Redlynne

Okay, finally had time to go do a bit of Search Fu and came up with the following pictures (courtesy of Sankaku Complex) that show Hitodama like what I was talking about before. Note that there's a lot of ... latitude ... in what can be done with these in terms of styling, and movement, even just in the anime/manga source art. They can either be "tethered" to characters (in which case there's often just two hanging around the shoulders), or can be free ranging (in which case, they're very will-o-the-wispy). They are however always shown as "fire" ... albeit a "ghostly flame" in appearance (ie. a dead person's soul).

You guys may have been able to successfully stress test the servers ... but the stress test on my CoH (Mac) Client was a total failure. Simply *moving* while Flying threw an Assertion Failure that killed my Client. After that, it was Goodbye Freedom ... hello Base Editing that I've been putting off far too long!

Speaking of which ... the Base Editor leaks memory like a seive and crashes my Client pretty darn regularly. Possibly related issues...?

Oddly enough ... I rather dislike the GFX for Defense/Resistance/Damage/Accuracy/To-Hit/Regeneration/Recovery Buffs and Debuffs.

Defense: BIG purple shields
Resistance: BIG orange shields
Damage: spiky red swirlies
Accuracy and To-hit: floaty crosshairs that fade in and out
Regeneration: green hoola-hoops of anti-gravity
Recovery: blue hoola-hoops of anti-gravity

These things aren't that bad when soloing ... but get a team together camping a spawn point (or fighting to stand next to a mission door inside an instance) and you can quickly get BURIED in useless graphical info. Gets especially bad on close quarters indoor maps (think Council/5th maps) where it can become difficult to see the action beyond the GFX spam.

Hasten however wins the "Worst Ev4r" award for most useless graphics in the entire game. I'd far rather have Synapse's motion blur effect than setting my hands (and arms and head) on fire.

Guess I'm the odd one out in all of this, since I try to slot as low as possible so as to keep the set bonuses as far down the exemplar ladder as I can. I usually don't slot anything lower than levels 22 or 27, but only single set IOs (because they have no set bonus to lose) and commons get slotted as 50s. Most of my builds are filled with level 27 set IOs ... because at exemplar level 24 (a breakpoint for flashback arcs) the 27s are within +3 and thus the set bonuses are "on" when at 24. Note that while you can have access to powers that are +5 above current level, you only get set bonuses of enhancements that are +3 above current level.

Since my main, Redlynne, is MA/SR/Soul Mastery and is scrap(p)ing for every last +Defense set bonus I can get, it is VERY necessary to have all those set bonuses "on" when exemplar.

This is the first I've heard of any AI changes in their behavior ...

Neither. Go Huntsman and gun down everything in sight without remorse, pity, or a rear view mirror.

Actually, you could do it with a Pseudo-Pet (or 2).

Activating the Power would immediately activate a Pseudo-Pet which does damage to target after a delay. This is the "non-critical" damage portion of the attack. Meanwhile, the Interruptable portion of the attack continues to play out as normal, but with modified critical chances to account for the "guaranteed" other half of the attack damage.

Kludgy ... but (perhaps) possible.

Do you mean anything like this?

I play on Virtue, and I was on Virtue for the invasion night ... until the lag monster found the Assertion Failure way to prevent me from participating, at which point I gave up in disgust.

I started out on my MA/SR scrapper main, Redlynne, and "mucked around" in Steel Canyon a block away from Positron for a while (maybe 15 minutes or so). But as the event wore on, it became less and less "oooh shiney!" and more and more "well this is lame" for me. The sheer quantity of AoE and Mez that the Praetorians were tossing around pretty much made it fairly pointless for anyone who wasn't Melee Oriented once there were sufficient spawns beating down everything in sight. *I* was doing "okay" ... but that's because I have NO GET HITSU! slotted up to the max and could "hang out" in the mosh pit and not get hammered in no time. So for me, in less time than it takes to complete a Rikti Invasion round, I was pretty much BORED with the Praetorian Invasion. And the server lag was ruinous since I could syncronize any of my attacks with what I was seeing on my screen (WTB FPS > 1).

So I switched out to my Huntsman, Leggs, on redside and took off to Cap Au Diable. Cap Au Diable was being handled a little bit better since there were fewer people in zone, and Beastyle was the Red Name handling the spawns in Cap. Once the action "moved" over to the factory area on top of Mt Diablo, things went downhill. The lag got to be so excessive that upon logging in, I would Mapserver and get either kicked from the server, or I would try to move (or even just turn in place!) and get an Assertion Error that would crash my client. A couple of times, my CoH Client (Mac) crashed so hard that I had to cold boot to recover. After the *SIXTH* time in a row of crashing out on trying to zone back into Cap Au Diable, I threw in the towel and didn't launch CoH again until the day after the event on Virtue.



Personally ... I'm really disappointed in the Praetorian Invasion. It follows the same (lame?) scripting to a substantial extent that we see in the Rikti and Zombie events. The basic, underlying problem is that the event(s) are scripted in such a way as to "favor" players clustering up into dogpiles that stay stationary. That's why every zone has a designated "Rally Point" for dealing with these events.

Instead, what ought to be happening, is something where you get a sort of "hole in the middle" scheduling which causes the mobs to spawn where the players are NOT but which is still "nearby" to where the players are. The spawn patterns for these sorts of events need to be scripted in such a way as to promote/cause players to DISPERSE rather than to CLUSTER so as to encourage a sort of "spreading battle line" that spreads outwards through the zone, rather than a sort of scripting which rewards/encourages players to camp spawn points and just never move until the event is over. Events like this ought to be about PURSUIT of the incoming hostiles ... not about Come And Get Me!

Be even better if the Event Mobs spawned hostile to all the "native" zone mobs, so that rather than having the zone mobs just stop spawning when the Event starts, the invading hostiles battle with the native mobs and the PCs in a free-for-all.

No ... the Wisps Aura (as you cite) is quite explicitly *NOT* what I'm asking for. That's a smoky puff-ball that goes shooting around through space. I'm talking about a hovering candle flame the size of your fist that animates as a flame (without the candle) and is positioned *over* the shoulders between jawline and ear height. That is most definitely *NOT* the Wisps Aura that we already have.

And just so you know, Tunnel Rat ... Hitodama flames for dead characters in anime have been animated, on more than one occasion, with only 2 frames so as to give minimal movement (and because it's cheaper). If you have any questions about this sort of thing, I'm *SURE* that someone on staff is enough of an anime fan to supply you with clips from anime to look at as reference for what I'm talking about. It's a fairly standard anime trope used as a cue to either indicate Death State ... or Depression so deep the character wishes they were dead.

AURA REQUEST

It would have to be done as a "Head" Aura variant, but other than that I can think of no reason why this shouldn't be possible.

In anime (especially), when a character is Dead (or just *really* depressed), you'll often see two "ghostly" flame balls slowly burning hovering above a character's shoulders. The proper name for these is Hitodama and they're will'o'the'wisp-like and are often depicted as being either blue or green.

Would it be possible to create an anime-styled Hitodama "aura" for CoH, which could be tinted with the Bright and Dark palettes? Would be very in character for both Necromancer and Demon Summoning Masterminds, as well as some Ninja Masterminds, and plenty of other anime themed (or just plain Japanese) character concepts.

Ever met the Streakbreaker?

If you've ever played */SR ... you should have.

I'm more amazed by how on the female models it's possible to draw the string and arrow through the torso of your character model.

I even use KB Cone Into Ground on my Ice/Ice/Arctic tanker. I call it the Hop'n'Pop, since it turns a pie slice in 2D to one side, it becomes a "poor man's PBAoE" that hits everyone clustered up around where you'd been standing. All you have to do is jump and key your cone attack at the top of your jump.

I say Gravitic. You don't have to worry about breaking sleeps, and the recharge reduction or the run speed reduction have their uses for a mind controller.

In quite a few of my builds, if I'm *really* pressed for slots (think Kheldians) then I just simply forgo the resistance sets entirely and use only two Common 50 Resistance IOs. That yields the greatest amount of Resistance "throughput" in the least number of (extra) slots.

So for me, the first and foremost question is ... do I have the slots available to implement (some) Resistance Sets or not?

Please note that the term "horizon" can have very different contexts to players and Devs (in part because the Devs know what's happening, while we don't). Bear in mind that any initiative started TODAY will almost certainly take A YEAR to bear fruit and reach a completed state. That's just simple "workflow rules" dictating that kind of thing.

So anything where there is (now) a push to get resources for Base Development will probably take a year or more to result in a releasable product.

For players, a year of "lag" between offering feedback and making suggestions ... and seeing the results of same ... tends to stretch the player's definition of the term "horizon" in ways that are both good, and bad. We (the players) tend to think of "horizon" as meaning ... the next Issue ... because we want stuff NOW.



Of course, the most helpful thing would be for Black Pebble (or his delegated authority figure) to *permit* the Dev team to come here, into this forum, to lay out the *POSSIBLE* shape of things to come for Bases ... with the express understanding, up front ... that it may not actually happen or even wind up that way in the final cut.

My favorite way of phrasing this kind of interaction is, "Help Us Help YOU!"

Because the simple fact is, some of the most powerful features in the game are ones that are present because of feedback from the community to the Devs. We've already seen how feedback in the All Things Art threads for Noble Savage and Tunnel Rat have led to ideas and features being implemented into the game.



So I ask the people who have Red Names to do us all a favor, by making it possible to leverage the power of this forum, and the people who devote their hopes and dreams to it ... I ask that you "Help Us Help YOU!"

Give us some "ground rules" and a *direction* to go in ... and with your guidance we The Builders will do all we can to advance The State Of The Game with you. But you have to be here to interact with us, lest the "evidence" of our senses tell us (rightly or wrongly) that we aren't sending feedback to people who care ... but are instead uselessly shouting at no one in an empty room.



Help Us Help YOU!

FX ENHANCED "CIRCUITRY" COSTUME PIECES REQUEST

One of the really cool costume textures that already exists in the game is Circuitry. The only flaw with it is ... it's a static pattern. This is one costume texture that really begs for animated FX. The only problem is ... we don't have a "3rd color" option for any sort of Circuitry animation!

BUT ... we do have the Flourescent Parts of costumes that you can see on the Resistance Chest Detail, Resistance Shoulders, Resistance Gloves and on the Tucked In Resistance Pants. All of these Flourescent Parts have colors that correspond to the standard costume palette set.

So ... here's what would be really wonderful to see ...



Circuitry - Fixed

This is essentially the legacy Circuitry texture, unchanged.

Circuitry - Slow

This would be an FX Enhanced version of the legacy Circuitry texture, which would involve an "animation layer" of moving flourescent lighting following the circuit patterns of the underlying texture in a way which makes the lit particles "flow" along the circuits in a "Tron-like" fashion. The circuit patterns and the flourescent FX would both use COLOR 2 for their color assignments, but the flourescent coloring would be brighter (especially in darkness), allowing the animated lit particles to be seen easily. Any flourescent particles would move "slowly" through the circuit patterns with this option. 10 second animation cycle?

Circuitry - Moderate

Same as the slow above, but the animation speed of the particles around the circuit paths would be quicker. 6 second animation cycle.

Circuitry - Fast

Same as the slow and moderate above, but fast enough to pulse a complete cycle of animation every 3 seconds.



Combat Only and Always On versions of the above could be (relatively) easily made.

The reason why I recommend doing this as an alternative costume texture (composite), rather than as an Aura is that there are plenty of costumes which use Circuitry textures on only parts of the costume, not all of it ... and Auras are (often) an All Or Nothing deal which don't allow for the mix'n'match of costume pieces in the way that a "Circuitry Aura" would require (to do RIGHT).