Rodion

Are characters such as á, â, à, ü, ä and ö allowed in names on the European servers? They're not allowed in names on the American servers, but you can type those characters in chat when you have the right keyboard layout selected.

If you can't use characters that are used in languages officially supported by the game (French, German), then it would be logical that characters in Danish wouldn't work either.

Really, you're just making an argument for the devs to fix the "exploit" that allows buffers to double-bubble characters. In many missions the main objective can be reached immediately after entering the mission (say, the Nightstar on the roof mission, the Psychic Clockwork King, or any of the AVs on the big open maps). So there are many instances where the exploit can be used, if you know what you're doing.

Rather than increasing the duration of bubbles across the board, another possible implementation would be to provide a new duration enhancement for buffing powers. If you want to increase their duration you would have to sacrifice something (slots, recharge, end usage, defensive value) in order to get the longer duration.

If you want to double the length of a buff, you'd have to three-slot it with duration enhancements. That means you're giving up at least two slots, and potentially the ability to slot sets or add more defense.

This would let people who don't want anything to change have their way, and allow people who want longer durations to get them a cost that doesn't affect the people who don't need or want them.

The demands for a character running on the standard difficulty (Heroic would now be called "+0/x1") are pretty minimal. It would seem that a character running with SOs should be fine for most missions against most enemies.

Instead of us making guesses about what she might like, is there something about the character the she feels is inadequate? Running out of End, not able to do enough damage, long recharge times, getting too beat up by a few minions?

If she's not really having any trouble with the current build and has fun with it as is, there may not be any reason to change anything.

On the other hand, you can really pep up an SO-based character by adding a few sets of Crushing Impact to your attacks. These can be relatively cheap if you just put in lowball bids and wait. Each power that has five Crushing Impact IOs slotted will give a global 5% recharge bonus. The CI sets themselves will provide 2 SOs worth of Accuracy, 3 SOs worth of damage, slightly more than one SO worth of recharge and 1+ SO of endurance reduction. The last two things are the best deal with IOs -- and that's one reason why ED with inventions isn't all bad. It's actually rather nice to get faster attacks and lower end usage with five slots.

You might also want to five or six-slot Instant Healing with Doctored Wounds to maximize recharge and healing and get a 5% global recharge bonus. However, be aware that only the first 5 of a particular numerical bonus will be effective. That is, if you slot four sets of five Crushing Impacts and two of Doctored Wounds, you'll only get a global 25% recharge bonus, not 30%.

If you don't care about the global bonuses you can just get whatever recipes are available cheaply to maximize the bonuses you want on the power (the so-called "Frankenslotting").

It's all the rage these days to give your character lots of defense bonuses by using expensive IOs such as Kinetic Combat, but if you're just running at standard difficulty (+0/x1) it's drastic overkill.

Finally, you don't have to get IO sets at level 50. Level 50s are a lot more expensive to craft. Generally, any IO between 30 and 45 is just fine for "casual" play. But it is true that there's a bigger supply of 50s because there are more characters running consistently at that level.

It's highly probable that the devs considered putting a secondary sort key on bids so that older identical bids would be filled first. They likely discarded that idea because they knew that players could easily defeat that sort order by bidding higher (which is is why I always bid just a little bit over the nice round numbers so many people tend to use).

That is, you can always jump ahead in line by simply bidding a little more than everyone else. This ability to line-jump makes having a secondary sort key pointless.

Except, of course, for bids at the maximum influence value. The devs probably never thought that someone would be bidding so much for items, or it would be so rare that they were simply wasting time and effort coding for something that would never happen.

And indeed, for the first couple of years nothing ever sold for that much. Not even when purples were introduced did things get that out of control. But then PvP recipes were introduced. And characters started to rake in huge amounts of influence from various exploits. And now anyone can make billions just by selling a few purples or a PvP recipe.

And at this point there's really no reason to spend the effort to provide an orderly resolution to identical bids at the maximum inf value: people can get much more than that off-market through direct sales. It's therefore a feature that almost no one would ever use, and dev resources are better spent elsewhere.

This is the right attitude. If there isn't an existing market history, you've got to make your own market. As a basic rule, what's popular at 50 is usually popular at 30-35, so use the level 50 prices to inform your selection of a niche.

You should post at prices that are high enough to recoup your expenses and provide enough funds to do what you want. If you've picked an item that's in demand (which ones should be obvious from what's popular at 50, usually ones that provide desirable bonuses -- defense and recharge bonuses on attacks are usually good bets), you'll sell it soon enough.

Once the ice is broken others will start posting items they're holding in reserve. Then the market will start normalizing again.

Someone's got to go first. If you get the price you want, don't worry about the woulda-coulda-shoulda.

A couple of years ago someone did some testing to determine the order in which identical bids were filled. They thought they detected a pattern, but I don't recall what it was based on. I have no idea what you'd search on, but the topic was a good three years old at least.

I don't think that the current ordering is exactly what the devs "intended." It's most likely what just happened to pop out from the implementation. If pressed they would probably say that the order in which bids are filled is undefined -- not guaranteed to be anything.

My guess is that it has something to do with the order in which identical database results are returned, which likely has something to do with the internal representation of the database. Unfortunately, that means it's not something that we, as users, can control.

Where do you think those items you're buying and selling come from? The aether? Every item you buy comes from someone playing the game. And the way the game is set up, the only way to efficiently generate large quantities of worthwhile items is to farm content; in particular level 50 content for purples, speed TFs and morality missions for merits/A-merits to get rares, and AE missions to get ticket rolls for uncommon recipes.

If everyone just stands in Wentworth's and bids on stuff that other people are selling, there will be nothing to buy because no one will be producing anything new. Eventually everything will be bought and slotted, and the market will collapse.

You can't on the one hand denigrate farming and then tell people the only efficient way to make money is on the market. Without production there is no market.

It's exactly like saying anyone who isn't a Wall Street broker is wasting their time because that's where all the money is. If everyone were a day-trader there would be no firemen, police, farmers, scientists, or programmers to write the game you play.

Finally, who do you think has enough inf to buy the stuff marketeers are selling at inflated prices? People with money to burn: in other words, other marketeers and farmers who know how to market their wares to the best effect.

Once we started down the road of switching alignment, a market merge was inevitable. Too many players would have changed alignment for economic reasons.

When characters could change alignments every few days, smuggling between the markets would have been rampant, and the in-game rationale for alignment changes doesn't make sense for constantly changing back and forth every week.

Probably the most practical consideration was Praetoria. If all three markets were separate then the Praetoria market would be totally worthless.

Ditto for the influence/infamy/information equivalence. It's just not practical to 'escrow' that.

So it didn't make sense to keep the markets separate from a practical, role-playing, economic, logic or customer satisfaction standpoint.

Right. Incarnate slots will allow characters to be improved globally without having to slot individual powers. Since the Incarnate system will only work at level 50, that shouldn't be a problem for powers obtained at level 47 and 49.

I see this all the time. With Hover blasters/dominators, +1 bosses will often appear to be running away, but are just looking for something to climb on to get closer to you.

Another big part of mobs running away appears to be to lure you into another spawn. Mobs running away on a big open map often make a bee-line for the closest spawn.

Nosferatu's behavior in the video is weird, though. I wonder if the OP has tried making an AE mission with Nosferatu and see if the behavior can be easily and quickly be replicated. There might be a particular power that causes it (you can see how Phantom Army might create a race condition because they can't be harmed), or some combination of high defense and to-hit debuffs.

For you to be able to buy a PvP IO someone has to get a drop (or buy it with merits), and then put it on the market or otherwise offer it for sale.

Like in the real world, the herd mentality causes the bear/bull market cycle. If everyone uses their A-merits to get and sell LotG +recharge, the result will be a glut of those and a decline in their price, and there will be no PvP recipes to buy because no one is generating them. Similarly, if everyone does random rolls the supply of rare recipes will go up, their price will go down, and there will still be no PvP recipes. If everyone puts their energies into farming PvP recipes or A-merits to get them, the supply of PvP recipes will go up, their price will go down and there will be no rare recipes on the market.

Markets only work if there is a balance between suppliers and buyers, and diversity of supply and demand; in our context the generation of rares through random rolls/merit buys and PvP recipes by PvPing/A-merits.

That means there's no one "best" way to do anything on the market. You need to find a niche that works for you, and be prepared to change that niche when it taps out. You find that niche by looking at pricing, supply and demand of various items over a period of days or weeks.

The upshot is: if you really want the PvP recipe, the only way you're guaranteed to get it is to buy it with A-merits. And if PvP recipes are selling for more than the influence cap, you don't even have the option to buy it on the market. You'll have to find it some other way. And probably the best way is to do that is to PvP and actually generate highly desirable items which you can use or sell for beaucoup bucks, rather than waiting around for someone else to post them on the market.

This is what I did on my Ice tanker. I chose a dark blue shade for the Ice armors and you can only vaguely see that there's ice around the character. On my Fire/Ice tanker I changed the Fire auras to a subtle blue color which is unobtrusive.

By customizing the powers with pastel or dark colors (which depends on the exact power set) you can get minimal effects on most sets.

Has the OP gone through this exercise with the powerset he wants minimal FX on?

Admittedly I can't make some of the powers as translucent as I'd like: Burn, for example, is hard to get right. I want to see what's going on around my character when I use Burn -- the default coloring obscures too much of the action.

Until you three-slot Stamina with SO-level enhancements, Stamina doesn't solve all your endurance issues. Even when it's three-slotted, you still can't attack indefinitely with most characters unless you have some sort of end reduction enhancements slotted in your attacks, plus some kind of Recover/Endurance bonuses from IO sets, or the Accolade powers that grant endurance.

That means the impact of having Stamina at low levels will definitely be felt, but characters are still going to run out of endurance, especially if they don't slot end red in their attacks.

Upshot: Stamina at level 2 will make the lower levels bearable for players used to how their 50s play, but they will still be significantly less powerful.

You should always have 3-4 break frees in your tray as a defender. When you're going into a tough situation, you should have 4 greens and 4 purples as well. Using purples before a tough boss can make you almost unhittable. Inspirations can be combined, so you should always be making new break free, green and purple insps from insps you have extras of.

As a kin, you should be able to use Tranference to totally drain a boss of end in one shot (they use a lot of their own End in attacks). They'll still be able to attack once in a while, but less frequently.

Inspirations are the "I win" button in CoH. Any level 40 AT can survive pretty much anything the bad guys dish out for 30-60 seconds just by using inspirations. On the fairly rare occasions my characters die it's because I didn't use an inspiration when I should have, or because I failed to stock enough (usually break frees) before attacking a nasty enemy.

If you're at all impatient /Devices is not for you. They may be effective, but they're a huge time sink. Nothing is more tedious than standing around waiting for a /Devices blaster planting several Trip Mines.

If you like to do big damage with minimal down time, go with Fire/Energy, take Hover and Aid Self, then go to town nuking mobs from orbit. Aid Self can work in combat, but it's more useful for a quick heal between battles, allowing you to keep purples in your tray instead of greens. Using purples liberally in combat allows you to go nuts.

It's not clear that this will be the case. The Incarnate slots seem to be about expanding your character in new directions, rather than giving us more of the same.

For example, one of the devs apparently said that the "extra" space for slots on powers in the enhancements window is not to allow for more than six enhancements in a power, but rather a side-effect of eliminating the graphics stretching that was taking place on wide-screen monitors.

This is the key point. It's easy for the devs to make the Fitness pool powers inherent as straight-up auto powers. Adding options to take them, not take them, turn them on and off, etc., are all things that would take substantial development and testing time. It's just not worth their time, and it's not worth pushing back something else that we want more.

As far as outrunning NPCs in escort mission goes: give all the NPCs Swift and Hurdle too. And, what the heck, Stamina too.

Problem solved.

The problem is that we already don't have visually unique names. Using the standard in-game font, names such as "Delilah" and "DeIiIah" (using upper-case I for the lower-case L) look identical. If you're picking names from a list or responding to tells with backspace, you'll never know that you're talking to a different person. (I use a font that differentiates those two letters to avoid this problem.)

That means it's already possible to impersonate any character who has a lower-case L in their name. Similarly, as mentioned with the name "0mega" only observant players will be able to distinguish the difference between zero and upper-case O. And, of course, unless you have eidetic memory, you won't remember the exact spelling of names that include hyphens for characters with whom you've teamed only briefly. So when you get tells from Badger-man, Badgerman, Badger - Man and -Badger Man- are you really going to be able to keep them all straight?

To determine whether this is really the person you think it is, you'll have to get their global name. Which isn't immediately obvious or easy now.

Both sides of this debate make a lot of specious arguments. As a practical matter, we do not currently have unique names. We have a system that allows players to use the same names that requires us to manually disambiguate identical names with syntactic garbage.

Optimizations could be made that minimize the need for appending the global to the name. The team display could show the global only for duplicates actually teaming. And if a name is truly unique on the system it would never need display the global. That means that players who don't want duplicate names could choose names that no one else has, and will be unlikely to choose. They could still let their creative juices flow and be unique -- until someone else happens upon that same name at a later date.

However, as a practical matter, there are many more things the game needs that have a higher priority. I don't have a problem with the way it works now, but I don't have a problem with allowing duplicate names. Both methods are equally valid. I just don't see the devs finding the time to do it, because it would be a complex change that would wind up having a lot of unforeseen problems. And it would make a lot of players unhappy.

Right. There's no consistent implementation of "inherent".

Powers like Sprint, Power Surge, and Rest can be slotted with enhancements and extra slots.

But Widows, for example, were said to get Fitness as an "inherent" even though they weren't powers that you could slot. They were just increased base values.

Also, there are powers like Ninja Run that are listed under the Inherent category in the Powers list that can't be slotted at all.

So, it was reasonable to wonder how the devs would actually implement this version of "inherent." Castle has since clarified this, and it works the way we would want it to work.

The playerbase was burned many times in the past by statements made by developers who have long since left the company. One thing would be promised only to be implemented in an unexpected way, or subsequently "nerfed."

Making Fitness inherent has long been requested and also dismissed by the departed developers as overpowered and unbalancing. The new developers have obviously changed their minds.

This is probably a harbinger of the increased difficulty of the end-game content. And the honest realization that it's just not fun to sit around and wait a minute or two after every fight to regain enough endurance to continue. This doesn't mean we'll never run out of end -- even characters with three-slotted Stamina will quickly run out of end if they don't have any end reduction in attacks. But it will make things a lot less painful.

Spectral Terror has a -15% to-hit debuff that is very useful: it's a lot like giving everyone on your team a purple inspiration. If you've ever run an AE mission that has an illusionist you'll find out that the to-hit debuff is perhaps the more important aspect of ST.

Sleeps aren't garbage, they're situational. They are excellent for players who solo, especially sleeps that don't cause aggro. You can use them to get past mobs and stealth missions.

Sleeps are great in situations where enemies have toggles that you want to turn off quickly but can't tell which enemy has the toggle on (for example, when there is some Ice Thorn or BP shaman that has a Snow Storm on one of your team members, but you don't know which of the six of them it is).

They're great for controllers who want to set up containment for an AoE damage power, even when you're on a team: you're going to wake them up immediately with your AoE, but by sleeping them first you'll get more damage.

Sleeps work through certain Force Fields that provide mez protection for holds and stuns.

They're also good for stopping aggro on you. If someone else on your team wakes them, it's okay: they'll lose interest in you and attack someone who isn't so boring. If your team is smart they'll let certain sleeping dogs lie until they've dealt with more pressing problems.

Finally, sleeps are always good when you get surprised by an ambush or you accidentally aggro a nearby spawn. Sleeps are as good as holds if you don't attack, and they last a lot longer, so they don't need a lot of slotting to be quite useful.

i don't remember whether slag golems have it, but many critters with slashing attacks have a -def effect. If you get hit a few times by them (getting shot by guns, hit by some swords, etc.), your defense will quickly go negative.

I suggest you use the combat attribute monitor and watch your actual defense values. It can be very instructive, and will tell you when you need to pop purples.

There was no announcement. I believe that when a character got the Incarnate slot in the closed beta you also got a third build. During beta I had a character that could access three builds.

Since that was beta there's no guarantee that it will actually be released along with the Incarnate slots. But the code for it existed at one time.

I'd guess the devs would like to award one respec per build you've leveled up in order to be consistent with the way the free tailor sessions work, but the freespec code currently only handles one at a time. The devs could award a regular respec for each build, but it would require writing a database script that gets run for an issue. If I were them I would be hesitant to add yet one more thing to the issue release cycle, and I'd also be hesitant to invest resources in making it possible to issue multiple freespecs, since it affects so few players.

But I did bring up this issue during beta because I knew other people would have the same question.