Live Patch Notes - 5/12/10

Because it's most recognisable, but my personal favourite is: She wants to dance with me.

Or The latest single: Lights Out

Yeah. GR is either going to revitalize CoH or drive it into the ground.

I guarantee you, the weakened Hamidon encounter is not responsible for the 25 minute LGTF runs.. The culprits are the assembling the team to the door once Penelope has been freed in the first mission, and auto-failing the third mission via getting Infernia and Glacia killed.

The latter I have never fully agreed with, and is an exploit that really needs to be looked at.

Well, since they display the animations and graphic effects from the Invulnerability powerset, that seems fine. Would you expect 3 stacked holds to mez a tank?

HAhAHAHHAhAhahAH! *inhale* AAAAAAAhhAHhAHHAhAhAHHAhAhaha! *wipes tears from eyes* Whoo boy, I needed the laugh, thanks!

Seconded! *flail!* I filed it as a bug report when i17 dropped, thinking that the enhancement screen had inherited its text size from my window scale. (I have the UI scaled to 65%, and then some specific windows scaled back up to 80 or 100.) But then when I heard other people having the issue, I knew it couldn't just be the UI scale, since not many people scale it down like that.

There's also an issue (has been for a LONG time) where if you scale your UI down (to 65% definitely, but possibly other numbers), the power tray has a tendency to migrate upwards when you zone. Not every single time, but often enough that I find myself yanking my tray back down a couple times per hour.

Also: face out of the cave, jump up and to the right. Works every time for me and pretty much everyone else I've told.

As far as I know the reward is a badge?

..but on a Lieutenant class?

Trust me, a group of Gardvords ignoring multiple holds is NOT fun.

this one is fairly recognisabibble as well

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQPJOSbL9VY&feature=fvw

Heh... Have you try to save them on PuGs? It will be much harder to save them on most of the teams than get them killed

And how are you going to run anything on Virtue?

edit: Last I heard it was depressed.

Totally agreement here.

Speed runs happen not because a particular tough foe is too easy, but because the objectives of a mission are too easily bypassed.

As long as we can hop to the end of a huge map to take out the sole objective, then that will be done. It's the difference of a 30 minute map v. a 5 minute map. Multiply that by 5 missions and you get a huge discrepancy of the 'intended' challenge and time (over 2 hours) and the speed version (under half an hour).

Quite frankly, Castle, it's not your job on your own to slow down speed runs by buffing foes. That's not the problem. My experience with LGTFs has all been PuGs, and even those that speed run are already slowed down by the Weakened Hamidon. That's already the speed bump of this TF. I've seen team wipes on this mission from teams that tear through all the other missions.

Get together with the game designers to change the objectives that are being bypassed:

1. Don't let Penny be Assembled to the door.
2. Don't let the deaths of escorts end the mission without penalty.
3. Don't let a huge map be bypassed to get to the Honoree... require doors to be unlocked along the way.

That's how you stop the speed runs. Not by making a foe so buffed that many teams can't even complete it.

Arc: Revenant Hero Project
Contact: Gordon Stacy
Mission: Go to Brickstown and take down some Crey cronies - 50 Crey.

IIRC hunts like this give reduced xp at the end of the mission. I got xp for defeats of some toons (most were too grey though) but no end of mission xp.

It will mostly penalize PuGs, teams who were able to easily speed throug LGTF still will be able to handle this mission just fine.

Edit: I think, the best will be approach taken for RSF, where you just release hostage without escorting...

I see a third option: He fixes it because that's his job, and then puts the creeps, whiners and jerks on ignore.

I'm fine with whatever. I just want Virtue back up so I can edit my base. Yes, you are a glorious beacon of light. Embrace your destiny.

name calling solves what?

edit: that's a very odd business practice to ignore paying customers. What happens to a company when they do that?

So let me get this straight: If my team does the LGTF and does NOT have a hero that has a Hold power (i.e. a Controller), then the whole TF is a failure???

This is the problem with CoH. Content that can only be completed if you have the right archetype along for the ride. That is hardly what I call Game Balance considering that not every team is made up of one of each archetype.

Well, we can all wait until the Winter event begins again and all get the hold power. So instead of "Let's go get some nukes and Shivs", you'll hear "time to run LGTF, but first... Snaptooth!"

No, that's not possible.

First of all, to the best of my knowledge Mitos in the LGTF are only weakened by being a lower rank than the ones in the zones. They otherwise have exactly precisely the same powers (the nucleus is a different story). That lower rank (they are basically Lts in the mission, but a special mito class in the zones) does alter the strength of powers like attacks, but the attacks themselves are the same power. So whatever the design intent of the "weakened Hamidon" was, it was implemented as a redesigned nucleus and a scaled down set of the same mitos.

This means the implementation intent of all the mez protection powers must be the same for both the standard and the weakened mitos, because they are the same thing. That's probably the real source of the problem: if the design intent was for the weakened hamidon to require a much lower level of mez magnitude than the trial version, they should have made two entirely different mitos. As it is, they are currently linked together.

My guess is that when the encounter was designed, the Healing Mito was originally set to have mag 30 protection to mez (it still does for things like sleep and stun). And then they decided at some point to increase the hold protection from 30 to 50. At that point a sign error was introduced.

Something worth mentioning is that protection powers are actually *negative*. When you run a protection power, it actually in a sense *debuffs* your mez attributes. If you have mag 10 hold protection, the power is actually *reducing* your hold by 10, or applying a -10 to hold. The meaning of the mez attributes is that if they are greater than zero, you're in that mez state. So negative is good, positive is bad. My guess is that at some point someone accidentally adjusted the hold protection by typing a "50" in there when they should have typed "-50."

This cannot possibly be by design, because it almost never makes any sense for something to hold itself unless something else is supposed to come along and free it eventually. Even if you wanted something to hold itself as a weird containment buff for controllers, there's no reason to apply a mag fifty hold to yourself, because there's no difference between applying mag 10 and mag 50 to yourself, again unless you're trying to overcome someone else's protection buff (and nothing I'm aware of can come along and buff Hamidon's mez protection). And if I was worried about that, I would apply mag 9999, not 50.

There is just no way that was done deliberately in this case. They'd be doing it to both versions of Hamidon, and there's no good reason to do it at all.

Dear Castle,

The new rule is more than welcomed in Hami-raids.

This is a completely ridiculous change for a TF of eight. Please change it back.

Thank you.

I'm pretty sure this is a mistake and will be corrected. And as an aside, I have a Blaster with four single target holds and can stack them to effectively get between mag 12 and 24 on a single target. There are plenty of Defender holds too. In fact I think some Scrappers and Tanks have access to a hold or two too.. so just "requiring a hold" does not necessarily mean that you need a Controller. (Requiring Mag50 hold pretty much requires a Controller, or several, but again I think this is a mistake and will be corrected.)

First, you're right and name-calling doesn't actually solve anything. I do, however, feel that a lot of people in this thread are blowing the whole thing *way* out of proportion. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but .. I mean, have you been reading the thread?
Second, Castle doesn't represent "The [whole] Company", and if ignoring people who provide no useful input (and instead only wank) lets him get his job done in a more efficient manner, I don't see anything wrong with that. He probably doesn't actually put anyone on ignore (probably most of the Devs don't), but I would be surprised if he didn't start skimming past certain people. Because again, I can't read this thread without think "WAAAANNNNKKKKK". Not as bad as on other forums to be sure, but still, wankery it is.