Goliath Bird Eater

There is that possibility also.

Stupid question, but did you remember to put @ in front of the global handle? Also, did any of your characters receive the email? If you're sending to your own global, all your characters, including the character you sent it from, will receive the e-mail (though only characters of the same faction as the sender can claim any attachments).

I'm not trying to be snarky, but this really isn't anywhere near a helpful amount of information concerning your computer configuration. Would you mind at least posting the following:

CPU
Amount of RAM
Video card/integrated graphics chipset, and installed driver version
Operating system

This way, someone might be able to at least start to point you in the right direction of what could be causing the problem. Certainly, it's better than "I17 sucks! "

At creation, if you decide to give your character the Bane/Crab armor instead of the Huntsman armor, they're gonna have the Bane backpack. You can't give them the Crab backpack unless you decide to go the Crab route at level 24.

And yes, while your first costume slot is devoted to your Arachnos uniform, your can alter it at a tailor.

Did you click on him, or just run past?

Hmm ... during beta, every member of the team got a doppelganger.

They show up in all the new hero and villain arcs, as well as the first (if I remember right) part of the new Posi TF.

Yeah. The clones don't copy *YOUR* powers exactly. Instead, they use the AE "Custom Critter" versions of powersets. This means, in addition to having powers in a set you may or may not personally have, they sometimes have powers that aren't even available to players with those sets.

"Choke hard" isn't quite the right phrase. Certainly, Crabs - who are designed to be medium-range, AoE-based fighters - handle large groups of lower-tier enemies better than they do one or two higher-tier enemies. But by NO means are they incapable of handling EBs. My main character is proof of that, and I was taking out EBs with him even before I really got going with major IO slotting. You do have to play it smart sometimes, which is where I think many fail. when I fight EBs, there are powers that are part of my standard attack chain that I never use, and there are other powers that I use differently when I fight an EB. And while I don't always win on the first try (I usually do, though), I haven't come across an EB yet that I can't eventually defeat.

First mistake: Assuming something didn't happen due to the developers being lazy. That assumption alone makes it not worth continuing any sort of dialogue with you. But I'm in a good mood thanks to I17, so I'll humor you.

Not only did I beta test the VEATs, but I focused on testing Crab Spiders. Having spoken with Back Alley Brawler, JLove, and a few others quite often during that time, I can tell you that the backpack was a major source of frustration. In fact, it took quite a bit of closed beta just to get it working right -- where it would show up at all; where it could be customizable; where the textures would be properly aligned; where all the attacks utilizing it would properly emanate from it; etc. And the fact that it doesn't vanish if you make a Bane or huntsman build is an unfortunate necessity, brought about by the technical difficulties that arose in trying to get it to work correctly for player characters, and in particular dual-build Spiders.

Could it be fixed now? Don't know; there are certainly more programmers on staff now than there were when the VEATs were introduced. However, right now, everyone is busy - big shock, I know - with the BIG stuff (i.e., Going Rogue and the next few issues beyond that). And if it even were possible to fix the Crab backpack now, it likely isn't a high enough priority to warrant having time and manpower devoted to fixing it anytime in the near future. So as much as it would be a welcome change, you're just gonna have to do what the rest of us have done who've had VEATs since they first became available: live with it.

Apologies to Dark_Inferno for hijacking their thread.

Bill, Mercy causing terrible performance isn't driver-related. It's just how the zone was constructed, and how that construction interacts with Ultra Mode. It's the only zone redside where my FPS stays below 30 (and frequently, below 20), and it's done that for the entirety of beta.