Tyrak

What I want most has already been said - so here are three new things:

1) A separate channel for basebuilding text. Why plague the group every time you want to decorate?

2) Energy effects - point (spheres of various sizes), line (of a couple different thicknesses, relatively short since you could line up multiple for a longer line), plane (both flat and vertical), and cube (in a couple of sizes). All in three or four colors and at least two styles, such as electric and plasma. Ideally with lighting effects, since this is a wish list.

3) Lighting options for individual squares instead of whole rooms. The floor and ceiling heights have copy to room and copy to base options, lighting could as well. This would be good for having an area set aside as a detention zone, radiation test area, or what have you.

3) NPCs spawning from and vanishing into the base portals - that gives the impression of people working at or visiting bases.

3) Fans. Ceiling fans in lighting and standing/floor fans in room details.

Sorry for the weird three - I was in the Twisted Burrow less than a week ago and it hasn't worn off yet. Then again, only three of the 'three' are items. I claim individual-square lighting options as an item.

The hideous colors, the torturous paths, the general disdain for convenience... all signs of a great(ly troubled) mind.

I was impressed.

I have noticed a lot of set enhancements being sold for less than the cost of materials (at current prices) and crafting. The price of purples has dropped by about a third in the few cases where I knew the price well beforehand.

Apparently all I needed to do was reboot after getting the patch. I thought I was done with that foolishness when I left XP behind.

So are the servers up? I have not been able to log in at all, and I've been trying off and on for about four hours now. I've gone through my anti-virus/firewall settings to make sure nothing there is interfering since the update but still no luck. I even went to account management, and everything is fine there. All signs point to at least the login server being down.

I haven't played around with it myself, but apparently you can use /commands to position the camera at given coordinates and to change the view angle to anything you want. Seems more trouble than it is worth to me but I expect it would give the best results when you got the hang of it.

I'm just getting started on the real work of building, having bought about two million prestige so far and earned about 750k more. The plan is to get most of the functionality in (all the teleporters, a couple of med stations) and have most of the decorating done in the existing areas before I start inviting people. That leaves plenty of room for growth for the future: finishing the medical facilities, adding and furnishing workshops and holodeck/illusion chambers where members can experiment with base design, coming up with some sort of meeting area, maybe living areas, who knows what all. I think that's important, as it helps people feel they've been a part of building the group but they get to start out with useful and (hopefully) attractive stuff already in place.

The base will be a mix of arcane and tech, though aside from a little bit of computer and lighting here and there in arcane areas it will be consistent within a room. I'm beginning with the large teleport room and the arcane control room. I figured I'd post my initial bits, see what suggestions come of it - and you may see something that gives you ideas.

First, in the arcane control room, my initial attempt at a scrying pool:

The magic axis (which has a visible bottom) rests on top of a pair of stelae, while a slow field floated over an arcane floor piece (idea found in these forums, thank you very much) forms the pool. I've placed a floor torch and crystal ball stand in the pool, though I am not that happy with it and will probably swap them out for something else. I will be putting something on top of the stelae, probably another pair of stelae. Around the pool will be seating and study area, while the far right will be a two-floor 'restricted' section of library (bookshelf auxiliaries) only accessible via teleportation. I will post again when I have more of the room 'done', but I'll be checking here for suggestions before I continue working on it.

Then, in the teleport room, a sort of sketched-out telepad enclosure:

The nuisance factor here is that the arcane teleporters are triangles. Enclosing two of the three sides properly requires lots of angle work and there are some problems filling in overhead and behind the angled arcane eye. I'm going to have to experiment with something similar involving much easier right angles and see how that works out. I also want to change the beacons, I think they should go on the stelae. I prefer the tech beacons, so I show those - the functioning arcane beacons are hidden behind. The telepad itself is sunk into the floor a step, so the arcane floor piece covers it.

The room itself will be divided into four sections. The entrance and infirmary doorways connect to the same space in the northeast corner of the room, and the telepads will line a diagonal path towards the southwest. Since the telepads are a bit smaller than a map square and will be slightly overlapped that will leave almost a full square open in the southwest corner. It will open to the northwest section (the print library) and the southeast section (the online library). Following the theme here, the print library leads to the arcane control room and the online library leads to the tech control room. If there is room the southwest corner will have the stairs to a lounge area above 'teleport row', otherwise there will be a set in each library.

Again, I will post when I am satisfied with the telepad enclosure, but that will wait until after the control room.

Something interesting I've noticed is that some colors look and behave differently on the different sizes of glass panel. Using the yin-yang symbol with both colors set to the same light blue, the larger glass gives a plain, opaque blue circle in a darker shade of blue; using the same colors on the smaller glass gave a sort of clear glass porthole look. Looking through that 'porthole', object rendering is a little confused. Stacking a few of these together (so that the bases touch without overlap and the holes line up), the glass in the farther ones is not visible at many angles - while the symbols themselves are. It looked like a series of floating lenses behind the first glass.

Can other people get this effect, including a significant difference between the large and small glass panels using the same colors for both, or is it just my video card rendering things oddly?

Incidently, I recommend removing the lowest lights from beyond the window... they are obviously between the viewing character and the floor beyond the glass. That disrupts the illusion for me. If they are gone, the floor beyond the glass is then just some sort of maintanence walkway on the outside. Something else you might try is to put another layer of glass just one step beyond the first to make it look like a stronger window. That might also help further obscure the bars on the lights.

I like Snap Shot as a blaster - with relatively little effort it cycles every second so the damage it does is its DPS, does good damage if you slot for it (I haven't to any great degree and it takes two shots to take down most even-con minions), and you can use it while asleep, held, or any other condition besides dead. I still toss in Blazing Arrows when they recharge, but unless you are perma-hasted Snap Shot does a lot more damage over time than does Blazing Arrow.

If you can get the recharge time down enough, Aimed Shot is actually better than Snap Shot, but it is a lot easier to get 100% recharge bonus (the maximum for Snap Shot, barring a -recharge effect) than 167% recharge bonus (approximately the break-even point for Aimed Shot) or 300% (the maximum for Aimed Shot, barring a -recharge effect). Especially if you want to have comparable damage bonuses from your slotting.

As mentioned before, Rain of Arrows is probably the best nuke due to the combination of recharge time and lack of endurance crash. On the other hand, you aren't going to take down bosses with it alone... and against reasonably lethal-resistant mobs you might not even get the minions.

Flares is even better than Snap Shot, especially when you factor in enemy resistances, but since it has been nerfed in other ATs I am expecting it to be nerfed in blasters fairly soon. Thunder Kick for martial arts scrappers is better still purely in terms of damage output, but it is a melee attack and sucks your endurance at a much higher rate. And of course with a brute the first level attacks are usually the best - being faster they build rage much more quickly. Don't forget the value of attacking faster when you have proc IOs slotted; more attacks in a given time means getting more times that proc fires off.

I suspect that the lower-level powers were deliberately chosen to be the best overall since they are the only ones you can start with. But with other attacks doing damage to multiple targets, more damage to a single target, some having more or greater secondary effects, there is no good reason to stick with a single attack power even when you can get away with it. Attack chains are always better since time spent making attacks counts towards recharge time for everything. If you're a blaster, though, don't forget to give some enhancement love to your 'weakest' powers - I have killed a Rikti Mesmirist three levels higher than me while being held or slept the entire time.

Another point to consider is that the tests above involve even-con mobs - what about mobs that are five levels higher, or eight levels higher? You won't be finding any when you're level 50, but you just may when exemplaring. My blaster first started taking wall groups in Cimerora at level 43, and the prestige gains were excellent in terms of time versus reward even with occasional defeats and frequent escapes to heal. Now that I've hit 50 I may have to exemplar and try that again.

So does the recipe come out at your real level or your current level if you are exemplared?

I would make them wider (at least 50%, possibly up to double the current width), and bring them closer to the front. Though if you are going for more of a large old-style office building having them recessed that far does work. Also, it appears that they are suspended above the floor, which is a bit distracting for me.

If the floor there is not bottomed out (or if you can raise it anyway), one trick you might try is to move floor safes over to serve as a dark line sticking just a little out of the floor and have the elevator doors imbeded in them, just a hair behind - that should give an illusion that the doors are fitted into a gap. It may not fit that way, though - I am thinking the safe may be too much closer to the edge of its bounding box compared to the cabinets and thus may look more like a wide black stripe in front of the doors. Easy way to check that is to see how close you can get a cabinet edge to the edge of a safe (either front/back or side, as the fit is slightly different by orientation). If it's close, this should work.

Set bonuses do not show up in power information. If you want to test that, take a known set bonus and check a power that has a low (sub-ED) enhancement bonus of that type. For example, say you've got a +15% set bonus to accuracy and you have a power that only gets a 21.2% bonus to accuracy from its slotted enhancements. When you look at the power info, it will show that accuracy has a 21.2% bonus. So far I haven't taken time to try looking for a way to get the final numbers... there may not be one, aside from doing the math yourself.

So here's a question - getting up to five copies of a set bonus, does it go by percentage or label (large damage bonus, for example)? I've seen people claim both ways. If the personal info screen only lists functional bonuses, then having six large damage bonuses show (with at least one value of 'large' different from the others) would mean it goes by percentage. So I guess the first step is to see if the info screen reports all bonuses or only functioning ones - has anyone, presumably because there were other set bonuses they wanted tied in, accumulated more than five copies of a matching percentage bonus? If so, please let us know if the info screen reports five bonuses of that size, or more.