srmalloy

I don't think it's an afterimage per se; I've noticed that some of the NPC mobs get absurdly-outsized magma piles when the power is used on them -- Headman Gunmen seem to be notorious for this, the magma pile appearing two to three times the height of the mob and partially translucent. I think there's something wrong with one of the non-visible geometry hulls for them. Fake Nemesis will also do it:

Yes, but if they have a kaiju battle, it's going to leave most of Paragon City in ruins afterward...

It would be interesting if, with I21, instead of just losing Galaxy City to a tutorial zone, we got the Galaxy City tutorial zone and a mid- to high-level Galaxy City zone with more of the new Shivans and new threats.

I was curious, so I checked. Of the three styles of scuta used by Roman soldiers, the round scutum is immediately available to beginning characters, the oval scutum isn't available at all (although you can sort of handwave it with the Spartan shields if you're not too picky), and the rectangular scutum appears only as 'Roman 2' with a fixed decoration, although 'Roman 4' is loosely similar. It's amusing that so few of the 'Roman' shields were actually used by the Romans.

No more /facepalm than three minutes with four different people saying "Pull Nightstar back to the middle of the courts" as the fight against her remains fixed at the northeast corner of the courts on a BAF...

Not to mention designing the pivotal character(s) you have to defeat so that they're functionally immune to debuffs and controls, so the only thing that is effective against them is a massive influx of damage, handicapping characters that rely on that debuff or control instead of outright damage.

Just as an observation, I've discovered that a character with ranged single-target attacks and a Stealth power can -- as long as you're careful around the Seers, who have enhanced perception, hang up at ceiling level and shoot the crates or containment chambers without drawing aggro. It's kind of funny to be hovering up at the ceiling of the warehouse throwing bolts of fire down onto a crate while all the Praetorians standing around it ignore the fire bolts, as if it's normal to have fire coming down from the ceiling to damage something you're guarding. There must be something in the Enriche...

Since they brought back the 5th Column, getting the 20 Council in Boomtown has become a challenge again -- not because Council in Boomtown are hard for a character running Numina's TF to defeat, but because you can't find spawns of just Council or just 5th Column, and the mixed spawns start whacking each other before you get within snipe range, much less AoE or melee range; it's hard to get in range fast enough to do enough damage to get credit for them.

This, and the way the random damage pulses looks to encourage the same "mass up under the healing umbrella" pseudo-tactic that was the staple of the original version of the Hamidon raids.

In a similar vein, would it be possible to either add a vendor to Pocket D to whom you can sell enhancements, or modify the bartenders so that they'll buy them? It would be better thematically if they, like Ghost Falcon, bought them at the 'wrong store' prices, because they would be a shortcut to allow players in a trial league that was staging from there to dump enhancements without having to run off to another zone, and not giving us best price would be what we'd be paying for the convenience.

Actually, two of my characters are from Soviet Praetoria -- Deva Molniya (Дева Молния), an Elec/Elec Dominator, and Obmorozheniye (Обморожение), an Ice/Ice Dominator. Stretching the lore of the world a little to get a more unique character...

Deva Molniya's background: Obmorozheniye's background: There's more background behind each of the characters, but that's what appears in their online information.

For all that it had issues with getting stuck through the MM's body, I preferred the pulse rifle from the CoV beta -- what's now the "Mk. II Mercenary Assault Weapon" for Assault Rifle.

The 'lasers out of my bagpipes' comment, though, did give me a bit of amusement picturing the possible animations for Bagpipes as a custom weapon option for the Sonic powersets, and how fast you'd drive players away if you made the sounds match the weapon...

When I ran this during the one-day open beta, it became really clear to me that it was very strongly encouraging the old first-version Hami raid tactic of a mass of characters moving around the map under an autofire healing umbrella. But then you have the alpha/beta effects to force players to spread out, defeating that.

It would still be nice for ex-Praetorian characters who go back to Praetoria to have your old contacts at least recognize you, rather than what amounts to your getting written completely out of Praetorian history.

Judging from your blanket condemnation of their manufacture, I hazard that you haven't handled a "proper medieval broadsword", either; their construction is a great deal more sophisticated than you describe. Broadswords were not, properly, cutting weapons; they focused the energy of the swing into a very small area, in the same way that an axe does not have to be particularly sharp to chop wood.

It does not require "a lot of force"; it requires a concentration of force. This is done either with a light but fast-moving object focusing its impact on a very small area (i.e., an arrow), or a heavier and slower-moving object focusing its impact on a small area (i.e., a sword or axe). Full plate armor was actually very rare up until the end of the medieval period; soldiers and knights would wear mail, with plate covering the joints and other more vulnerable areas.

Fewmets. It's perfectly feasible to wield a broadsword one-handed; how else is a knight with his shield on his left arm going to wield his sword?

I'll add a second -- Back when "City of Hero" was released to the Asian market with a Korean version, there was a standalone application that was just the costume creator -- and at several Comic-Cons, I've seen NCSoft with a standalone costume creator that let you run the character through several animations. Make that an iPad and Android app, with the ability to save costume/powerset files and transfer them between your computer and your mobile device, and you'd have everyone with the app out showing off one of CoX's strengths -- it's complete rejection of the "your appearance is dictated by your gear" theme that virtually every other MMO has.

This is the reason why I've finally accepted that I'm going to have to get a cellphone -- when I bought my house last year and moved, I discovered that the digital phone service my cable provider offered had changed, and was now VOIP -- which meant that, when I lost signal on my cablemodem, I discovered that I'd also lost phone service, and was unable to report the outage (an effective but underhanded way to drive down the number of service outage calls -- they lose service, they have no way to call and report it).

It also wasn't helped by his comments about changes to the Regeneration powerset -- the 'small tweak' that changed Regeneration to the point where they had to issue a freespec so that people could fix their builds under the new version, or Jack swearing up and down that Regen was grossly overpowered, because they'd run a Claws/Regen Scrapper on their internal test server and were able to take down +7 spawns for an eight-player team solo -- despite widespread claims of fewmets from the players -- and the change was rammed through and kept even after Jack came back after the change was put in place and admitted that their internal test server was bugged and didn't decrease to-hit chance and damage when attacking higher-level targets, so their 'godlike' Claws/Regen Scrapper was hitting about ten times as often for about ten times as much damage as it should have been -- but the changes were going to stand regardless, even though the reason they were made was completely bogus.

They already did that once to the post-30 XP range; are they going to go back and do it again? How easy does the post-30 range have to get before it's 'smooth'?

No; Self Destruct doesn't leave a body, so Vengeance, Fallout, and Mutation are all useless at that point.

The ones where random citizens interrupt a comment with 'Nemesis is watching you' interjections comes, IIRC, after you complete a mission where you rescue the city council who have been captured and are to be replaced with Nemesis automata duplicates.

NCSoft has been at Comic-Con for at least the last five years running; it would be far better to assume that they would be there and plan accordingly -- you can always cancel travel and hotel reservations, and a membership can always be transferred to someone else.