Halon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TBndcBjQFM


Dev release is imminent.



Oh wait, wasn't talking about CoH.

Oh, like a vet reward decoration!

So in other words, the really cool rotating wall decoration that's one of the two arcane batteries ain't never gonna actually rotate then?

Sigh.

It sounds like they're trying to overthink what a raid is too much.

Just let everything decorative be destructible. A certain number of points of damage and it blasts away as if flung by a kin or whoever throws desks and car shells and fork lifts.

Then it disappears after x seconds.

Then you can only slow people, not stop them since there is nothing indestructible anymore.


After the raid is over, all the decorative items go back to where they were, end of story.

I made a slow field using the mid-level forge. I can't find it to place it, though.

I went into a security corridor I made awhile ago (don't have a proper room which would be "Deathtrap" or "Stronghold"). In that room, it doesn't show up in either arcane or tech defense.

I tried other tabs with functional items, battery, items of power, both tech and arcane. Not there.

I even checked the descriptions of everything under "arcane defense" as I made it with an arcane forge, just in case the name was something different. But none match a "slow" field, though there is a repulsor and force field, neither of which sound like they'd slow based on their descriptions.


So where is it? Or do I need one of the two real defense rooms? Or some other room?

EverQuest toyed with the idea of letting people choose to play a level 1-4 yard trash monster roaming newbie areas. I think it got rolled out briefly, but then it disappeared for some reason.

Never did figure out why.


I'm still waiting for a "wild" server where stuff like this is available with live, or at least more viciouis invasions, which are not killed off by guards or BM aura. Throw monkey wrenches into the daily lives of people going to grind in AE by invading the AE area and "taking it" until kicked out.

My bet is such a server would be overflowing with players, rather than people avoiding them.

Thus unless you have 20 level 50 alts with ten billion inf gathering dust, best to, sad to say, farm for prestige using a 50 and AE.

If it's not too late, I'd like to submit my arcane base. I don't have photos, but you can /tell me on Freedom to see it. It's not like the above ones, I assure you.


/tell to Waitress


This assumes my power is restored by this evening.

Thanks, interesting!



I wonder for other pools, though. Is the drop rate for bosses say > 3x that for minions? Because in level 5 missions currently, you get spawns of 3 minions, 1 min + lieut, or 1 boss.

What are the new changes to the difficulty system?

However, higher ranks (bosses over lieutenants, e.g.) are more likely to drop purples.

But I suppose it's not that much more to overwhelm a zergling rush of difficulty 2. :-/

The likelihood doesn't increase for 3, 4, and 5 difficulty, assuming you can handle it?

By the way, I do not want a "force save" option just to get around the undo difficulties. Fix it properly.


I'd rather risk the occasional screw-up than blow away hours of work just because I forgot to save. Or because my client crashes, which it does on a regular basis.

Nah, fix the issues the right way.


I agree with some other posters -- "save a copy/restore a copy" of the entire base would be a nice thing to do, along with "revert this entire edit session", which could be implemented in exactly the same way. Then you could experiment or revert terrible screw-ups that might take hours to fix.

How do I get the holograms (small and large) to get out-of-sync with each other? Not different icons on them, I can do that already.

I mean, say, one has the icon facing you, and the other is 90 degrees from that, so it's edge on.

I placed a large and a small on each other so the large holo was "above" the small one, nothing new I'm sure. But for some reason the pictures were 90 degrees out of sync with each other. I thought that was just the way they were, so didn't think much about it. It looked cool.

Then I messed with it, and I haven't been able to get them back out-of-sync since. They're always aligned.

Or was that something they recently "fixed".

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I think at one time the MM bubbles lasted like 1.5m.

I think they last 4m now and are much easier to play with than constantly recasting.

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And it's funny that Lightning already feels it's very boring only having to cast every 4 minutes, while I still find it highly irritating I have to cast every 4 minutes.

Yet there's little else they can do except what, force-blast away the occasional guy harassing a blaster? :-/

Still, "irritating to do" is a poor answer to "nothing to do".

One of the best EQ exploits was actually originally a "works as intended".


Of the three pet classes, mage (elementals), enchanger (magically floating sword and shield) and necro (skellies ftw!), the skeleton could be equipped with a shield and a weapon. Or dual-wielded weapons.


The skelly would adopt the speed of the weapons without changing it's punching damage. This derived from them being NPCs, and they didn't want people giving, say, guards lame weapons to turn them into wiffle guards. (Giving them weapons to hold was actually a pretty cool wow factor thing.)


The pets incinerate and take the weapons with them when they die or you zone, btw.


So necros got the cool feature they could improve their pets by giving them weapons that were faster than their punching rate. So far so good. Pretty cool wow factor.


But that didn't just extend to, say, a short sword. But also you could give 'em a rusty dagger, a truly crappy weapon that is nevertheless very fast, and very cheap.

Suddenly your pet was running around doing DPS at a rate inversly proportional to the lame rates of melee tanks.


Still, this was OK up until...the day.


They finally implemented the level 50 pet, which was not out at release. And someone gave it fine steel daggers, which, while expensive at about 4-8 plat sold to a vendor, was worth it to stock for the traveling necro.

So they had a PvP dual (typical ask-and-agree dual in the real world) where a 50 tank went against a 50 necro pet.

And it wasn't even close. The pet could lay waste to a level 50 tank. The necro's pet was tougher than an entire other melee class.

In fact, the mage's fire elemental pet could do a better job than the tank, but it still lost. This was primarily due to the fire shield on the elemental, and the fast skelly almost beat itself to death with reflected fire damage.


So two things happened:

1. They lowered the actual level of the 50 pet by, I forget, 3-6 levels or so, though it still conned as "50".

That still wasn't good enough, so:

2. They got rid of the pet adopting the speed of the weapons it was given. They changed the pets to be PC-based rather than NPC-based. So you could give 'em weapons, but they'd adopt the damage of the weapon rather than the speed.

And as far as I know, no weapon even to this day approaches the damage of a skelly's punch, at least not at punch speed.


This solved the problems of tanks being chewtoys for a pet, but still had two funny results:

1. You could give low level pets expensive weapons, and they'd be a little more powerful than they normally are. This isn't done much because A. They're expensive and go poof, and B. It only works for the first few levels anyway. High level pets still outstrip the weapons.


Except for...the Weighte Axe. See, the pets would also do the cool thing of single-weilding dual-wield weapons, so you could have them run around with 2 rusty 2-handers or scyths (which really looked cool for a pet.)

Damage-wise, this did nothing as just one 2-hander converted the single-hand punch to the 2-hander's damage, so the second one bought nothing. And it only mattered at low levels where the 2-hander's damage outstripped the punch.

...except for the Weighted Axe.


It was sort of a joke, monster-alpha strike weapon that had a tremendous damage but a hellaciously slow 7.5s swing rate.

But was there anything in the world that ignored the weapon's swing rate but took its damage?


Why yes. Yes I believe indeed there was.

Unfortunately they thought of that, because giving a skelly a weighted axe just had the axe disappear. Sad. Would have even benefitted a 50 pet IIRC.



Needless to say this was long ago, now that they're up to level 80 or 120 or wth ever by now as cap.



Then there was the evening that someone figured out the latest update removed the limit on casters having only one pet at a time.

I missed that evening, and only a few hours later they ripped the servers down for an emergency fix, but, in the words of Klingon leader Kor from the Trek Organians episode, "Pity. It would have been...glorious."

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No, I never did get it fixed.

I had the pleasure of deleting my favorite room and having to rebuild it from scratch. Granted, it has had a few tweaks in the process (because I just can't resist!), but it is still my favorite room. Tech support contacted me once to say they were bumping me up a level, then never got back to me again.

And Impish_Kat, that will be very, very helpful to me in the future...I can already tell...

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I've had things zap off to god knows where and I couldn't find them to delete them. It wasn't quite the irritant as your situation, but I did find the room's list of placed items. You can click on the delete button there, or you can hit the delete key.

I ended up hitting the delete key because clicking the button didn't work right. It never sold the item. There's some weirdness with my 3D card, dual monitors, and the left-right configuration of monitors 1 and 2.

Extending the height of the bar at the bottom of the base editing screen fixed it.



(I have a similar problem with entering enhancement view mode by double-clicking the word "ehnancements" above the clicky bars where you place your attacks and toggles. But if I extend the height to a full 3 rows, I can double-click it again.)

Beacons themselves are not crafted. They just appear in your placeable items list once you get all the exploration badges in an area. They still cost money. Teleport pads themselves are crafted.

Beacons are not placed "in" a teleport pad, so to speak. They're wall items, and you put them on a wall in a TP room, and they "attach" to the nearest TP. Both the beacon and teleport pad outline boxes change from blue to yellow to show that pair is connected. It's pretty hard to miss.

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If it were only that simple.. I say that because, What happens if someone destroys a Salvage Bin? Or even worse, what happens if someone destroys an Enhancement Table? That could very easily be an "I feel a disturbance in the Force" moment... That could get really ugly, really quick.

People could (in theory) lose an insane amount of time/effort/inf if an Enhancement Table was "destroyed" - and if they made Enhancement Tables & Salvage Bins "indestructible" people would try and take advantage of this using them for "Cover" and/or to protect other Base Items.
Which leads us right back into the "Abusive Bases" problems mentioned in the Massively article link above.

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There is a middle ground -- temporary destruction of the item during the raid. Then it reappears afterwards, still stocked. This would allow the items to be used as blockers AND also be destroyed, without fear of actually losing a bunch of rare enhancements.

Apply this to all items, decorative or special purpose, that don't otherwise have raid rules attached to them. They are their normal, infinitely hard and immovable selves, but one shot or punch and they go down like a cardboard box in a bank mission. Or 2-3 hits. Or a bunch like a swat vehicle, say, for enhancement tables. Whatever.

But they can be busted through so that's no longer a problem. And it all reappears after the raid.


Pick up the pace, and let people raid for fun a lot more, with just the "desired" raid items being at risk rather than everything either being perma-destroyed, or perma-indestructible-because-we-don't-want-it-perma-destroyed.

No. Middle ground. Temporary destruction.

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The reason for the spaces is that the doorways between rooms is where people spawn in a base raid. They needed multiple places in a base to spawn that were free of obstructions. Putting them IN the rooms would be a bit more difficult to do.

Then people found ways to close off the doorways with base items so attacking forces couldn't get past. Kinda breaks the base raiding 'game'.

So they took the base raiding offline til they can figure out a new way so people can't block off invaders like that.

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Temporary and easy destruction of any base item, decorative or otherwise, that doesn't otherwise have rules set for it in a base raid.

Now that wall of bookcases gets smashed out and destroyed with one blast or punch, per item anyway.


After the raid is over, it all magically reappears. Simple and easy to code.

Heck, they don't really even need a breakapart animation -- just have the thing fling out of the way like a psi or grav or whoever summons forklifts and gargoyles and rolls of Owens-Corning fiberglass insulation and flings 'em. After 30s, they disappear, wherever they landed.

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Thanks for the answer to #1, it was bugging me because I have a small base plot (the 12x12) and am trying to figure out how to place things...and I was like "this would be so much easier if I could put something into that giant empty space that won't take a room!"

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I'm scared to try upgrading or moving rooms because I don't want to have to disassemble some pretty detailed constructions, like my spiral staircase with giant wooden longbow flier area, or the masses of stone step slabs supporting some raised arcane TPs.

And god only knows if I can convert the combo room some day into a real power or control room without disassembling all the stuff.