MTeague

Fair point. I've never used TW (even before the nerf), so I tend to forget it. But, precedent for not caring so much about exact weapon type.

A sword would traditionally be Lethal damage, somewhat in conflict with the actuality of the powers doing Smashing damage. If a weapon look were to be added, it should probably be a Hammer or Mace to go with the Smashing. They'd also want to keep the rest of the numbers... animation time, etc, pretty darn close to that of the vanilla attacks, but there may be some that are in the right range.

Levelling in early to mid 20's I used Form of the Soul almost exclusively to handle Endurance issues. In Form of the Soul, I could do an attack chain FOR DAYYYYYSS. Never ever stop, just Naginata-Storm-Of-Doom. Any other form, I'd find I'd need to pause and kneel after every fight. Even WITH Quick Recovery (though QR was default slot only and had Power Transfer proc) Once I hit the early 30's and got enough slots to start getting decent Endurance Reduction / More Recovery, then I started foolish around with Mind and Body. Haveven't been super impressed with Mind. +Recharge never SUCKS of course, but I almost never need to pause in my attacks at all anyway. Form of the Body can be nice for some +Resist (since I'm Staff / WP, any +Resist is more layered types of sustain for me). The -Res in Eye of the Storm, doesn't suck? But I didn't really feel that I lacked for kill speed to begin with.

Level matters. If you're doing a Posi 1 and the Empath doesn't even have Fortitude? They're a Bad Emp. As in "Bad Emp! Baaaaad Emp! No treat for you!" <spray water in face> If they're in their mid-20's and they have the important available powers and a mix of attacks, I'm far happier with that than an Empath who takes ALL the attacks or ALL the Empathy powers. Late 30's and beyond, I expect them to be able to toss around a mix of attacks along with their empathy powers And while I don't see them often, I expect any MM Empath to be able to compentently control their pets between buffing and any personal attacks they may have. I don't care if they have precision control over every pet, but know when to be in bodyguard mode, know when to be "'sic 'em, boys!!!", and know when and how to quickly banish them if they're about to draw extra aggro by chasing a runner. Absorb Pain I do not personally take or use, because generally I can do the job right fine without it, and it's rarely worth it to me to have the personal debuff it applies. Ressurect is touch and go. I often take it because I figure the team will expect me to have it. But I always sort of begrudge it the power selection. Blasts, I tend to look for decent secondary effects worth stacking. Dark Blast is *quite* nice to make them miss more, kind of back-door-even-more-defense for whoever you Fort'd. Psi Blast, is a classicly thematic pairing, but -Recharge is harder to feel an observable difference, etc.

Ideally, I would change the P2W and T4V vendors to Sir (Or Madam) Not Appearing In This Game. But this is highly unlikely to occur.

It's always fun to experiment with Pool powers you don't usually use, so for that alone, I approve. Darn near every power in Super Reflexes is pure gold, though. Elude is really the most skippable of them, and i still like having Elude. (in case a sapper gets lucky and drains me... the +Recovery on Elude is Quite nice, and it basically softcaps you EVEN IF you get detoggled. Elude makes for a great "NOPE!" button.). But, lots of people DO skip Elude, and most do just fine. For sustain, I'd (of course) toss a Panacea proc into health, and then look for 1-3 other powers where I could toss a Power Transfer Chance to Heal Self proc. That should be plenty good maintenence heals for a character who's almost never going to get hit at all.

Tradition demanded that you not pick up hover until after 8 or so wipes to the Pumice / Igneous trying to get back to the mission though. Often chain-reaction wipes of two or three groups each trying to get back and running headfirst into the other guys trainwreck. 🙂

Are we talking a Goblin Deck or a Squirrel Deck here? I gotta know if I should load up with Protection from Red or Protection from Green.

Personally, I would love this, though you are correct, there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth that it kills "playability", and "nerfs fun". But, in the spirit of Balance, some Villain missions would also need to be failable if you toss mass amounts of AoE damage and destroy the computers instead of download the files, kill your kidnappee instead of preserve them, or blow up the Prototype Widget that you're trying to steal.

I am sort of hoping plaques get their own Tour Guide Mission Tips. I mean, sure, I could download a map mod, etc, but I generally don't. I do stop to read them when I notice them, but I woudln't be surprised if i commonly breeze past several without even realizing it. (though to be fair, that's a choice I make, too....perfectly good solutions out there I dont' make use of)

While levelling, Dominators can feel weak, particularly in difficult missions when you're not Perma Dom yet, and you're trying to save Domination for a boss fight, but die before you get there, and now your domination bar is back to empty, and you might not have enough trash left to build it back up before the boss. I definitely experiencd that a few times in Praetoria, 1-20. Missions with several waves of laser guided ambushes can be rough when you have very limited amounts of self-maintence (Panacea proc), and when you're afflicted by pride hubris causing you to crank the difficulty slider up a bit higher than you probably should at low levels. But once you get to mid-20's, early 30's, that's when Dom's really start to shine. At least, in my experience.

Many kinds of mobs, do not resist Psi, so vs many things, you will do good damage. Those that DO resist Psi though, often resist it REALLY hard. So I would recommend either sprinkling misc damage Procs for other damage types where you can, OR, figuring out other damage dealing powers you can squeeze in on the side. Later on, you should find healing far less needed. I mean, no one ever says "Oh darn, this Empath has my back, I HATE it when that happens...." But your buffs will largely remove the need to focus healing so much. Always use Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost on cooldown. I don't care on who. If Regeneration Aura is up, you just covered all Maintenance heals the team might need. Beyond that, blast away. Go nuts. You'll NEVER have endurance issues once you get Recovery Aura, since you're always in range of it. So spend the end on blasts like it's going out of style. Recharge Debuffs are a subtle effect. You will reduce incoming damage by a fair amount, by increasing the delay between enemy attacks. But it's hard to FEEL that as viserally as Dark Blast stacking massive -ToHit and watching enemies just whiff. I think you'll be fine. It should morph into something like you're looking for as time goes by. Keeping a couple buffs rolling isn't hard once you create a bind for them.

Clearly, you're just that badass. 😀

Actually as long as you're IN COMBAT, you'll see your Brute just fine. Energy Cloak does suppress the visual cloaking effect while you punch things and a few seconds thereafter. So one OPTION is, do use it!.... once you're in a fight. And keep hopping from fight to fight to fight! Never stop punching! But I admit, on my energy/energy brute I did argue with myself if I should just skip it and take Leadership instead.

To be fair, it's very possible to simply skip these accolades. I've only got half of them on my main. "Having" to do them on your alts, again and again and again, is a choice. That said, I don't object to the idea of alternate methods to acquire the badges.

not that often I'm surrounded by mobs while airborne. oh it can happen sure, Sky Raiders, GoldBrickers, etc. But most of the time I'm airborn I'm zipping from place to place not fighting.

Also a general rule of thumb is any set that people talk about as being a "Bad Set" can still perform just fine and 95% of your PUG groups won't care or even notice. Many will tell you Electric Blast is a "Bad" blast set. You can still wreck face with it. Maybe it takes you 25% longer to clear a map. Anyone care? I don't. An empath is good solid team reinforcement that protects me if I decide to do dumb things in the name of fun. And maybe I don't need the buffs for Peregrine Radios, but they're mighty nice to have on hand during Night Ward / Number Six arcs.

I will never enjoy AE farming, and I will never do an AE farm. I see no challenge and no point in fighting mobs perfectly custom tailored to be weak to my strengths. That said, it's a valid part of the game. And has been. Both during LIVE and here on HC, the devs are very well aware of it's capacties and have obviously not decided to remove the ability to create such missions. If has such a tacit stamp of developer approval, then I'm not going to rag on it any more than my first two sentences. I try to see it like "Okay, I loathe mushrooms on pizza, and see no idea why you'd want to ruin a pizza by putting fungus on it"...... but probably more than half the forums would say the same to me about the awesome wonderfulness that is Hawaiian Pizza. Different tastes for all. My only real regret with AE is that Homecoming did not and probably could not keep the vast library of Story-Focused Missions that AE had had in LIVE. The Moonbase Laser villian mission where you ransomed Paragon for One Meeeeeelion Influence was just fantastic. There was a rogue-to-hero themed AE mission I loved too, "Tangled Vines" where you had to get everybody's favorite WSPDR reporter out of the isles to the safety of Paragon City. And a very Matrix-y / TRON-y story arc I remmeber from Live where there was an NPC who had been a hero and had been.... trapped within the AE system.... and forces within wanted to try to get out to the "real" Paragon City. So many other really good ones I remember thoroughly enjoying that... we couldn't get a copy of. Those are the breaks. But AE in principle CAN be used for great storytelling as well as mass farming.

Ah yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

I do not recognize this as being a problem. Look, I prefer redside over blueside. Heck, I prefer goldside over redside, but that's a separate animal. But other players are under absolutely no obligation to like what I like. The devs are under absolutely no obligation to try to make everyone like all content equally, or to play in a nice distributed manner across factions. Yes, humans often make what I consider sub-optimal choices for reasons that I think are bad reasons. That doesn't mean I get to redo their choices for them to what they "should have" chosen. And it doesn't mean that a referee needs to put their thumb on the scales in a lopsided enough fashion until players change their minds. The devs may choose to do so, of course. But I don't recognize it as a problem, or a need. If redside isn't as populated as you might prefer, lure some fresh meat new blood over. Or mentally start treating it as a more exclusive area for those willing to make the leap.

It's not clear to me the devs WANT to allow for Henchpets that are visually indistinguisshable from a player. Maybe they're fine with it? Illusion Control / Phantom Army / Mirror gives me hope. But I've not heard anything from them saying that they WANT to allow fully customizeable MM pets (though nothing writing it off as a bad idea, either....) Pet Buffs, typically make very slight alterations to the costume. There are slight differences between a completely unbuffed henchpet, a henchpet with the first buff not the second, a henchpet wtih the second buff but not the first, and a henchpet with both buffs. Does that HAVE to stay true for all future MM pets? Not necessarily. But I;m sure they'd LIKE that to remain true, and I'm sure it's a big obstacle. If players can put in absolutely anything, what visible effects can your petbuffs reliably give? Then there's the pet attacks themselves, and making sure the animations of the pet attacks FIT the pets. The Grave Knights attacks look so badass because it FITS the Grave Knight. It's not going to be so easy to assign an attack to something that might be female, male, or hugemale, might be 4 feet tall or 10 feet tall, might be thin and graceful and might look like a linebacker. Might be humanoid, weretiger, or robotic. Might have a head? Might not. etc.

If you're cybernetic, you're still a living being, still have a mind, and are still vulnerable to psionics. And if you're fully robotic form, but a living soul inhabiting it, well, psi attacks could still reach you. I think you'd need to be truly mechanical, no ghost in the machine, just truly a machine to deserve any kind of inherent boost to psionics. That said, it would be an interesting idea. Balancing it would be... all kinds of fun. And it's not something I forsee happening, but.... they've surprised me before. Recently, even. Who knows?

That is an unfortunate truth. The missions in Mercy, Port Oakes, and Cap Au Diable, are very much "City of Lackeys", where you're a useful tool to someone else. It doesn't stay that way. But a lot of players do not make it past that pont. They get disgusted and walk away. They never get to Sharkhead Isle, where you start coming more into your own, and into Nerva and St Martial where you're treated with more respect and even deference by some contacts. Tip Missions are a good way to feel like your own villain once they start dropping at lvl 20. And some of the newer arcs like Mr G are just wonderful. That said, it is definitely true some mission arcs are more about helping someone ELSE's evil scheme. Vernon Von Grun acknowledges your power and treats you with respect, and has a few amusing arcs with some great temp powers. But ultimately, if you're "Well what is MY characters motivation? Why would I help this mad scientist?" It's largely on you to headcanon you'll make his work fail, but walk away with his secrets. And then you get to Weston Phipps, the Kicker of Puppies Himself, and there's just NO reason to help Phipps unless your character is also a Twirler of Moustaches and Kicker of Puppies. Some characters, I simply don't talk to certain contacts.

I'd be on board with that if it had more costume options. As it is, it's quite likely my Stone armor dude will be Graniteless.... just because of the costume issue. I don't work on costumes for as long as I do to become a faceless granite slab indistinguishable from everyone else wtih teh same powerset. ... That's why he's still at lvl 1 in Breakout.

I mean, to some degree so does poison? you're definitely going to want the primary debuffs to land on bosses first (though catching them with splash effects for additional debuffing never hurts...) The "I want to be able to solo everything and all my characters will be maxed IO builds across the board" tendancies on the forums (and I'm no exception here), has produced a definite slant to favoring Debuff heavy sets, with Buffing sets being viewed as "better for Masterminds" because even solo, an MM has pets to buff. I'm not sure how much the actual average player (vs the average forumite) goes nuts with IO's but that divide has become my rule of thumb. I would put in a good word for Controllers using the Sorcery pool though. Containment + Helpless Mobs + Enflame is kinda fun, and Spirit Ward is a nice thing to toss onto your buddies or pets. It would give you some options to do your own thing if you happen to be on some night your friends aren't, etc.