General Idiot

Personally, the one and only thing I want out of a Kheldian rework is still giving them mez protection in human form. Every argument I've ever heard against it is invalidated by the fact that the Arachnos epic ATs exist - both of them have the same mix of ranged and melee attacks along with similar survivability and much better team support. Mechanically they do everything a Kheldian can but better, with the sole exception of tanking. Though honestly in all my years playing this game from back on live to here and now, I don't know if I've ever once seen a Kheldian actually tank. That said, I'm not asking for much. The same mag 4 protection soldiers get in their level 1 passives. Argument could be made for mag 6, that being what soldiers have if they take both of said passives. Not enough to make you immune to mez forever, just enough so one random minion tagging you with a single power doesn't lock you into Dwarf for the rest of the fight.

Is that why half the time when you check history for an item it just doesn't load at all, or is that an entirely seperate thing?

More specifically, all enemy groups will drop enhancements fitting their theme. The exception is in incarnate trials, where you'll receive enhancements of your own origin regardless of what you're fighting. Solo incarnate content like dark Astoria might do that too but I'm not sure there. Invention salvage meanwhile is split purely into magic and tech, and groups will drop whichever fits them better. Invention recipes as far as I know are completely random aside from their own rarities.

Personally I just rebound A/D to strafe entirely years ago but that's probably not something everyone would want.

If Super Strength is balanced around Rage, then it follows that the damage it deals with Rage active is considered ok and thus one stack of Rage active without crash should be considered balanced. It's only when having multiple stacks of Rage that it becomes unbalanced in terms of damage output, and the crash is there to discourage stacking it too much because the more you stack it the more time you spend debuffed and doing no damage at all. So I wonder, is it possible to make Rage only crash -if- there's a second stack or more of Rage still active when it expires? That way those who hate the crash could just use one stack and enjoy smashing things with no penalty, while those who enjoy stacking it as high as it'll go and being extra smashy most of the time with periods of no damage in between can continue doing that. Possibly the crash might need to be made slightly more harsh to balance things out but that would only further emphasise the risk/reward playstyle some people enjoy, surely.

A primary set for which archetype? The only existing category the mix of melee and ranged powers you've given fits into is assault, which no archetype gets as primary and only dominators get as secondary. Thus my commentary on control sets, not as secondary effects on these powers but because this set as you've written it would have to be on a dominator. Unless you're actually suggesting a whole new archetype with assault primary, in which case I do wonder what secondary you envisioned for it?

I wonder, would it be too much to ask for these alternate animations to also make their way to Thorny Assault's version of Ripper and Night Widow Training's version of Eviscerate? I asked the same in the main patch notes thread before these ones were up but it makes more sense to ask here, so. Thorny Assault > Ripper as far as I'm aware is a straight copy of the Spines one so that at least in theory should be doable. Night Widow > Eviscerate has a slightly different animation if I remember rightly, the body movement is the same but it includes animated blades that extend from the wrists similar to what Rippper does. That one might be harder?

Seems like an assault set given all the melee attacks and honestly I'd love an assault set with a single pistol for ranged and punching with the other hand for melee. But it does beg the question of what control set could possibly pair with it for your stated concept goal since assault sets are only available to dominators. For the kind of concept you're aiming for it might be better to create a pistol power pool that's just the pistol attacks, or personally I'd make it a ranged version of the fighting pool with three pistol attacks and two defensive powers akin to tough and weave. Though those would likely need to be mutually exclusive with the fighting pool for balance. But then you could add such a pool to a melee AT and have exactly your concept rather than having to fit control powers in somehow. And it could be used for other concepts too, like the military types with assault rifles carrying a sidearm.

Personally I distinctly remember getting lag spikes of the kind described here back on live. And given the discussion of large leagues I can't help but wonder if that barrier thing was part of what made incarnate trials lag so horribly when they first released too. BAF especially I remember having upwards of thirty seconds delay on some things because the server was just that far behind. The server having to stop and empty the SQL queue strikes me as one of those things that doesnt cause a noticable delay in a small test server, even the open betas. But then cause a significant one on a live server with many more players doing all sorts of other things that could also be causing barriers here and there. So it's possible this was an issue on live too and just not considered enough of a problem to invest time and resources into solving it for no direct return. Remember, our team here isn't beholden to a publisher expecting return on any money they spend. So they can spend time fixing stuff like this where in a more commercial environment there'd be a bean counter somewhere saying no.

I wonder, any chance of this also making its way to the Night Widow version of Eviscerate? Or is that animation more unique from the Claws version than it seems?

Looking more closely at Bayonet though you're not wrong there, it does substantially more damage than I thought at first because it has a damage over time effect as well. Presumably this is considered balanced as a secondary effect, the same as how fire powers usually do more damage because they have DoT while other sets get a slow or defense debuff or some such. All the crab melee powers have -def attached. I could see adding a bayonet equivalent for crabs with the same bleed effect but no -def perhaps. Notably the bane spider does have an 8 second recharge melee power and it does almost the same total damage as bayonet, though again some of that is a secondary damage over time effect that all the bane mace melee powers have. Personally if it were up to me I wouldn't add another melee attack, instead I'd add a third ranged attack to give crabs more than just the two single target ranged powers since they're meant to be the more ranged focused side while banes are melee.

Holy balls, it actually happened. Here i thought it'd been given up on long ago.

The kmeter bit is the bane spider's critical hit from hide, which they can also get on the two wolf spider melee attacks. There's no way for a crab spider to activate that extra damage as they lack the cloaking device power that enables it. But since it's the same power the effect is still there in the code even though it'll never trigger. If OP is including that extra damage in their math when asking for buffs to equivalent Crab powers, they shouldn't be. Without it included, Pummel and Slice do the exact same amount of damage in PvE. In PvP Pummel does slightly more but that's because animation times are a factor in PvP balance (they're not in PvE) and Pummel has a slower animation. Bayonet meanwhile has no direct equivalent in the Crab Spider powers (and there's certainly room to create one for the more melee focused crabs out there) but it does do slightly less damage than the closest thing in Arm Lash, which has a 10 second recharge to Bayonet's 8 and does correspondingly more damage. There's nothing terribly unbalanced here.

I thought lockouts were a stupid idea when the live devs first added one to Water Blast and my opinion has not changed in the however many years it's been since then, they're still a stupid idea now and only more so for each new set that comes with a mandatory 'no you don't get to use your fun gimmick for this completely arbitrary period' mechanic. If removing the lockout would make the powers unbalanced as is, then rebalance them so they're not.

For the snipe, an appropriate animation already exists in the form of Masterful Throw from the dominator martial assault secondary. I think that uses a shuriken projectile like most of the other attacks in that set but at least theoretically it should be possible to swap that out for a knife instead.

This is pretty much it. All five winter sets have a 6% fire/cold resist bonus, so if you're building defense and using those for their sizable defense bonuses you end up with 30% fire/cold resist from those alone even before considering anything else in your build. And then most of the purple sets have that same 6% bonus so if you're building recharge and thus using purples for the 10% recharge bonuses you again end up with probably that same 30% just by default. Compared to other resistances which tend to come in smaller 1.5% to 3% at most bonuses, it leads to builds often having disproportionate amounts of fire/cold resist no matter what you were actually building for.

In the case of Staff that's not the issue. For a short while after release way back on live it used to have entirely different sound effects that had way more weight to them than the current ones do. And the current ones are fine, I just liked the old ones better.

Something like the Gun Fu and Military Assault sets they have over on Rebirth would certainly be a welcome addition here, yes. Gun in hands, shoot people at range or kick them in the head when they come closer. Also it's very debatably contemporary but an assault set with a bow and maybe martial arts powers would be cool too. From a technical standpoint the issue is mostly mixing animations that expect a weapon in your hand with ones that don't. Can result in weapons clipping through the character, or spontaneously appearing and disappearing depending on which powers you use. It's not an insurmountable challenge as proven by the existence of those two sets on Rebirth but it's undoubtedy a bit of work to get running smoothly.

The only change I want for Staff is to have the original sound effects back. The current ones sound so wimpy in comparison and I've always wished they never got changed even if the live devs were probably right that originally it sounded too heavy for what it is.

Honestly I always thought the giant swirling vortex was a placeholder for FX the live devs never quite finished.

I'm imagining a character actually literally juggling their gun, their bow and their mace and making attacks with each one as they come back down before tossing them up again and that is the most hilarious mental image I've had in a while, so thanks for that.

Basically the whole account server that handles all of that was never designed to hold the number of character items people are leaving in it now that super packs don't cost real money. So every now and then it just dies for no reason and some people can't claim things for a while.

The textures used for upper and lower body are inherently symmetrical though. The game quite literally only has a texture for half the body and just mirrors it to render the other half. It's not a case of 'simply' making an asymmetrical texture because it's not the texture causing the limitation. Significant parts of the costume system would need to be rebuilt to make it even possible for those particular costume parts to be asymmetrical, long before it gets anywhere near anything relating to textures. Now that's not to say it's impossible because it's not. But you're seriously underestimating the work required. If you look over at Rebirth, they have asymmetrical costumes. But that was months if not years of work on the part of their devs and last I checked they're not even finished it yet.

Anything new in 2014 is still going to be well above the game's system requirements though. For reference since I'm not sure some people realise how low they actually are, those requirements are: CPU: Pentium 3 or Athlon equivalent CPU SPEED: 800 MHz RAM: 256 MB OS: Microsoft® Windows® XP/Vista/7 VIDEO CARD: 32MB Direct3D Card (GeForce 2+/Radeon 8500+/Intel 845G+) TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 32 MB 3D: Yes DIRECTX VERSION: 9.0 (included) SOUND CARD: Yes FREE DISK SPACE: 2 GB And yes, I realise they're honestly quite absurdly low almost 20 years later and the odds of a machine old enough to not be significantly above them actually being still actively used are low at best, but so far as I know they're still the minimum the devs try to keep supported. It's why we have things like the legacy 32 bit client, even though there haven't been any 32 bit processors available new anywhere for over a decade now.

OK but that's a very specific combination of three separate costume parts that don't even share a common theme so it's unlikely to ever see more than one such costume at a time. The sybil robes, on the other hand, a large chunk of the playerbase has wanted for ages and has several capes on that one piece alone. So the chances of seeing a couple dozen of them on screen would be much higher. That said, I'm not sure anyone's ever actually publicly tested it. Would be interesting to see what the actual performance impact is if one was to make a costume with all three of the pieces you mentioned and, on a minimum spec computer, go into an AE mission set to x8 with every mob wearing it to put the largest conceivable amount of capes on screen at once. Then compare framerates between that and the same mission but give the mobs a costume with one cape each. The only difficulty really would be finding someone who actually still has a minimum spec computer. I'm told they do exist but I haven't met one in years.