InfamousBrad

Archetype: Corruptor
Powerset: Dark Miasma
Power: Darkest Night
Customization: Color Tintable
Model: Female
Colors: Any

Steps to Re-Create:
1) Setup as above, level to 4 or above.
2) Cast Darkest Night on any enemy ("anchor") with at least one other enemy within the radius of Darkest Night.
3) Particle effects for the anchor appear normally.
4) Particle effects for any other enemies do not.
5) Either watch the enemy that doesn't show the visual effect for Darkest Night activate some power of their own that puts a particle effect on their model, or hit them with some power that puts a temporary particle effect on them (I use Corruptor, Ice Blast, either Ice Bolt, Ice Blast, or Freeze Ray.)
6) Observe that the particle effect for Darkest Night now shows up, and stays active on the enemy even after the other particle effect expires.

I asked somebody else to test this, and they got similar effects, although they claimed that the Darkest Night (non-target) effect disappeared shortly thereafter; I was unable to reproduce this. For me, it works consistently, unless they exit the radius of Darkest Night and then re-enter it.

At 12:07 pm Central Daylight Time, I'm logged into Virtue. The Server Status page still says that they're all down.

You left one out: If you have any published story arcs in Mission Architect, check to make sure they are still valid. Even if they are valid, play through them if you used custom enemies, to make sure that they are still giving XP.

Back in 1996, I bought an amazing house for throwing parties in, and, well, started throwing parties in it, inviting the local SCA, local science fiction fandom, several roleplaying groups, the local goth crowd, the local Pagan scene, and the crowds from two local coffee houses, plus I don't even remember who all else. By the 3rd or 4th one, they were drawing about 60 to 80 people, and people were having a great time.

One night at the coffee house, somebody handed along one of the friend-of-a-friend invites to one of my parties, which, for lack of a better name, people were calling "the Brad parties." The receiver said, "is this one of those infamous 'Brad parties'?" The name stuck: they were "the infamous Brad parties" thereafter. By the end of year two, even newer people assumed that that must mean that I was "the Infamous Brad," and the nickname stuck.

Playing around with my new iPhone 3GS, I ended up adding three bookmarks to the Home screen specifically for when I'm playing City of Heroes:

• Dev Digest: http://cohdigest.appspot.com/?t=1
  .
  Needs no explanation, and it looks great in Mobile Safari. I glance at it off and on throughout the day.
  .
• COH TFs: http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddb97fvv_20fpc8r9gn
  .
  I made this one myself, combing through and condensing down all task forces, strike forces, and trials in City of Heroes and City of Villains. Table of contents links at the beginning make it easy to zoom to the TF or SF or Trial that you want to run.
  .
• CoH Chars: (custom)
  
  What was driving me nuts was the lack of any way to run something like Mids Hero Designer on my iPhone ... although I will say that CoHPlanner.com's online character builder works fine in Mobile Safari, it's just clumsy by comparison to full-fledged Mids.
  
  What I came up with was to do Short Forum Exports from Mids (in a custom color scheme of my own, more suitable to white background text) and save each one to a Google Doc, one character per document. I named each document the name, powersets, and archetype of the character, as in "Infamous Brad: Robotics/Force Field Mastermind" so I'd recognize them easily, and then I moved them all to a folder called "CoH Characters." Then I went into Google Docs on the iPhone, navigated to that folder, and saved a bookmark to that folder to the home screen.

I didn't save a link to this forum, to Vidiot Maps, or to Paragon Wiki on my home screen, but that's only because I use Xmarks on my PC to keep Firefox's, Internet Explorer's, and (via iSync) Mobile Safari's bookmarks in sync with each other. If you don't, those are probably worth adding to your iPhone's home screen, too.

I hope this helps somebody; I know it made the game even more enjoyable for me.

I crunch the numbers, but I don't min-max. I wouldn't think, any more, of starting a character without first plugging the combination of powers I had in mind into Mids Hero Designer. But that's because, after 3 and a half years of game time, I know the game's combat mechanics well enough to look at the results and see, "oh, okay, this is practically an all-AoE build" or "hmm, lots of def, no fallback plan" or "wow, this build is going to be an endurance hog" or whatever.

I'm not trying to build characters that can solo a +3 AV and a full 8-person team's worth of minions, lieutenants, and bosses, and I don't spend billions of inf maxing out the stats on any of my characters. But Real Numbers was a gigantic improvement in my quality of life, because it saves me from spending dozens or hundreds of hours of misery to build an alt that I wouldn't enjoy playing anyway.

For what it's worth, I still like the Hollows revamp. Oh, I think War Witch went overboard and crammed a few too many factions into it, but that's nitpicking. The last couple of heroes I created, I soloed my way from level 6 to 10 in the Hollows, off of the first two contacts plus Meg, including soloing Frostfire (now that I know how to solo EBs at that level, hard-won that knowledge was, although inspiration-tray tetris helps). One of them I came right back after my 2nd safeguard mission and soloed my way up the 3rd contact, and I'll probably finish out the storyline when I go back to that character.

And it's not completely empty, not on Virtue during prime time anyway. There are still people running around.

What has changed is the loss of all of the people whose preferred way of getting from level 6 to 14 was to find someone (level 8ish) with Frostfire, farm that mission until everybody's level 11 or above (by constantly upping the difficulty as people level), then find somebody else with Frostfire at level 10ish and farm that one to 13 or 14, then go on to the "real" game. I do not, not, not in a thousand years miss farming Frostfire. I was so bored with that mission, years ago, that I can still navigate that lair blindfolded. Those people are now in the AE building, and at least there, they occasionally run more than one mission.

If you're starting a new hero, and you don't want to grind AE, and you don't want to grind newspaper missions, if you actually want some story in your story?

• Level 2-3: Initial contact missions.
• Level 4: Grind street mobs in starter zone.
• Level 5-6: King's Row, 3 newspaper missions and the Atlas Park safeguard. Collect Raptor Pack.
• Level 6-9: The Hollows, 1st and 2nd contacts plus Meg.
• Level 10-12: Steel Canyon: 3 newspaper missions, King's Row safeguard (collect Jump Pack), inventions tutorial, intro to Midnighters.
• Level 12-15: The Hollows, 3rd and 4th contacts, plus Meg if needed.
• Level 15+: Faultline.
• After Faultline: Explore as suits you, because you're past the really sucky level 5-20 classic content, and all of your contacts now offer full-fledged story arcs.

It's not as XP-efficient or as reward-efficient as alternating AE boss farms with task forces, but it's a lot more interesting.

Looking at the original poster's registration date, I'm having a hard time accepting that the question might be anything but troll bait. If you've been playing, even off and on, for five years then you know expletive-well what a farm is, because you've been seeing people spam invites for fillers for one farming mission after another the whole time you've been here. You know what the people who are looking for missions to farm find desirable. You know what maps they prefer. So when you see someone exactly replicate one of the classic farming missions, any of the long list of ones that NCsoft, Paragon, and/or Cryptic have had to go in and set to timed missions so that people couldn't farm them over and over forever, you know full well what the person who designed that mission was thinking: "this combination of enemies, with this particular design for an ally that will increase my farming efficiency without kill-stealing my XP, on a map that lets me move continuously and effortlessly from one spawn to the next until we're ready to reset, of exactly the right size to hit hit the max-ticket cap for me and all 7 fillers -- there, perfect."

If you weren't someone who registered back in 2004, I would tell you to not feel bad if you can't tell the difference between a legitimate mission and a farming mission, it just means that you haven't learned all the borderline exploits, and that's a good thing; let those of us who have been disgusted by the whole phenomenon for years put our knowledge to good use shutting them down and don't worry about it yourself. I'd reassure you that the exact combination of the right one or two factions with exactly the right one or two maps with a particularly counter-intuitive NPC design is not something you're likely to stumble upon by accident, and if you do, you're unlikely to get the slot locked for first offense.

But since you're not someone who just fell off of the turnip truck, it seems to me that it's far too likely that you're trying to stir up an argument, cloud the waters, to create the false and dishonest impression that there's any particular doubt about what's legitimate and what's not, so that you can lie to yourself and to others that you had no reason to think that your lovingly-recreated wolf farm or TV farm or Dreck farm or meow farm or anything based on similarly exploited game mechanics was disallowed, so that if you get punished for it, you can feel justified when you scream and cry that the developers are meanies, that they're arbitrary dictators who only picked on you because they're bad people and they hate you for not being a fawning fanboy.

If my guess is wrong and the question was sincere, my apologies for the misunderstanding. If my guess is right, good luck with that, farmer.

US servers are up.

From here:

5.7 megabyte patch is now available to download. That's about the right size for the build that's on the Training Room, see the (munged up but barely readable) patch notes for July 20th and July 27th. No new features, no major tweaks, just about a dozen or so minor bug fixes.

And, ironically, the Server Status page is down, too: no matter how many times you refresh, it shows the status as of June 24th. Man, they can't fix that particular bug soon enough to suit me.

Avatea's announcement said the servers would be coming down for a patch at 10:00 am EDT. It's only 8:30 am EDT, and at least half of the servers are down -- did something else go wrong, or did operations jump the gun on the patch?

Winner: Mission 2 (or sometimes 3) of the Positron TF: rescue the FEMA workers. Gigantic office map full of Spectral Daemon Lords; two hostages to escort to the door past multiple ambushes. If it weren't for that one Bob-awful mission, people wouldn't hate the Positron TF nearly so much.

First Runner-Up: Lawrence Ansaldo's level 20 mission to go street sweep for hazard-zone-sized spawns of level 26-29 Council in The Pit.

Operating System (Vista, XP, OS X version): Vista
Browser: Firefox 3.0.12
Forum: Developers' Corner
Bug Description: The Dev Digest and Community Digest posts show raw HTML
Link to Forum Post: Dev Digest, Comm Digest

Operating System (Vista, XP, OS X version): Vista
Browser: Firefox 3.0.12
Forum: n/a
Bug Description: The reset-password link (from a failed password login) is invalid
Link to Forum Post: n/a

I think it'd be funnier if you set it in the conference room in Recluse's Watchtower instead of on the decks of Ouroboros. And I'd substitute Arbiter Daos into the first group, and reserve Scirocco -- who we know is sweet on Ghost Widow -- for Princeton.

... presumably to be followed up by Arbiter Daos as Nicky and Arbiter Sands as Rob, standing in front of the restrooms in the lobby of Pocket D, singing "If You Were Gay"?

I can't imagine how to test that, especially if it was an intermittent.

Assuming i16 closed beta can't happen during the Forumpocalypse, I guess this means Friday if it's still "the week after Comic Con"? See you then, if only in the costume creator.