srmalloy

Drop a single level-50 Recharge IO in it, and it's close to perma all by itself; Hasten or, better, a couple of global recharge bonuses, and it becomes perma (and you should be getting a few -Recharge bonuses out of slotting your other powers).

As a lark, I set up a variation of this for my Ice/EM Tanker, where I made a big file of insults, one line per insult, and created a Perl script that, when running, read in this file as an array, and would periodically write a file that consisted of a bind that mapped a key to 'say insult in local, taunt, load bindfile', reloading itself with a new bind containing the next random insult. This would let me pop off random insults directed at whatever mob the character was taunting that I could intersperse with taunts without the verbal addition. As a touch of characterization chrome, I used CoX's Unicode support to have some of the insults be in Russian using Cyrillic characters (the character's background being Russian).

Although these can sometimes be funny, as when I ran Jim Temblor's arc with my level 44 DP/EM Blaster... and one-shotted first the submarine, then Nocturne.

Synapse is much less of a pain with the modified TF exemplar code, where you keep some powers higher than the exemplar limit, particularly when you pushed off getting Stamina until 22 -- with the continual End drain from the Clockwork, Synapse was one continual painfest.

I think, though, that a comparison of them for the second-worst depends on which you dislike more -- ongoing Endurance suck or "maze of twisty little passages, all alike".

Perhaps something like having Longbow take over either of the two small islands in the zone, with a base that has a hospital like the one in the Vanguard base in the RWZ, a base entry portal, and a universal vendor. Putting it on the southern small island would let the devs set up an ongoing battle between the Sky Raiders and Longbow like what goes on in the air just south of the damn in Faultline between Longbow, the Sky Raiders, and Arachnos.

Particularly if you made the animations for Chainsaw Melee like the ones for Dual Pistols, particularly the animation for Piercing Rounds. Watching your character toss the running chainsaw up in the air, catching it, and then whipping the saw across your target would be so worth the price of admission...

Not getting XP for mobs you drag into the drones has been around as long as the game, IIRC; it was put in to eliminate the ability of players to hit mobs much higher than they were, then pull them to a police drone, who defeats them, and getting partial credit for a mob that they would have had no chance of defeating on their own, which with the XP bonus for mobs higher than you could be much better than defeating mobs your level. This could have been exploited heavily in the early game, when there were mobs that didn't have any ranged attacks, so that once aggroed you could drag them anywhere without having to worry that they'd faceplant you from range.

The problem could be addressed in one of two ways -- adjusting the randomizer so that the chances of getting an all-5th or all-Council spawn are higher, or to divide the area where they spawn in two, one where only 5th Column spawn and one where only Council spawn (i.e., give the 5th Column the SW part of the zone where the Council/5th spawns are now, and the Council , and the Council the NE part of the zone where the Council/5th spawns are now). The Council has already become the Warriors of Steel Canyon, getting beat up by the 5th Column virtually everywhere I see a mixed spawn; we don't need to see it again

Stalkers. Illusion Controllers. Any character with Invisibility from the Stealth pool. Sail in unnoticed, grab the glowie, and click the blue button to exit the mission. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sure, you're only getting the basic mission-completion bonus, but at a maximum of what, two minutes per mission, you can do a lot of missions in an hour. You're getting a pile of reward for zero risk; that's why all the glowie-hunt missions from the police radio and newspaper make you clear the end room (although, as fallout from this, there is little that makes you feel sillier than having the random glowie placement put it 50 feet inside the mission door where you can get it without even seeing a hostile mob, and then still having to make your way to the end room to defeat the boss).

And even doing your own bit to add characterization to the missions doesn't help much, because there are so few missions where you can do something like that. For example, with the mission to unlock Mark IV as a store, your goal is to go into a Crey facility and insert a virus into a Crey computer to delete all records of Mark IV's existence. Every time I've done it, I treat it as a challenge to slip in and get to the computer without drawing aggro from any of the mobs in the mission, because in character deleting Mark IV's data from the computer is more effective if it's just gone; if I draw aggro, Crey knows that someone was infiltrating the facility, and will run security checks, and might turn up some data that will lead them back to Mark IV. If I do it right, I get a lot less XP; that's my tradeoff for the satisfaction of meeting a self-imposed challenge.

I recently received an email that purported to be from NCSoft telling me (in bad English, and encoded in base64 in the body of the email, which nothing I've ever gotten from NCSoft has been) that my Aion account was to be suspended for chat violations, and that if I wanted to prevent the suspension, I needed to go to (URL redacted -- the hostname was "secure.ncsofti.com").

With mail like this, even with the obvious fraudulencies in the mail, I make a habit of opening the raw view of the mail, which the automated mail headers (the ones added by the mail system, not the person spoofing fields like 'From:') showed that it came from a Yahoo user, and showed that the phisher who was sending them out was insufficiently competent to keep the Yahoo mail system from identifying his IP address in the mail headers. NCSoft support has the email now, and has added it to the various phishing attempts they're investigating.

However, there is evidence that the cake, while not a lie, is an utter fail:

From speaking to Positron at the last SDCC, that's where they want to go with the maps, but the map creation is still ugly and painful. While the maps are built out of common tiles, the mechanism for linking the tiles together is still a manual and finicky process -- anyone who was around for the beta and launch of City of Villains will remember the 'black wall' bugs with the red/yellow office tileset; those were due to minor misalignment problems between adjacent map tiles.

From his account of the process, a player-accessible map editor (or an on-the-fly map creator) is about the same level of effort as power customization was, and while it's something that they are looking at, the amount of work involved in it means that it's taking a back burner to other development work. For myself, having the game generate a random map for most missions would eliminate the 'deja vu' feeling from having played the exact same map over and over again, sometimes back-to-back.

One thing that might be possible to do faster than reworking the maps to make them 'snap-together' is to break the lab and office maps apart -- as it stands now, you enter a multi-floor map and the pattern is fixed. If the office and lab maps were broken up into separate floor units, so you had 'entrance' floors that have the door from the zone, 'middle' floors that had both up and down elevators, and 'end' floors that have only a single elevator, you could randomize the layouts by selecting the floors when someone first enters the mission, rather than having the relationships between them fixed and immutable. That would at least give us four tilesets -- lab, original office, red/yellow office, and abandoned office -- that would have greatly-increased variability.

I would have loved to have seen LRM in the Munitions Mastery ancillary pool be a 'missile swarm' effect for its AoE, rather than a single missile with a large explosion; it would have been immensely cooler to watch. Admittedly, it wouldn't have fitted as cleanly with the Assault Rifle weapon use, but it could have used that fat tub rocket launcher the 5th Column/Council pull out if you really needed a visual consistency.

This.

I'll have to see about dusting off the Word document of Brigadyr's background, get around to finishing the battle scene, and either post it or link to an HTML version (I expect it will have to be an HTML version; it's more than six pages incomplete). It's far and away the most detailed of the backgrounds for any of my characters.

You also get this as the animation for the Surveillance power in the Munitions Mastery pool, an 80' range power with the following effects (from City of Data):

• Analyze +54 [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]
  Effect does not stack from same caster

• RES(All Types) -14% for 20s [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]
  Effect does not stack from same caster

• Defense -0.14 for 20s
  Effect does not stack from same caster

I assume that the '-0.14' is -14%, but that's the way the website presents it.

No, no -- the April Fool's prank is that they add nipples to the male body types while applying 'package' shading to the female body types, then take them away tomorrow claiming it was all a mixup by the art department, then pull a "We have always been at war with Eastasia" history rewrite to deny any of it happened and it's all in your mind...

There are still April Fools pranks that slip by; apparently, a hoax news story about the decision to ban 'violent' national anthems from being played at the World Cup competition was sufficiently believable to have spread worldwide by credulous journalists (from the UK Daily Mail website):

At least change the hedge models in Perez so that this abandoned zone that citizens don't go into any more has ratty-looking untrimmed hedges, not neatly-pruned ones. Makes you wonder what kind of hazard pay the landscaping company gets to come in, trim all the hedges, and sweep up all the crud. I mean, look at King's Row, and all the ratty bits of gunge you find in all corners of the zone -- and that's a regular city zone; with no maintenance being done in Perez Park, we should see broken windows in the buildings, piles of random garbage in odd corners, and with two gangs competing for territory there's no graffiti on the walls?

This message has been brought to you by the Nemesis Army.

Why do you think everyone has that ramrod-upright stance when they're not waving their weapons around? If you want a character who's new to the concept, just pick a face with the wide-eyed expression to show their not yet being accustomed to hiding them there.

I've seen requests for some time asking the devs for a better application of the various 'sit' emotes, centered around how difficult it is to actually get a character to sit on furniture properly. Without it being a game comparison, NCSoft's MMORPG Aion has a mechanism where you can click on 'sittable' furniture and your character will move to and sit down on it, without your having to do any particular positioning; I'm wondering whether it would be possible for the devs to make something similar -- click on an object you can sit on, you get a pop-up with the various 'sit' emotes and a 'cancel' option, then pick one and have your character sit down there. There would, of course, be clipping problems with the regular diner-style booths and large characters, but that would be up to the players to deal with.

Lampooned very early on in the game by Scott Kurtz in his webcomic PvP Online (from an arc starting June 1, 2004 and later collected in a 16-page comic that was part of the Collector's Edition):

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