srmalloy

Or perhaps Mace, if the devs would give us 'purse on a strap' as a weapon. "Take that, you hooligan!" *WHAP*

Depends on what the red arrow is pointing at.

Granite Armor has no customization because it has no visible power effects to customize. Now, I realize that there are a lot of you reading this and calling fewmets on that statement, because everyone can see when a character turns on Granite Armor. However, the statement is correct, albeit incomplete.

Granite Armor does not have a visible power effect the way other powers do -- creating a glow or shape around the character. Granite Armor works the same way that a costume code or a Halloween costume does -- the Granite Armor character model replaces your character's model completely. And being a completely separate character model, all of its characteristics are inherently baked into it -- there's nothing to customize. In order to make Granite Armor customizable, the devs are going to have to change the fundamental mechanism of how this power works visually.

Which isn't to say that it can't be done. Look at Animated Stone -- there are different character models for that depending on whether you want a rocky or crystalline pet. But the fact remains that it's going to be a lot more work to make Granite Armor customizable than it was to make other powers customizable, because the character's appearance isn't hooked to the power; it's buried in the game's rendering.

Ahhh -- a member of the American Non Sequitur Society ("We may not make sense, but we do like pizza").

Except for Willy Wheeler. For him there should be one more contact with him, where you have a sort of 'morality choice' between finking him to Arachnos and getting a reward for turning him over, after which he's hauled away and disappears from the game for you a la the goldside contacts (a lovely opportunity for a cutscene there), or blackmailing him and getting some minor one-shot or ongoing reward for not turning him in -- for example, a medium inspiration once per day or a tailor ticket for a costume change or a couple of invention discount coupons.

Unfortunately, for me it seems as if that particular point is exactly where the boards decide I'm not logged in, so I'm SoL for the post content.

You don't have as much recharge as you think. The Law of Fives states that you're wasting one of your LotG +Rech enhancements:

Not only that, there's a specific citation from Castle on the use of LotG +Rech enhancements:

Or costume sets to make less body-conforming suits of powered armor:

However, there are very few reactors in the Midwest that would, even with a seismic event like the New Madrid quakes of 1811/1812, be inundated by a tsunami.

Third image still isn't loading; the URL for the image is malformed, and so is the link:

http://www.cityofheroes.com.httpd.webdev03.austin.ncwest. ncsoft.corp/en/global/includes/images/Issues/issue-21/Screenshots/carnival_of_light3.jpg

Reminds me of the game mechanics for "Tales from the Floating Vagabond", where the longest weapon range was 'See that dot?'...

If you have a spare power slot to drop it into, you can get a fair bit of use out of Ignite as a channeling and obstruction tool -- drop it in a doorway to block it, or to force mobs to move in a particular direction -- but it's a really situational thing.

Go fly through Dark Astoria with an Ice/* Tanker with all the toggles running; it's like Snowblind City.

Acurracy is our watchword; we never make misteaks.

Everyone but the person who is to become the team leader disconnects, waits two or three minutes to make sure that everyone has gotten logged out, then log back in. A bit of a brute-force solution, but it works.

Oh, lord... You could make a number of silly Plant Control characters just using the puns from P.D.Q. Bach's grand oratorio, "The Seasonings" (S. 1/2tsp) with lines like "Bide thy thyme", "...the march of thyme beware", "If you've got the money, honey, I've got the thyme", "Have you any onions... and have you savory?" "Onions have I... But savory have I none." "Then thou art an unsavory rapscallion!"

The times I've run Keyes and had my character fail to make it back to the towers before dying again to the nuke pulse put me strongly in mind of Jack Emmert's flat statement that challenge and enjoyment comes from throwing yourself at the big boss again and again and again, getting flattened each time, until you finally find the one thing you can do in just the right combination of conditions that will work against him, and that's how he wanted CoH to work for the AV fights.

I've had a running problem for months with the game starting up and none of the bars -- Health, End, Experience, Domination, Fury -- showing anything but the little flash at the end when they move. And /initgraphics or /unloadgraphics doesn't reload them with the rest of the graphics data; the only way to get them back is to exit the game and reload it... again and again, as many times as it takes to get the bars to show up.

You do realize that three of the four examples you give are painted, not bare metal, and the only one that is bare metal is cast iron, which has had no finishing applied beyond having the molding sand scrubbed off? Painted surfaces are going to have significantly-different reflective properties than bare-metal surfaces.

I don't think the art team is fixated on shiny and ornate costume pieces so much as the advances in rendering technology is allowing them to add the costume pieces that they couldn't do in the past because the rendering engine wouldn't support it. Look back at the costume pieces that were available when CoH released; you had 'Metallic' and 'Medieval Armor', and that was pretty much it for 'shiny'. All of the other metal pieces were dull and flat, sometimes -- as with the 'steampunk' pieces, to such a degree that they soak up any color you try to apply to them.

Consider also that a character's costume is supposed to be iconic; which hero presents a more compelling figure -- the one who is clad in polished, gleaming armor, or the one that looks as if he barely survived his last fight, with dents and scrapes and rips and tears all over? It's one of the tropes of the superhero genre that damage to your costume disappears when it's no longer significant to the plot.

I expect that, once the art department has gotten over the first flush of 'look what we can do now', they'll go back and address some of the other issues people have raised about the costume items. In the meantime, if you don't like them, don't use them.

See what happens when you get the Rogaine confused with body lotion?

Not entirely true; it depends a lot more on the social standing of the person the armor belongs to. The common soldiers would have basic utilitarian armor, perhaps issued from their lord's armory when the troops were to take the field, where the care would consist of periodically rolling them in barrels of sand to remove any rust that was forming. Get up to the nobility, and you would likely see someone having a set of 'parade' armor that, while it may have been fully as proof as their regular armor, wasn't primarily intended to be fought in, and was often chased or enameled or gilded on top of being kept polished, all to present a more impressive image of the noble. The higher-ranking the noble, the more important it was for them to be seen to be noble (and sumptuary laws might be used to preserve social distinctions by restricting what kinds of clothing and armor someone could wear, to prevent them from being mistaken as someone of a higher social class).

So you might have a polished but still dark utilitarian armor, like that of Count Galleazzo da Arco from 1445, contrasting with the highly polished and reflective armor parade of Emperor Maximilian I in 1490 (when he was still Archduke, and the ornately enameled parade armor of Prince Nikolaus IV ('The Black') from 1555:


And could you please find someone to look at the code for the forums to find out why I can go to the root forum page, be welcomed by name, click on the 'City Life' forum, be told there that the forum doesn't know who I am and I have to log in, doing so, then opening a forum message, clicking on a 'Quote' button to open a reply editor, then when I click on 'Submit Reply' be told again that the forum doesn't know me from Adam's off ox, and when I sign in again it throws everything out the window and shows me a black page with no content... three times... all in the space of five minutes?

I believe that the elements of Hamidon were made simplistic in order to reduce the rendering load with all the powers going off, but I think that they've remained simplistic too long; mitochondria have a visible internal structure that I believe could be added to make them more visually complex:
Similarly, the nucleus is not an undifferentiated body. Take the nuclear speckles, for example. Preserving the existing Hamidon process, when he drops to a pop point, a set of speckles could migrate out of the nucleus and begin to grow rapidly, differentiating into the mitochondria as they moved to their positions around the nucleus. The central nucleolus could have a coiled mass of chromosomes. And, resurrecting something from the very first version of the Hami raid, when Hami is taken down, he spawns a number of Hamidon Buds, which are miniature copies of Hamidon that ooze away from the central spot and disappear into the ground unless defeated first.