MTeague

Psychic Shock Wave immediately leaped to mind.

Why do they all have to get the power at the exact same lvl? Some controllers get AE hold at 18.... some at 26. Some tanks get their AE quite early.... some quite late. What's really wrong with a bit of variety? I suspect though, it was a question of what power would you give them earllier, and/or just a question of what the OLD powerset looked like, BEFORE they gave each blasters secondary a +Recovery power. They likely just picked a toggle or click power to grant the effect to, and decided that would cause less disruption, AND require less enforced respecs, than if they actually shifted around what level you get each power at.

Oh god I can only hear the Village People in my head. Time to pour a large drink.

Wait, I thought company softball, you swung the bat one handed and carried your beer with you as you ran from home to first. Which slowed you down, but every infielder had to manage their beers too....

I don't feel this is valid criticism. This isn't WoW. This isn't somethign where your Best-In-Slot Mythic 25 man raid drops can ONLY drop from specific content, are immediately Soulbound, and might only drop once after 6 six weeks of focusing the same raid set while 12 or more people want that same drop. Purples are shiny. That easy. It's entirely understandable why people want them. I would caution them that purples are NOT always your best slotting choices (melee attacks I'm often happier with Touch of Death, etc). But I still get the desire for the perceived "best stuff". They ARE playing the game. Maybe not as many hours as you or I clock. But they're playing the same game. The good news is any player CAN still get the drops. It just might take them longer. Absolute worst case, 100 merits gets you a purple recipe. Now if you want 6 full purple sets, yes, thats 6x6x100 = 3600 merits. And, to be clear, I would NOT buy that many purples directly with merits. But it can be done, by anyone, no matter how casually you play the game, even if it might be the project of a half a year because you can only play a few hours for a couple nights a week. Me personally? I would use Converter Roulette to earn the Inf in a fraction of time, by crafting Uncommon IO recipes, using Enhancement Converters to convert the result to valuable Rares, posting them for sale, then buying whatever purple recipe / IO was cheapest, and using MORE Enhancement Converters to change that to the one I want to slot. I'd only directly buy purple recipes with IO's if I wanted something now-dammit-now and was sitting on a pile of 1800+ merits. (which, some of my characters are).

The /Poison corruptor should be plenty able to kittenize / debuff particular targets. Nothing wrong with bringing Envenomed Daggers, but I don't think you should need them unless you exemplared too far down for the Corr to have their debuffs. "Arachnos Soldier". this could mean a lot. Crab Soldier with lots of Pets? Stalker-Style Wolf Spider? I think it can be made to work, but hard to tell how I would have expected that person to be adding to the group by just "Arachnos Soldier" alone. But with the tank holding most things, I'd expect the Corr and Soldier and the MM saying "Kill THIS target ignore eveyrthing else" should have been enough to burn down the imp. I'm making assumptions I probably shouldn't make, but I'm thinking maybe pets were uncontrolled / strictly on defensive mode? And the Soldier may be a more pet-oriented / AE focused build rather than someone meant to take down a single hard target? Also: how IO'd out is this team? Expectations would be different between "all tricked out" and "still levelling so only SO's". Is a biiiiig difference in performance. I love the Green Machine idea @Psyonico lays out. Massed empaths go from "Aw, an Empath. That's cute" to "That rabbit's got a mean streak a mile wide! Look at the BONES, man!" Basically you want Alpha Soaker / Preventer: Can be a Tank or Brute, can be a Controller or Dominator depending on their sets, can be a CrazyIdjit Scrapper or Stalker or Sentinel. You can even load up multiple sources of Energy Blast or other Knockbacks and go wtih the Ragdoll Special. As @The Philotic Knight mentions in his treatise on FF, mobs that are flung on their butt are not doing any damage to anyone. You can make that your "tank" if the team is willing to roll with it. Debuffer: technically optional but makes everyone's life muuuuuch easier. Poison is an excellent choice here, as long as they're good at deciding what is the most important target to debuff at any given moment. Poison has a very limited Splash Area on their bread-and-butter debuffs. There's always a temptation to use them on a cloud of adds vs keeping them on whatever needs to die Now-Dammit-Now. Buffer: technically optional but again, force multipliers are Good Things. Empath is plenty good choice here, but many options exists. Trash Killer: minions, lieuts, reg bosses. Something with decent AE damage, or, perhaps, very fast-cycling single target damage. Boss Killer: for the Big Nasties. Some bosses, but mostly EB's and AV's. Typically you want high single target damage for this, esp with debuff sources layered. Now that's 5 "tasks" but realistically most AT's should be able to contribute to more than one of these tasks. Take a look at your group config and figure out who's doing what. And if you have a gap where no one is best suited to a particular thing, then what's the fallback plan / how do you compensate? Ie, if you had no debuffer, do you have multiple DPS'ers with multiple -RES proc IO's? If you have no boss killer, make sure people are saving multiple Red Insp for when it's time to burn the big guy.

I'd love it if inspirations affected MM henchmen by default. I'm thinking it might be considered OP, but I would not darn them to heck if they made such a change. as @ImpousVileTerrorsaid, P2W or Superpacks. I tend to get mine from Superpacks. I never have a giant supply, but those I do have, go to the MM's. But also note, as @Major_Decoy said you can't combine them. If you have too many team +greens? you cannot combine them to a make a team +purple or a team +red. Also, to best of my knowlege there is no such thing as a team +wakie.

a) i disagree that this was a dramatic change, even remotely on the same scale as evicting someone from a dwelling b) what would advance notice have really permitted you or anyone else to do? If they were firmly committed to the idea and NOT going to change their mind regardless of feedback? I get frustration. I get that I'm also quite removed from the issue, and don't feel it as I never did farming or double-inf generation by this method. I always kept XP on, and went for Incarnate slots, or Vet Levels Just Because, or moved onto a new alt. So maybe me not really using it ever is leaving me 100% blind to the impact of this change. But I really don't see what advance notice would have allowed anyone to do. Not if they were of the firm opinion that it had to be done regardless. At most I guess you could have spent the last X days before the deadline in full-farming mode? What opportunity do you feel was lost because they did not do advance notice?

Anything that boosts HP total is very nice for boosting any Regen effects, in addition to the "you have that many more HP before you keel over" part.

Ding 50. Keep earning XP. Gradually you will unlock your incarnate slots. There are no other true requirements. That said, Mender Ramiel's Arc (ouroborus) still exists, and is a nice intro storyline to it. It USED to be required to unlock your Alpha slot. It's not required anymore, although it will unlock it right away whether or not you earned enough XP to get it otherwise. I would also encourage you to, at some point, sit down with a strong cup of coffee and try to digest as much of you can of this thread: A Comprehensive Guide to the Incarnate System There's TONS of info in that. You will NOT absorb it all at once. But it's a very good read, and worth coming back to a few times as you get your feet wet.

I mean, it's disappointing, but I think they very much collectively learned the lesson of Never Ever Ever say "Damn the Torpedoes, the nation wants to see the launch", EVER again.

To be fair, when I read your first remark I was a bit surprised, because I read it as a kind of flippant "You completed it, no? So what's your problem?". To be clear that's NOT a direct quote. But it is how I READ your post. I refrained from commenting on it because I wasn't sure, but that WAS my first impression of that post. One thing I have painfully learned over the last 20 years. Text, especially to someone you haven't known for a long time, is extremely easy to mis interpret. Questions in particular, if not phrased well, can easily be read as a challenge. So rather than say Better to say something like: "Did it prevent the TF from being completed? I'm not trying to be dismissive, I'm just genuinely curious. I've never had him not be there." Now. Would I actually have said that myself? Maybe not. I hope I would have phrased it that way. But If I was busy, tabbing between windows, or keeping on eye on the stove, or on laundry, maybe I woulda typed something quick and posted it myself. It happens.

Panacea can be worth it on a Stalker just for the +END alone, since we *grumble grumble* don't get Quick Recovery, same for Numina's. But yea, I'm looking at my own screenshot above, and looking at the Regenerative Tissue unique I have in Health and saying.... "you know, I should probably take out that IO, and move that slot somewhere else...."

I would add a clarifier to this point. You may or may not agree with me, but it's my take on it. If I buy a Red Fortune +Defense for 2,000,000, and then turn right around and post that SAME THING for 4,000,000. yes, that's inflationary and arguably parasitic. I mean, the same thing happens all the darn time in the real world... middlemen are everywhere. But in the real world there's typically some contribution in terms of storage / warehousing / maintenance of supply lines, something, to justify that middleman's slice of the pie. Maybe not all the time, but usually. But the above example of buying and reposting the same darn things to the same market.... is basically Day Trading. Whether or not I should, I hold a distinctlly un-charitable opinion of that. But, contrast that with buy a Dampened Spirits To-Hit Debuff/Recharge recipe, craft it, convert the result until you get a LoTG Def/+7.5% global recharge. I do not consider that inflationary or parasitic in any way. You have consumed and destroyed some raw materials to produce a more valued commodity that people are willing to pay more for. Not unlike buying the raw materials and then selling pizza.

That would take some considering. Lack of +Recharge in the powers themselves makes it more difficult to stack magnitudes on a boss. You'd still have +Hold duration, of course, but Hold and Recharge comes at it from both directions. OTOH, I get "Here's your cake. Have it, or Eat it. Pick one." If this was the price, well, it might be worth paying. And the answer might even be different at different stages of play, and depending on your secondary. On my Mind/Kin, I can still get a lot of +Recharge from Siphon Speed, to have some confidence I'm still spitting out the Holds fast enough. But a Mind/Emp might evaluate it differently, and a Fire/Poison might decide between the Imps and the Poison debuffs they're not lacking for any damage and would prefer raw lockdown. And that's cool too. Nice to have there not be any clear "Best" slotting that's always true across the board.

Only 40% of my characters touch the Fighting pool at all. Tough/Weave are not even close to required. You may choose to take them on all your characters, but that is your choice, and some choices come at a cost. Also, having Hasten autofire is a thing that I would not want uuntil / unless I was ready for it. Like, "Increase # of Autocast powers to 2"? I could probably support that. Have Hasten always be autocast? No. Just burns my low level characters out of END before they're ready or wastes it if I don't have enough Recharge to perma it.

I'd actually be LESS likely to slot these sets on a Dominator. You have your entire secondary tree to melt face with. The primary is to hold your enemies down while your secondary does unspeakable things do them. Really, it's on a Controller, where very often your Primary *IS* your damaging tree, that I could see these being used.

If such sets were added I would *definitely* look at them on my Mind/Kin. Currently I have both Dominate and Mass Domination slotted with Lockdown for the extra +2 Hold and the extra Ranged Defense. But below level 38, he was a shall we say, a Crock Pot / Slow Cooker. single target Rotation of Dominate/Mezmerize/Levitate, and only levitate had Dmg enhancements in it. occasional use of damage-slotted Terrify after that became available. Now, I certainly *could* have slotted Mezmerize for +Damage, even if I'd wanted to keep Dominate kept as pure control / extended hold duration for sake of stacking magnitudes on tougher bosses. But levelling him, I was firmly "my job is to CONTROL, damage can come as a side effect", and got used to Confuse mobs being a healthy chunk of my damage when soloing. After level 38 of course, I got Fulcrum Shift. And my damage issues kind of went away. But if he wansn't /Kin, I likely would have had to make different choices along the way.

I am virtually certain of this as well. Which is why i have minor dread at every "Make it a Toggle!" post, and why I try to make clear I consider it's strength more important than it being constant-on.

Intersesting to experiment wtih as an OPTIONAL setting. Not something I'd want to see enabled full-time. I mean, I've SEEN these blasters, they don't care WHO's next to the targets, a big cluster is GOING to get nuked....

The most irksome enddrainers on melee for me aren't the sappers. they die fast, and often miss, or otherwise get Controlled pretty quick. The most annoying ones for me as the Freak Super Stunners. Because I'm pretty sure that End-Drain-On-Ressurect they do is 100% auto-hit. It's nailed my /SR scrapper pretty much every time, until I learned to just back the heck up before finishing them off. And not just a little, because it has a decent range when it activates. Carnie packs aren't that that big a deal because either there arent' usuallly so many of them dying at once, OR, their drain may require a to-hit roll that my /SR just dodges. I'd still rather have the odd Can-Opener in the game though, that I have to be alert for and handle a bit difference instead of facerolling everything.

I must be in the minority who actually prefers Instant Healing to actually be +Regen rather than +Absorb. Some of it is just concept... I want to see the green heal almost as fast as damage is taken. I don't want my character still hurt but with an absorbtion shield. That's not Regen to me. That's ForceField Armor. Some of it may be that I play a Stalker, not a brute. While he's capable of it, typically my stalker is not expected to soak alphas for a team, one after the other after the other. A brute would be. But the thing with Regen as a schtick is if your regen is good enough, you are an immortal god. You can go for days. Nothing stops you, you just laugh at the things that surround you, and you just punchy-punchy-punchy (or stabby-stabby-stabby, etc), and incoming damage doesn't matter.... as long as it's below a certain threshold. Once you cross that threshold, then Regen is in serious trouble. And you can slot for +Defense and +Resist to adjust exactly where that threshold is. But I think they haven't put it on tankers yet, because they're really not sure how to keep the threshold high enough for a tank to do their expected job, without being truly totally immortal. Now, has that ship already sailed? Yes, and no. Willpower gets ludicrous amounts of +Regen if surrounded, and is available to tanks. So a case can be made, just turn IH back into a toggle, and let tanks roll. But Willpower will lose a bunch of that regen if their team blows up the surrounding cloud of minions and leaves them facing just the AV/EB. /Regen has no such dependance on the number of foes surrounding you. I will say, if push came to shove, me personally, I'd like IH to become a toggle.... so long as it retains 100% of it's current regen strength, and remains enhanceable exactly as it is now. If the price of it becoming a toggle were to be slash it's strength by 30%, or to make it unenhanceable, then no thank you, I'd rather keep it as a click, and I'll use it strategically where needed.

Interesting. Did not know that. I guess it explains why it's seemed a popular thing to slot for.

I prefer to slot for Resistance on /Regen. I won't AVOID +Defense bonuses, and if I can get them by allocating 1-2 more slots, I will. But I primarily slot resistance. Reason: /Regen will have zero DDR. I don't like putting all my eggs into one basket on defense only to experience Cascade Defense Failure when a couple gunners start pinging me down. Resistance feels like a more reliable wall that I can trust even when I take a few hits. I don't use Mids. I know I know, all the cool kids do, I should get it, but I haven't. I prefer to just wing my builds. My /Regen is a lvl 38 stalker. He's not a brute. But he's quite capable of leaping ahead and soaking the alphas for teams when he's needed to. Because he's only lvl 38, not 50, his slotting is not yet done. He'll be getting more bonuses as he goes. My slotting: Currently he's at 53% smashing / lethal resist 32% fire/cold resist 24% energy/negative resist 20% toxic/psi resist 17% ranged defense 22% melee defense Your milage may vary, but I'm pretty happy with the result. And the numbers should go up as he gets the rest of his slots.

Unless the set bonus was overwhelmingly powerful, 2 sappers would still detoggle you. and if you're in a group soaking the alpha, it's entirely probable you're being pinged by multiple Sappers.