General Idiot

Not specifically mercs, but one change made on another server I'd love to see here is making all the mastermind upgrade powers automatic - instead of having to upgrade every time you resummon pets for any reason, it's just an auto power that upgrades any nearby pet every few seconds if it's not already upgraded. The only downside is it takes away the option of not upgrading specific pets, though I'd argue that was already done when the upgrades became AoE given how finicky it is to exclude a single pet from being upgraded as is.

For a while on live the standard strategy for the Recluse Strikeforce was to bring a sufficiently IOed mind control dominator to put the whole Freedom Phalanx to sleep so they could be easily woken up and fought one at a time. So it's definitely possible.

Widows with not widow claws would be great, yes. Even if it's limited to only the non uniform costume slots.

This, plus being universally mag 4 for tanks and brutes, 3.5 for kheldians and 3 for scrappers. One question though, what defines the difference between a good aura and a weak aura?

The ingame info is wrong for it then, because it definitely does have a taunt component just like all similar powers with buffs that scale on the number of nearby foes do. Either that or the power is broken because if it doesn't have a taunt, it should have one.

Knockback with magnitude lower than 1 is knockdown. The only times you'll see sweeping cross or spinning strike do knockback instead is if you use them on enemies I think two or more levels below you, in which case the level difference results in the magnitude being higher and thus enough to do knockback, or if you put a knockdown proc in them and both the proc and the power's normal effect trigger on the same enemy, in which case the two effects combine to produce a magnitude high enough for knockback instead. Similarly, other powers meant to do knockback can end up doing knockdown on higher level enemies for the same reason of being scaled down by the level difference. If you look at other powers that do knockdown, you'll see they all actually do 0.67 magnitude knockback. Knockdown as a seperate explicit effect does not actually exist, though I'll admit the power descriptions could be clearer on that. Regardless, none of this is a bug.

So I finally got around to downloading the new version of this and I have one likely not so small request. Can the colours used for the power list be customisable? Because the old one had green for powers you have, yellow for available and blue-grey for unavailable while this one uses blue for powers you have and grey for unavailable and my brain finds that extremely jarring. Also being able to change the yellow now used for the toggle buttons and current level back to the green it used to be (Or to any other colour) would also be nice. Additionally, in the configuration the size option for stats/powers doesn't appear to change anything while in the old one it changes the size of the text for powers in the primary/secondary/pool lists.

This is not a bug. The rarity in packs indicates your chance of getting that particular drop from the pack, not the quality of the ATO you'll receive. All ATOs from super packs are at the normal orange quality and require enhancement catalysts to become purple.

A slightly more silly suggestion but I always thought the best new Judgement power idea I ever saw was Fleet Judgement - just an oversized version of Propel that throws an aircraft carrier at someone. Also yes please on the orbital cannon. So perfect for so many characters where having an enormous energy blast they fire themselves makes no conceptual sense.

The same thing happens with Katana and Ninja Blade. If the sword isn't already drawn, you get the sound effect but no animation on the first power you use. Notably those two do have redraw options - if you use them, the first power activated will play the draw animation but still not play the power's animation. And then there's the other bug where your sword is only visible to other players when a power is animating. The moment you're idle again it vanishes on other players' screens even though you can see it on yours. Both of these bugs only happen with sets that use the katana, as far as I'm aware.

That 'useless' melee range hold is the highest damage single target power a warshade has though. The actually useless one is Essence Drain, their other melee attack which is a clone of Dark Melee's Siphon Life power. But while Siphon Life was long ago buffed to deal decent damage in addition to its self heal, Essence Drain remains so lackluster that a lot of people forget it even exists. The bigger issue of using the normal melee powers for dwarf is a matter of cooldowns. Most notably Sunless Mire and it's two minute cooldown compared to Black Dwarf Mire having if I remember rightly a 20 second cooldown. You can adjust cooldowns on them in different forms (the two T2 powers already do that, being 4 seconds in human form and I think 6 in nova) but if they're on cooldown already when you shift they stay on cooldown. Not a huge issue with a two second difference between forms, especially with how much recharge a lot of kheldians build for, but much more of one with a minute and 40 seconds difference. To remove the form specific powers entirely and simply use the normal versions in forms as well would likely require giving both archetypes a full on revamp because of this. Not that I'd be against such a thing, but that may be beyond the available development resources we have currently. And then there's the cottage rule to consider as well, though whether merging two copies of effectively the same powers into one actually breaks that is debatable.

Ever felt Dark Extraction was a bit fiddly to use in combat, with having to find a dead target under all those particle effects and use the power on it before it despawns? Try this: /bind KEY "+$$target_custom_near defeated enemy$$powexec_name Dark Extraction" Replace KEY with whatever button you want to bind it to, of course. You'll target the nearest corpse and extract it in one button press, no searching required. I still don't entirely understand exactly why, but the "+$$" at the start causes it to execute the bind twice per button press, instead of only once and requiring two presses to actually make the power activate.

None of those powers are overpowred on their own, no. But, having effectively extra power slots could be very overpowered in some builds. Instead of taking boxing, you could take that primary or secondary power you'd otherwise have to skip to fit the three fighting powers in. Multiply by however many prereq powers you can now skip taking and that could make a very significant difference.

About Force of Will - Scrappers and Stalkers really need the same fix that Tankers and Brutes got to ranged damage modifiers, because currently Force of Will's two damaging attacks do more damage on a tank than on a scrapper and that's just wrong. I suspect such a fix is likely already planned, but maybe fix the numbers for Force of Will at least before it goes live or you're going to have a lot of disappointed scrappers out there. Also, Weaken Resolve is an amazing debuff on a tank. -15% resist for one power slot, plus the ability to slot Achilles' Heel for more debuff as well might make the people grumbling over the loss of bruising over in the tank thread fall silent for a bit. Also would it be possible to get an option to hide the extra power tray that pops up with Mystic Flight and now Mighty Leap? Even if it only hides when it's just those extra powers and not mission specific stuff. On an unrelated note, one as far as I know unnoticed change to Psionic Melee. Greater Psi Blade no longer does AoE insight strikes on a tank. I suspect that is a bug on live with the current implementation of Gauntlet since it hits the same five targets as Gauntlet does in the same radius, but I always liked it because it gave the tank version of the set something unique. Is there any chance that functionality might be restored and made a proper feature of the set, given tanks' new focus on AoE?

Pretty much as the title says. I'd really like an option for this power to make it not completely hide my costume when I use it. Keep the same FX, just make it not make me vanish entirely. Peacebringers got a similar option for Light Form and one could argue Dark Armor got one for Cloak of Darkness (The Soul Noir theme lacks transparency, though uses different FX) so it's not something completely without precedent.

With how hard it's been said to be to change that, I really want to know what the original devs thought was going to happen that they had to absolutely nail it down that you couldn't do it. Unless it's less intentional and more a symptom of ten years of spaghetti code stacked on top of it.

I could be wrong but if I remember rightly some of the demon summoning pets actually do lose their basic melee attack when you use either both upgrades or just the second specifically on them. If it works for them, one would think it reasonable to assume it'd work or could be made to work for other pets.

Perhaps worth noting this also fixes the few powers (the ones added when all epic pools got a 5th power) that always used ranged modifiers and thus did terrible damage. It may also have changed the damage on Arcane Bolt in the Sorcery pool too but i havent gotten onto the beta server myself to check that yet.

The powers the Resistance enemies themselves use with it function more like Assault Rifle, too. And given the two sets already share some weapon models I don't see why it couldn't happen.

Can this change be applied to Willpower's Rise to the Challenge power as well? Currently it applies a 1.25 second Mag 3 taunt, which makes it rather easy to lose aggro as a Willpower tank when there's other taunt auras around. Additionally, could that duraction be changed to the standard 13.6 seconds? Every other taunt aura, on tanks at least, has at least that duration. The only other outliers are higher duration, not lower. I never understood why Willpower arbitrarily has a so much lower duratiion on its taunt aura - if there's an actual reason for that, I'd love to know what it is.

If it really does apply to any power that takes accuracy enhancements, as was said, it should logically also be affecting pool powers.

Can confirm, for Mu Mastery at least the lightning fires the moment you hit the button. It should, presumably, fire when the character's arm jerks back a half second or so later. The slow version of the power animates correctly, but the fast version reliably has this problem every time it is used. Edit: Nevermind! I just noticed there's a new patch on the beta server which among other things includes a fix for Zapp's timing. Whether the same issue affects other snipes in epic pools or otherwise and whether the fix is for them as well if it does, I am not sure.

Assassin Strike (When used while hidden) is also interruptible, so that's one more. If it were me and I was going to change interrupts at all, in addition to fixing the endurance cost so it gets refunded if interrupted, I would rather give all interruptible powers a different effect in combat as was done with Assassin Strike and as is being done with all snipes in the patch currently on the test server. Interruptible powers have a reason for being interruptible - so that you can't reliably use them in combat. Not being able to is irritating at times but it's the whole reason they are. It also means something like Aid Self can have a good heal attached to it, instead of having the nerf the heal amount on it so it's not better than equivalent powers in primary or secondary sets. Compare Aid Self, a 20% heal on a 20 second cooldown, with a power like Reconstruction, a 25% heal on a 60 second cooldown. Without the interrupt, it's hard to argue in favor of Reconstruction with three times the cooldown for only slightly more healing. If it wasn't interruptible, both the healing and the cooldown of it would probably have to be nerfed significantly or it'd be too powerful for a pool power, especially given it also has the endurance recovery effect if you have Aid Other as well.

If changes to the existing base teleporter powers are on the radar at all my biggest request would be not putting the power on cooldown until you've actually gone into a base with it. Which may be difficult, I know, but currently it's quite easy to accidentally close the menu it summons and waste the power for no effect. Or to mistype the password for the base you want, get denied entry and again, waste the power. That plus a lower cooldown and maybe a shorter or just non interruptible animation would make the slash command all but irrelevent to me. Again I'd argue for the same five minute cooldown Long Range Teleport has, personally. Some would say that'd make Long Range Teleport a wasted power pick but I would point out it still has the advantage of being enhanceable for lower cooldown plus being only one loading screen to get to another zone. And if we're worried about speed task forces, a five minute base teleporter is still slower than what's possible on a full team with team transporters given only one needs to be used at a time and they go direct from one mission to the next with zero travel time through a base or from the base teleport point to the mission door.

That's very disappointing to hear. Is there any chance it might be reconsidered? Perhaps disable it in combat only to fix the actually definitely an exploit uses of it to escape death in pvp or master challenges or whatever else, while leaving it usable for the useful social functions that provide no particular gameplay advantage? Admittedly I have no idea how simple or not so it would be to disable a specific slash command in combat, but I and a great many others will be very sad to see it go if it does. Alternately, a buff to the existing base teleport power if the slash command goes would be a nice compromise. Either not taking thirty minutes to cool down (Which is a real pain if you accidentally click the wrong base, which isn't an issue at all with the slash command) or not taking fifteen seconds to animate or both - I'd make it five minutes and five seconds personally. And probably add bases as an option to Long Range teleport too, if that's possible.