GuyPerfect

Ragdoll only occurs for knockback. All other hits have some kind of animation to indicate that it landed. I guess these aren't currently getting recorded?

I was able to hunt down the numbers for this.

It applies a flat-rate 8% chance per activation per target to your attacks to deal a single tick of 35.69667 Toxic damage. In its current state, it is NOT a procs-per-minute boost.

Just as reckless as ever. If you don't take melee attacks from your epic Defender sets, you're doing it wrong!

So the Retro Sci-Fi pack brings with it many new pieces using the oft-omitted glowing effect we've seen in a few places here and there over the past several months. Well, I'm quite stoked! It's given a more streamlined look to one of my characters, and I even decided to make a brand new character built around the wearable glowsticks!

In the future: we need more glowies.

Here's the dude who was using some other pieces that weren't as glowy (he's a tribute to the Nintendo Virtual Boy):



And the chick whose costume is specifically glowy:

I know this is more of a bug report (and I won't be surprised if it gets moved), but I reeeeally want to raise awareness for people purchasing the female Retro Sci-Fi shirts individually in the market:

Shirt 1

Shirt 2

This is backwards.

The shirt with the ring 'round the bottom is Shirt 1, and the one without it is Shirt 2.

I purchased them both so I'm not out 40 points, but it's going to cause a problem for somebody sooner or later.

Restarting the client seems to have convinced it to stop being stupid, so at least there's a workaround.

EDIT:
Except now they cost 250,000 Inf? Whaaaat?

Oh for crapping out loud. I log into a different character to claim some instead and it won't even let me. Did you guys run out or something?

Happened on two characters. The one on the left here purchased a bunch before it just up and quit letting me buy them.

Am I blind, or is there no way to see the individual pieces before purchasing them?

'Cause I'm not purchasing if I can't preview. 400 is a lot of points to wind up with something you don't like.

As happens from time to time, I got to thinking...

It is no secret that Toxic damage is near and dear to my heart, and I in fact have a character dedicated to it. After sampling Water Blast on the beta server, my thoughts turned to the ever-elusive Toxic powers and the character concepts surrounding them.

In essence, Toxic damage applies to anything chemical, be it molecular substances in their basic forms or organic fluids such as bile and venom. It's considered an "exotic" damage type, and it has been the rarest of them ever since its introduction. Protection from Toxic damage, with occasional exception (such as two of the Power Sets currently in development), tends to come as a byproduct of self-heal powers and only in the form of Resistance, for no power grants Toxic Defense.

Thing is, Toxic damage is so eccentric that we really don't have any good sources of it, and there's quite a genre of character concepts that can't be worked into characters due to this. That said, when designing Toxic sets, what kinds of concepts should be accommodated?

We have precedent in the game already for two general themes of Toxic powers: biological and technological.


Biological

The biological powers, let's face it, almost exclusively originate from the mouth in some form or another. Vahzilok fire projectile vomit at you. Arachnoids, Hydra and the Devoured spit... something at you. Snakes spray you with venom. And players get access to a power called Bile Spray, which is exactly as it sounds and I'm not surprised I've only seen a handful of other people ever take it.

Though it may be a niche, the spew-rific character is one we currently can't make. I'm not a super hero buff, so I can't think of any examples in the comics scene of characters who specialize in... puking on their enemies... but that's something we really can't get in the game. As much as I hate how restrictive it is, any biological Toxic Blast will wind up being a bunch of variations on the same thing: Spit, Vomit, Upchuck, Spew, Regurgitate, etc.

Having said that, if we can learn anything from Sonic Attack, a mouth-centric attack set can still be accomplished.


Technological

I think there's a lot more freedom of concept in the technological side of Toxic damage, but it unfortunately alienates the biological character concepts.

Already players have access to Toxic damage that piggybacks on otherwise non-Toxic weaponry: Dual Pistols, the Bane Spider Mace, the Widows claws, um... I guess that's about it, and two of those are melee. The one exception is Poisonous Ray, which in a way that defies all logic fires a burst of energy that is somehow poisonous. The "poisonified projectiles" concept is a bit finnicky, but there is a precedent for it.

One thing we do have, though, is Venom Grenade: a form of ordnance with a chemical payload. NPC enemies use some things like this as well, such as the Nemesis Gas blasts or the various forms of poison gas missiles like the ones used by turrets and Malta Titans. The D.U.S.T. soldiers in First Ward have a Toxic Burst that isn't all that elegant, but it's effective: they just dump a bunch of acid on you and call it a day.

Somewhere in here we've got the Hellfire attacks from Demon Summoning. The whip and a couple of the pets have a sort of flame that deals Fire and Toxic damage. This makes about as much sense to me as Poisonous Ray, but hey, it's Toxic.

While the potential for a tech-centric Toxic Blast set allows for quite a bit of variety, it will likely use a weapon of some sort regardless of what form it takes.


Meeting Half Way

A third option would be a compromise: half bio, half tech.

On the one hand, it's extremely easy to just do it wrong by giving some total mismatches like Projectile Vomit on one side and Venom Grenade on the other. Yeah, they're both technically Toxic ranged attacks, but there's no synergy or conceptual link between them. Doing it this way is sloppy.

On the other hand, doing it right is plenty difficult. What first comes to mind is Spider-Man: he has the relative strength of a spider and can crawl on walls like a spider, but he can't spin silk like a spider; he has to make that himself (I know he did it in the movies, but that's not canon). Somewhere in there is a happy medium of biology and technology, and I really think I want that in a Toxic Blast set.

Although visions of Toxic Blast have been dancing in my head for years, I've still not come up with an overall concept that I'm satisfied with to the point that I can design 9 powers for it.

How about you guys? What concepts would you want for a Toxic Blast set?

But until then, derpy derp derpity derp!

They shouldn't let this crap go live, so I'll milk it for all it's worth. (-:

I've considered the "alright" thing in the past, and what I've decided on is this: as long as "although," "almost," "altogether," "almighty" and such are words, then so is "alright." It makes no sense to disallow just that one instance of the trend while allowing all the others.

In cases where "all" actually has significance in the context, I'll say any of these as two words. "Were your answers on the exam all right?" "You'll need to get us all together if we're going to do this."

Well, that's a bit relieving, then. So instead of confounding grammatical mistakes, the real transgression there was a lack of sufficient knowledge in the words they decided to use.

Knowing this now, I would have had different jokes in the original post. Thanks for pointing it out. (-:

Hope you were expecting this. It is my civic duty. *Salute*

For the record, the text problems this time around were sparse and much less offensive than in Issue 22. I believe the writers made a point to do better than last time (read: anything differently from last time), and the writing in general is much more satisfying as a result.

I appreciate the writing, and no hard feelings for the problems that I did encounter. I'll still give you guys crap about them, though, since you gave us crap as them. (-:

Despite the language I've used below, this post is largely tongue-in-cheek... for the most part.
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A few things before I point out specific errors:

* Belladonna Vetrano's arc consistently refers to the Spirit Stalkers as Nightstalkers. Fix it.

* I have not thoroughly checked the text for the Magisterium trial. I was too busy earning The Really Hard Way. (-:<

* There were many things I "let slide" since they weren't outright incorrect. Some proper nouns were not capitalized. Some punctuation was missing. In some places, incorrect punctuation was used. I've not documented those here.
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It was pretty smooth sailing before I got to Sir Bedwyr's missions. So hey, that's, uh... three contacts of pretty good writing!



I'm trying to think of how this one happened. S and T aren't next to each other on the keyboard. Even in the Dvorak layout, there's another key between them. Perhaps the writer originally had "its" without the apostrophe (which would have been a typo in and of itself), then went back and deleted the wrong letter?

Whatever the case, is would not be wise to do this again, 'cause then I make threads like these. Seriously, what's so aversive about the concept of "maybe I should read this sentence after I write it to make sure it's correct" that you guys fail to do it every single issue?




... Absolutely incredible. Where you writers have a history of using "it's" as a possessive rather than the contraction it represents, here we have a contraction being presented instead with a possessive! And to top it off, it's not even a simple matter of an apostrophe: you outright spelled a totally different word in its place. Slow claps all around.




In a noble quest to accommodate the benefit of the doubt, I researched the word "loathe" to see if it could be used as an adjective and if, through some fluke of interpretation, this sentence might actually be grammatically correct. Nope.

And honestly, what must have been there before this easy-to-proofread mistake occurred? "The Spirit Stalkers are uncomfortable owing anyone anything"? Given the flow of the sentence, I can't place where that "are" came from.




Well, this one's just too easy. *Ahem*

You know what else is the worst of the worst? This typo that you includeded!




Alright, I'm going to give a bit of praise on this one. But just a bit: they obviously ran a spell checker. I know this because "properly" is spelled... well, properly. So they at least tried to make sure there weren't any misspellings in the text. I'll give them recognition for that.

The problem is, no dolt with three sevenths of a brain could possibly have picked the word "properly" in place of "property" on purpose. It was probably typed as "propery" or something and the spell checker caught it, so they right-clicked it, closed their eyes and picked the first suggested word that came up. They didn't even look to make sure it was the right word, let alone proofread the dodgamn sentence to see if it was conveying whether someone correctly forgot that someone else stole their family. Geezus!




You mean as they are meant to do? Or maybe as they are wanting to do, which doesn't make a lot of sense but is grammatically correct? "They are want"? What the crap? How do you do that even by accident? I am loathe to see such a pathetic error get published.

Also, what's with that stray period/full stop down there? Did it get lost? Was it so anxious trying to escape from the abomination of your writing that it got wedged between two sentences and couldn't get out? Poor little guy. We should hold a candlelight vigil in its honor.

Come to think of it, that might be a problem with the dynamic text display. What does he say if you're of heroic Alignment?




In the last mission from The Magician, there are some elevators. First you're on floor C1, then you go up to floor C3, then back down to C2. When you get there, the elevator indicates that it can go back down to C3? Wut?




Oh, even better! The next elevator takes you up from C2 to... C2.

Listen, mission map designers, I know you're not involved with the writing thing, but you still have an obligation to do your job correctly.




Deeeeeeeeeerp derpy derp derpity derp!

Back Alley Brawler never made it out of the work-in-progress stage during beta. This is Ms. Liberty's Task Force now. Who was sloppy and careless enough to forget to go back and fix the badge title?




Thanks to @OmegaUltima for this one. My only character with... let me get this right... the Sister Psyche's Comrade Badge badge... is currently redside and I wasn't able to snap this error on my own.

Fortunately, whoever screwed up the MoSTF badge wasn't responsible for this one, since this one leaves out the careless and only retains the sloppy. I... I don't know what to say, but I'm genuinely pleased to see this error instead of the worthless nonsense of the other badge.
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Well, that's all I got for Issue 23 launch material. See you guys at the Summer Blockbuster event!

I just finished running First Ward my first time last night. The events specifically follow what happens during the story arcs in the other Praetorian zones, and it's all chronological: Nova Praetoria, Imperial City, Neuropolis (they spelled it wrong in-game), First Ward then Night Ward. That said, for the most part, it at least picks up fairly well except for those (like me) who didn't encounter Noble Savage earlier in the game due to sticking with the Loyalist arcs.

First Ward is just where people go who aren't actively in the Resistance but also not welcome in Praetoria proper. I can respect that. First you find out what's gone bonkers at the survivor compound, then you make some allies, and then OH CRAP GHOSTS. The latter half of the First Ward arcs go over what's up with the Apparitions, and as soon as we find out what's controlling them, the Talons of Vengeance become involved. Once THAT is taken care of, Night Ward picks up.

Doing these through Ouroboros, the only thing that was really unclear to me is: who is Blind Makwa, and why am I talking to him? You just go straight from Katie Douglas to him, with no apparent connection or any connecting text.

There are two major problems with First Ward:

1) It is too tailored to hero characters. This has come up before, and I always just figured people were exaggerating. I mean, in Dark Astoria, villains say "I'm here to save the day," but at least it's all sarcastic and insincere. But First Ward? "When the inevitable happens, I would like us to be friends beyond even the grave. You will always be in my thoughts and in my prayers"? Yeah, try again Mr. Writer Person. Villains have absolutely no reason to go to First Ward, they just get an ultimatum by some wizard when they hit level 20. "A town in ruins? No thanks."

2) It is too tailored to Praetorian characters. This is the lesser offense, but... How in the world did my character know Calvin Scott escaped from the Asylum? Not an hour earlier I was beating up Goldbrickers and stepped through a portal. Mr. Writer Person was really sucking it up that day. We'll see if Night Ward makes more sense.

I typed "animum"? Noooooooooo!

Theory time!

My money's on "Snap, we're on a schedule! Just toss together an enemy group as fast as you can!"

On the bright side, I got it for defeating an Inspiration Collector. <3

While the mission was not selected, the team leader used his Team Transport power. He went to his mission, but I went to one of mine in a different zone.