MTeague

I support anything that could help dilute the ridiculous amount of Longbow on the Isles.

I suddenly feel a need to respec my Mind/Kin to add Enflame to his toolkit. I have been *Quite* happy with New Enflame on my Staff/WP praetorian scrapper in several of the nastier First Ward missions.

It comes down to reliability. If you go "All In" and softcap defenses on your Fiery Aura character, then your resistances almost don't matter. With very good healing and most things missing you, you're probably good. Probably. ("they mostly come out at night. mostly") But.... with no DDR... you always have to keep in the back of your mind that that defense is fragile. And not every Defense Debuff requires a hit check. Or if you're tanking a LOT of mobs at once, it only takes that first lucky hit for the Cascade to begin. I'm still wrestling with it myself. I don't like having defense be that fragile. But if you don't go nuts and stack defenses Very high, it almost feels like there's no point, because a 28% defense will get ripped down by common debuffs quickly. But ignoring defense entirely and being pure resist + heals isn't often enough. Ultimately, I'm slowly coalescing on "Stack Mainly Resist and Some Defense.... when soloing I'll only have the resist + heals.... when teamed, team buffs can finish my defense". With the option to pop multiple lucks for very hard fights solo. Still not 100% sure of that plan, but what I'm moving toward.

Wait? You're saying a Scrapper is capable of doing something other than targeting an enemy and attacking? Are you sure about that? 'Cause I don't think I've ever seen it happen.

I mean, that's something players would simply learn. Or not. Not unlike the days when people would cry out that they needed heals to a Trick Arrow defender, who'd be like "oh yea, I got a Healing Arrow right here. It's a suppository. Bend over." Snark aside, it is important for players to know what powersets bring what powers to the table. Not everyone can free everyone from status effects. Even powers that DO free you from status effects, don't always work on ALL status effects. Kinetics/Increase Density won't do a darn thing for Fear or Confuse, though it does add some Smashing/Energy resistance Poison/Antidote covers all the traditional Clear Mind effects, while also giving Cold and Toxic and Slow Resistance. ForceField/DispersionBubble protects vs Hold,Immob,Stun, but won't do anything abou Fear/Confuse/Sleep. StormSummoning/O2 boost protects against Stun and Sleep, and Endurance Drain (malta anyone?), but won't free you from Hold, Fear, Immob, or Confuse. and several, such as Time, Trick Arrow, Cold, Nature, etc just have nothing. You on your own. Personally, I wouldn't want words flashing over people's heads, but as long as I can turn it off, I'm fine with it. A UI based indicator / color change to health bars would be less invasive for me, but I do get there can be colorblindness issues to wrestle with too, and choosing what kind of indicator is best for a variety of people. Letting the end user choose is best, but of course, requires more coding and testing.

I suppose part of my thing is a conviction that half of the P2W powers shouldn't even exist. At all. Period. Yes, I know they existed on LIVE. Yes, I know they're never ever ever going away. Yes, I know I'm leaving resources untouched on the table by not using them. Yes, I know they don't cost real-life money now. But I still view P2W powers through the lens of "you're from the dark times.... when microtransactions were infecting my favorite game that should have always remained a flat subscription". (No, I'm not always rational).

This deserves a "We Love The King Day".

Plant / Psi is crazy good. Seeds of Confusion is stupidly good. Most mobs will be busy beating up each other and you just rip them apart while they do. Very easy to tag them enough to get exp, and if you occasionally miss a minion or two, eh, it really don't matter. Mind Probe hits very hard and most things don't have Psi Resist. I do recommend TK Thrust though (smashing), for those robots and other things that DO have substantial psi resist Drain Psyche provides you with a very large +Regen and +Recovery as well as debuffing targets. Seeds of Confusion Hope into the pack Drain Psyche for many stacks of +Regen Profit! Plant also gives you access to Tree of Life, which if you choose to slot it up, is right up there with Triage Beacon, and with enough recharge you can have TWO up at once. Carrion Creepers is almost more fun than should be legal. Fly Trap is a pretty beefy pet. Far more durable than you'd think to look at him.

Welcome! I'm not sure how doable Consoles are or not. Particularly given the kind of no-man's land that the legalities off the private servers exist in. I know lawyers can take for EVER to approve something, and NCSoft may actually prefer to leave the game in a legal limbo. I still have hopes something will come from the HC team talking to NCSoft, but it feels like all those decades when I hoped the Cubs could win the World Series, you know? Still, miracles CAN happen.... I do believe the question of reclaiming characters from LIVE has been answered with a firm Never Going To Happen. Some old threads certainly suggest so, anyway. EDIT: That said, it's pretty fast to level up and gear up characters now. VASTLY easier to get the IO sets than it was back in the day.

I'm not opposed to the idea. I'm not convinced it's needed, but it does come up fast enough to cast on each member of the team one-after-the-other. You'd save cast cycles, but not really change the limits of how many you can buff with it. Much like Bubbler shields. That said, if the devs choose NOT to take action on this, I would offer my own personal triage steps Can I pop Vengeance? OH YEA BABY! ELSE, is someone in dire need of a Heal / Rez / Other major buff? Do that. ELSE, is someone actively mezzed right now? CM them. ELSE, did they just pop a wakie? Heal if can, then CM. get them back in the fight instead of being wobbly. ELSE, Scrapper, Tank, Brute, Stalker, VEAT, Sentinel? You'll get nothing and like it! (unless you qualify for #3/4, above) ELSE, are you a Defender/Controller/Corruptor/Mastermind who could hit me with CM or equivalent in return? I prioritize you before other pre-emptive CM's. ELSE, are you a player controlling a squishy who cannot provide me with CM? I'll CM you at this stage down the list. ELSE, are you somebody else's MM pet? I *so* do not care. ELSE, are you my MM pet? I might care. If soloing. And you're a T2 or T3 pet.

The only changes @WindDemon21 has proposed that I'm on board with is strongly increasing Regen's resistance to Regen/Recharge debuffs. The rest, I've simply "Nope, I can't get on board with that", and I'm not arguing it back and forth because it's clear he and I both have strongly held opinions and neither one of us is going to budge on it. That said, I do not begrudge him the right to the make the suggestion and to argue for changes he thinks are needed, even if I'm looking at them saying "No, my /Regen characters wreck face out of gate, they're fine". I do think what is getting under people's skin is the assumption/statement that "everyone agrees with this".

I can see how the Defense loss on rage crashes are Highly Unpopular on say, an /SR character. Whereas my Invuln/SS tanker barely notices the short-term defense loss, because even if things hit him it ain't for much. Then 10 seconds of "might as well not attack" from the short term damage debuff doesn't matter to me in the slightest. I can taunt, I can combine some inspirations, I can double check positioning, I can let some attacks come off cooldown.

never bought a single envenomed dagger. Don't plan on ever doing so. I do occasionally pop a charge of Shivan though.

basic syntax: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Binds Deep Magic: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/The_Incomplete_and_Unofficial_Guide_to_/bind But yea, what Doomguide2005 said. If you see someone hemmoraging END, make sure to to catch that person in Recovery Aura. Similar judgement calls for who's most necessry to catch with Regen Aura.

I'm with you on the Regen Debuff Resistance being stacked out the wazoo, just like /SR gets Defense Debuff Resistance out the wazoo, to protect their whole thing. I can't get on board with a precastable Absorb Shield. I know they went there for Sents and frankly, I'll never make a Regen Sent because of it. For me the feel and intent of Regen should be that I DO take damage. My green bar DOES move. It just heals right back up afterwards. I do not care how much of that is passive vs toggles vs clicks. I don't mind it being click heavy. Maybe something that kicks in as health drops....., so that you're not that hard to hurt, but extremely hard to put down, and spend most of the time with a green bar pinging back and forth between 50% and 100%? But I don't want Ablative Carapace by another name as something intended to heal damage before it even happens.

The comics "pages" for the Galaxy City tutorial are nice. But oh my god, the HORRIBLE GOD-AWFUL nails-on-blackboard voice acting. And no I don't care about Blue Spectrum in the slightest buddy, in fact even my heroes slaver at the chance to kill him, not because of anything against him? But because of the over the top dude SCREAMING in my ears to save him. I simply can't tolerate that.

I prefer redside to blueside, by a lot. Out of my 40 characcters, I think 3-4 may use a Patron Pool. A fair number of redsiders will do a Patron Arc. Because merits and story. But generally, I prefer my characters to use their OWN powers, not something Sirocco or Captain Mako etc taught them how to do. If the characters powers already firmly overlap (ie, Leviathan Mastery for a Water Blaster), I can justify it. But also consider; Patron Pools are 35+. You CAN get to 35+ as a Praetorian if you never leave praetoria and go straight from Neutropolis to Imperial Underground to Doorman to First Ward and then Night Ward. Most will have left for the Rogue Isles or Paragon long before. I can't really see any in-game scenario where it would make remote sense to go back and ask dear kind Mother Tillman to root around inside your head. Or where Praetor Berry could be bothered to spare more than 2 minutes to do anything other than scold you for wasting his time. Even my most buy-into-the-gold Responsibility Loyalists would never want to deal with Sinclair for more than absolutely necessary and still feel slightly unclean after. Just having a hard time seeing storyline how to work these in.

Philosophically, I don't like inherents that only function when teamed. /eye Defender, /eye Khelds. That said, they are fine soloists, and it's really "what do you bring to the team" that people gripe about (in my experience), soooooo okay. I could live with that if need be.

What I would do? Give Sentinal's a damage boost when they're Attacked. I'm not talking "when they're low on life", like oldschool Defiance. I'm saying kind of like Brute Fury. Much lower damage bonus cap Fury Bonus Cap (+100%?) because you're not supposed to outperform Brutes or Scrappers damage when you have the benefit of being at Range. And probably it would wear off faster than Brute Fury by a good bit. But that way, you kind of use both your Primary AND your Secondary. If you offtank for a team (or solo), lots of mobs attack you, you hurt things more. But if you're hanging back and blasting and no one is attacking you, your damage is meh.

Four pools still allows for a very wide variety of use. It's only really limiting if you're irrevocably tied to the siren song min-max off defense powers to slot LotG's and Hasten. It's OK to let that go. You can just.... not take the Fighting pool. At all. Or Hasten. Skip it entirely. I promise, your character will still WRECK FACE. And it won't feel nearly so cookie-cutter anymore.

Tellin you, man. I still want a Dominator with Legal Control and Legal Assault powersets. Now THAT's some scary stuff!

That's a losing game from the word go. What's the difference between running AE missions at +4x8 for hours or running radio missions at +4x8 over and over for hours? What makes one "ok" and the other "bad"? AE is part of the game. It can be used for good or ill. "Farmers" are nothing more than players who obsessively focus for maxing rewards while minimizing effort. It's not my cup of tea. It never will be. I'm more story-focused. But I can't say farmers are BAD or shouldn't exist, or somehow have less right to fun than anyone else. I can't blame someone for being efficient within the mechanics that the game provides. If they were selling influence for real life monies? Then I'd be up in arms. Particularly because that could be a thing NCSoft might take offense at and unleash their hounds instead of the current Détante.

To a degree this already exists, if you consider that you can buy any recipe or enhancement with enough Merits. I mean, influence wise, that's typically a Bad Deal, and not something you would ever do. But in theory, if the AH prices ever seriously got out of whack, you could buy things with merits, so anything that gives merits is "partial xp" to a reward.

I'm picturing you sitting there fuming in Vendetta Mode, grumbling in Yosemite Sam voice "I'll get that blasted enhancement converted if it's the Last Thing I Ever Do." Knowing your long past the point of doing it even remotely economically, tossing influence out the window to buy more converters, and just being in a contest of wills with the game to finally produce the stupid piece that you wanted lol. Lord knows I've done exactly that more than a few times.

Not super opposed to it. Most people who are going to buy the Purple sets in enough bulk to think about twinking characters are going to spend FAR more time at lvl 50 than in the levelling phase. Not much difference in them rushing to 50 and then slotting them vs slotting them earlier as they do task forces / radios. I don't think it's needed. But I don't see it as changing much either.