srmalloy

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You understand correctly. That's they way it works. Doc is saying that a level 10 can't slot a level 50 IO. But a level 50 can slot a level 10 IO (but the level 50 will only get getting a TO's worth of boost out of it. The same amount of boost that a level 10 character would get.

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Really? So it really only makes sense to START looking for IOs AFTER you reach level 50 (so you dont have to go out and get the same IO's again) ?

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No. A level 25 IO is a little worse than a level 25 SO (for Damage, 32% vs. 33.3%). A level 30 SO is about a +1 SO, and a level 35 IO is a little better than a +2 SO. However, that IO never degrades; you slot a level 35 IO in a power, it will still give the bonus of a +2 SO when your character is 50. And the ED limits hard-cap what you can do with straight-up slotting; a level 50 Damage IO is +42.5%, so two of them starts getting hit by ED, and a third pushes you only about 2% better than three SOs. So what you get from slotting higher IOs isn't more effect, but more flexibility; instead of the third common Damage IO, you could slot an IO from a set that gave you Damage and End reduction; you'd still be ED-capped for damage, but you'd be getting a break on the power's End cost without eating up another slot. And because you wouldn't have been having to fork out for new SOs every five levels, you'd have more influence to play with for buying recipes and salvage that you don't get in drops.

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Some options for the escorts:
<ul type="square">[*] Have stealth suppression when someone is following you. (this is my preferred option, especially if there is a "stop following me" command you can give them so that they can switch to following someone else if you need the stealth. Mind you, this one also only works if the +Stealth from these IO's is suppressed when you attack, which I'm assuming it is)[/list]
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This is what got implemented. From the last patch notes on test:

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You can now pick up escort hostages while stealthed. However, everyone around the hostage will receive a stealth debuff when it is acquired. The debuff to stealth powers will remove when you exit the mission.

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Note carefully that the debuff is removed when you exit the mission, not when the hostage exits the mission. And a mayhem mission I did where I had both kidnap and breakout side missions suggests that the application of the debuff may be a little broken; I broke out the villain first and did the kidnap last, then went around cleaning out the last mobs, and I was getting an aggro range with Shadow Fall running that was equal to the aggro range with Shadow Fall off. So if you have missions with multiple rescues, you may have no effective Stealth by the time you pick up the last hostage. Hopefully this will be fixed if my assessment of the effects of multiple hostages' debuffs is accurate. Because I completed the kidnap after the bank robbery, I was unable to test whether exiting and reentering the mission without resetting will 'clean' the stealth debuff, or whether it's persistent.

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On the Cryptic Website, in their "In Development" section about future games, they have a concept picture of what I think would be a GREAT epic boss or something like Hami. It is the first pic, where it looks like a jungle and it is just a Giant, ancient, monster-thing with a big club. That would be cool.
But of course, Hami is fine now, especially since they plan on fixing it, and I am happy with that. But we can dream....

Click on the square of pictures to open picture viewer and see monster I am talking about

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Instead of waiting for the animation to cycle around, why not just go to the development section and look at the bigger picture of the figure? Definitely looks Central American in design; it's carrying a macahuitl, and looks as if it might be derived from Quetzalcoatl in his role as the god of death.

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I only used the missions a few times - not necesarily because I couldn't find a villain to team with (which was the case ALL too many times) but because the costume options are limited by the legs and bodies chosen. While I have one character who really should have gotten all the badges and such, I didn't bother with half the rewards for her because she's got Monsterous legs.

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Or, as I discovered only after doing the full set of missions on about ten characters, that the one costume piece I was primarily interested in -- the laurels -- wasn't available with any of the head settings on all but two of my characters, both of whom had the same head style.

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Knowledge is power!

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Hmm, perhaps you could pass along that message to the devs, so they can empower us with knowledge about the hard numbers behind the game?

Or maybe they're deliberately keeping the knowledge all to themselves so they don't have to share the power...

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No, no... they're protecting you. You see, if they give you information about the underpinnings of the game, you'll acquire knowledge... and knowledge is power... and power corrupts... and corruption is a crime... and crime doesn't pay... so, you see, if the devs give you the hard numbers behind the game, you'll go broke.

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I believe it's been confirmed that both his boots and gloves are inventable costume pieces

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The feet are Invented. The arms are off-the-shelf and available in the Costume Creator today.

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We can rebuild him... we have the technology. We can make him better... stronger... faster... but we can't make him more intelligent.

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I like this idea, needs fleshing out a bit the the basics are sound, send it off to Statesman and Positron!

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A lot of ideas come from players. I believe Statesman said ED (Although many disliked it) was created by a player. Ironically, there is a post dating April 2005 Or March 2005 by Pilcrow that is very similar to the idea of ED. Wonder if that was it?

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There were a fair number of posts suggesting some sort of scaling mechanism for enhancements, where the bonus for subsequent enhancements of the same type would decrease. IIRC, virtually all of them were set up so that a power six-slotted with one enhancement type would have the same bonus that it did pre-ED, with the enhancement effect being higher than normal for the first enhancements of a type and sliding off until the sixth one gave the lowest benefit. I don't recall ever seeing a post advocating a mechanic for reduced effect where the fourth and subsequent SOs of a type in a power would be virtually useless.

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Ill comment on the Clockwork since..well I'm a tech head.

Tesla Prince/knight/king/duke -Nikola Tesla's main claim to fame lay with his invention of the alternating current motor. Tesla believed that alternating current was vastly superior to (Edison's) direct current, but the problem was the lack of a practical motor. Alternating current is practical because of the fact that it can be altered or converted to suit a variety of situations. For example, if the voltage is made quite high, then the current necessary for a specific level of power is very low. This low current then becomes very efficient when sending electrical power over very long wires. (This is the reason why the power lines running across the countryside are at very high voltages.)

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Actually, virtually all of the technology associated with alternating current, as well as radio (after protracted legal wrangling, Tesla was finally vindicated in 1943 when the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in favor of Tesla's earlier patents -- when an engineer [Otis Pond] once said to Tesla, "Looks as if Marconi got the jump on you" regarding Marconi's radio system, Tesla replied, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents."), remote control, flourescent lights, polyphase power systems, disk-turbine rotary engines, wireless power transmission, and a host of other inventions, many of which were lost after his death.

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Dark Servant : I never got this power (my dark aren't high enough) but I got a MM friend that has it. The dark servant isn't perma. 3 recharge in it will make it almost perma with a 5-10sec wait between each summon.

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The Corruptor and Mastermind Dark Servant powers are different; the Corruptor version has a duration of 240 seconds and a recharge of 240 seconds, allowing it to be resummoned as soon as it drops; the Mastermind version has a shorter duration and a longer recharge time, if I remember the details correctly -- in a similar fashion to how the Corruptor Twilight Grasp has a much larger effect radius than the Mastermind version.

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2) There was a glitch that cause a hallway's entrance to turn black and make you be unable to see through it until you walked through the black wall.

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That glitch is still around. It's due to map tiles not synching totally. The real scary thing is that sometimes the map tile is really out of synch, causing you to fall out of the map.

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Yeah - this happened to me in a CoV map not long ago. It was pretty fun, actually. I was walking around on top of the hallway.

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In the Arachnos Base maps, one of the end rooms -- the one with an elevated platform inset high into the left wall as you enter the room (for those of you who did the Wretch arc from Seer Marino, it's the end room where you find Ghost Widow) -- has a gap in the back of this alcove. There is a group of pipes that go down through a hole in the floor mesh, and on the right side of the pipes, the gap in the floor mesh is large enough for you to get through and escape to the outside of the map; if you have Flight, you can follow the hallways back toward the entrance/elevators and see what the structures you can see through the walls from the inside actually look like.

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-Both the Arenas and Universities had construction sites at their present locations during the issue before they were finished being built. The workers would say funny stuff when you got near them.

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Even more amusing, late in the run-up to the debut of the Arenas, the contruction sites got paved over with concrete -- but if you wandered around the paved areas, you could still hear the conversations of the construction workers beneath the concrete, who, since there were no openings into the understructure, were presumably trapped there.

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Did you know..
Tesla Cage used to be a Sleep?

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The Tesla Cage that the Clockwork Tesla Princes will use on you is still a sleep.

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I am inclined to agreew ith your assesment James. Bases just dn't give me capacbilities I didn;t already have. If they get this whole CoP thing going and it's now important to ahve a functional base in order to ahve Items of Power (which are actually uesful, unlike tekleporter and resurection circles and such) then that will be a big step. If they get raids working then (for groups taht care about PvP) that will be quite helpful also.

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An empowerment station is a fairly cheap addition to a base that lets you turn basic salvage into hour-long buffs -- healing, attack rate, resistance to individual mez effects, and the like -- that you can't readily obtain any other way.

All of these posts made me go back and read Jabberwocky in Toontown...

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I GOT MINE!

and the code worked fine

http://www.so-there.net/uploader/files/1/gve1.jpg
http://www.so-there.net/uploader/files/1/gve2.jpg
http://www.so-there.net/uploader/files/1/gve3.jpg

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And they've jerk hacked the map. Look at the third image. Look at the old city zone setup on vidiotmaps. Notice something missing? On the new map, there's an 'X' with 'Hamidon sighting here', but there's no room to put the Hive in its relation to Eden without a lot of shuffling. All of the other zone gates are straightforward tunnels to the next zone, but the link between Eden and the Hive has to either loop way out of line -- based on the other zone connections, the gate on the west side of Eden should go straight into southeastern Faultline -- or go under Faultline to pop up on the far side, which doesn't make sense from the position of the Hamidon sighting mark and the fact that the tunnel would be going under a reservoir. Could this be an indication that the Hive and the Hamidon are going away in the future, with Hamidon raids being replaced by the Statesman SF?

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So, does anyone know what we receive by buying the code to update our game? Badge names? Description of costumes? ???

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The full description (with pictures) is here, but the text is:

Jump Jet Prestige Power -- High velocity jump jet launches Heroes and Villains to great heights and complements all other travel powers.

“Pocket D” VIP Card Teleport Power -- The Pocket D night club provides a central location where Heroes and Villains can co-exist in peace and join in celebration. This exclusive VIP card allows Heroes and Villains to teleport into the newly constructed Gold Club VIP section of Pocket D from anywhere in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles.

The exclusive Heroic-themed Justice costume pieces, and the Villainous-themed Sinister costume pieces provide even more options for player customization and role playing.

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That, or the 5th Column are outright taking the Council back over. That would be a heck of a turnaround, albeit not an unwelcome one. The Council is painfully lame.

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Yes, no more COBRA wannabes.

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The whole '5th Column Subversion' understory was, I thought, underimplemented. The period when we saw the 5th Column and Council fighting it out in the streets was way too short; I can't see how the people behing the takeover could have swung enough of the rank and file to roll over the rest that quickly; I would have enjoyed it more if it had gone in a progression -- first you see some of the Council as street spawns and in a few of the 5th Column bases you get sent to in missions, then the firefight between the Council and the 5th Column holdouts starts and spreads across zones, trickling off over several weeks, ending with occasional street spawns of Council chasing 5th Column, or sniping them from rooftops. Meanwhile, the 5th Column bases become filled with Council, first with the old 5th Column 'branding', then with the Council logo oversprayed (i.e., swap the 5th Column banners for Council ones, spray the Council logo over the 5th Column logo on crates and doors, etc.), then the takeover completes and the Council signage is everywhere.

The rationale behind this is that, while the Council may have been ready to instigate the coup, changing all the signage would be too much of a complication to happen as soon as the coup starts -- you have to figure that someone is going to get suspicious when the barricade doors in all the bases get repainted a different color with a new logo, or that all their supply crates are being painted with a different logo before being shipped out. It's not reasonable for there to be a flag day where everything in the 5th Column bases suddenly transforms into Council gear.

Having Reichsman escape, gather the remnants of the 5th Column, and take it back from the Council provides an opportunity to do it better -- heroes and villains start seeing missions from contacts and the newspaper/police band that send the player into a Council base, but it's 5th Column in the base (still with all the Council logos, possibly with the exception of the banners yanked down. Running firefights as occasional 5th Column groups attack spawns of Council on the streets (probably abortively in the Rogue Isles as Arachnos steps up its presence to shoot them both down to keep order, spreading into open firefights between the two groups, ending with the Council bases back under 5th Column control, changing symbology back over time to the 5th Column logos. Entirely new missions where the heroes and villains get sent into Council and 5th Column bases to do various things, some of them ending with the post-mission dialog with the contact saying that they discovered that the information leading to the mission was planted by the other group, in order that the hero/villain attack the base to inconvenience the other side. Large battles between the 5th Column and Council on Striga, possibly making it a joint hero/villain cooperative zone against both the Council and the 5th Column...

Something I noticed in Positron's letter was that, in Issue 9, heroes will be getting Statesman's Strike Force, described as the hero equivalent of the Lord Recluse Strike Force. Unless something is being done with the Hamidon, that will be giving heroes two ways of earning combination enhancements, one of which is straightforward and formulaic, while villains will have one that still requires a carefully-tailored team to have a decent success rate (and I've seen the postings about 'non-optimal' teams completing the LRSF; doing it once, or even twice, is not statistically significant). Throwing the balance the other way, or will there be additional options for villains not covered in his letter? I'd like to believe the latter, but experience with prior announcements has taught me to view then with a jaundiced eye...

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It seems to me stealthing a mission for glowies is no different than getting mission xp from contacts that tell you talk to other contacts or to patrol areas in a city (clicking on phone booths, etc). These types of missions are usually minimum risk to the player too. I guess they're gonna nerf those missions as well?

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They already are nerfed compared to the regular missions. On all of the 'Go talk to the (PvP Zone) Liaison' missions and similar non-combative missions, the XP that my character has gotten has been significantly less than what their normal mission bonus is.

Part of the problem with Statesman's "Risk vs. Reward" reasoning behind implementing concealment suppression is the fact that, as characters go up in level, the amount of XP they get from the mission bonus rises faster than the XP they get from defeating mobs. For example, my level 6 Brute was getting a mission bonus about equal to the XP from four white minions. My level 40 Mastermind is getting a mission bonus equal to more than twenty white minions. The higher level your character is, the more incentive there is to pick missions where all you have to do to complete the mission is to race stealthily to the end and defeat the spawn there, investing the minimum amount of time necessary to get the mission bonus, then dash to the next one. As long as a character can make more XP by rushing to the next 'Defeat BOSS_NAME and his guards' or 'Steal OBJECT from the VILLAIN_GROUP' mission than by staying in the mission to defeat more than the one spawn at the end, then you're going to continue to see people using concealment powers to avoid having to fight their way to the back of the mission.

Rather than supressing concealment powers, I think a more elegant solution would be to have a random chance that one or two mobs within each spawn are given a Perception bonus, offsetting the aggro radius decrease from concealment powers, making it harder for characters to sleaze their way to the end of a mission without aggroing several spawns. Another option might be an exit bonus for a mission if it is cleared. Another might be to lock all of the mission-objective glowies, so that you have the choice between attacking the container holding the objective to break it open, or to go through the mission defeating mobs to find the one that has the key to the container which will let you open it without breaking it open and alerting everyone in the room. Or change the way 'Steal X' missions work and require that the person who took the object exit from the entrance door of the mission -- but the group you took it from has a tracer on the item, with an ambush heading for the tracer, rather than the 'run to where the character was when the ambush triggered, then stand around' effect I see in missions now.

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States said that there would be four ATs for CoV. So unless that's changed then I say The Facemaker (great name!) and killer mimes are true.

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Lord Recluse said that one of the statements is not true. We know that the first one is true. However, if both of the remaining statements are false, then LR's statement is still true; one of the statements is, in fact, not true. He did not, however, state that only one of the statements was not true...

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I thought the reset trick didnt work for these since they are timed?

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You can reset a timed mission just like any other; however, it's not going to reset the timer, so you've only got whatever limit the timer sets to run through the mission however many times you can.

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ok,

does the gangsta-**sideways**-holding-pistol shooting position bother anyone? (yea I shoot RL )

yech,

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Well, you have to realize that they're using custom weapons with the HoMeBoY ·Nyte-Sytes·.

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Yeah, Since Issue 2, Scrapper's main problem is GETTING dev attention.

Don't worry regen scrappers.

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Are you kidding? Some poor regen scrapper accidentaly taunted the devs, and the entire secondary hasn't been able to lose dev agro for the last handful of issues.

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The problem with Regen as a secondary is that the manner in which it was implemented inherently doesn't scale; ignoring the deaths from taking a ton of damage in a single alpha strike, healing quickly as a defense breaks down to two categories: if you regen faster than you're taking damage, you look godlike, and if you take damage faster than you regen, you're dead if you can't drop opponents quick enough to move into the other category. Everything the devs have done to the powerset has just run the breakpoint back and forth, and there's a very fine line between survival and faceplanting (and it's far too easy to go quickly from 'fine' to 'debt' if you judge things wrong).

If you took Instant Healing and changed it so that it made each hit act like illusory damage -- i.e., for each hit you take, a second or two after the hit you 'instantly healed' part of the damage, then what you'd have would be a defense that would scale the same way that Resistance and Defense did, and could be balanced against them -- 40% Resistance, 40% Defense, and 40% Instant Healing would all, over time, protect a character from 40% of the incoming damage. Unfortunately, doing a rework this fundamental to a powerset seems to be more than what the devs are willing to do, since it would entail rebalancing the other powers in the set as well.

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Along with our Patron Powers, comes missions and probably other stuff we have no idea of yet. So respecing wouldn't work. I'm assuming lvl 40-50 missions and story arcs would be mostly (if not all) about our Patron. That's most likely the reason why respeccing isn't allowed at the moment.

If they allowed it the easy way, they'd reset your toon back to 40 so you can choose your Patron again and start THAT arc.

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That would be, in my opinion, the most equitable way to do it. Give the 41-50 respec mission the additional option of allowing you to 'reset' your character, rolling them back to level 40, either keeping the powers/slots up to 40 as they were or doing a full respec topping off with the three slots you get at 40. Picking a different patron at the cost of all your post-40 progress seems to me to be a fair balance between "permanent" and "patron-of-the-month club".

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I think how Posi was saying it was that the Patron pools are tied to content thus not making it easy to just switch pools/content. But the content in these pools arent required but they are still tied to the pools in case you did (and I doubt people will just skip arc's because I know the 40-50 arcs will have some memorable things, just like CoH had)

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That's certainly one way to read it. As it stands, we don't know if the patron unlocks a power pool AND optional missions, or if the patron gives missions and the missions unlock the powers, or what.

When Posi said you don't have to do any of the patron content, he was answering a guy who said his character would never, ever take a patron. Not doing the content sounds to me like skipping the whole deal, powers, missions and all. But I could well be wrong.

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There's also the question of whether the patron arcs and patron-specific content is open only to characters who picked that patron -- if not, then you can still 'experience' all the patron content without having picked a patron by grouping with someone who was doing patron-specific missions; if it is restricted, however, then it will be jerking hugely at established play groups, by forcing people to team up only with other flunkies for their patron, essentially gutting one of the reasons for the existence of VGs (unless everyone in the VG picks the same patron, which guts choice in character development). For all that I believe that the devs have made a number of bad decisions about the direction of CoX, I don't think that they'd institute content that prevented you from playing with your friends -- that would be a PR debacle. So I expect that, while you may be locking yourself into patron-specific content for your missions, you're not going to be prevented from participating in someone else's patron-specific content for a different patron.