Starjammer

And, of course, they completely re-did the shader controls in the 6/8 patch without documenting the change.

The Shadow controls have been completely redone. This is not documented at all.

When customized settings are off, you have a slider control that ranges several levels of degree. I did not check them all.

When set to customized controls, you now have the option of setting Level of Detail (Low, Med., High, same as before). You now also choose the range and size of the rendered maps. Apparently, this cuts down on the times on outdoor maps where your framerate drops while trying to calculate and render shadows from the far size of the visible zone.

It is bugged, in that every time you close the options window, the control reverts back to the basic slider. If you have changed the customized settings, they revert to whatever the basic slider was last set to.

Also, the help text next to the range and size settings are spectacularly less than descriptive. Doesn't really help me to understand what the settings are doing.

People who act rude or stupid on the Interwebz because they're anonymously hidden behind their computers don't die of spontaneously-combusting brain aneurysms.

I'm not so sure the "check every 10 seconds" thing is correct. Slotting procs on Health and Stamina work that way, because they tick every 10 seconds with a duration of 10.3 seconds, but I don't think FA does.

According to Mids, FA ticks every 0.5 seconds with a duration of 0.75 sec. That means that you should see the proc fire every 10 seconds on average. It lasts 5.25 seconds and won't stack. So on average you should have the Build-Up buffing you roughly 5 seconds out of every 15, give or take.

But I have to say I've never actually six-slotted FA with Gaussian, so I've never seen it in practice.

Since you mentioned tohit debuffs above, one thing about FA that often gets overlooked or discounted is that it also provides something like 60% tohit debuff protection.

Yeah, I know, a lvl 41 power to fix something that's mostly an issue in the 15-25 range.

Any NAT-capable router (which yours almost certainly is, unless you bought some early-90's surplus somewhere) should be able to handle this automatically. In fact, trying to set up port forwarding is probably what gave you troubles in the first place.

You took Confront and then Presence/Provoke? I don't think the Taunt set is worth it.

Since you're taking Body Mastery anyway, I'd take Focused Accuracy and six slot it with Gaussian's. I'd five slot Build Up with Adjusted Targeting. I'd get the extra slot by taking it from Conserve Power.

Too many slots spent on Physical Perfection. You can get far better return on them in other powers. It's also worth putting a second Performance Shifter: Chance for +End in; that averages out to a flat extra 0.2 end/sec recovery.

Since this is an /Invuln build, you'll probably want five copies of the Impervium Armor psi resist and the Aegis psi/status resist. That's 18% Psi resist by itself.

I'd replace the Numina heal/rech/end in Dull Pain with rech/end. You'll lose a miniscule amount of healing and gain a few seconds worth of recharge. You're already capping HP.

You may also want to consider more Recharge, perhaps Hasten. From my own experience, Fiery Melee has a very slow feel to it for a scrapper primary, which is probably a legacy of its tanker roots.

Finally, you didn't take Unstoppable. Unstoppable is awesome. Not strictly necessary, I suppose, but awesome.

All my $.02, of course.

FPARN

On to business: One interior office map that really bugs the heck out of me is the one where the corridors run in a complete square with the map entrance on the interior of the loop. The elevator is usually on the "back" side of the loop. Needless to say, this map never corresponds to a building where the entrance is enclosed in a courtyard, since no such building exists that I know of.

I think there's also a warehouse map that behaves in this fashion.

Sorry, don't have the map names handy.

Bug fix: The Peacebringer costume change emote causes the eye auras to stop working, until a power is detoggled. Toggling on a new power doesn't fix it but detoggling a running one does. Reported this ages ago and never fixed.

Suppress Close FX does not suppress the yellow Willpower aura effects.

For powers that use the Tarzan emote to activate... well, anything other than the Tarzan emote, please. And yeah, I'd take pretty much anything.

Wings: For my own take, I would like to see wings beat double-time when climbing and hold when in a dive, just as they do when falling.

Flight in general: Banking turns and/or the ability to roll. And an easy way to either perma-set a flypose or launch it in conjunction with a flight power. Binding powexectoggleon Fly$$em flyposeX does not work, unless you hit the bind twice.

Please find some way to put Power Slide back into circulation, preferably not as some god-awfully late Vet Reward. I know it was promised to the DVD edition crowd as an exclusive, but it's been over 5.5 years now. I think they'll get over the betrayal.

Adding a "blast-off" element to rocket boots would be fun, like a small burst of smoke and flame. Similar effects for the other specialized footwear.

That's all off the top of my head...

Since nobody's mentioned it:

You give pets insps by dragging and dropping the insp to the pet's name on the pet control panel.

I think there's also a command-line command that will do it but I've never looked into that.

QR

I just sort of skimmed through most of the posts but I don't think I saw this one, so here goes (at the risk of offense).

During the 1930's in America, pre-WWII, there were a lot of well-intentioned intellectuals who thought that the fascist movement in Europe was the way to go. Top-down control over the social order backed by private industry. Heck, even Woodrow Wilson wrote a few admiring things in that regard. Of course, this was before the extremists took the ball and ran with it.

It's not outside the realm of possibility that the Reichsman Cole was simply an American fascist sympathizer who enlisted with the Nazi cause in the years leading up to the war. Or, if he was indeed a more mercenary version of Cole-Prime, perhaps the German nationalist movement simply made him a better offer.

Everything is subject to interpretation, of course, but gadget-augmented skilled normals generally fall on the "Natural" side of things. Technology generally covers those whose abilities solely derive from tech devices, such as cyborgs, armor-suits and the like.

Groups with contemporary military training, like the 5th Column, Council, Malta, Knives and maybe Crey and Nemesis should scatter for precisely the reason of thwarting AoE. Substitute "AoE" for "grenades and artillery" and that's how modern militaries are trained.

While I agree it would be more realistic to have the bad guys respond en masse when a fight starts, I also agree that is one area where reality has to be sacrificed for playability.

On the other hand, I could certainly see instanced maps having an overall "threat awareness" where the frontal assault gives the critters in the back an opportunity to bring other measures into play, such as setting traps or ambushes. I mean real ambushes where a group of baddies hide and wait for you to reach them. You could then give players the opportunity to detect and avoid or counter these traps. It would give additional value to stealth and stealth tactics for purposes other than simply short-circuiting the instance.

I would also propose that while smarter AI might make fighting mobs harder, that's not a bad thing in terms of presentation. If Malta were smarter, for instance, they wouldn't need Sappers. Smarter critters need less "edge" in terms of power and durability; the computer wouldn't have to cheat, in other words. And if you can make critters less powerful and durable without shortchanging them, then that would be one way to address the "more super" issue.

Running Shadow Maps with Shaders set to High. I was outside the front door to the Talos Island Vault Reserve building when I noticed that the shadows for the monorail train tracks and the cars moving on them don't move and lengthen with the sun. They simply stay as if the sun were directly overhead.

This is especially glaring and noticeable in the "afternoon" when the building's shadow starts lengthening towards the track but the track's shadow stays put.

Maybe I just haven't paid enough attention to it. Is it just this stretch of track or do all train tracks cast static shadows?

Pursuant to a conversation struck up in another thread, what changes would you like to see happen if critter AI were revamped?

Smarter? Dumber? Selectable difficulty? Special tactics? What?

How would you suggest going about making it happen?