Issue 26 Page 3

Issue 26

October 1st, 2019

Check out this news post for details on the Halloween Event and more information about this update.

Tasks

• The first two story arcs for Issue 26 are here! Both were written by @holymittens, a professional video game writer, and target the two “middle” alignments, with one story arc for Vigilantes and one for Rogues.

New Story Arc: Shauna Braun

• Characters of the Vigilante alignment between Security Levels 25 and 29 can find Shauna Braun in Independence Port, near the southern Police Station, or using the Contact Finder.
  • Shauna Braun is a young programmer from Paragon City. She was raised by her father in a tiny apartment in between Kings Row and Independence Port. Shauna moved out when she went to college, but her father - having sacrificed so much to give his daughter a good education - continued to live there until it burned down a year ago. The PPD closed the case, citing an accident as the cause of the fire, but Shauna doesn't buy the explanation. She wants to uncover the truth behind her father's death and bring the perpetrators to justice.
• This arc has two different endings, with a badge for each. The badge art was created by @Log.

New Story Arc: Bobby Curtin

• Characters of the Rogue alignment between Security Levels 25 and 29 can find Bobby Curtin in Crimson Cove, in front of the White Elephant building, or using the Contact Finder.
  • Bobby Curtin is a bouncer at the White Elephant in Crimson Cove, a private establishment which prides itself on being 'neutral ground' between the many warring factions in Nerva. Bobby is known by frequent patrons for being willing to step in and break up fights between anyone, be they Longbow, Arachnos, or mortal manifestation of an ancient god.
• This arc introduces true branching missions to City of Heroes; depending on your choices, you will be presented with a couple of entirely different missions, leading to several possible endings. There is only one badge for this arc, with art created by @Log.

Rikti Mothership Raid

• The Rikti Mothership raid can now be started from the LFG queue. Characters must be level 35 and have the Member of Vanguard badge to join the raid in this way.
  • If the league is not locked, a minimum of 16 players is required to start the raid this way.
  • All enemies inside the mission map are level 54, including the ones that are lower level in the zone. All players are bumped to combat level 50 for the duration of the raid.

Powers

New Origin Power Pool: Force of Will

• This power pool grants you access to various powers that allow you to manifest your own willpower and use it to harm your foes.
  • You can only have one Origin Power Pool (Sorcery or Force of Will) in your active build.
• Weaken Resolve: You overwhelm your foe with sheer strength of will, reducing their defense damage resistance, and chance to hit! Recharge: Long
• Project Will: You manifest your willpower into a blast and project it toward a distant foe, causing moderate psionic and smashing damage. Project Will has a fair chance to knock the target down. Damage: Moderate, Recharge: Fast
• Mighty Leap: While this power is active you're able to leap great distances and jump incredibly high. In addition, while this power is active you're able to use Takeoff, which will knockdown nearby foes and increases jump speed. Recharge: Moderate
  • Takeoff: You stomp your foot on the ground with tremendous force empowering your jump speed for a short time and shattering the earth beneath, knocking nearby foes off of their feet. Recharge: Long
• Wall of Force: You project an unfocused blast of sheer force at foes in a short wide cone in front of you, dealing moderate psionic and smashing damage and potentially knocking targets down. Wall of Force requires you to have two other powers from the Force of Will power pool. Damage: Moderate, Recharge: Slow
• Unleash Potential: Unleashing your potential, you grant yourself a moderate boost to defense, regeneration rate, and recovery for a short time. Unleash Potential requires you to have two other powers in the Force of Will power pool. Recharge: Very Long

Other Changes

Zones

• The Abandoned Sewers have received a minor atmospheric tweak to make them visually distinct from the standard Sewer Network.
• Bloody Bay, Siren’s Call, Warburg and Recluse’s Victory now have a full complement of 8 Exploration Badges and one Exploration Accolade.
  • The Exploration Accolade art was created by @Flashtoo.

LFG Queue

• The LFG queue will now wait until you have the Recommended number of players for a Trial or Task Force before teleporting you to the contact or mission if the league is not locked.
  • If the league is locked, Trials and Task Forces will continue to ignore the minimum players and start even solo. You can invite more players into the League once the Trial starts, but not to a Task Force.
  • Incarnate and Holiday Trials continue to always require the minimum number of players, whether the league is locked or not.
  • Incarnate trials will no longer automatically fail if a locked league drops below the minimum players. They will still fail if they drop below the minimum players in an unlocked league.
  • This setup is an attempt to satisfy both players who want to start Trials and Task Forces solo or with small teams (lock the league) and those who want to use the LFG queue to find teams for Trials and Task Forces (don't lock the league).

Bug Fixes

• The five Enhancement Sets from the Lords of Winter Super Pack (Avalanche, Blistering Cold, Entomb, Frozen Blast and Winter's Bite) are no longer incorrectly grouped with their Superior versions in the auction house.
• Many fixes to UI scaling for scrollbars, listviews, and compass elements.
• Fixed an issue preventing base item rotation in the 64-bit client.
• Implemented a workaround for a rare issue where the mapserver connection would get stuck while zoning into a map.

October 23rd, 2019

Stability

• Minor adjustments to particle physics in an attempt to prevent or mitigate a crash happening deep in the internals of the PhysX library. As we have not yet been able to reproduce the crash under controlled circumstances, this may or may not have an effect.

October 29th, 2019

Powers

• Fixed transparency values of Stealth and Invisibility.

Stability & Performance

• The PhysX simulation thread is now completely decoupled from the main thread and should not cause lag or frame rate slowdown even if it is extremely overloaded and falling behind.
• PhysX is now more aggressive about dynamically removing debris if it detects the simulation is running too slowly.
• Fixed an issue with the particles generated by certain powers taking much more processing power than they should. Stone Cages was the worst offender.

UI

• Fixed the Auction House search box not responding to input at very high (>2.5) UI scales common on 4k and UHD monitors.
• Fixed text of Auction House "Make Offer" button not scaling with UI.

November 1st, 2019

User Interface

• A fresh install now defaults to borderless windowed mode on the primary monitor, for maximum compatibility with monitors that don't support such tiny (and petty) resolutions as 800x600 or 1024x768.
• Pressing Alt+Enter to switch to fullscreen mode now always switches to the desktop resolution. Non-native fullscreen resolutions can still be selected from the options menu.
• Pressing Alt+Enter to switch out of fullscreen back to windowed mode no longer results in a huge window that is partially offscreen.
• Running the game with -safemode to reset the graphics options now resets them to windowed mode, rather than 800x600 fullscreen which is not very safe.
• When in borderless windowed mode, the game will drop topmost status on loading screens and when waiting for network connections, to ensure that it's possible to Alt+Tab out to other windows while the client is otherwise busy.

Misc

• The Halloween Event has ended. Fall has come to Atlas Park.
  • If you have leftover Halloween Salvage, you can still trade it in at the Halloween vendors (Annah in Croatoa, Granny Beldam in Nerva, Acantha in Imperial City).

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with the 3D resolution option sometimes showing incorrect values in the options menu when in borderless windowed mode.
• Closing the options window on the login screen will no longer result in various options being reset on the first character you log into.
• (Maybe) fixed the issue with the D-Pad on PS4 controllers.

November 19th, 2019 [ROLLED BACK]

UPDATE: This patch has been rolled back due to unforeseen stability issues. It will be returning at a later date.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed clip region for the load costume list in the costume editor on high DPI monitors.
• Added a sanity check for the UI scale on startup in case it gets corrupted in the registry.
• Added a work around for a deficiency in old versions for Wine on Mac that resulted in a divide-by-zero crash on startup.

Homecoming Crash Handler

• The new Homecoming Crash Handler has been added to the game - however, it is currently inactive until we update our Privacy Policy to cater for it.

November 29th, 2019

General

• Atlas Park is now ready for winter.
• The background color for Damage Resistance enhancements is now a slightly redder hue, to distinguish them from Defense enhancements.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed clip region for the load costume list in the costume editor on high DPI monitors.
• Added a sanity check for the UI scale on startup in case it gets corrupted in the registry.
• Added a work around for a deficiency in old versions for Wine on Mac that resulted in a divide-by-zero crash on startup.
• Candy Canes can no longer drop in Architect Entertainment missions.
• Fixed mistimed VFX for the dark version of Atom Smasher.

Homecoming Crash Handler

• The new Homecoming Crash Handler has been added to the game - however, it is currently inactive until we update our Privacy Policy to cater for it.

December 3rd, 2019

Advanced Crash Avoidance Technology Implementation

• The mapserver will no longer crash when attempting to transfer a character from one shard to another before logging it in.
  • Explanation: the previous patch introduced some internal changes to character data, and those changes are applied when the character logs in. If a character transfer was attempted on a character that had not been logged in, the receiving mapserver detected that the character was missing the new data fields, and triggered a programmer breakpoint in order to warn about the missing data -- which is to say, it crashed. It no longer is so enthusiastic about detecting missing fields on the live servers.
• The Mission Computer and Oracle will no longer crash the mapserver when a player tries to craft at tip mission while in a Task Force.
  • Explanation: Tip missions are really contacts, and crafting one adds a contact to your list. While a player is on a Task Force, it can only have one Contact available, and trying to obtain another caused the mapserver to freak out and crash. It has now been taught that it can just refuse to give the character another contact instead.

External Links

• Issue 26, Page 3
• October 23rd, 2019
• October 29th, 2019
• November 1st, 2019
• November 19th, 2019
• November 29th, 2019
• December 3rd, 2019