srmalloy

The original version of the Hami raid was extremely subject to griefing. Originally, Hamidon was up all the time, except for a period right after he'd been taken down. This made the 'Heart of the Hamidon' badge more difficult to get, as it was basically suicide to get to except right after a Hami raid had completed, than it is now, where the bowl is empty unless people have worked to spawn him, and you can just walk up and get the badge.

The basic process was to have a tank taunt Hamidon with an empath keeping them alive, while one or more Illusion trollers/fenders dropped Phantom Army onto Hami to help keep him distracted, then a mass of characters roamed the goo in a pack, healers spamming heals, taking out the mitos one by one. Then everyone who didn't have a hold left the goo while the rest spammed single-target holds until Hami stopped attacking the taunt tank. Then, while the holds kept going, everyone threw attacks at Hami until he died.

Now for the griefing part. On his death, Hami spawned a 'Hamidon Bud' -- basically, a micro-Hami -- one for each character in the zone, and killing the Hamidon Bud got you an HO. You can immediately see where the AoE Blasters could steal HOs from the defenders and controllers, and sometimes the tanks. If you couldn't kill a bud fast enough, you got squat for your time, which could be up to two hours.

This was changed so that anyone who'd done damage to Hamidon got an HO, which resulted in people hanging out waiting for the damage phase to start, then zone in and take one shot at Hami to get their HO, avoiding all of the defeats and debt the rest of us got while whacking the mitos. The population of the Hive would often go from 60-80 to the (then) 240-character max once the damage phase started, from all the people coming in to leech an HO. (And, not incidentally, creating an amazing amount of lag.)

In the major revision to the mechanics of taking Hamidon down, the zone capacity of the Hive was reduced to 60, preventing the mass influx of people seeking to get an HO on the cheap, and changed the mechanism of taking him down to not require groups larger than the zone capacity.

Actually, it comes from art books on drawing the human figure, where the alignment issue was pointed out as a common mistake.

However, for the vacuum-shrunk-to-fit-the-torso designs that we have, a female character's breasts would be directed normally; that's the problem -- only the Armored upper body type presents the chest as a single chest-wide protrusion, rather than two separate breasts. Even when doing it doesn't make sense -- the lorica segmentata chest detail, in particular; the segments are supposed to be able to slide up and down over each other as the character bends, and having it shaped like the samurai chest detail, as a smooth sweep, would be better design.

As would a webform, necessarily inside the 'account management' section of the NCSoft support site, that would allow you to pick a server/character (as the transfer-to-Test tool does now) and show you the status of everything that character had in the Auction House. Not allow you do do anything to it, just to view the information, so you don't have to log in a character and run them over to Wentworth's or the Black Market just to see whether you'd bought/sold something.

The 'separation' is actually not unrealistic; if not constrained by clothing, breasts do not point 'forward' from a woman's chest; lines drawn from the center of the base of each breast out through the nipples will angle out from directly forward somewhere loosely around 30°. It is the constraints of clothing that cause them to point forward (and one of the mistakes bad artists make is to have them pointing forward without something holding them that way).

Of course, the CoX skintight costume pieces must be made with a fine mesh of braided spider silk or aramid fiber to provide sufficient support in all directions to keep female characters' breasts from Gainaxing all over the place or requiring the devs to implement Jiggle Physics. I concede that it would be nice to have a choice for each of the skintight chest parts between skin-conforming and 'real material' styles; as it is now, the only way to get that effect across the chest is to use the 'armored' upper body type, which severely restricts the available costume pieces. But that's something to throw at the art department; I think it would take a different torso mesh (the game already does it for the 'armored' upper body types, so that's not a huge issue in itself) and all of the chest symbols would need to be checked to determine whether they need to be remapped, repositioned, or redesigned to work on that mesh.

And even more rife with writers and artists who don't bother with anything approximating research, for whom "That looks close enough" is the mantra to handwave the lack of accuracy. The people who think the name of the winged goddess of victory from Greek mythology is pronounced "NIGH-kee" because they see all the sports-shoe commercials and take its pronunciation as gospel, instead of the actual Greek pronunciation "KNEE-kay". But who are these Greeks to think they know how to pronounce their own language, after all?

On the other hand, Psi/EM rocks in an ITF; when the mobs hit Unstoppable and everyone else's damage drops into the 10-40 range, you're still pumping hits of 200-600 into them. It's situational; there are opponents against which Psi sucks rocks, and opponents that you'll steamroller.

He's doubled his regular time...

Yet another example of faulty or missing research on the part of the developers; in ancient Latin, 'c' is always hard, pronounced like 'k', so it's "kim-ur-OAR-uh", although in Latin vowels were considered long by nature, so it could equally well be "keem-oor-OAR-ah", or any mix of long and short for the 'i', 'e', and 'a'.

Actually, they all fall into two fundamental types of the 'Chicago Frame' style of construction, the difference being whether the glass sitting in narrow frames is the exterior of the building, or it has bands of decorative masonry separating the windows. Variations in detail but not fundamental style.

Or at least take a page from the trick used to make 'windows' in the old FPS 'Doom', where you'd have the opening in the wall (the door) and behind it would be a wall that had a fixed texture applied to it that was the outside view, so that it gave the impression you were seeing outside the map, without actually having an 'outside' -- a sufficiently primitive solution to be viable on machines considerably lower in capacity than what you need for CoH today.

Or at least have the transition a) occur in a rational direction (i.e., no bank map behind a cave entrance door on Thorn Isle in Nerva), and b) have the mission entrance blurb explain the disjoin (i.e., there are some arc missions against the Council where you go to a warehouse door, but the mission is a standard Council cave, and the mission-entry blurb says something like "if it hadn't been for the information from your informant, you never would have found this Council base concealed under a warehouse basement").

Actually, it would be kind of funny if, despite the building itself being a little chewed up and the lobbies having random bits of wreckage lying around, the AE functions were still running.

There are other cases of missing updates -- in the Brickstown Safeguard/Mayhem map, for example, even though it's outside the map proper, you can still see where the AE building should be south of the bank -- and it's not there. Putting up a shell of the building would keep the skyline consistent, rather than having buildings vanish. And I'll have to look when my latest lowbie does her AP safeguard to see whether the Wentworth's and AE buildings are visible from inside the map area.

Actually, the code for that already exists in the game. Go back and look at the way the spawns work during Rikti invasions -- a character will draw Rikti attention (i.e., have Rikti port in near them) as long as they're not under cover. Move under a bridge, or the porticoes on the north side of the Golden Giza, or under the overhang around the arenas, or into a store/vault/university/arena, and you don't get Rikti porting in near you.

Don't forget the Rikti mothership raids we have now; turning off all of the Ultra Mode chrome and setting Ventrilo's task priority to High has stopped the problem I had with getting horrible voice lag (getting voice from the middle of the raid played back after the shields had come up and everybody got ported back to Point du Hoc), but during the raid, I still see 'recharge dissonance' -- where the icon of a power has grown back to full size (that animation being entirely client-side), but the server thinks the power is still recharging (due to the server load slowing it down). It doesn't get as bad as the old-school Hami raids -- I remember waiting minutes for powers with 5-second recharges to come up (I also remember having, at one point, twenty-one stacked Accelerate Metabolisms on my character, but that's a different aspect of the old Hami raids -- and it still didn't make powers recharge faster on the server, due to the load).

Oh, yes, just what we need in CoX -- female characters Gainaxing all over the place.

Reminds me of the screenshot someone posted some time ago of their enhancement tray with the little pop-up window telling them that they can't use the level 648 SO until they were at least level 645 (or similar way-off-in-Never-Never-Land levels).

You want a laugh with it, try it with the 'flypose4' emote/pose, and then pay attention to where the jets are.

Ahhh, another person brainwashed by the radium-paint stereotype of green radiation , which is the result of α and β particles from the radium hitting a luminescent phosphor in the paint; a similar mechanism is used with tritium in sealed tubes lined with a phosphor (less toxic and has a different color from the phosphor). The actual glow from radiation is Čerenkov radiation, created when charged particles pass through a medium where the speed of light is lower than the speed the particles are moving, and has a distinctive blue glow, characteristically visible in storage or cooling pools containing radioactive material:

Doesn't change the fact that once you hit a particular mob with the AoE, there is nothing you can do via slotting your power to affect whether the individual ticks of damage 'hit'.

Out of curiosity, what do you need Power Boost for? You get increased mez for Suppressing Fire and increased knockback from Power Thrust; you didn't take the stun-heavy EM attacks, so you're only getting a benefit for two narrowly-useful abilities.

And I've found with my DP/EM (also 50) that, even slotted with IO sets, with Hasten up and even a little extra recharge (i.e., Speed Boost), I can pump out attacks fast enough to deplete my End despite the End reductions; I get down to 25% End or so, then pop Conserve Power, and my End will climb back to 100% by the time it fades, and it has a fair chance of recharging before my End gets that low again.

Perhaps a burned-out Perez Park map, where the buildings are replaced with Boomtown-style wreckage, and the woods are replaced with the smoldering trees that we see in several of the portal missions from Unai Kemen and others. It would be easy to whip together an explanation of why the zone is so blasted, and it could be set up as an alternate version of Perez for either portal or Ouroboros missions.

Not specifically that, but having a running mob get shot within their aggro radius to set them off -- eliminate the quirk of another spawn ignoring the fire beam spearing through the group to hit the running mob in their midst.

What amuses me most about the people who post builds for comment are the ones who post level-50 builds with four sets of purple IOs slotted. Which is all well and good for an end-game build, but for 99% of the character's career they either a) won't be high enough level to slot purple sets, or b) won't have the influence to buy and craft them -- yes, this is a blue-sky gosh-wow build, but what are you going to do while getting there? If your only focus is on what you're going to be at the very end, the trip to get there is going to be depressing.

It depends on what you want to do with the power you slot them in. I have two Blasters with the Munitions pool, and they both have LRM slotted with 3 Centrioles, two Accuracy IOs, and a Recharge IO. This gives LRM a base range of 234 feet, and with Boost Range that goes up to over 360 feet. Boost Range, a couple of reds if I'm feeling nasty, Build Up, and then that completely oblivious spawn waaaay over there has all the minions go away and the lieutenants seriously injured.

Read my previous post. The problem seems to be that people are looking at Hail of Bullets and expecting it to work like a 'rain' power, where each tick of damage gets a separate to-hit roll. The way it actually works is that, when you start firing, you get a to-hit roll against each target in the area. Each target that is hit by the attack then gets the DoT applied against them -- 12 ticks of damage, with each tick of damage having an unmodifiable 50% chance to be applied. So if you miss a target in the initial burst of to-hit rolls, they will take no damage from your HoB. The power isn't a rain power, but the way it looks creates the impression that it is a rain power, so when it doesn't do damage like a rain power, it gets judged as underpowered or underperforming. What I'd like to see is the devs changing HoB on the test server so that it's a rain power, with its damage tweaked to balance it against the other nukes, and let people play with it for a week or so -- with the ability to improve the accuracy of each tick of damage, the damage per tick is going to have to go down to keep it balanced, and I don't know whether the resultant effectiveness is going to feel adequate, but the only way to know for sure is to try it.