Von Krieger

The third carnival image isn't loading for me.

I flew all around Thorn Isle with a macro set to a button with his name on it clicking it repeatedly and got nothing.

When 1, the big ectoplasmic pancake spawns but you spend the entire night cycle flying around trying to find him but fail to somehow miss the giant ghost thing, and 2, you spend the next day cycle beating the crap of out lesser ghosts, only when nightime rolls around, he doesn't spawn. We didn't even get the spawn message. The first spawn message was what drew me to the zone in the first place and I spent a good 15 minutes flying around at the very tippy top of the map looking for the guy.

This is the second time I've tried to take on Caleb and failed outright to have him be FINDABLE once we got him to spawn.

It's REALLY getting annoying.

Getting him to spawn is so time consuming in and of itself, having to play hide and seek with him is downright obnoxious.

Tangent: Zwill is not having coffee this week, so no coffee talk. Today it's more of a chai tea talk.

No planned guests today.

Arbiter Elbow makes a McCauley Culken face and Zwill dubs him Arbiter Home Alone.

Talking about Gamescom and Carbine Studios (another NC Soft studio in southern CA) and their debut of Wildstar, their new MMO.

"It's like if Firefly and Futurama had a baby, and then they put bunny ears on the baby."

Arbiter Home Alone is dual boxing, being on Live and Beta at the same time.

Positron looms roundly over Zwill and has apparently appointed himself Zwill's guest.

Tangent: Zwill's Chai Tea. Posi refers to his double-cup as a Coffee Condom.

Talking about Wildstar's community manager and their community putting his head on various different animals. Posi asks our community to do the same to OUR community manager.

Zwill disagrees.

Beastyle is heading to Photoshop.

Tangent of Posi's shirts. His current one is Han Solo and Chewbacca in Calvin and Hobbes style on the Millenium Falcon.



Posi apologizes for abandoning a Sewer Trial team to attend a meeting while at the twin hydra heads. He remained logged in to get the rewards.

Posi says beta is going well "We're finding a lot of really sweet bugs."

He's made adjustments to the amount of people that can be in an instance. Like in Atlas Park. He went into one and found no lag.

Positron photoshop:

They'll be testing out an account server crash today.

They will be also testing Premium account levels tomorrow and putting all Beta players at the Premium level.

Beta character wipe yesterday.

Street Justice has been officially turned off.

Zwill says the tears on beta last night were delicious.

Street Justice will be out before Issue 22 and seemingly one of the "reasonable soon" releases. But it's not Soon™.

Tangent: Zwill's vocabulary and the use of Awesome. Posi says he had a teacher in the 80's that the word was overused.

Tangent: Posi and Zwill argue about TMNT and when the cartoon came out. Zwill wins.

Tangent: 80's fashion. Acid washed jean jackets, peg-rolled jeans, and Positron's mullet.

Tangent in chat: Posi says Raph would be a Claws scrapper because you can't have two Dual Blades characters on the team. The chat suggests Street Justice.

The Livestream folks added in ads. Zwill wants to make a kickstarter to pay for them buying the ad-free upgrade.

We're going into our featured discussion: Paragon Rewards.

Tier 1, EVERYBODY gets this. Some people wanted to call it Tier 0, some marketing guy said it didn't sound marketing friendly.

Limited costume slots, but unlimited preview. Still customizable.

2 Global character slot tokens.

Cannot join SG's at the base tier.

Can't use IO's. Can still use TO/DO/SO and Hami-O's.

Limited chat channels.

Largely done to nip the RMTers in the bud.

"If you look at any games that have relaxed chat privalages, it is immediate and terrifying."

No Mission Architect access. Since it’s a bit more of a drain on server resources.

Limited item drops, only small inspirations. No salvage. Cannot craft. No recipes. Cannot trade. Influence cap of 25 million INF.

I was wondering the first day of beta why I went from 1-15 without a drop.

No hero of villain merits. No auction house.

Limited enhancement inventory space.

Obviously no Incarnate access.

This is for a Free player. Someone who has never subscribed or bought paragon points.

They will get access to the LFG tool, the help channel, local chat, and be able to queue up for the Sewer Trail.

Returning players will have 1 reward token per badge you've earned, 1 reward token per year's subscription, and 1 token if you've ever used a code from a physical box. 1 total, not one per boxed set.

1 token per month and one token per 1200 PP bought.

Posi: "I had a friend of mine actually calculate how much he has to pay to get Tier 9 on day 1. He was excited about it."

This is going into the Premium tier rewards, since most VIP's have this baked in.

Going over a lot of things that VIP's get that Premiums have to pay for or have to unlock via tiers.

Zwill apologizes if this week's coffee talk is a bit try. Posi recommends the chat give tangent ideas.

Tier 2. You earn the Trustworthy badge. 3 months currently or 1 month once Freedom is out.

Can join SG's and SG Chat.

Private Tells.

Trading.

INF cap to 500 million

Additional inventory size.

+2 Salvage, +1 Vault

In game e-mail.

Mission Architect system, but you can't get tickets. Just to play content.

Reminder that this is for Premium players, non-VIP, non subscribers.


Tier 3

Loyal Badge

All chat channels. (Broadcast, Global, Etc)

Chat tangent: Bacon. Makes Zwill want Bacon.

Posi: "Bacon nearly killed my father in law."

Zwill: "Bacon has nearly killed generations of people."

1 Billion INF cap.

Increased inventory again.


Tier 4

Steadfast Badge

Can earn Vanguard Mertis and Reward Mertis

Inventory space goes up again

INF cap at 2 billion (the max)

Medium inspirations.

Lifetime Auction house license.

MA with tickets and XP and such.


Tier 5

Addicted Badge, 36 months

Permanent Mastermind and Controller access

Inventory size increases.

A thank you for sticking through.

If you previously bought access to them, you DO NOT get a refund.


Tier 6

Abiding, 57 months

Access to create MA stories.

Reminder that they will be selling limitless MA story slots.

Posi: "There is probably a server limit somewhere. But if someone hits it, we'll increase it."


Tier 7

Purposeful badge, 78 months

Tangent: Posi is astonishes that Zwill has to schedule his lunches and thus is a huge *********.

Zwill and Posi want the veteran token bar to change colors.

Lifetime IO Access

Piyerus: "I'm still a bit confused. Do we need the first badge in the tier to be in that tier, or do we need to totally fill the tier (get the final badge) to be in that tier?"

You do not make the selections in the tier. You just need to earn the amount of tokens for the badge.

Another reminder that the access mentioned here is Non-VIP players and that these are the AUTOMATIC rewards. Not stuff you have to pick and choose.

More inventory space.


Tier 8

Radiant badge

Zwill: "Not recommended to buy your way here at once."

They have measures in place to prevent single purchases of PP this high.

Large insps get added onto the drop table.

More inventory space.

VIP subscribers get +150 PP per month. Just under an extra $2 of PP per month.


Tier 9

The repeatables and the VIP exclusive Tier 9 things. Like the 3 aspects of Celestial armor.

Tier 8 is what they have the +150 PP listed in the document from Clockwork 01.


Reward meter has it's own button in the beta.

Posi doesn't want to answer " are you guys saying "Tier 8" meaning "you are currently filling in tier 8" or "you have finshed filling in 8?" because he doesn't want to get it wrong.

Arbiter Home Alone says that they're now called Reward Levels, rather than Tiers.

Second Measure shows his Sthulhu for president shirt. "Are you ready for some Real change?" "Why vote for the lesser evil?" "Go with the Elder God you know."



Posi sighs and apologizes for the piles upon piles of jargon and working on the game has gotten three times harder.

Posi: "If a VIP at Tier 9 drops to Premium, what will they lose access to?"

Incarnate system and powers.

Anything labeled VIP only, like time manipulation unless they buy it in the store.

Lose the VIP server.

Not going to get the PP stipend or the monthly transfer tokens.

You'll lose the 12 per server base slots.

You keep any banked transfer tokens. They do stack.

You will keep all Paragon Points earned from the monthly VIP stipend.

Tangent: The Coming Storm and saving PP for a rainy day.

"It's raining Shivans, hallelujah it's raining Shivans!"

Reading off the veteran reward token badges. Will copy/paste these in later.

Rookie, 1 token (freebie)
Trustworthy, 2 tokens
Faithful, 3 tokens
Dependable, 4 tokens
Loyal, 5 tokens (Tier 3)
Zealous, 6 tokens
Staunch, 7 tokens
Steadfast, 8 tokens (Tier 4)
Devoted, 9 tokens
Dedicated, 10 tokens
Committed, 11 tokens
Unswerving, 12 tokens
Addicted, 13 tokens (Tier 5)
Ardent, 14 tokens
Fervent, 15 tokens
Eternal, 16 tokens
Battle Hardened, 17 tokens
Tried and True, 18 tokens
Allegiant, 19 tokens
Abiding, 20 tokens (Tier 6)
City Traveler, 21 tokens
Honorable, 22 tokens
Enduring, 23 tokens
Genuine, 24 tokens
Distinguished, 25 tokens
Resolute, 26 tokens
Purposeful, 27 tokens (Tier 7)
Uncompromising, 28 tokens
Loyal Customer, 29 tokens
Tenacious, 30 tokens
Unshakable, 31 tokens
Diligent, 32 tokens
Persistent, 33 tokens
Radiant, 34 Tokens (Tier 8)
Over this and you're in Tier 9 and into the repeatable and limited time only VIP rewards

Posi gives a shoutout to Thesaurus.com that has helped him name the Veteran Rewards program. He's already forgotten the name and has to have Zwill tell him.

Someone is hovering outside of the cube and listening to Zwill.

Zwill says he's going to keep calling it a thermometer until Black Pebble shoots him with his nerf gun.

Posi: "We started out with veteran, then loyal, then go oh that word is cool and click on that one."

Beastyle is making fun of the say Zwill says thesaurus.

Zwill: "You making fun of me? Let's talk about hair, buddy!"

Beastyle marches over to show us his hair. HeXCoda in chat calls it an Emo-ver. MechaCrash calls it a male version of Shy from the costume creator.



Milkweasel " For those of us who don't use or desire server transfers, would it be possible to grant a choice of a reward for VIP rather than the transfer? (rename, respec, char slot, transfer, some PP)"

Posi: "We can't do it unfortunately. We know not everyone will use them. But if you have friends come in and they like go on Freedom and you have nothing on Freedom you can move over."

Zwill says we cannot trade the tokens in for their equivalent PP value.

"Will the VIP server be named Hoorb?"

No, they will be revealing the name at PAX.

PAX is the last weekend in August.

6-10 at Elephant Castle on Friday, CoH meet and greet.

They will be having PC's in the Antec booth, and Antec is making a CoH custom case.

Shilling for Antec, Alienware, and Razer.

Zwill is using the Going Rogue Desdemona mousepad. So does Posi.

"It has a nice surface, it's big, it has the little sticky things so I can put it down on the desk and it won't go anywhere.."

Joking shilling of the iPhone.

Arbiter Home Alone shills the Droid.

MechaCrash suggests the Nostromo.

Zwill and Posi recommend the Logitech G13.

Posi references the bingo board.

bashirallen: Question: So a premium player can not even SLOT a IO until Tier 7?

Correct, unless they buy a license.

Zwill's lunch appointment person arrives and is wondering why he's not eating.

Next week: Beam rifle!

I've been logged out of the forums about 5 times now today, twice while in the process of making a post. This seriously has to be looked at and corrected.

I'm up getting snacks when Zwill and Synapse start and tangent about shortness when I walk in.

We'll be going in depth, ability by ability, with Time Manipulation. There ought to be an Intrepid Informer article, but it's not up yet.

CoH community talk. We went into open beta.

We found some major bugs in the first 5 minutes, and had an obscene number of people log in.

The market exploded sometime last night and is still not back up.

They are heading to GamesCom and PAX.

In chat Beastlye says that Street Justice has knee to the groin attack. We're advised to try it out once the store comes up, since it's coming down soon since it's not an I21 powerset.

Time Manipulation article is up: http://goingrogue.na.cityofheroes.co...r-issue-9.html

Zwill says the powerset is for numbercrunchers and minmaxers.

Synapse: "It's a pretty balanced set as to what it can do. It has buff, debuff, control, and heal."

First power: Time Crawl

Decues target's movements speed, recharge on powers, and regen rate. Inflicts a status called Delayed.

Sexy Jay stops by the say hello.

Delayed targets will suffer from greater debuffs. A lot of them are AoE and thus can be used to focus on a single target while debuffing crowds as well.

Temporal Mending

Different than other heals, longer recharge than Healing Aura or Soothing Aura.

It offers a good heal and also a heal over time effect and -recharge and slows are reduced on allies.

It's good at the start fo a fight as well as during as preventative maintainecne.

Time's Juncture

Toggle AoE around you, -dmg, -tohit and -speed. If they get close to you while delayed the buffs get bigger.

Temporal Selection
+Damage +Rech +Regen

Accelerated status, Heal power becomes 50% more effective

Zwill: "Think Fortitude type effect. This is one of it's signature abilities. It's a huge reason to get a Time Manipulator in your group. The buff is just huge."

Zynapse: "Two time manipulators can put this on each other and it's crazy."

Distortion Field
Ranged (Location AoE), Foe(-Recharge, -Speed), Chance for Hold
Approx 4% chance to hold every second.

Critters have a hard time getting out of it.

Time Stop
Ranged Hold, Foe -Regen, -Heal
Longish recharge and reduces healing on foes. Time Crawl makes this a Mag 4 Hold.

Farsight
PBAoE Team, +To-Hit, +Defense(All), +Perception
Three slotted with SO's can perma this. It does not stack.

Zwill hates Blind the most out of all status effects.

Slowed Response
Ranged (Targeted AoE), Foe -Defense, -Resistance

Pretty fast recharge, up every spawn or two. Delayed will have the debuffs boosted.

Zwill: "This set is a really good all around one."

Chrono Shift
PBAoE, Team +Recharge, Heal, +End, Moderate Healing over Time, +Recovery

This one has an amazing animation. This is the one with the big portal.

"It looks like you're travelling through time."

Described as "Kind of a buff nuke or a heal nuke"

Zwill: "I'm killing you with healing... er... defeating you with healing!"

Tips and tricks with the powerset are something new they're doing with the articles.

Synapse: "It's not a definitive way to play the powerset."

Zwill: "It's scary because all the players combined are smarter than all of us."

The set is more proactive than reactive.

Temporal Mending and Foresight can be used to buff up before battle.

Time Crawl is good for the tough guys, since it drops regen,. Damage, and boosts further debuffs.

Temporal Selection is useful for damage dealers that you want to deal damage quickly and folks you want to assure stay alive. It's kind of a grab bag and is pretty much good for everybody/ You can get two of these out at a time with only minor +Rech.

If you have Time Juncture slotted for -to-hit and have Farsight running you're going to be pretty tough. Dark Watcher's or Gaussian are recommended.

You can be a support character that can be in the thick of things, but watch out for Incarnate trials.

Time Crawl and Time Stop can let you lock down a boss for a few seconds.

Zwill: "It can be a wipe-prevention tool. Lock down the boss and book it out of there."

Synapse: "Don't underestimate a well-placed Distortion Field at a chokepoint. Stacking ti with like Caltrops and that sort of thing."

"Make good use of Accelerate and Delay, so you can focus on single allies and enemies both."

Zwill finds it's a very flexible set and goes well with a lot of different powersets.

Grav/Time is a little slow on the DPS factor but is amazing on the "OMG nothing is moving" factor.

Arbiter Fancypants the QA guy in the background has played Time constantly and is asked for his thoughts.

He likes get enough global recharge as possible, hasten, and once hit the Global recharge cap with the Tier 9. He also likes Beam Rifle. Time/Beam defenders are supposed to be pretty fun and Beam/Time Corrs are almost obscene. Disintegration + Scourge. "Discourgigration."

The QA guys have loved Street Justice and beam rifle.

We'll have a Beam Rifle cast sometime in the next few weeks.

Going over previous things about the aesthetics of the powers without the clocks and gears type of thing. Thus wanting the set to have it work with as many character concepts as possible. Clocks would be good for a steampunkish Victorian look.

Zwill: "But what would you do with the 50 million time lords?"

Synapse things it will work with just about every origin.

Zwill: "The Terminator! Time Manipulation and Assault Rille!"

Zwill is going through puberty again and has his voice crack. Blames it on his cough and Convetion Rot and Nemesis Plots.

Chat room dubs Zwill the Typhoid Mary of PAX.

Zwill: "Now is the on Sprockets when we dance!"

Zwill will not touch ZombieMan's monkey. Not even if he says it in German.

Zwill refuses to say it as he always gets in trouble when he tries to speak German or French.

Beastyle has used Time Manipulation on the chatroom to enable Slow Chat.

" Delay/Accelerate only buffs your own heals/debuffs? Or it gets beneffit for other powersets to go ahead and debuff/heal better too?"

Only buffs and debuffs Time Manipulation heals and debuffs. If you're working with another Time Manip guy their powers will be boosted.

They have tech qorking under a cone of silence to fic the store on Beta.

Nothing new on PvP.

Zwill has to remind the chat room to keep it on Time Manipulation and Powers.

Delay and Accelerate do not stack, spread it to more targets.

Beam Rifle and Time are confirmed for I21, Street Justice soon after, and Titan Weapons ever later.

"Icy Bastion on Scrappers when it gets ported over?"

He says no, because Stalkers have Hibernate.

Chat room reminds him that Scrappers have Stalker pools.

"Will Mind Link take recharge soon?"

Not designed to.

Time Manipulation +Rech does not effect incarnate powers.

He clarifies earlier that they it is likely that Scrappers will be getting Icy Bastion then.

Dominators are not going to get nerfed or get buffed they're "Going to get stuff."

He wanted Time Manipulation to be competitive with Radiation and Kinetic/

He doesn't want them to be overpowered, but not underperformers either.

Time Manipualtion has changed a great deal from the feedback. Things have been buffed, toned down, and adjusted.

Everything but the +Rech will affect pets.

Zwill did not know that.

"Will missing Mastery sets ever get proliferated."

Synapse: "I'd love to! Get those thematic gaps filled."

They didn't want to do everything at the same time, so Defenders aren't getting Poison this time around, but will eventually.

He doesn't have a problem with Masterminds getting Empathy and Defenders getting Pain Mastery now that they've blurred the lines between the sides.

Titan Weapons is not announced for Issue 21 or 22, they're not saying.

Every character will get a Freespec with Issue 21 due to the epic pools being lowered to have the powers available earlier.

Zwill is complaining about having to repsec his purpled out controller to get Burnout.

Burnout does NOT affect Incarnate abilities. Only primary and secondary.

Time Manipulation does have a tendancy to "nom your endurance" with really effective, long recharge powers.

Street Justice has quick animating powers, so it's not overly endurance intensive. On par with Dual Blades or Claw.

Brutes will probably get Martial Arts in the next round.

Peacebringers get a version of Afterburn and also a panic button for scary situations, dubbed Quantum Acceleration in their secondary.

Warshades get a zone-wide teleport power called Shadow Slip.

We will NOT be getting more new power selections. But Synapse wants to be able to give us a few more slots. It'll be hard though, since they tried it in Beta and it broke things.

Zwill says hopefully we'll be able to get Street Justice before it's pulled from the store.

Regen is one of Synapse and Zwill's favorite sets.

Reminiscing of the good old days of Regen.

Synapse wants to fix Energy Aura's mez protection/taunt aura combo, since it currently drops. He wants to make the taunt effect merely suppress and keep the toggle running. That's something that is on his agenda for today.

Neither of them knows if the next round of power proliferation will have the animation team able to help out.

Synapse is about to say something about Stalkers but stops himself talking about some sort of Ice power.

They've moved away from the Tier 9 nuke type penalties. Synapse has been thinking about maybe lessening the crash from the nukes. But if they did that, they'd have to lessen the damage.

Respeccing individual powers instead of builds? Zwill mentions enhancement unslotters, but it's currently not possible in the system. Synapse says they want to be able to improve the Respec process.

Synpase thinks Burnout is affected by global recharge, as it is affected by slots. He says it's not possible to perma, but it would stack if it did.

You can now right click and remove buff abilities that do not have negative effects. Like removing Hasten to stop the glowy gloves.

Next week: Likely a chat about Beam Rifle

I will also try to be there.