Redlynne

Galaxy City on Virtue would be fine for assembling ... at the base portal entrance (obviously). Atlas Park is incredibly crowded on Virtue, so best to avoid that zone for people who are creating level 1 throwaway characters just for the tour because they don't have anyone on Virtue yet.

Okay, I'll step up. Who wants to tour the Spring Knights base on tuesday next week (3 Nov) at 930p Eastern?

Slots on a Kheldian are at such a premium that I honestly can't find a good reason to do anything more than double slot Dwarf and put two level 50 common Resist IOs into the power. Most of the set bonuses on the resistance sets are garbage from beginning to end, so there's not much point (imo) to slotting up for them. Better off spending your slots on the attacks in Dwarf than on the form power itself.

The other day, I saw a Necro MM in Sharkhead flying around with pets in Group Fly. It was actually a little ... creepy ... to see all those zombies hovering around, with the glowing lights supporting them in the air. Then later that same day, I saw a Robots MM hanging around the Black Market in Cap Au Diable ... and the bots had been left to hover in the air while the MM concluded their market business. That was really cool, seeing the "rocket boots" on the bots burning away.

So I'd like to ask that any masterminds with Group Fly post some screenshots of your pets group flying with you. I know that different pets have different group fly animations for them, and I'd like to see them all ... without having to get 5 MMs to 20 in order to do it.

So ... screenshots anyone?

Both the Decimation and Gaussian's build up procs are unique IOs. You get to slot ONE of each on your character.

Bots/Force Field

Boring as sin to play, but tough to take down ... so long as the AV doesn't have attacks that ignore defenses.

How many stun powers are there in MA/*?
3 ... TK, CS and EC. The stun on TK however is such an afterthought that it's more like an afterthought than an actual stun stacker. So effectively, there's only 2.1 stun powers ... both of which have exceptionally long recharge (CS especially!), making it difficult to leverage the stun potential of MA/*.

How many immobilize powers are there in MA/*?
1 ... CAK. The immobilize on CAK however is pretty much useless, since it's only MAG 2 with a 50% chance of getting +1 MAG. Minions die in just a few hits (Scrapper ... go figure) and LTs take not much longer to dispose of. The immobilize property also doesn't "do anything" to prevent incoming damage, since as a Scrapper you need to be in melee range anyway.

How many Knockback powers are there in MA/*?
1 ... CK. While many players enjoy the visceral thrill of "punting" targets (especially off high ledges!), the Knockback on this power is actually something of a turn-off for many players. This is because use of Knockback means that you're going to need some sort of environmental "containment" by terrain if you don't want to be chasing your target all over the place ... which in turn reduces damage throughput over time. Very annoying for messing up positioning. Changing this to KnockDOWN would make the power much more useful.

How many Knockdown powers are there in MA/*?
1 ... DT. This power actually gets it right. FINALLY.

Development priorities for SG Bases ought to be as follows:

• 1. Decorative
• 2. Editor
• 3. Functional
• 17. PvP

I say this because the Decorative aspect of bases is both the most immediate and the most enduring. Furthermore, the Decorative aspect of creating bases easily dominates all other time sinks concerning them combined.

Improvements to the Editor are what make the Decorative exploits we love to see (and tour) possible, and reasonable to achieve.

Functional improvements to bases are what make them "useful" beyond simply being an exercise in creative expression. Base functionality gives PURPOSE beyond simply being eye candy.

PvP ... unfortunately ... simply a "nice to have" feature so long as nothing else need be sacrificed upon its altar. Otherwise, it's simply "not necessary" any more. We have arenas (that are barely used). We have PvP zones (that are farmed). There is remarkably little pressing need for SG Base PvP on top of all of that ... especially if it's done as an obligation which can easily turn into a "job" to protect your base on a (set) weekly schedule. To be honest, in a lot of ways, we'd be better off adapting Architect Entertainment to allow PvP use of its maps than re-injecting PvP (and all of its nasty limitations!) back into SG Bases.

Here's how Castle could recode the Kheldian inherent power to be more team friendly:

Take the current effects and ... chop them in half ... and then apply them twice.

Half of the effect is a large radius PBAoE team effect. This boosts the Kheldian plus all of your teammates within range. If a teammate is within your PBAoE radius, they "fuel" the buff for you and you in turn give back to them. This half of the effect is ALWAYS ON ... even when in Nova and Dwarf forms.

The other half of the effect is self only. This half of the effect is only on when you're in human form. Since the only one who "loses" the effect when you're out of human form is yourself, there is no whining from teammates to "get back in human form so I can get your buffs!" dynamic constricting how Kheldian characters are played.

Power levels remain exactly where they already are ... but half the benefit we currently get remains available in forms *and* is shared with the team.

S imple
E asy
E ffective

Not being done ...

Bah. Hasten is overrated.

I'll see your Photon Seekers suggestion and raise you an even better idea ...

Mastermind controls for Photon Seekers

• Attack
• Defend
• Passive
• Goto
• Follow
• Stay

By default, you command them as a group (ie. no individual targeting).

*/TA is better for a team than */FF ... simply because */TA makes everyone else on the team better at what they do.

Yeah ... wood and trees ... and subdued lighting.

That's been a theme for the Spring Knights base ever since I started building it. One of the things that I see a lot in people's bases is that spaces tend to be very "busy" with all kinds of "stuff" here/there/everywhere. Don't get me wrong, it's extremely impressive to look at, and when done RIGHT can blow your socks off ... but it's also perfectly possible to build spaces that "look great" but which you'd never want to have to "live in" for any length of time. I don't know how many bases I've visited where one of the first thoughts that runs through my mind is ... "I wouldn't EVER want to have to LIVE here."

So with the Spring Knights base (link to OLD article in City Scoop from last year, now fixed!) I wanted to create a sort of ... serene ... environment that put you at ease. In practice that's meant local lighting in dark rooms ... resulting in a sort of "twilight" effect ... and a lot of wood, wood grain and trees and leaves. I use a lot of (wooden) stairs to match up with the arcane wall platforms and bridges, which fit together (almost) seamlessly in a wide variety of applications. I also use a lot of bookshelves, the other quintessentially "wood" item around the base so as to keep that "natural" feeling going. I've even got the wall colors tuned to match up with the colors of the blonde bookcases and the brown bookcases and stairs, so as to better blend each into the other.

Another thing that I've been at pains to do with the Spring Knights base is to keep the spaces as OPEN and as AIRY as possible. This has meant max height ceilings and max depth floors everywhere, lending a sense of "vastness" to the spaces ... which due to the room lights being "off" everywhere (local lighting only) makes the base feel far larger than it actually is. That's because with the walls being (mostly) dark and the lighting mainly at ground level (usually) there's a sense that the walls enclosing the spaces of the various rooms just sort of ... disappear ... and become rather "unimportant" since the focus of your attention is centered inside of the rooms, rather than on the walls which bound them. It's one of those things you just have to *experience* in person in order to really *feel* it.

The Spring Knights base is blueside on Virtue server. If anyone would like to take a tour and experience firsthand the kind of thing I'm talking about here, feel free to send me a PM. Tours are even available to level 1 "throwaway" characters if you haven't got any heroes on Virtue yet. Trust me, it looks a LOT different now from how it did in the pre-Issue 13 days (when I still had to deal with raid pathing!).

Yeah, the flaming crystal ball was something I discovered while doing my power room. You merely need a floor torch, a desk crystal ball and a wastebasket to finish the item. Only the desk crystal ball needs to be floated into the flame.

Really cool thing about the crystal balls is that they're transparent and refractive even though they're inside an animated particle effect. The transparency of the crystal ball overrides the flames ... allowing you to see "through" the fire of the torch light.

And in case anyone is curious, the "pattern" or arrangement (if you prefer) of salvage racks I've got here should be perfectly cross-compatible with the sizes of tech racks and the tech empowerment station ... in all three dimensions.

This is the Arcane Workshop in the Spring Knights base. There's a second Tech Workshop as a counterpart which hasn't been "completed" yet but which will follow the same patterning you see here.

As you can see, I've got 3 usable floors of space ... with the lowest floor, underneath everything, being a "relax & research" area. The "first" floor of salvage racks (marked with the black and white banners) is for common salvage and is divided up by salvage Tiers (1, 2 and 3). The "upper" floor of salvage racks (marked by orange and yellow banners) is for uncommon and rare salvage ... again divided up by Tiers. This helps keep everything "sorted" so that you know exactly which rack to go to in order to find stuff you're looking for. The arcane Empowerment Station is on the uppermost floor. All the way down on the "ground" floor, near the trees, is the Arcane Transfer rack. This last salvage rack is intended to be kept (relatively) empty so as to facilitate transfers of salvage between characters in the SG.

Note that the trees are very useful for "obscuration" to hide the fact that I've got stairs hanging in the air without adequate supports.

For those who are curious, the Room Lighting is "off" and all light is supplied by local sources ... resulting in an "islands of warmth and comfort" feeling.

So there you have it.
A 3 floored Workshop Room.
And I've still got a huge 3x3 set of floor blocks to fill out with yet more decorations.

I've slotted the Gaussian proc in my Nova form and have been running it on Hamidon raids. It *does* proc ... the problem is that the proc is so random that it winds up being a "nice when it does" rather than something you can rely on. It does bump your damage output (for 5 seconds) but there's really no rhyme or reason to when it will.

I've also 6-slotted Decimation (with its proc) into Dark Nova Bolt, where because of my set buffs the power has a recharge of under 3/4 seconds. That means that I can "spam" the power in less than 1.75 seconds per shot for the animation (1s) and recharge (<0.75s). That's 5 attacks per 10 seconds at a 0.75s recharge, and 6 attacks per 10 seconds at 0.66s recharge for Dark Nova Bolt with the power on auto-attack. That's a LOT of proc chances ... which is good because both the Gaussian's and the Decimation proc have a 5% chance each (which by themselves is kinda lousy).

The combination of the two, for Nova form, kinda sorta "works out" however ... so long as you're slotting up Dark Nova Bolt, because that gives you two Build Up procs to work with, which starts getting reasonable. The only problem is that you never know when one (let alone both together!) is going to proc ... which means they fall into the "nice!" category when they do, but aren't something you're going to be *relying on* to save your calamari.

Not being an OS X hacker, I wouldn't even know where to begin to edit the config file you pointed to.

What *would* be fantastic though is if the CoMac developer were to whip up a handy dandy little application/utility for us which would allow Mac users to assign which drive letter we'd like to have the Home folder (for CoH) mapped to ... since not everyone has the same number of drives (iMac slabs vs G5 towers for instance) and therefore no "one-size-fits-all" system is going to be an adequate solution to this particular little problem. That way we could play with the same /bindloadfile syntax in our files whether we were playing in OS X or in XP/Vista/7-of-9-attempts.

Otherwise, I'm going to have a write a macro to run my /bindloadfile clusters which will try to load both ... and only the one that's valid based on which OS I happen to be in at the time will load (and chain to all the others). Because let's face it ... playing a Mastermind or a Kheldian without using /bindloadfile is the definition of *GIMP*!

Eh ... who needs -ToHit on Terrify?
Gimmie 10 seconds of enhanceable Immobilize on Terrify instead and we'll call it even.

Telekinesis in PvE however has been nerfed into the ground. It needs to have a larger AoE around the anchor ... the anchor needs to repeatedly play the flinging of dirt upwards animation, as a cue to teammates (and the controller themselves!) who the anchor is ... and it needs to have a max targets limit of 16! >.<#

There, I said it.

Wow ... thread necro ...

But yeah, Abduction Tactics are extremely successful in solo play ... but a bit slow for use in teams that like to just mow through everything in their path. Flipside though is that if you're on a PuG that can't handle massive over-aggro, and if they can slow down enough to let you "do your thing" then you can whittle down herds of mobs that are simply too big for the team to handle into something they can both bite off AND chew properly.

Was able to score a Siphon Insight proc off WW last night. It has now been invented and slotted into Flash Arrow on my Grav/TA controller.

Monitoring the Healing Delivered channel revealed that the chance to proc is per use of power and not on a per target affected (ie. no multiple chances to proc in AoE powers). Using Flash Arrow on a group of 7 severely grey targets resulted in a low proc rate consistent with this mechanic.

Worse though, there was no power effect buff icon that appeared/applied to the character and monitoring the combat attributes for Base showed absolutely no movement on To Hit or any other parameter.

At this point, I'm wondering if the Siphon Insight proc even "works" properly.

The good news is that Flash Arrow remained aggro-less even when the proc (says it) went off. This is because the proc is not debuffing the targets.

Might be time to notify Castle about this one ...