed on Praetorian Earth, they would probably have had a harder time of things. This was quite some time back, like within the first year of CoV release. I honestly think that a massive game of player speculation telephone has transformed it into Tyrant killed Praetorian Stefan Richter, and I will continue to believe that until someone produces a source.

Yes, that's definitely unique to Flashback, as I've done that mission a number of times recently (used double xp weekend to get a bunch of 13s to 14) through regular contacts and it's fine that way.

Not sure how new this is, probably related to certain spawns being already active when you enter a mission. In the final part of the Council Spymaster multi-parter for the Radio, the Council Spymaster took off toward the door the moment that I entered the door, rather than waiting to see me to make a break for it. I have to wonder if this would also mess up the hero cape mission or War Wall Defender badge mission.

Agreed. The problem with invasion-coding ToT mobs is that, while it will make them less deadly, it will upset the damage scaling for those trying to fight them. If they set the things at level 30, like the Rikti and Zombies, any character who doesn't have SO equivalent enhancement wil be sucking wind trying to put a dent in the things. If they set them at level 10, the low-levels will do better, but they will be trivially easy for level 50s. There's no Golden mean here.

They were so bad that they changed company policy to hide them for all of their games? When their biggest games make this one at its peak look like nothing? I doubt that very much. If any game's performance caused them to do that, it probably rhymed with Schmabula Schmasa.

The fact that the instigators of the Rularuu Invasion were not present at the portals does indeed show that the instigators don't have to be among the ones that we're fighting. That isn't proof by lack of evidence, it's an identity. It happened.

There's one whole other Malleus text? Wow. Snark aside, exorcisms are religious rites, not necessarily magical. I doubt that a priest would say that he was working magic during an exorcism, for instance, unless he wanted to be defrocked. It is a related area, though, as demons are at least players in both witchcraft and possession.

Same here for the last 2 months. Well, I did have a single instance of CoH not responding/locked up, but even that is a better average than the pretty low average of about 1 crash per month under XP 32 bit.

Not even remotely preposterous. The use of malleus in relation to magic is entirely based on the original association in the title Malleus Maleficarium. It isn't "the most recognizable"association, it's the only one.

Actually, that's your assertion about the role of the Coven. My assertion is, and always has been, that the Malleus Maleficarium is the inspiration for naming the Malleus badge, either directly, as a word used in the title of a text advocating the killing of witches, or indirectly by providing the inspiration for the name Malleus Mundi. For me to be wrong on that would require a coincidence of astronomical proportions.

Fair enough. Perhaps the only level of control in either event was one of destination, diverting beings from their normal places to Paragon. They didn't need to be controlled to attack the heroes they found there, it may just be confusion or their normal belligerence. The Circle of Thorns do seem to believe that it can be used to bind Faathim to their will, however.

It doesn't invalidate it. It does, however, show that none of the mobs that we fight have to be the instigators of the event. The instigators of the first event weren't present for us to see, why would those of the second event be? I tend to believe that the latter is the case, especially since the Circle of Thorns have the thing by the time of Scirocco's patron arc. They could have stolen it back from whoever took it, but the simplest answer, barring any new information, is that they had it the whole time.

I'm not talking about the in-game story for inspiration, I mean that it was what inspired the game writers to name the book. I don't even have to ask them, it was the inspiration because there is no other source for an association of the word malleus with magic.

I also want to point out that I'm not actually all that offended by the badge name, but I find your justification attempts humorous.

As for my claim about the book's power to bind the will of magical beings, it was used to usurp control over the creations of mad gods prior to the Halloween event. By the way, whoever among them was behind the Rularuu invasion never showed themselves during it. Funny how they didn't but the Coven did.

Actually, you pulled it out of your hat. The charge of speculation was made in the post of yours that I quoted.

The ONLY source for association of magic and the word malleus is the Malleus Malieficarium, that is where the inspiration for a magic text called the Malleus Mundi comes from. It's as simple as that, and no amount of mental gymnastics will change that.

Or one of them was. You don't know that the Coven were behind it, and your leaps of logic to get there are based on flimsy evidence. The article is purposefully vague, but your alternative explanation requires that all of those who were involved in the uneasy truce lost control of the book to a third party (general use of the term, since there were already three parties involved in the truce, making an outside group like the Coven technically a fourth party), which may be possible, but seems no more likely than one of those groups absconding with it and manipulating all of the players that we have actually fought from behind the curtain. A magical tome of the reputed power of the Malleus Mundi can bind any magical entity to the will of the wielder, no matter how organized those entities may be.

Any claim that the Witches are behind the original Halloween event is just as much speculation. The article mentions several of the mystical groups that are already in the game as suspects, but never mentions any mysterious witches as being seen with the Malleus Mundi. You are obfuscating because you don't like political correctness, and I find that to be every bit as misguided and harmful as someone putting meanings into words that are not there in the original context.

Please enlighten me as to what other context earning a badge called Malleus for defeating witches has. I can't think of any other reason for the name than to be evocative of witch hunts.

Looks like you're fighting +2s. You have a base of 56% chance to hit a +2 with a 1.00 accuracy power, as UberGuy pointed out above. Multiply that 56% by 1.33 for the enhanced value and it comes out 74.66% (actually 74.48, but the 1.33 is a rounded repeating decimal, the more correct value being 1.3333). Since the 1.00 base accuracy for the other powers was already there for us in the last calculation, the Lightning Clap math has an extra step. 56% times 0.8 times 1.3333 giving us the 59.73% number. If you're wondering where the 1.07 went, that is the 0.8 times 1.3333 value rounded to two places.

Here's a bug that I noticed, though it looks to be more of a fix becoming unfixed in the last patch. With Issue 16, a couple of level disparity issues in certain specific types of low-level spawns that had been in the game since release appeared fixed. These spawn level disparity bugs included level 10 Vahzilok Cadavers appearing in some Vahzilok spawns well past that level, while the rest of the spawn was the proper level, and the mixed Outcast/Tsoo spawns seen around the Steel Canyon hospital always having level 12/13 Outcasts and level 15 Tsoo. When Issue 16 went live, I noticed that the Cadavers were still spawning, but they would be the proper level, at least on my level 12ish characters, and that the Outcasts and Tsoo were all the same level in those spawns. It had been broken for so long that each of those made me do a double-take. With the last patch, they are both back to how they had always been.