Monkeyking

In sufficiently large groups, the tanker might not be able to grab the entire crowd at once. The enemies will be focused on him, but not actually taunted. Then you drop a big AoE, and things get interesting. For that matter, the teams you've joined may just be playing it safe. A lot of teams will run at a much lower difficulty level than they're capable of handling, and bluntly, that's super boring. As a Beam Rifle blaster, if you don't actually need me to delete a couple bosses for you, you don't have it cranked up high enough. I'm just along for the ride at that point.

Blaster Defiance allows the first two attacks to be fired even while mezzed (I think this is actually baked into the attacks, rather than a function of the inherent power). I have observed that Beam Rifle's first two attacks can't be used while mezzed if I'm flying. I'm wondering if this is the animation engine being weird, and the flying animations of these attacks not being rigged properly.

I've noticed that the sound is accompanied by the disintegration FX firing off on all nearby targets. It's like there's a dummy disintegration effect jumping around between enemies, including defeated bodies.

Munitions Mastery has an odd interaction with Beam Rifle too. Both weapons are trying to use the same weapon slot. All your attacks will use the last weapon you customized, and whichever category you didn't pick, you'll see a phantom charge for that weapon in the tailor (though you don't actually get charged for it). Actually, I'm fine with the Munitions powers coming out of my beam rifle, or allowing the APP to unlock assault rifles for use with beams. It's annoying that I redraw the same weapon for Munitions powers though, and not great for people who wanted to carry an armory of separate guns. If you really wanted to knuckle down and do a bunch of work, you could move Munitions to another weapon slot (should probably do that anyway, for the sake of Dual Pistols), give it a No Redraw option, and also allow Beam Rifle and Munitions to add each other's weapons to their respective categories.

Finally got some testing time in. Sniper Changes Seems like a generally positive change. In combat, I didn't find that it changes very much. Your snipe just becomes a heavy 4th blast, which I was used to as a Devices user, but without the risk of losing a blast you might have gotten used to because someone threw a dark blast at you. As a Blaster I have enough attacks in my rotation that I didn't notice my snipe having a longer recharge. From the perspective of Beam Rifle, I have Disintegrate management eating up enough time that the recharge doesn't matter, and I imagine other sets have similar concerns. The out-of-combat sniper shot hits pretty hard, but I could almost live without it. Testing at level 50, enemy resistances tend to blunt the impact quite a bit unless you juice it up with Aim/Build-Up/Surveillance/etc. It's basically good for deleting one boss Stalker-style. Was that the intent here, to mimic Stalkers? All in all, seems like a modest buff, but nothing that really breaks the game. Just a tweak upwards in DPS for the most part. I'm not really seeing what's making people complain. Devices changes The damage on Web Grenade doesn't matter to me much because I've rarely used the tier 1 immobilize on any Blaster. It will be extremely welcome for low level Blasters though, before you have a functional attack routine. Taser becomes a melee attack, and that's cool. Actually, there's some great synergy here with Caltrops. Again, it's of more value to lower level players, but it's a nice hard-hitter that's a bit longer than melee range to wreck up people stuck on your Caltrops. Even at higher levels, 4 slots in Taser will give you something to fall back on when you've sucked down slow debuffs. Targetting Drone gets recharge reduction, which isn't quite what I was hoping for, but I'll take it. Given Time Bomb's extended recharge, to say nothing of Gun Drone and the thematically linked LRM Launcher, it's a pretty nice benny. The change to Time Bomb feels team oriented. It's still going to get used the same way: Throw Smoke Grenade, drop bomb, start fight. This will just annoy teams far less now that they don't have to wait 10 friggin' seconds for you to deploy the thing. Now it seems like Trip Mine is the skippable explosive, with Time Bomb being the vastly more usable alternative. If I could talk you guys into a quick deploy for Trip Mines, I'd be pleased as punch, but Devices feels pretty good amongst all the other power creep now. P.S. Change Field Operative to not permanently turn the user into a ghost, please. Blasters have to run it all the time now, and I'd like to be able to see myself in combat. Maybe get the low-pitched hum to fade out like other toggles, while you're at it.

No go. Homecoming puts up the splash screen, then immediately closes itself out. I've never gotten that to work independently; it always has to be launched from Tequila. EDIT: Oh, you meant the Homecoming option in the Tequila launcher. Double clicking THAT launches the main game. Okay.

I actually can't test the snipe changes because the only blaster I've gotten back up to speed is a Beam Rifle/Devices blaster. Nothing changes for me. Well, that's not true. What it DOES mean is that I won't have one of my main big damage shots turned off by tohit debuffs anymore. That's good. On the other hand, quick snipes being limited to 80 ft is functionally a range nerf for me. But that fact is, SOME people have quick snipes pretty much all the time. With some effort, you don't even need Devices to achieve it. So in that sense, I'm happy that people don't need to twist their builds up into knots to make it happen. Targetting Drones is going to need some kind of benny thrown in, though. Right now, getting trivial access to quick snipes is the main strength of Devices, especially since you don't get the extra damage kick from Build Up. If everyone's got quick snipes, the only claim to fame for Devices is getting to skip one accuracy enhancement - a benefit that no longer applies at high levels, or when you're slotting in IOs. This is going to widen the gap between blast sets that don't have snipes, as well. Sonic Blast and Dual Pistols might need looking at after this. Ice Blast maybe not, though, since getting two holds is an immeasurable advantage (and now they do big damage? when did the freeze rays get buffed?)

You have to do the tutorial to work undercover. If you don't run the tutorial and talk to Calvin Scott/Marchand about the possibility of going undercover, they won't respond when you call them up at the appropriate time.