Umber

Early on I had an annoying habit of renaming screenshots so I've lost the date information, the first one I lazily stopped renaming is here.

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Awesome stuff, Posi!

So... what cool stuff will be financed with this flush of our money you're shortly be receiving?

Invuln with invinc replaced with recon might not be too bad.

My guesses:

Blaster - psychic blast (confirmed) and modified Psychic Assault
Brute - axe/mace (confirmed) and Regen
Defender - fire blast and traps
Dominator - earth control and a new stony assault
Controller - plant control (confirmed) and dark miasma
Corruptor - elec blast and storm summoning (confirmed)
MM - no primary (confirmed) and radiation emission
Scrapper - superstrength and ninjitsu
Stalker - broadsword and invuln
Tanker - elec melee and elec armor

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I strongly suspected we were getting ready to see alot of cross-AT "pollination" of the reserved powersets, and I'm entirely happy to see it happen. While I'm sure a goodly amount of work is needed to make sets fit properly into different ATs its still a lot less work I'm imagining than making entirely new sets. This was a low-hanging fruit just daring to be plucked. Gimme my axe brute, mine mine mine!

One downside - ya can't keep giving us new powersets after 4 years and not give us more more server slots. I'm not paying for a third account, its just not going to happen, the second account was hard enough to justify. And after 4 years I've made so many friends on a single server its just not feasible to up and move elsewhere. I know the "play on another server" suggestion is the standard mantra but its not realistic. Give us more slots! I'll gladly trade every empty slot I have on Freedom for 2 more slots on Triumph, deal?

The costume bits look wonderful. Improved power tray UI, great! Contact management improved, awesome. Inspiration conversion, weird and not even asked for that I know of but gladly taken. Level-up boost, also kinda weird and neat. Hyperlinked chatting? Oh heck ya! More Real Numbers, sign me up!

Yet another new mysterious organization (magic-based, to boot) that we've somehow never heard of in 4 years of exploring the CoH universe? Meh. Roman-styled maps? Any new additions are nice but it sounds pretty bland.

Excited, eager, mildly dampened over this Midnight Squad business and the increasingly painful need for extra char slots. i12 preview review: 8.5 out of 10.

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Go with the Fade Line texture and reverse your colors to match. I think that's the best you'll get.

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Oh! Its not the perfect solution but it'll do! Thanks!

I'm trying to put Thin Stripe 1 on a character's sleeves without also putting it on their hands but can't seem to find the way to do it. As seen in this image I'm running into an either-or situation. The pic on the left is using the Long Sleeves option but it wont let me put a texture on it, just a single color. The pic on the right is switched to any other sleeve type where it lets me place the Thin Stripe 1 texture but it also covers the hands.

As per my crudely photoshopped example I just want the long sleeves textured, not the hands! Anyone know what sleeve options will produce the desired effect?

Aha! Didn't spot that thread from the non-costume-related title!

Looking for inspiration on a new Christmas costume, had a decent design last year but am drawing a blank for what to do this time around. Make with the pics!

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I am VERY excited about this issue.

I'm now withdrawing almost every nasty thing I've said about Positron.

Sounds good to me!

Post your goth chick designs here, folks! And if nobody minds I'll make a gallery of the "entries" and put them up on a webspace for everyone to see. No more forum pruning problems then

I recall seeing a thread showing off player's goth chick costume designs, was thinking of working up such a character and was hoping to stumble across that thread for some inspiration. My forum search-fu has failed me tho, does anyone remember the name of that thread so that I might locate it?

Shield / Shield all the way.

The others sound neat, but I want my shield sets.

Did anyone else keep an eye on the Defeat Toxic Tarantula progress bar (for the badge) while running the STF?

I'm not 100% sure but I'm all-but-positive that my character's bar did not move at all from running it last nite. Are the toxics here considered "rogue" and dont count towards the badge?

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WHY STORY ARC EXCLUSIVES ARE BROKEN:

Because they are the ONLY thing you can't repeat. The only. Think about everything else on the list posted by Dr. Brainstorm:

TF - Any character 12+ can do Positron's TF (if a hero, obviously) ANY TIME THEY WANT.
Trials - Any one 24+ can do a respec trial ANY TIME THEY WANT.
Killing mobs of all levels - With exemplar you can do this ANY TIME YOU WANT.

You might need a team, that's OK. But story arcs can only be done once. Fix that or no recipes be available only from story arcs. All you're going to accomplish is creating:

ULTRA RARE LOOT

Which goes against everything you said you wanted to accomplish. It will make the game more hardcore than WoW or Everquest II.

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What he said.

Lets not jump all over Castle for performing due diligence. I have no doubt that once he has a chance to look into it he'll see what we've been saying all along - the miniscule damage comes nowhere close to meriting the lengthy recharge time.

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More and more discussions/rants are being closed down by Lighthouse. I realize he is the Community Relations go-to person <snip>

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You should have stopped right there.

I'm growing increasingly frustrated with our devs not so much for the slow issue releases (which is irksome enuf) but in their seeming inability to learn from past overrreaching release estimates. Bugs are always going to pop up and will require extra time to work out, but any development studio is going to learn to build in sufficient time to make project deadlines. If you say something is going to be done by in four months, fer instance, what that should mean is "we expect to be done in 6 weeks, 9 weeks if all heck breaks loose" then release the final project ahead of schedule. Could any of us actually imagine an Issue coming out *earlier* than suggested? I think we'd all die of shock.

I'm also growing frustrated with the "better late than buggy" phrase that folks are tossing about way too easily to excuse our devs every time they slip a schedule. Of course we don't want them to release a buggy product but there is a third option, the non-buggy on-time release that we have yet to see.

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I'd rather not state if any one aspect is more or less important than any other aspect.

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Then allow me

Aspects of the game that affect a smaller percentage of the population that would require a larger amount of dev resources to fix is less important that aspects of the game that affect a larger percentage of the population and take fewer resources.

Anything the Devs place in that is buggy needs to be fixed eventually, but some utilizations of their limited resources are better than others

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No offense to the PvPers, but imo the devs have already invested way too much time in what is at best a minority interest.

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It is a minority interest because it is undesirable to would-be PvP'ers.

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As a non-PvPer allow me to state the simple reason why I'm not interested - CoH isn't a PvP game. It wasn't build around PvP concerns and is lightyears away from having any real balance. The devs admit there is no AT or powerset balance, and tougue-in-cheek suggest that balance exists at the team level (which is just another way of saying that stronger builds will pull the weight of weaker builds overall). The amount of change necessary to get powersets to rough equilibrium would be massive, its not something we're going to see take play in CoX when the devs won't even devote the time to tweak blaster secondaries. If you want a PvP-balanced game you'll need to wait on CoH2 or City of Marvels.

Someone else had compared the situation to Dominator unpopularity, and the situation is similar with only one difference - scale. Thats a big difference tho, Doms can be improved with relatively minor tweaks, PvP balance would require a revisit to almost every single powerset in the game with some major changes across the board. It'd require darn near a rewrite of the game.

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Long and the short of it, while there are some small PvP thingies getting some attention (like _Castle_ posting about Brute Fury in PvP a few days ago) there are not any big PvP issues on the nearer term feature lists.

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That is the best thing I've heard from a redname in a goodly amount of time. No offense to the PvPers, but imo the devs have already invested way too much time in what is at best a minority interest.

Don't ever recall seeing a twice-raised necropost.

Thanks for the info, Cuppa!

Too bad that Posi left it to you to be the bearer of bad tidings. He made this mess, he should have cleaned it up. Don't get me wrong, bug-hunting comes first, just don't make promises to one's customer base unless 100% sure they're deliverable.

Looks like a shaky start to the new regime.

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can we use photoshop to lighten the photo if it's too dark and things are a little hard to see?

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You may not manipulate or edit the shot in any way (although basic cropping is certainly allowed and encouraged for dramatic effect).

My guess would be no

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Cuppa, any chance you guys could start putting these comics out in CBR/CBZ format? It's a lot easier to read.

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CBR/CBZ is just renamed RAR/ZIP files so that the commonly-used comicbook reader software will serve as the default app to open the files when clicked on. Rename them back and you can open them with your compression software to see the individually-scanned pages, generally in JPG format. Just FYI....