srmalloy

At least for stone, there's a wider range of colors than what they gave, particularly for the crystal inclusions. Unfortunately, for some of the best visual effects, it would be necessary not only to change the colors of the powers, but their textures, which cranks the requirements for Power Customization up toward impracticality.

All three of the attempts I've made -- two with my Fire/Rad Controller unsuccessful, one with my Ill/Kin Controller successful -- were just heroes. I expect things will get more entertaining come the weekends. The two fails were just flat-out not enough damage; we couldn't get Lord of Winter down far enough to trigger even the first spawn of the Winter Guardians. Now that I have a successful run under my belt, though, I'll be better able to plan for repeating it with other characters.

At least having it produce the same kind of temporary 'ground fracture' spray that, IIRC, Foot Stomp does would make it more visually entertaining.

Note that doing this gets you your name change, but you'll have to rejoin any VG you belong to, losing all your accumulated prestige in the process. Possibly a small thing, but...

From my position off taunting one of the right-side yellow mitos, I didn't have a clear view of what happened, but it looked as if our shortage of taunt tanks -- we only had four to start with, although we wound up with a full set by the end -- and some coordination issues caused an aggro management problem when the other teams stepped into the goo. You did a good job resolving it, though; aside from the green mitos taking longer to go down than I'd seen previously, everything progressed smoothly after we reformed.

And that's been my largest source of disaffection with CoV over time; there's no real way to do it with the existing contact/mission structure, but it always feels as if, regardless of how high-level your character is, that you're still just a legbreaker for your contacts, not a villain in your own right. It would take a redesign of the mission system to have branching options -- so when you undertake a Dastardly Plan™, you'd have a choice among several first steps, each of which would have several choices for second steps, etc. -- which would be a massive undertaking to get all the necessary content in place. Failing a mission would eliminate that choice and its tree, so you'd have to go back and pick one of the other choices to bring your plan to fruition. But I don't expect anything like that to come out any time soon.

With the current game engine it would have to be minus the reindeer, but I can't help thinking how much harder it would be to defeat Jurassik when you're laughing uncontrollably at the eight reindeer dangling in harness, their legs scrabbling frantically, swinging back and forth as Jurassik waves his club around.

Then, too, it would make for some interesting behind-your-back sniggering at the hospital... "Those were some interesting contusions you had there; how did you get them?" <mumble> "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that; could you speak up?" "Jurassik hit me with a <mumble>." "Pardon?" "A reindeer! He hit me with a reindeer, okay?" "A reindeer?" "I don't want to talk about it."

Not to mention the quirky little bug where sometimes after being hit with the loogie gun, the visuals and sound don't go away on your character until you zone, long after the actual effect of the power is gone.

Just think of it as an undocumented eleventh power in the Illusion set, an autohit AoE against your teammates, to confuse them about what it is you're really contributing to the team.

There's a reason why, whenever you see a mixed spawn with the Warriors and some other group, where there is one mob being pounded with a baseball bat, the mob being pounded is always a Warrior...

Most of my character bios have the same truncation problem, and with one character I keep going back and hacking at turning the original bio into an origin story, which is up to six pages and hanging while I script out a major battle. About half of my characters have a bio by the time I finish going through the character creation process; most of the rest get one by about level 10.

There is an intermediate stage that still requires a lot of work by the devs that reduces the Sturgeon's Law factor for user-created maps. If you pay attention to the mission maps in the game, you have a limited set of different types of map tiles (i.e., lab, warehouse, office, etc.) that are stitched together in different combinations to make the maps. Letting users create new maps by giving them an editor to do the linking of the map tiles would avoid the problem of 99% of the CoX players not being graphic designers. Unfortunately, when I spoke with Positron at the last SDCC on this subject, he admitted that, while linking tiles this way was how maps were built, the process was not automated, and there were still a large number of issues with connecting the tiles that required hand tweaking at each join (the problems with early CoV maps where you saw the 'black wall across the corridor' bug is an example). It would take resolving that problem so that the map tiles could be simply 'clicked' together to make a map before an editor like this could be given to the users.

With my Ill/Rad and Ill/Kin, it's exactly the same procedure: spam Deceive on them until you get the pink polka-dots, and watch the carnage as you send in your pets, keeping the Master Illusionist deceived. The only real annoyance is having them pop their pets and KS you.

The boss-grade Gunslingers also have a handgun (!) whose attack will outrange Snipe from the Assault Rifle set with Boost Range active. Oh, yes, range is a Blaster's defense. And I've got some land for you, guaranteed to have water on at least one side.

And you've described the primary issue with Crossbows -- the animations. Look at the other weapon sets; weapon customization changes the mesh the character holds, not the animation for the power. You don't fire a crossbow the same way you shoot a bow. You can't add crossbows as a weapon customization for Archery because that replaces every attack animation, not just the weapon mesh. It would be much easier to make crossbows a customizable weapon option for Assault Rifle, except that Flamethrower, Ignite, and Full Auto don't work for crossbows. You could steal the Assault Rifle animations for creating a Crossbow set using the Archery powers, but then you're mixing two powersets' characteristics to create a third that doesn't really get you anything new.

Except that, in Aion, once you get into water deeper than an arbitrary limit (which, depending on your choice for character height, can range from still having your head above water to being twice your height underwater), you begin to drown. Apparently, while there are boats on both Asmodae and Elysia, the concept of swimming is utterly foreign to them, and no one knows how to swim. Or even float on their backs.

If you take a Dual Blades character and give them daggers, a full-length cape, and either a hood or a wide-brim black hat, you've pretty well got the iconic anime character for using Ninja Running.

While we've got a number of different costume pieces that let us create variations on the 'Iron Man' style 'less than an inch of suit all over your body' power suit, we don't have any complete set of costume pieces that fit well into the 'bulky suit' style, as exemplified by the fancy Enforcer or Valkyrie boots. And there's only so much you can do with the sliders.

I can remember the rumors from a while ago that there was a badge for 100 Snipers...

It's more complicated than that. You start by breaking up into teams by function: Hami aggro team (tank and healers to keep the tank alive), yellow mito aggro team (tanks), yellow mito killing teams (scrappers and leftover tanks), green mito killing teams (controllers and defenders), blue mito killing teams (blasters). Each team should have controller or defender who can teleport and rez to pull fallen teammates out of the goo.

Then you go around whacking the monsters to collect EoE inspirations and spawn Hami. Once Hami is spawned, the EoEs get passed to the tanks and everyone forms up in a cluster

Then each iteration follows the same procedure. Buffs are dropped on the tanks. The Hami aggro team goes in and gets Hami's attention while the
yellow mito aggro team each grab a yellow mito's attention, using EoEs to keep damage manageable, since they don't get healers. Once the aggro is contained, the mito killing teams go in, each one focusing on its assigned color. As each yellow mitos go down, the tank taunting it follows the scrapper team and helps take down subsequent yellow mitos. If a team clears all of its assigned color earlier than the others, they help with the remaining colors depending on their power options.

When all the mitos are down, everyone dogpiles Hami, with the raid leader watching Hami's HP bar; when it gets down close to the pop point, the TP/rezzers on each team bail out of the goo so they can recover downed teammates. When the pop happens, everyone else bails out of the goo, making sure that they duck behind a rock long enough to break targeting before meeting back at the start point. Sometimes someone forgets, and Hami proves how much he hax by reaching out and dropping a splash on everyone as they form up for the next iteration.

Each repeat goes the same way, except for the last, where no one bails and we grind Hami into the ground.

I suppose that it would be possible, if you got the timing right, to get all the yellow mito aggro team back out into position to grab aggro back right after the pop and start the next cycle without going through the rest-and-rebuff process, but it would be a great deal trickier to pull off. If you could do it, it would make for an impressive raid time, though.

The power is named "Ninja Running", not "Dashing" or "Broken-Field Running" or whatever. It's a specific themed style, which I concede would be more accurately named "Anime Ninja Running" from the number of times I've seen it in that genre.

I don't know why, but this reads, to me, like "I am Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht."

Ever since I happened to see (probably a glitch) Unicode characters in chat in CoH, I've almost exclusively made characters with names from other languages, partially for getting names easier, and partially for the amusement and extra bit of characterization from making chat binds in the character's native language -- which can be startling when people see them in the chat window. Because extrapolating from the real-world history opens so many options, a lot of mine have Russian backgrounds -- Yadernii Ogon (Ядерный Огонь -- 'Nuclear Fire'), Ledyanoy Kulak (Ледяной Кулак -- 'Ice Fist'), Umstvenniy Ulan (Умственный Улан -- 'Mental Lancer'), BRIGADYR (БРИГАДИР -- 'Taskmaster') and KOMANDYR (КОМАНДИР -- 'Commander'), Ogon Moroza (Огонь Мороза -- 'Fire Frost'), Tenevoy Ogon (Теневой Огонь -- 'Shadow Fire'), etc. Some of them come out hard for people to type, like Zvukovaya Radiatsya (Звуковая Радиация -- 'Sonic Radiation'), but it hasn't affected them getting onto teams. I'd prefer to have the names in Cyrillic in the game, but then I'd never get remote team invitations, because it's so hard to type Unicode characters with a default US installation of Windows.

Not to be a grammar Nazi here, but I believe that the correct spelling is 'fulgurite'; did you check that one?