srmalloy

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In the third mission, that team was the only one I've ever been on that charged straight up the canyon of lag, and one of the few teams that took Rommie and Requiem on the platform.

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It's funny; the last two ITFs I've been on wound up with a mix of characters (one a normal random PUG, the other being seven MMs and a Defender (we couldn't find an eighth MM) that were not suited to the standard 'pull the generals down the canyon' routine, so in both ITFs we steamrollered up the canyon taking out everyone on the ground. It [u]did[u] cut down on the number of Cimeroran Traitors who would drop in from behind us while we hit the phalanx control unit, though. But those two have been the only times that we've cleared the canyon in all the ITFs I've done.

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I guess it's nice they had time to add new random visual effects to the alakazamreact emote.
But when are they going to allow the juggling emotes to be used while Hovering?

I suppose a person could easily argue that both of these emote QoL improvements are highly questionable uses of the Devs' time and effort. But at least having versions of the juggle emotes that work while Hovering would seem a tiny tad bit more visually satisfying (if that's the right term) than the alakazamreact emote being random. Oh well.

Hovering while doing the CardTrick or ThrowConfetti emotes look so dang cool.
I'm sure juggling while Hovering would look equally nifty.

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Want something equally annoying? Stand in one spot, turn on an 'offensive' PBAoE aura power like Icicles or Hot Feet or Choking Cloud and then see how many emotes work for you. Completely kills wonderful setups for screenshots, such as my Fire/Rad Controller standing at the middle of her Hot Feet/Choking Cloud auras doing the 'jugglefire' emote while her Fire Imps dance around slapping a bunch of random mobs twisted up by the AoE hold and locked down with Fire Cages.

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The doors, heroside, for the midnight club *now say which zone they go to.*

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As you head back into the door chamber, it's clockwise from left by increasing zone level. Steel Canyon, Croatoa, and Founder's Falls. What's so hard to remember?

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And as far as this goes:
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Each time you fire Blazing Arrow at the oil slick, you're not firing it at an enemy and therefore wasting the damage from that shot. Sure, it recharges, but since it's the big hammer in the archery toolbox, using it for no greater effect than the piddly origin power seems like a waste to me.


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Also a good point, but when you're basically melting an entire spawn at once (along with debuffs and RoA), do you *really* need to have BA up that one more time? IME, not really. That's me though, and YMMV, of course.

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Particularly when, after firing Disruption Arrow, Acid Arrow (both bump the effective damage of a flaming Oil Slick), and Explosive Arrow (more damage to all the targets in the fire), Blazing Arrow is back up again to use on anyone who looks particularly obstreperous about lying down and playing dead for you.

Overall, I enjoy playing my TA/Arch Defender; he's never going to be a soloing powerhouse the way my Fire/Rad Controller or Ice/EM Tanker or DB/WP Scrapper, but on teams where I don't notice that the Tanker is relying on Gauntlet to hold aggro (and, as a result, discover that I can pull aggro away from a non-taunting Tanker) take a dirt nap, it's not at all hard to see the difference in the rate and ease with which spawns go down with and without my contribution.

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If you're worried about End, you may want to go Fire for your Epic. If you're neck-deep in enemies, Consume will refill your blue bar every time.

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Consume makes it much easier to make it through the end drain from Hot Feet and Choking Cloud after using the Vanguard Medallion -> EMP -> Fire Cages -> Fireball sequence; following that up with Consume refills your End bar, which gets you past the Recovery suppression from EMP and lets your imps run around bitchslapping all of the mobs doing seaweed impersonations.

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I noticed this before i15, unless you mean they added even more.

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There were different footfall sounds for different floor surfaces all the way back to the original release, but that was one of the things I noticed right away when I logged in yesterday -- there is a lot more variation in the sounds, and a lot of the old sounds have been redone, which to my ears is not always an improvement -- the 'walking on grass' sound around the SG portal in Talos Island, for example, sounds to me more like "walking through low dry brush" than "walking on grass'.

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Sweet, I think I'll actually be here for that one! Just in time as well, a week later and I'd probably be on the road... HUZZAH!

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And if it were a week earlier, it would overlap the San Diego Comic-Con, like it did last year... :P

And along similar lines, why you can't (for example) lean up against a wall with Hot Feet running. I haven't tested it exhaustively, but it appears that any aura that affects others prevents most if not all emotes from working.

The claim that it's being done to curb online gambling is high-moraled, but given the size of the industry in China, I suspect that it was more a case of government officials not getting paid off to ignore it, and it will be determined that gold farming is not "gambling" for the purposes of enforcement of the new regulations once the appropriate baksheesh has changed hands.

...for all the good it's going to do in the long run.

Information Week has posted an article about China's declaration that virtual currency cannot be traded for real goods or services. Defined to include pre-paid game time cards, a joint release by China's Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce on Friday stated, "The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services." While a concerted effort to crack down on the backbone of RMT enterprises -- the low-paid gold farmers -- will impact the 'industry', there will undoubtedly be ways found around the regulations; however, in the short term, this is going to have to hurt the RMT spammers where they live, as 80%-85% of the gold farmers are believed to be in China. The ban is not, however, being presented as legislating compliance with RMT bans by game companies, but rather as a way to curtail gambling and other illegal online activities.

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This might stink:

Players are no longer able to reinvite others to a Task Force after the Task Force has started.

Assuming each MA mission is a Task Force.

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That should cut down a small amount on the AE farm spam, by making it more inconvenient for them, since they will now have to quit and reform in order to add more people to the farm.

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I don't think they're allowed to make fun of us unless they use their redname accounts.

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How can you tell the difference between a redname making fun of you posting on the boards through a non-redname board account and some random board member making fun of you posting on the boards through their non-redname board account? It's still a green name in the 'Poster' column; you'd have to look at the diction and writing style to have a chance at figuring it out, and even then it could be someone mimicking their style.

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So... with side switching... does this mean that villain archetypes will get ancillary power pools? I mean, they cant really have patrons as heros can they? Likewise, does this mean that heroes are getting a set of patron powers?

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You can have the Power Pool of a different Patron.

And once you learn their powers, becoming good makes you forget them?

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The Patron pool powers that let you summon an Arachnos pet? How are those going to work with a 'turned good' character? You think Lord Recluse is going to let you continue to be able to summon them?

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How about a cat-girl as a result of a plastic surgery horror?
Jocelyn Wildenstein

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IIRC, that's just the result of too many facelifts. If you're looking for plastic surgery examples, then you want Stalking Cat (more pictures on his site here).

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Phantom Army wouldn't have these issues though, I'd presume. With this difference, I'd suggest illusion as the primary for a troller that intends to solo all the GMs. For secondary, I'd guess rad would be better than kin, if for no other reason than the debuffs are mostly toggles that don't require constant reapplication.

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More to the point with /Rad, though, is that it has the only way to buff the damage of Phantom Army, by debuffing the resistance of the GM. With /Kin you can buff the snot out of your Phantasm, but you can't do anything for PA.

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I highly doubt such a thing is possible (the game doesn't know where the buff/debuff effects on you come from and also doesn't know how to differentiate from buffs and debuffs, and it wouldn't be easy to teach it)...

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Depends on the buff/debuf. Autonomous buffs and debuffs, perhaps, but toggle buffs and debuffs have to track where they're coming from so that they can turn off if the originator turns off the power for any reason (e.g, Radiation Infection vs. Lingering Radiation -- RI has to be able to turn off when the caster stops paying End for the toggle, but LR is a click power and continues once cast until its duration expires). However, the buff/debuff doesn't have to know who the originator is; all it has to do is store what color(s) the effect had when cast. Of course, this can run into oddities; what happens, for example, if you put together the Radiation Rangers, each with their own signature power-effect color, and they all use Accelerated Metabolism, so they all could theoretically have five different colors of AM glow at once. Talk about visual spam. If you just used the first active application, then you could have other forms of buffspam, where successively-cast buffs wearing off result in the buff effect changing color as each one wears off in turn. It would be simpler artistically to use the color of the last-applied buff, so that if the Radiation Rangers all used AM at the same time, their glow would be in the color(s) chosen by whichever one was slowest dropping the buff.

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6) The Atlas Statue is a structural impossibility which leads one to think that it was created and maintained by someone with stone shaping powers. This being the case; what happens when that person dies?

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It's a steel (or impervium) framework with a stone skin. The earliest version only used the stone covering on the continents of the globe, the rest of the globe's framework was exposed.

(Yeah, i had to answer one question semi-seriously. Awesome list of quasi-imponderables though.)

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Reality and Logicses... They burrrrrnss usssss....!!!

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It's enclosed in an AeonTech DoubleTalk(tm) stasis field that keeps the stone from being affected by the stresses imposed on it by gravity. The same type of device was built into many of Paragon City's buildings during the last big construction boom, which is why you see buildings in Faultline and Boomtown standing canted at angles which would cause a building made of any normal construction material to shear and collapse. The field generator, can, however, be overloaded, which is why some buildings exhibit damage while others don't.

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Despite no announcements on the boards, this page confirms NCSoft will be exhibiting at San Diego Comicon next month.

"Well, of course they are, why wouldn't they be?" you may be asking.

That's a legitimate question, but if you take a look at this page, two names that seem to be missing are Atari, and Cryptic, which is just odd, unless they exhibit under some other name and I don't know it.

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If Cryptic is set on releasing CO at the start of September, then I'm not surprised that they'd skip Comic-Con. They're getting into crunch time, and it'd be better to have everyone at the studio working away than have guys take at least a week off to get things planned, set up, actually run at the Con, and then back home. Paragon Studios isn't under the same sort of pressure that Cryptic is right now, having a large expansion and a free update to worry about as opposed to launching a brand new game.

That said, I'm now looking forward to what goodies we'll get leaked to us via folks visiting the Paragon Studios exhibit during the event.

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This pretty much. Also keep in mind Cryptic/CO might end up being there, as I heard some of them stated they regretted not really being in force at E3.

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If they didn't have booth space already bought and paid for last year, they won't be at SDCC this year. And even with all the space in the main exhibit hall at the San Diego Convention Center, SDCC is getting more and more pressed for space. There has been discussion about SDCC moving up to Anaheim to take advantage of the space in the Anaheim Convention Center (this possibility is one of the driving forces behind the proposal to expand the San Diego Convention Center -- losing SDCC alone would put a significant dent in the city's tourist income). While I don't know how things were handled each time SDCC contracted for more of the exhibit hall (I used to be part of the con staff), for each of the years that I was involved, there was a [u]waiting list[u] for booth space, so even if Cryptic had been waiting with cash in hand to buy booth space last year, there might not have been any available -- it would take having current exhibitors decide not to come back for space to open up for anyone that wasn't already an exhibitor.

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skip the mountain path and jump/fly/teleport up the side of the mountain; avoid killing the enemies at the top of the stairs to avoid the Nictus ambush, try to keep everyone behind the altar to ensure that Sister Psyc-- Solaris actually goes to the altar, instead of bubbling people and fighting.

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It was kind of funny, the one ITF I did where I wound up playing guide because half the team had never done it before; we went up the mountain path and cleared everything there, then we went up the right-side stairs and did a careful counterclockwise sweep of the top of the mountain, taking everyone else out and then trimming the group with the Minotaur from the back until the Minotaur aggroed, finally clearing the top. One of the team grabbed Sister Solaris as I warn everyone to watch out for the altar, and she runs through her spiel and then is led to the altar, going through her ritual as people start asking "Where's the ambush?" The mission completes, still no ambush. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, we exited, just as happy _not_ to face the swarm of Khelds.

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Yeah, I don't the point of snipes. In a practical sense, not worth all the high costs involved. In a thematic sense, sniping is not something I see traditional heroes doing, so I'm not sure why it's ubiquitous to blaster sets rather than specific to a few.

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Depends on whether you have good sight lines on your target; I've found that with my AR/Em/Mun Blaster, that starting off with Boost Range, Build up, then LRM (all the minions in the spawn go down, boss and lieutenants start running toward me), Snipe (one lieutenant goes down), Slug (second lieutenant goes down), M30 Grenade (boss is knocked down), Snipe (boss goes down) does a decent job of cleaning up a spawn. In the typical short sight lanes of a door mission, you don't always get to use that kind of a layered attack strategy, though.

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There are issues with AE, there are issues with farming, there are issues with PLg, in all cases they are different from each other.

It is important to search for the reason that brings these behaviors about.

Lets start with AE, why do we create an AE farm for? The real reason under neath it all, the one that causes the effect.

For myself, I find the prices at the market totally absurde, and my luck at getting good drops also totally absurde in the bad way. So by default I am forced to purchase my IOs, or get them via merits. I don't roll for IOS, all I get is the super rare, no one ever gets, legendary scarce: "Crap of the Hunter", "Pace of the Turtle" or "Call of the Sandman"; are they any other droppable recipies besides these?

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More and more, I'm seeing characters 40 and up who, on TFs or in teams, ask questions like "Where's Kings Row?" or "What's Ouroboros?" -- things that anyone who played their character up through the chain of contacts would learn, characters who have nothing but MA and level badges. People who [u]brag[u] about having gotten to level 50 without ever leaving Atlas Park except to go to an SG base to make IOs. In connection with this, the opening of the MA buildings has caused salvage prices to go crazy -- common salvage selling for three times the price that Luck Charms stabilized at, for example. People are running MA missions to get tickets to buy the expensive recipes they can't get any other way, and they're not getting the salvage drops they'd normally get in the process, so they wind up pillaging the auction houses for the salvage they need to build them.

Without affecting how people use the MA to get tickets for salvage or recipes, addressing the problem of characters who reach the top tiers of 'experience' without ever leaving the MA building is one of giving them a reason not to spend all their time doing MA missions. The idea that came to me during a discussion on the level-50 channel was that, for all its realism, the MA is just a simulation, and you don't really learn until you're actually [u]doing[u] it for real. Change the Mission Architect so that all the experience that would normally be awarded for defeating mobs and mission bonuses are awarded as patrol experience, which would then be awarded as experience while doing missions outside the MA. Since patrol experience is capped at ten bars, eventually you'd need to leave the MA and do real missions to advance your skills, but someone who was doing MA missions to earn tickets for salvage and/or recipes wouldn't be affected; the ticket drops would stay the same whether or not the character was earning patrol XP.

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Actually, I'll be trying to find a combo that will be as invisible as possible. I kind of want my radiation attacks to be more "heat shimmer" than color.

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No... What you want is a turquoise to blue-white color, as in this image or this image -- the Cherenkov secondary radiation from the passage of the actual radiation. That's what I intend to do with my Fire/Rad controller; the actual radiation will be invisible, but the Cherenkov secondary emission will be highly visible.

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On my first run we ended up killing the kooshballs one by one while someone tanked Romulus.

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Last run I was on there were two tanks. I pulled the healing fluffy away from Rommie and kept it taunted. You can't pull the fluffies too far or they ignore you and head back to Rom, but you can get it out of heal-the-AV range.

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You have to be careful, though, as you can also pull it out of 'available to be sucked dry when Rommie goes down' range, which leaves you with the healing Nictus to deal with; when we accidentally did this, we had to put our Stalker up front to 'tank' the Nictus while everyone else whacked it from outside of its healing range, a long, slow grind.

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That's right, my mistake. The enemy animation had me confused for a second. They all do that same "stroke-like" pose that stunned heroes perform.

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Except that they stand there in one place waving like seaweed in the current, not skating around at high speed the way stunned NPCs do. It's the immobility of a hold with the 'woozy' figure animation of a stun.

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Is it just me? I always thought building with max damage set bonus in mind is kinda a waste on a blaster. I mean, if you set up your display to show you the damage boost you get from defiance it quickly outshadows anything you'd accomplish with set bonuses. I'd think building for global recharge, so that you can keep firing, keep firing, keep firing, and let defiance take care of the damage boost. It gets massive really fast on an AR/EM. Heck, it gets massive on any blaster that keeps shooting.

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Not to mention that tricking out your build with a full set of each purple set you can fit in the build gives you something that you'll be building toward for an unpleasantly long time, and the set bonuses you're planning on won't materialize until after you've spent hundreds of millions of influence buying recipes. Seems kind of silly to be planning around a build you won't have for 99% of your playing time.