Void_Huntress

And this is pretty much why I can't play conventional MMOs. I need a sense that I, myself, am more awesome than my opponents. City gives me this. Most conventional games can have me lose to Random Mook 3918732.

In a one on one.

The good news is I'm pretty sure recaptcha doesn't go off of single returns. So it might not be ruined forever.

I wouldn't count on anything in the sale being permanent. This is experimental, so they may decide something isn't worthwhile, or to change things up before the next time something resurfaces (or is price slashed) again.

It's interesting to me, how people will look at a powerset like Dark Miasma and see different things. A testament to its versatility, I suppose.

I always saw it as a buff/debuff set, rather than a control-oriented set. To me, the mezzes were the things that were out of place.

While I can see where you're coming from, personally I would LOVE to have Dark Affinity available for other ATs as alternate version of Dark Miasma, because swapping out those two mez powers would be great to me.

... I do agree that blackhole's persistence as a power is kind of baffling, though.


Synapse, is there any chance you can tell us what you think Blackhole's actual PURPOSE is, as a power? Because to date, all of the purported purposes it has have been demonstrated to be not met by the power.

I'd be all on that for the gadget attacks. Of course, some of the current temp powers out there really ought to be 'you should have a limited amount on hand'. See: Recovery Serum, and Power Analyzer series.

Which is why my SO suggested at one point selling 'memorized recipes'.

So that you only needed salvage to craft your temp power whenever you want.. and maybe for some of them increase the max holdable stack.

... I'd like that variant on a defender or corruptor. Alas.

With A Pony Wish List Item: Be nice if we could have alternate version powersets, or powersets with mutually exclusive choices.

One of Turbine's games is a notable entry, where essentially all combat (aside from some PvP duels) is instanced. Even the 'wilderness areas' are instanced.

It's also the MMO I think does the most interesting things with in-mission mechanics.

It permits you to attempt a lot of things 'solo' that are meant for full teams (which is six members there), even though some things are genuinely impossible without multiple hands.

You can get around that to a degree with hirelings (which are essentially temp power teammates; they count as a teammate for all purposes except the command bar the summoner gets), but some quests are genuinely impossible without multiple sapients involved.

... Aside from raids, they still let you in the door. I don't know if raid content is permitted to be entered solo.

The only thing I can think of is whatever NCSoft might be possibly paying Cryptic for their initial work on the game. Would that be reflected as a reduction in income, if it exists?

If players are reporting critical bugs that aren't fixed prior to build finalization, I would think that at the least the OCR team would be informed so that they aren't learning about the (already documented) problem from players after publish.

There's definitely a communications problem here.

We didn't get any kind of acknowledgment that it was noticed in Beta, and it didn't even rate a 'known issues' item. What's up with that?

Please re-read my post. The part you quoted has the relevant bit.

Pet resistances are not relevant in the taunting scenario.

(emphasis added)

How exactly would Resilient Boost help a mastermind when taunting? Bots/Traps doesn't have any +res to self. Any resistance the bots have is irrelevant when taunting, since the MM takes damage directly and pet resistance doesn't apply to bodyguard mode damage distribution.

Are you assuming Tough, or an epic shield power?

I always figured Mind Probe being tagged 'melee' meant it had requirements on positioning. Likely contact, or being very very close to contact. That allows for 'not being there, or placing an obstacle in the way'.

The fact that contact doesn't seem to actually happen could simply be an artifact of the animation system. I mean, my Martial Arts and Street Justice characters seem to be punching the air in front of enemies all the time, and the enemies still get hit. Does that mean shields shouldn't work against them, either?

There are hardware configurations (certain ATI boards and/or drivers, I believe) where skirts still to this day vanish underwater.

That would be a lot better, yeah. I'd still rather not be under time constraints (what if I didn't get enough? What if I accidentally claim it on the wrong character?), but it'd be a vast improvement over the current situation.

Responding to myself because I had a related thought.

In most MMOs, cosmetic items being connected to time-limited or high difficulty content is common. The thing is, in most MMOs aesthetics are not a primary draw for a significant portion of the playerbase, due to the high constraints on aesthetics until you've gone a LONG way into investing yourself in the game. So the people for whom these are The Most Important Thing are very, very rare because most of them don't sit around that long.

This means that most of the playerbase either doesn't care about the pretties, uses them as kind of status symbol, or just goes 'Heh. Pretty.' There are of course exceptions, and they'e possibly loud exceptions, but they're exceptions.

In City, because of the flexibility in expression we have stepping in the door, even as a new player with none of the extra shinies, a lot of us get invested into the IDEA of a character, and that idea can be more tied to appearances than powersets.

To me, things like this are about as sensible as "You can only roll a shield defense character in August" or "You can roll Shield Defense, but you have to unlock Shield Charge in January."

I'm sure I'll eventually have a character concept that would benefit from either the aura or the emote, but it'll probably happen in spring. Which means it won't be available.

This sort of thing bothers me, and I think I'm just going to sit the event out. Like I generally do for seasonal stuff. I very much do not like having to know who to put in the effort on to get these things, and having a limited span of time to figure it out and actually go through the process.

Is there any chance some of these seasonal-only things could turn up in the store? I would pay for almost all of them as account unlocks. Pretty much right then.

Costume slots are currently discounted 25%, and that was the initial discount on Beam Rifle as well.

I'm idly curious how well, for example, the gleemail subsystem would cope with mailing IOs and salvage to yourself when not all of your characters are valid to have them.

Bet there's a hilarious minefield of 'Oh. Wait.' for this option.

Super Tailor.

While being a 'tourist' you cannot:

* Access O-Zone. This not only keeps you from accessing old arcs on your own outside of contacts (which as established you cannot do), but it's also a useful transit tool that essentially isn't available while on the other side.

* Access SG bases. This hampers both social interactions (some people hang out in SG bases) as well as actual gameplay benefits (storage, base teleporters, empowerment stations).

These are nontrivial limitations. They may mean more or less to some folks, but they're definitely barriers to many folks' 'normal' play, and that's being on top of not being able to initiate play on anything but paper/radio/tip missions as a tourist.