Winterminal

*Knowingly smiles and nods, comforted that multiple other people know the reference*

Here's hoping for i21 testing! (Even though we won't hear about it for while...)

Yeah, sure, but I assume you've seen the female model while using the 'Walk' power... C'mon, if their hips swayed any more, they would dislocate a joint! I'm not complaining, but is overly noticeable. Then again, as has been said, that is commonplace for most comic-book characters.

*wrangles in his post and whips it back on topic*

All signature characters have something: Statesman has a Detail 1, Back Alley Brawler has Gloves, and Mother Mayhem just happens to have a rather unique Chest Detail...

It is far from the worst culprit out there, I completely agree. I just thought it was worth pointing out.

In my opinion the visor should be fully visible, since it seems as though they would function like Ironman's mask, rotating upward above the forehead when not in combat (hinging on the circular part of the hat that goes over the ear). Though, I definitely see what you are saying about it making it look like a full helmet. Plus, I'm not a huge fan of the visor's design anyway, so I don't use that much, and therefore this is more of a nit-picking argument than anything

Though, having said that, I do wish more of the other "Detail 1" options fit better with the hat.

My guess would be that a gorilla/ape head would have been easy enough to make, but it's the rest of the body that was problematic. When you consider most of the beasts we now have access to (big cats, wolves, and bulls/bovines) they are all four-legged creatures, whose limbs all end up about the same in terms of mass and length. To believably adapt them to the humanoid skeletons we have in-game, you simply lengthen the hind legs.

The bird model was a bit more of a stretch, considering we can't make our arms the actual wings. But again, adapting it to the in-game models was probably relatively easy, considering it was plugging a pair of bird legs on to the bottom of the "Monstrous" leg skeleton, and designing a realistic looking bird-of-prey head.

For an ape, the problem is that they are already semi-bipedal (we evolved from them, after all). But they have longer (and in the case of gorillas, more muscular) arms, and their legs are comparatively shorter. If you put an ape's upper body on our human or monstrous lower body, it would look disproportionate.

Who knows, maybe we will see a version of this in the future, but my guess is that they skipped it this time around because they wanted to get the pack out and trying to figure out how to make Simian features work would have pushed back the release.

This.

I know power customization, story flexibility/rigidity, and costume design can sometimes be thought of as QoL, and therefore get pushed down the priority list in favor of content-based stuff. But all of the aforementioned stuff is content to a lot of players. And like Ellis said, it is what has kept me interested in this game for so long, while other games have lost their shine: If I didn't like a story arc for a certain character, I could move on to a choice of three others. If I don't like my current costume, odds are there's an existing option that will fix that. If I want green ice powers, than I can have my green ice powers! (No, I've actually never wanted green ice powers.)

Point is, it has been a great 7 year run thus far, which is a very impressive number for an MMO, and especially to be able to still be king of its genre with existing shiny new competitors. I can only hope that the Paragon Studios team knows all of this, and will continue on the same path. Good on ya, mates.

I'm banking on this. From a business standpoint, they were wise to first release the content that would involve the most people at any one time. I can be patient as long as that patience will pay off in the end. As with many others, I simply don't want to be left in the dust. I don't mind if most of my characters are not Sons of Krypton, in fact, I prefer them to have certain flaws. I just hope that when the day comes that Tyrant gives himself to the Well (or some similar event involving Rularuu, the Rikti, etc.), that my characters will be able to provide more help than "civilian crowd control."

Forbin beat me to it, but that's the exact quote.

So unfortunately, this would be the ultimate power-leveling tool, since the lower level character would be gaining all the xp even when not online, with no hindrance to the lvl 50 character since they can't gain any xp anyway. If they made it so 2 level 50s could pact together, and maybe share incarnate xp at some cost (reduced inf gains or something), that could be something worth looking into.

As for expanding the number of pact members...

I am all for encouraging groups of people to play together on a regular basis. But the more people you add to a pact, the more places the xp has to be distributed. Experience returns could get excruciating small, and make leveling quite a chore. You would also have to input a system to allow yourself to unpact with a certain member of the group, but not everyone, to allow for situations where one person of the group becomes inactive.

It looks incredibly complicated, and does not seem to be a feature the devs nor the player base are particularly concerned with at the moment. I like the feature, don't get me wrong, I just don't think we will expansion on it for a long while.

Nice, I see whatcha did there.

This pure awesomeness. A Preatorian killed with a rock. Can we please get this in the game somewhere? Even as a comment from an NPC civilian walking around Nova Praetoria?

"I hear Colonel Duray was killed by a Primal hero throwing a rock! The Emperor might be in over his head...

I knew the formation of the weapon was part of the animation, but I didn't know if it would transition seamlessly between powers. I wondered if this was the case, but I've never actually tested it, so that's good to know, thanks for pointing it out.

The other points in your post reiterate what I was saying: In order to have different elemental weapons, it would have to be another wave of animations due to the way the elemental weapon powers are set up, even if the character model motions were the same throughout.

This combo is about as straight forward as it gets, so there's not much advice that need be given. You get 3 ST blasts, a snipe, a cone, and a Targeted AoE, so you have plenty of ranged attacks to keep you busy. If the enemies get close, you get Irradiate and Atomic Blast, and Energy Manipulation's array of very good melee attacks. I'll say this: watch out in the early levels, since you'll lack a ST immobilization that comes with the other sets, and use and abuse Cosmic Burst's Stun. It is a great secondary effect that can save your life.

I could be wrong, but I think it is a little more complicated than that. In a weapon power set, the character model performs a certain action, which causes NPCs to react in a certain way (depending on the attack). So the weapon that you plug into the player's hand has little-to-no impact on the execution of the move. At the basic design level, the model is programmed to swing it's arm(s) in a certain way, with the hand closed in a fist around the cylindrical handle of *insert weapon here*. This is why weapons are so customizable: the weapon is, in fact, a costume piece. It does not matter if the character model is holding a mace, war hammer, or club, any certain move is still going to be executed the same way, and have the same effect on an enemy.

Thus, you run into a problem when trying to incorporate elemental weapons into every move of an elemental set: The existing elemental weapons in that set are part of the power animation, as opposed to a separate costume piece incorporated into the power animation (which is why there is no re-draw pause when you, for example, click Ice Sword immediately following Frozen Fists). In order to give an elemental power set customizable weapons, the devs would have to make the sets weapon sets, with a unified group of animations, where you could just plug in whatever type of ice sword / fire sword / stone hammer / etc. that you wanted.

The only other option (as far as I can tell) would be to do what I mentioned in my earlier post: make the weapon part of every animation, thus removing redraw, at least according to our current definition. The problem with that suggestion (I think) is that the weapon would in fact redraw with every click of a power, it would just be part of the animation, which would break continuity and fluidity in the attacks.

Now, if you are talking about simply giving elemental weapons as options in sets like Broad Sword, Dual Blades, War Mace, Battle Axe, etc., that seems entirely plausible. The only reason I can think of as to why the devs haven't done that yet is that it would be hard to justify an Ice Sword (which you would expect to do Cold damage) in a set like Broad Sword that is exclusively Lethal damage.

As a disclaimer, I do not know much about programming or how the system works. I am using deductive reasoning based on simple in-game observations.

I would not be at all surprised if this happens in the not-too-distant future. Sure, many forum residents have requested this, but I don't think that will be the main reason. The fact is that, currently, the trials are the "new toy" and there is a surplus of 50s out there that have yet to become Incarnates or are in the process of becoming so. Naturally, the powers-that-be want to encourage the playing of the new content, so they have limited the acquisition of Threads nearly exclusively to the two trials. But within a few months, players will have most likely filled out their 50s to whatever levels of Incarnate power they choose, thus depleting the number of normal 50s interested in becoming Incarnates. Once that happens, it will become more difficult for players to find a large enough group of people who (a) happen to have a new 50, yet to be an Incarnate, (b) actually want to make that 50 an Incarnate, and (c) have the time/energy/desire to run the necessary amount of trials to get the powers they want. At that point, I bet the Devs will make Threads available as random drops (at a decent rate) from most/all level 50 content, rather than listen to the slew of complaints from people on lower population servers that they cannot find enough players to form a Trial league.