General Idiot

If you want to level slower or not at all so you don't outlevel contacts or whatever other reason, the game already has an option to turn off earning xp entirely too. Which if I remember rightly was added for that exact reason way back on live.

Really if we want to balance IO bonuses everything that isn't defense needs to be buffed, or defense needs to be nerfed. But I can hear the screaming from here even just suggesting such a thing with how much people love their softcapped blasters and such. Merging regen/recovery and hp/end bonuses together like how they did with damage resist and mez resist bonuses would probably make both of them better, though. That might be an idea worth considering.

To my knowledge the powers exist in the game files but only as placeholders, they have no animations or visual effects. Our devs could theoretically create effects for them similar to how rad melee and armor were done but the big problem there is the only wind VFX that exist currently are in storm summoning, which would mean a lot of duplicated visuals if someone made a wind/storm controller which you can bet a lot of people would. Thus they'd have to create wholly new visuals for it which is a lot more work than recycling existing ones. And recycling existing ones isn't exactly a trivial task to begin with.

If they increased the other resists they'd probably decrease the S/L resist to keep the power balanced. Not sure what metric they judge that by but most likely it'd end up giving somewhere in between resists to everything rather than just boosting the others. Willpower as a set doesn't underperform as is, at least as far as I know, so there's little reason to buff it.

Because that would be an enormous amount of work to do. Even if the actual animations fit with no adjustment all the supporting stuff still needs to be hooked up individually for each one to make the extra options appear and function properly. Don't get me wrong, it'd be amazing if they could. But you might be underestimating just how much work it'd be.

I'm not a huge fan of making it a click power but that's mostly personal preference. My real problem with it though is tying the defensive buffs explicitly to your primary set's damage type, because that makes it vastly more useful for some sets than others. If you're something like Dual Pistols it's good because tons of things do lethal damage. But something like, say, Ice Blast it becomes much less worth using the defensive version because almost nothing does cold damage so a buff to cold resistance only is extremely situational to the point that even when it is useful it'll be forgotten about. Additionally, having it charge up per enemy (if I'm reading that right?) would mean it'd have to charge very quickly or it becomes unusable outside of the occasional Elite Boss or Archvillain fight because by the time it's available the enemy is dead or mostly dead already.

That's true of a lot of new and proliferated sets, though. There's a lot of epic pools missing.

I suspect it's probably one of those 'technically doable but more work than it sounds like, maybe eventually' sort of things.

Yeah, if the arc ends with 'defeat this named guy' already then it makes sense to make the named guy an EB. AV maybe not so much unless they're particularly notable but a lot of them especially in the lower level arcs aren't. But adding bosses to missions that don't already having them means rewriting the story of those missions to justify a boss fight, and at that point I'd prefer they just write new stories instead.

Brutes are explicitly designed to be able to tank. Scrappers are not. That's why.

You're probably right there though I think my definition of what constitutes functioning properly may differ slightly from yours. I don't see mobs occasionally running for their lives to be a problem worthy of changing multiple powersets to correct it. Nor do I think adding an option to correct it for those it does bother makes said option mandatory, any more than taking Hasten or the fighting pool is mandatory. No one's forced to take those either no matter how many people do.

Alternately, what they could do is add a taunt aura toggle to probably the presence pool. That way people who want to add that to their non-tank characters can do so and everyone else can go on their way. If nothing else it'd be interesting to see what that did to the farming meta since half of why brutes are popular over scrappers is their inherent taunt keeping things in burn patches.

Easy mode for people who want to casually take their time without worrying about dealing with other people rushing or needing to go afk to help grandma with something or whatever sounds fine to me. A little off topic for this thread perhaps but a fine idea.

I was just coming here to post this. Scared the hell out of me while I was looking through the animations. Worth additionally noting that this is true on all themes - original, color tintable, lava and crystal all play sounds in the editor.

Perhaps worth noting in that discussion that Stone Skin is now giving some resistance and defense to all but psi, not just smashing/lethal. So you're not completely defenseless vs fire/cold until 26 or 35 now.

Assault gives +damage though. They're not seperate, just two terms for the same thing. There's a few powers that do add outright bonus damage seperately from +damage that sometimes also say +damage in their tooltop but usually you can tell the difference by them specifying a damage type in their long description. Fiery Embrace is the only one that doesn't, I think, because way back when it actually was just +damage and they didn't update its description when they revamped how it works. The bigger issue with allowing enhancements in +damage powers is that damage enhancements ARE +damage under the hood. So if you made a +damage power enhanceable, it'd be enhancing itself. Especially in the case of a toggle like Assault this would result in the damage bonus increasing infinitely and exponentially, likely until the number overflowed the variable it's using in the code and the server crashed.

I am genuinely amazed no one has taken this in the month since it was posted. But now I did, so thanks!

I suspect the actual code is trying to pull them to your exact location, and letting the game's collision detection arrange them wherever from there which doesn't consistently put them in any particular spot. To get it to stack things consistently in one spot or relative to their former position would thus require new code to be written that could end up being quite complex. Which is not to say it's impossible, just that getting consistent positioning out of it may be a lot more effort than you're possibly assuming.

As will Hover or Combat Jumping, or any other power that gives air control.

The main problem with a psychic armor set is how do you differentiate it from Willpower, which is pretty much already that concept in a lot of ways. Even this suggestion has two powers that are barely renamed copies of powers from Willpower. Mechanically the other seven powers have different effects, sure, but they're all pulling from the same conceptual space - the whole mind over matter bit that we already have a set for. On a more practical note - having melee and ranged defense but no AoE is extremely bad when almost every mob has an aoe of some kind. Having psi defense explicitly when you already have positionals is going to do literally nothing against all but a tiny few powers that don't have proper positional tags and honestly those are more likely a bug than anything. Astral projection seems way too gimmicky to be actually useful most of the time, and I'm not sure the game engine can actually do what it requires - it'd have to spawn your body as a seperate entity, make all your running toggles affect that entity instead of yourself, keep track of that entity's health to affect you in turn, teleport you back to the body's location when it expires... I love the concept of it but it'd be a nightmare to implement, if it'd work at all.

Gaining a new stack should reset the duration on existing stacks, yeah. So, so many times I've gotten a third stack and gone to use AS only to have one fall off just as I hit the button.

See I always wanted the opposite - taking Mace Mastery should unlock the Arachnos maces for use with War Mace as well, so you can set both to the same and ideally then have no redraw between them. Having some extra mace options for Mace Mastery isn't mutually exclusive with that though and very much would be appreciated as well.

One thing I could see them doing is increasing the limit on pool powers by one, and making epic pools count toward the limit. So if you choose to not take an epic pool, you can take one extra normal pool instead. I'm not sure what effect that would have on overall balance though, some ATs care more for their epic pools than others.

Not long after Homecoming started I saw a really good suggestion for a hellfire assault set using the whip animations for ranged powers and fire swords for melee powers.

CoH spaghetti code strikes again I suppose. Good to hear it's on the to do list already though.