Veazey

I actually have a 31 TA/Archery and a 30 Rad/Rad, both of which could be copied over onto Test quite handily.

Unfortunately, I also tend to not be extremely reliable for testing purposes, since I'm often debilitated by migraines. However, my global handle (on live and Test) is the same as my forum name and I'd be glad to try and help out when I can.

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Ick!! Did you see that preview of the book cover? No way was that drawn by a professional, I used to draw things like that when I was 14 with all of the proporitions scewed. I really hope thats either a bad scan of the cover or its a rough draft because that is just embarrasing!

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According to the interview, that might be a rough by George Perez, or a rough that was turned into an attempt at a cover for press purposes.

The thing I want to know is: why is Positron wearing his TRON armor? Was it a recent addition to his suit to put in the glow stuff, or is it a recent addition to the game's tech to do that and he always had it in the story bible?

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How does everyone feel about getting together Wednesday night for some testing? Say, between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST? That should give any west-coasters time to get home, and still be early enough for those of us on the east coast. Yesno? Noyes? Fishinpinktutus?

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You can count the Scarlet Bowman[numeral] in.

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I myself am especially concerned about the controller/defender version being the same. They need to be different or defenders need to get an advantage of some sort in the set.

Such as the defender version having quicker recharges than the controller version and better debuff %'s.

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That should've already been the case, as to debuff numbers. If not, then this is another nail in Trick Arrow's "properly tested before implementation" coffin. Just like the fact that the preponderance of masterminds are /dark. Yet another hint that Trick Arrow is woefully unbalanced.

Add me to the list of confirmed cases of Flash Arrow actively aggroing a mob to me.
They were all the "ignore him so he doesn't hurt us" type of con-grey (too low to gain experience from), and I fired a Flash arrow into the mob and the whole thing turned on me. They didn't attack me until after I had activated the arrow.
/bugged it but felt like adding a second confirmation.

After cranking my difficulty up to Rugged, I was somewhere between "coasting" and "grinning" my way through missions.

The animation changes are excellent, and that jab animation gives the set the attitude that it never quite achieved before. I am indeed very pleased.
However, there seems to be a slight lag between the Eviscerate & Focus animations completing and their damage being taken. I'm not sure if this is because of the test server's load and the unreliability of the build or what, but there is latency there.

I agree entirely with Goofy_Parrot.

Even with the reductions on Glue and Disruption and the no-more-to-hit-check on Flash, Trick Arrow is still plagued with numerous small-to-medium problems that add up to an extremely under-realized set.
Let me add my voice to the throng clamoring for severe increases to the effectiveness of all the debuffs in the set. If all it does is debuff, it ought to do it better than the other mixed-bag sets. The recharge time of Oil Slick still needs to be reduced, and the area of effect for Acid desperately needs to be increased.

And while I'm on my soapbox, I might as well make a suggestion that I think would infinitely increase the viability of Trick Arrow/Archery: give Explosive Arrow a fire component. I don't care if it's 99% smashing and 1% fire, just so long as there's an area-of-effect power that will set off the Oil Slick.
I'm glad that these changes have been made, but they still haven't brought TA up to par with the other defender primaries.

I've actually taken a TA/Archery defender to 30 (primarily with other "gimped" powersets on a team we've taken to calling The Gimp Squad) and it can be a very powerful set, when properly utelized. But these changes will make it actually powerful enough not to need the Medicine pool to be "viable."

And all this time I was hoping that the heavies were airborne weapons platforms so that I could shout "Where's our gorram air support?!"

I agree with Arc Salvo in that the other blaster secondaries are loaded with very dubious powers. I picked up Lighting Field on my first ever character (an elec/elec), and managed to use it successfully zero times. It drained too much endurance to keep it on all the time, and if the bad guys weren't near me, there was no need to run it...and by the time they were close enough for it to hurt them, a single attack would hit harder and generally drain less endurance.

Devices and Energy Manipulation are still the most useful blaster secondaries (though some people may disagree on Devices) because they're Swiss-Army knives. Our primary role is to be the artillery: stand back and hurl damage over our allies' heads. Our secondaries should complement that role. Self-stealth, accuracy boosting, secondary-effect boosting, range boosting; these are all complementary to the artillery mindset.
However, most of the powers in blaster secondaries aren't. So, we end up dipping repeatedly into pools to give us the staying power that comes innately to the other archetypes. I'd just like to add my voice to the throng requesting that the blaster sets get reviewed and tweaked some. I know it's not going to happen in the short-term forseeable future, but it's something we'd like to see, so I'm feeding back.

Good to see some hard numbers on the set everybody loves to hate.
I'm also glad that I'm not the only one who sees it as a potentially very useful set once a few minor adjustments are made.

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Sky Raider jump bots, when they explode, do lethal/fire damage.

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A-ha. An exploding something that does fire damage!

This is really sort of a nitpicky thing more than a serious problem (like the decade-long pause and the Entangling Arrow delay), but I would absolutely love it if Explosive Arrow did smashing/fire or lethal/fire instead of smashing/lethal. Even if it's 1% fire...that would give Archery a synergy with Trick Arrow in that you could hurl an AoE to attack foes and the Oil Slick with the same shot, instead of having to waste a Blazing Arrow.
I know that all the other grenade-type attacks (M30, the dynamite the Scrapyarders use, all the foe grenade powers) are smashing/lethal. I've watched the combat log to make sure there isn't already some in-game precedent for fire damage from grenades, but there isn't. This confuses me slightly. There's a massive, firey explosion. Shouldn't it burn at least slightly? Yes, there's a concussion (smashing) and yes, there's shrapnel (lethal), but I feel like there ought to be a tiny fire component, too.

Once again, this is sort of a small thing, but something I feel would also greatly improve the interoperability of Trick Arrow and Archery, because Electricity, Energy, Sonic, and Radiation all have a cone or AoE attack with an energy component that can be used to set the slick on fire without "wasting" a shot.

All I want is for my robo mastermind to be able to build Voltron or Devestator.
Is that really so much to ask?

...OK, maybe it is. But a madman can dream, can't he?

Man. Everybody's leaving at once. It's a shame, too. You guys (Alexa and Arctic_Sun) have both done an excellent job of dealing with this often-fickle group.

Good luck in your future endeavors and hopefully you'll still be seen around town and on the boards, even if in an unofficial capacity.

I second (or third or whatever) the suggestion to not use Gamespot to disseminate preview videos. I know there are business-y reasons for doing this, but I've tried this video on several different browsers and versions and can't get both the audio and video to play at the same time (it's either or, and the video crashes Firefox).
Plus, I just plain don't like Gamespot. It rubs me the wrong way.

As to the actual content update we're getting:
Whee! I can finally make a Bizarro version of my main and do PvP missions with my 35+ heroes.
Next up: trenchcoats and dual pistols for players, storm & ranged elec. for corruptors, daggers for stalkers, energy armor and all that for tanks/scrappers, and cold fusion for everybody.

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You know how Fury builds up when the Brute gets attacked or attacked? And how domination builds up based only on how often the Dominator attacks?

What if defiance built up based on how often the Blaster was attacked only? That'd sure be better than we have now. They could nerf the max damage on defiance, but make it more useable.

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Arc Salvo's right. Having it tied directly to health is, in my opinion, of exceedingly limited usefulness past level 10. I have only had Defiance work well for me once. I was teamed with someone higher level than I and facing a ton of CoT Death Mages. One got me down to 1 hit point and managed to miss his next four or five attacks while I pummeled him with Defiance maxed out. 30 seconds later, a lucky shot made me a carpet.
I just wish it was less binary. Blasters are either OK or dead, so something that becomes the most useful when they're nearly dead rarely gets used in practice.

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First...I confirm that we're working on right now (as in pohsyb in the next room) to add CoV costume parts into CoH if you own both games....

Then we repeal the hated stealth nerf. The reason why: many well reasoned posts. It's that simple. You guys pointed out the problems.

AND now...we're changing the way Archvillains spawn. A ton of forum goers disliked adding so many AV's into missions a while back...so we've come up with a solution. If the team size and mission difficulty are ABOVE a certain level, an Archvillain spawns. Below that, players will face only an Elite Boss. If the mission is set on the first two levels of difficulty, it takes 4 heroes or more to spawn an Arch Villain. On the third level, 3 heroes or more. On the fourth level, 2 heroes. On the highest (Invincible), a solo hero will spawn an AV. Note this works in BOTH City of Heroes and Villains.

In order to incentivize larger teams, Positron is going to add a bonus to AV rewards!

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Ladies, gentlemen, robots, and space aliens...
This is the reason that I love this game. The devs listen to the community and when it's important, they'll change things. Thank you.

Last night, I found a tre-mendous bug: Move Room doesn't move the stuff in the room, too.

I had a teleport chamber with the basic teleporter and 2 beacons in it that I had just shrunken in size (so that the teleporter couldn't be moved too far away from the beacons...dumb, and I like idiot-proof bases). Then, I decided to move it to a more logical location. So, I used the Move Room button, thinking it would allow me to actually move the whole thing with the furniture in it.
It did not. The teleporter and both beacons were gone. All the changes made to the room itself (wall, ceiling, floor, lighting) were reflected, but nothing else. I sent a /bug and /petition report before logging and was going to post something in the forums today, but found this thread in the Dev Digest before posting.

This is a serious problem and more information can be provided to help replicate the error.

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Personally, I love whatever Dev was responsible for THIS in CoV.

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Freakin' sweet. But, I've got to say the following dialog takes the cake:
Goldbricker 1: One man's unsecured wireless network is another man's payday.
Goldbricker 2: We should mark these open nodes with chalk or something.

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You're luckier than me, though.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, ever visits Albuquerque.

Except that stupid rabbit that's always making the wrong turns here.

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Weird Al does. He even wrote a song about it.

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As cute as this is, why CAN'T brutes and tanks toss teammates? Nothing in the world would make me happier than being able to toss a scrapper/stalker buddy at an enemy mob, especially if it gave them some sort of very short duration damage boost. Would love to see the game have more power combos, where 2 ATs could combine for a special attack of some sort.

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I agree. Something like this would skyrocket the coolness factor of the game significantly. Tanks/brutes can "Fastball Special" another melee AT into a mob of foes, fliers can pick people up and drop them into mobs...stuff like this (and the much-discussed "gestalt powers" of several months ago) are incredibly novel and well-documented in the lexicon but extremely difficult to program and execute.

Still, though, I want the Synapse-As-A-Weapon epic pool.

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Either that or Statesman is a Nemesis automaton. Wheels within wheels!

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Propaganda you say? Did you see the sign in the background?

Let's just see how big a success it was come Monday.

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Doubly-brilliant. No wonder States is always droning on about "mission statemens" and "nuke-you-lar arms."

I'd like some of the more animalistic options so that our mutants can be less anthropomorphic.
I'd love more jackets, like the one States is wearing on the cover of the "Web of Arachnos" novel.
I'd kill somebody in front of they own mama for lab coats.

/I promise; no more Aqua-Teen references.

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Nah, a police radio or something of that ilk is a much better idea.

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Allow me to throw my two cents in the ring (or something) for this idea. Not only could you have fun with the mission dialog (like Radio Free Opportunity! from CoV), but it would be a more reactive approach, which is what heroes are known for. They don't stake out the 22nd National Bank in the hopes that it'll get robbed; they see a suspicious-looking van parked half on the curb in front of it and go to investigate.
The newspaper is perfect for villains, but a police scanner or Freedom Corps emergency radio thing is more the speed of heroes.

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Noooooo! Don't leave us, Gil! After watching Serenity, I've lost enough! I can't lose anyone else right now!

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You and me both.
And buena suerte, Gilgamesh. The little lights you shed into parts of the city we never saw made Paragon City seem even more real and alive. It will be missed until the new guy can buy enough tissue paper to fill the ends of your shoes.