srmalloy

You're still going up the stairs? On the entry level of the pool room, go over to the extreme right (as seen from the entrance), near the alcove there (which always has a transformation chamber that needs to be destroyed anyway). Now turn around and face the middle of the room, and look up. There's a gap between the upper level and the chamber wall that's big enough to fly or leap up through to get to the top level. In one of the pools to either side of the walkway at that point, you'll generally find random Council, but you're far enough away from the transformation chambers to keep from triggering them until after you've cleaned up that end and can decide how you want to proceed about taking out the chambers.

However, "bang bang" is insufficiently onomatopœic to warrant changing the phrase just for that.

Get on a fast-moving team and watch the fight move away from where you planted the location for your Rain of Arrows while the animation is playing... again and again... and then tell me that it's overpowered. Remember, it's a location AoE; if the mobs move out of the area before the attack finishes animating, or while the DoT is going on, they stop taking damage, just as they do with Rain of Fire and Ice Storm.

That's almost backwards to how I do it; I'll slot Acc TOs in my attacks (if I have the spare influence while buying up salvage like Luck Charms) up until 12, when I try to slot my character out with generic IOs -- a 15 IO is a touch better than a +2 DO, and a 20 IO is better than a +3 DO. At 22, I'll switch to SOs, because 25 IOs are about a -1 SO, then I'll do the SO-upgrade thing once at 27, then at 32 start slotting generic IOs, which are a shade better than +2 SOs at that point. From there, I'll keep slotting whatever generic IOs I can get while collecting pieces for the sets once I get to the 42-45 range.

And this important; your cones are going to piss off large numbers of mobs. When I was getting my AR/EM to 50, I knew that I could reliably run up (with Stealth) to a white or yellow spawn of Nemesis, hit Boost Range, Build Up, Full Auto, then Flamethrower, and have the entire spawn down. I also knew that I could expect to drop to at least half health from the return fire in the process (more from yellow mobs, but popping a Sturdy helps there). So you wind up with a staccato kind of style -- large amounts of cone damage alternating with time spent healing. And with the AoE target limits, it's entirely possible to have your cones interact poorly with the group around the Tanker, resulting in your grabbing a lot more aggro than you're suited for -- I've pulled Minotaurs and Cyclopes away from our Tanker in ITFs because of variations in the focus of the Tanker's taunts.

Although the animation time seems too long when compared against similar short-range high-damage attacks, I have to agree that the animation for ES just screams attitude.

However, with Archery, you need to be aware that Rain of Arrows is a pseudo-pet attack like Rain of Fire and Ice Storm -- you target the location and start your animation, and when it completes, it creates an independent entity at that location causing the damage, where the targets in the area of effect around it start taking damage; if they move out of the area they stop taking damage, and if they move out of the area before the animation finishes, they don't take any damage at all. If you're on a fast-moving team, you will have to worry about grinding your teeth over the number of times you start Rain of Arrows only to have the entire fight drift out of its area of effect before your animation completes.

The animations feel too long for the set as a whole, although they do give the set a 'cool' factor that the others don't (I admit, mostly from the shiny 'new-car' quality). However, I think the animation for Piercing Rounds is way too silly; throwing your weapons up in the air, while it's a major attitude move, is just asking to have them grabbed away.

I haven't had a lot of time with my character properly slotted out in the higher levels -- due to the rapid advancement during the double XP weekend, she wound up getting to 29 with only four SOs slotted, and the rest mostly 15 IOs with a couple 20 IOs. She definitely felt underpowered relative to other Blaster primaries during the Citadel TF, and has felt underpowered since doing a respec to pull out IOs to sell and reslotting with 30 SOs, but I don't have a good handle on how much yet.

While I think that asking the animators for something like this would be unlikely to make it past the cost/benefit analysis, when playing my DP/EM Blaster, what I wanted to see was different animations for each power driven by a sort of combo system, but only tracking the previous power, so that the animation sequence you got for your attacks depended on the order in which you used them -- Executioner's Shot followed by Dual Wield would give you a different animation for Dual Wield than Empty Clips followed by Dual Wield.

However, if I had 5 inf for every time I picked a target point for Rain of Arrows with my TA/A Defender and had all the mobs but one or two move out of the beaten area before the animation finishes (and, like the other location AoEs, it doesn't actually hit targets until the pseudo-pet drops at the target location, so unlike Full Auto, which attacks everyone in the cone when you light them up even if they wander out of it, anyone who leaves the beaten area before the arrows hit escapes damage entirely), I'd almost be able to buy and slot a full purple set...

I remember doing an analysis of Defense, Resistance, and Regeneration against each other during the "Nerf Regen Every Update" period, where I took a generic hero with a fixed amount of HP, then set them up with either Regeneration, Resistance, or Defense as their protection, a fixed amount of outgoing DPS, and a number of attacking mobs, each with a fixed amount of HP and DPS, then ran simulations with varying numbers of attackers. Unsurprisingly, Resistance characters fared the best; they had a stable, predictable rate of HP decline. Defense characters fared next best; their survival was more random, as a bad set of numbers coming out of the RNG could faceplant them quickly. Regeneration fared better than the 'unluckiest' Defense characters, but otherwise came off the worst of all; their survival depended heavily on being able to survive long enough to grind down the incoming damage -- HP dived faster than either of the others, which matched what I'd seen in play; Regen characters would either die in the first ten seconds of a fight or come out of it uninjured.

When I fiddled with the parameters to add Defense to Regen and Resistance characters, and Resistance to Regen and Defense characters, things turned around completely. It took only a relatively small amount of Defense and Resistance to make a Regeneration character obscenely survivable -- Resistance cutting down the incoming damage and Defense preventing a hit entirely (allowing the regeneration to work on 'old' damage) flattened the HP valley for Regen characters hugely, to the point that they became the most survivable option.

Looking at the way Regeneration worked, it became obvious to me that the fundamental premise -- really fast healing that healed incoming damage again and again until it was gone -- was going to be incredibly hard to balance, and that all of the changes that Cryptic kept making didn't address the perception of Regen characters (that they would come out of a fight barely injured, so they were clearly overpowered, without noticing that that character was at 10% hit points a quarter of the way into the fight), but just slid the line that divided 'groups a Regen Scrapper could jump into and beat' from 'groups a Regen Scrapper could jump into and get their *** handed to them'.

The more I looked at it, the more it seemed as if the problem could be solved by changing one power in the Regeneration powerset -- Instant Healing. Instead of making it be a big boost to regeneration rate (as either a toggle with an obscene End cost or a click power with a long recharge), make it truly 'instant' healing, by having it treat every incoming attack the same way that Spectral Wounds is handled -- you take all the damage, but a second or two later, some percentage of it 'instantly' heals. As this would be applied once to each attack a character receives, it changes the power from 'heals the same damage over and over again until it's gone' to 'stop X percent of incoming damage', making it equivalent to, and balanceable against, both Resistance and Defense, allowing it to be turned back into a toggle that didn't cost obscene amounts of End to run.

Reminds me of this Dilbert strip:

Oh, yes. And throw in Munitions Mastery for that lovely snipe-range AOE; my AR/EM/Mun Blaster has three Dmg/Rng HOs slotted there; with Boost Range I don't always get to use it to its fullest capacity, but it makes for some interesting show-off moments. "See that dot?" *Boost Range* *Rage* *Rage* *Rage* *Build Up* *WHOOOSH* ... *BOOM*

And being able to outrange the frelking Nemesis snipers is a never-ending source of amusement.

My second was a Katana/Regen Scrapper; I have yet to rebuild him after ED and the change that made Instant Healing a click power -- I had built the character as much as possible around regeneration as a hands-off defensive set, focusing on learning where the line was between getting faceplanted by incoming damage in the first five seconds of a fight and being able to hang on long enough to start dropping enough opponents for his regeneration to breast the tide of incoming damage, loading his attacks with damage and using Focused Accuracy to compensate... and then the whole playstyle got ripped out. Since then, I've toyed with going back and rebuilding him, but since Willpower has proved to be the 'fire-and-forget' secondary, I haven't had much interest in rebuilding him.

Actually, the "Horrible furry sex" scene was cut out of the final version, but will be back in an extended version, although depending on where in the cutting process it got removed, it may resemble, in James Cameron's words, a "cheesy videogame" if it was cut before the final effects were generated.

are there any plans to do the same type of thing for the way skirts and kilts work, so that you can have, for example, the Cyborg legs with the Valkyrie skirt, or is the problem of getting character movement to 'push' multiple layers of costume still a sticking point (i.e., making the skirt move right when the character's legs push it while running/kneeling/jumping)?

If they weren't wide enough for people to crawl through, then all the time and money spent putting in the sensors, diverters, the overpressure pulse generators, and the digesters would go to waste. You see, you let the resistance sneak into the building via the ventilation ducts, then, once inside, the diverters close off the regular duct connections and open the shafts to the digesters, then the overpressure generators send massive pressure waves through the ducts to blow the intruders into the digester shafts, where they're chewed up and turned into fertilizer.

I need to go home before I can upload the image from the screenshot I took, but with the bugged Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage, I had a character one-shot Jurassik, doing, IIRC, "4.06311 e+011" points of damage.

Don't forget the "Here's this object that I need more information about. Why don't you go to [contact four zones away] to ask them about it" mission where you schlep to the contact, who tells you that they're not the best person to give you that information, and you should go to [other contact] -- who is standing 20 feet away from the contact you got the mission from, but because both of them have had their feet nailed to the ground, they can't talk to each other, despite having cellphones they could call the other with.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

Door missions on Thorn Isle in Nerva with a bank behind the CoT entry. But, then, I suppose even the CoT need someplace a little more secure than Oranbega; there are people trotting through there killing everyone in sight and looting everything that isn't nailed down all the time...

I've spoken with Positron at Comic-Con about this, and there are some things that could be done without major work on the costume code; things that would just be database additions. For example, one of the things that's been a niggling annoyance (the 'wish I could do this' kind) is with the Tech Sleek set (click on image for a bigger version):


If you use the 'Tech Sleek' pattern, you get the outfit colors divided neatly, with the armor plates being one color and the flexible mesh the other. But for other patterns, the pattern covers the entire costume piece. What I wanted was to have the flexible mesh a fixed dark color, with the armor plates having the pattern on them. For example, getting urban camo by specifying the 'Camouflage' texture with white and black as the colors, but have the camouflage pattern only on the armor plates, not the flexible mesh.

And apparently there is a mechanism in the costume code for this -- part of a costume piece can be designated 'uncolorable', which means that it will always be the color 'baked in' to the piece, like the buckles on some pieces, and any patterns would be applied to the remainder of the piece. So some types of retexturing are just a matter of the devs a) having the art department not busy with other things, and b) deciding that additions like this is a good thing to do. Unfortunately, we don't know enough about what's going on behind the screen to tell whether the art staff have the time to make additions like this.

Running down the street in King's Row as a callow, newly-minted superhero a couple of days after I'd started playing, about a week after the game left beta, and these purple-con Banished Pantheon went by (level 30 Chambers, one Dessicated, one Rotting, IIRC) as I bailed frantically out of their way -- someone else's ambush.

However, while you only have a 7.88% chance of getting recipe drops, that breaks down into a 7.67% chance of getting one recipe drop, a .21% chance of getting two recipe drops, and a .002% chance of getting three recipe drops. When factored back according to the number of recipes you get for each of these probabilities, your chance of getting a recipe is, over time, 8.1% -- for every 1000 mobs you defeat, you will average getting 81 recipes; to put it into rounder numbers, if you go out and grind 100,000 minions, 91,900 of them won't drop a recipe, 7,668 will drop one recipe, 426 will drop two recipes, and 6 will drop three recipes. Depending on what the actual drop rate for purples in Pool A is (1:500 to 1:5000), your average return for those 100,000 minions would be from 1.6 to 16 purple recipes.

I would argue differently; when I'm playing my AR/En Blaster, I'll watch other Blasters run into a big spawn of, say, Nemesis, popping Build Up as they run in, then hit their nuke... and then get chewed up by the ones they missed as they scramble for cover, all their End gone, while I sidle up to a group, hit Boost Range, Build Up, then Full Auto, watching the reverse cascade of orange numbers as they wake up to their situation and start shooting back... then I use Flamethrower on the survivors, lob in an M30 if there are any that aren't quite dead, and go running off to find the next group, my End bar barely dented.