FupDup

Nope. On the bright side, Electric Mastery's damage aura got a nice upgrade (it now has a 10 second DoT after contact). But that's really about the end of what Sents got that was positive.

I've always felt like something was off with my villains' earning power and it's nice to see that I wasn't just going insane. ... I mean, I still am, but now I've also got math to back it up!

Full mezz protection on a T1 power with fast recharge is kind of crazy. Mezz protection should be expensive if your AT doesn't come with an armor set (or certain support sets). If you're a squishy that does not fill either condition, you're supposed to get stunned. You've got a whole lot of strengths so here's one weakness to deal with. Something less OP'd would be to simply increase the duration and strength of the existing to-hit buff effect so it can actually be used to counter debuffs. That's really all the power needs, if it needs anything (it's already pretty good as it is even with the mostly ignorable buff effect). I could understand a small mag immobilize protection at most, similar to what Combat Jumping gives (and that kinda makes thematic sense too). But that's it. No protection to stuff like holds, stuns, or sleeps on something this easily accessible.

I'll miss P2W, it was a cute way to poke fun at games that are unironically pay to win (and this game was actually headed that way towards the end of live). I understand the reason for changing it, but still.

Refractor has the same basic damage as other circular AOE powers like M30 Grenade, Neutron Bomb, Explosive Arrow, etc along with the same recharge (so it should have the same proc potential as any of those similar powers).

The reason I brought up survivability was to reply to the person above my post who said that Blasters have easier to build defenses and thus have higher defenses total. More broadly, the trade-off of less damage for more survival/self-sufficiency was the whole point of creating the AT so it will always be relevant in any discussion surrounding them. They aren't supposed to out-damage Blasters, if they could they would be busted.

Maybe a compromise could be for the badges to come with a one-time aether reward similar to Halloween badges?

The king is dead! Long live the king!

A few things about durability comparisons: 1. Comparing strictly ranged defense between the two AT's is kinda silly because a lot of armor sets are designed to either be focused around resistances (like Rad) or typed defenses (like Invuln, Energy, etc.). There's more than one way to bulk up. 2. You get no DDR whatsoever, compared to Sents who get it on every defense-based set and most "layered" sets too in varying amounts. All it takes is one half-naked Roman man throwing a pointy stick at you and you're gonna start cascading if you've got no/low DDR. 3. Sents get other survival tools like clicky absorbs, max HP boosts, certain T9s (the crashless ones), armor set depending. 4. What do your other defense types/positions look like besides just ranged, along with resists? If you picked a resist armor in your Blaster epic you'll have decent enough S/L resists and maybe a third type if you picked something like Mu or Soul. And I'm guessing the remaining resists are barely in the double digit range. Or, in other words, your protection is less comprehensive. If you wanna fixate on positional defenses, let's look at SR. With no enhancements slotted, an SR Sent will be sitting at 49.82% DDR compared to your 0%. With some modest enhancement, this can jump up to around 75-78% give or take depending on just much defense you slot in its powers. I just don't see how someone can say with a straight face that ~75% DDR softcapped defenses is totally the same as softcapped with 0% DDR. If you wanna say you'd rather have the defiance buffs and more melee attacks of a Blaster over that DDR or whatever other survival tools like absorbs and such, that's a perfectly legit argument to make. But it's not legit to say that 75% DDR is totally the same or inferior to having 0% DDR. The one thing I'll give Blasters for durability is that on average they do tend to have higher regen due to their sustains having just stupid amounts of it, at least in terms of what Mids shows as the regen % (the actual HP/S is a bit muddier to compare due to max HP differences).

Random idea: Savage Control Premise: Your controls powers are various animals and insects, for example throwing bees at somebody's face to disorient them, sending an elephant to charge forward and trample a whole mob (knockdown), giant boa constrictor to hold a target, etc.

You need to use enhancement boosters, which you can find from random drops (rarely), merit vendors, and/or the auction house. After you've slotted the enhancement in a power, click on the enhancement to open up the combining screen, then add the boosters in (if boosting set IOs, avoid clicking on catalysts because that makes them unboostable). Also, you can boost IOs to +5, not just +1 or +2.

It's not so much that the original target needs to survive so much as there being at least one player nearby holding its aggro and keeping it loaded.

If we're really going to stick with the "wet" mechanic, can we at least get a P2W water blaster power? Give it one of the high-tech looking pistol models and have it reuse FX from Aqua Bolt. Then characters of fully "natural" human origin could at least make enemies wet, instead of relying on non-natural means like storms or ghost sharks or such. (Assuming that the set can't be given an internal source of wetness for whatever reason so it doesn't need to depend on outside factors to function).

And it also fits the "riot control" theme too. Now you get to spray down protestors villains with water hoses!

It's less that those opinions aren't allowed and more that they are not always/usually listened to. Sometimes it can give us stuff like Spirit Drain (a clear workaround to the devs' self-imposed epic pool power design formulas) but generally it doesn't amount to much.

Yes. Full list for reference: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tmuk9Jf-NxhSE2P1RB6wRtn-qUDvwqpV_10B9QAAinE/edit#gid=0

The graphics are fine for the most part, aside from some stuff with very low resolution (just update the worst looking things to a similar standard as the best looking things in the game and we're good). I'm kinda used to playing older games though so I'm a bit biased. The real benefits of a different engine would be making new stuff easier/quicker to add and improving overall stability. That kind of content would go much further than prettier visuals in terms of making me want to play more. I'd probably stay away from Unity in particular, however, due to the recent controversies surrounding it...

This feels kind of forced TBH. Instead of trying to ram this square peg into a round hole I'd rather have a new character added or maybe repurpose an existing one whose AT isn't fully clarified (maybe Blast Furnace? IDK what he was supposed to be other than having fire powers). EDIT: Blast Furnace has too many melee attacks to be a Sentinel, so scratch that one.

Those are two questions. 😛 As a serious answer, you can't actually out level either zone because PVP scales you down when necessary and Rikti stuff scales up to 50. The only limit to worry about is the minimum level, which is 35 for RWZ and variable for the PVP zones. For PVP it might be prudent to build out your character a bit before heading into them, because you still keep set bonuses while you're examplared down (if the enhancements are attuned or give attuned benefits). And you can keep powers/slots up to 5 levels over the level that you're examplared (for example if you're scaled down to level 30 you can keep all your stuff up to level 35).

As a correction, one of the devs in the Closed Beta discord later clarified that it wasn't actually a coding difficulty thing as to why we don't have more mutually exclusive power picks. The issue was a potential slippery slope where people might start asking for it in literally any situation where they make a drastic change or replacement to a power and it would become a huge headache. And in the case of Regen I don't think it's even necessary or logical to have so many different branching paths. Thematically the set is supposed to do one main thing (heal you quickly). This isn't something that is meant to be versatile or open to alternate interpretations. The devs also said absolutely heck no to any form of absorption in regen, not even weak passive absorb like Sentinels currently get (in fact they actually might remove that if they ever did touch Regen).

I try to mix up which contacts/zones I level through if possible (much easier blueside than redside) and I have a decent mix of both blue/red (usually 1 villain for every 2 heroes). I run a bank mission every 5 levels for the exploration badges. Every once in a while I do tip missions if I get really bored of the normal contacts. I join TF's periodically throughout the journey to speed things along and grab badges/accolodates. That being said I haven't made a goldsider in a while nor have I done the Croatia arcs for a while either.

Captain Powerhouse changes avatars like most people change their socks in the morning.

The new judgement power I'd want to see: Desolation Creates a large patch of toxic rain that lingers for several moments, acting as a continuous area-denial tool more than an instant death button like the others. Like Blizzard, it would probably be allowed to deal higher total damage than its peers due to having that damage spread out over time and being avoidable if the enemies move outside it. Because it's a rain patch it might or might not have a modest slow effect even in the core version. I would argue that it should not come with the usual avoid/afraid effect that other rain powers do because of its incarnate status and it has to compete with giants like Ion and Pyronic. The radial version's secondary effect is up for debate. A -res effect would fit the "acid rain" sort of theme but might be too stronk? Perhaps a hold effect that puts enemies in the puking animation like the Malta Titan gas missiles. A Psionic judgement would be nice to have as well but I'm less certain on what its mechanics would be. Maybe a narrow piercing cone with super high damage at the cost of hitting fewer targets, making it basically a single-target judgement?

There is currently no word on if the devs plan to do anything with the set or when. Part of the reason for that is that people might interpret such as a promise/expectation to get to a certain thing at a certain time, so better to keep it hush hush so it's like a surprise gift if it ever comes. That being said, I do wish that DP has some kind of proper Aim replacement/substitute like converting one of the existing underused powers (Dual Wield?) into a ranged follow-up kind of power. Or someone suggested once that swapping ammo types could give a brief follow-up effect. Beyond that I also think that the alternate ammo damage types should make up a larger % of the total damage each attack does (same damage total, just different split between lethal/exotic) so that you can more properly counter enemies resists. Perhaps the standard ammo could be turned into smashing damage instead of just lethal? Like hollow points or such. Last but not least, I want the Sentinel variant of Suppressive Fire to have its standard ammo form do real damage again like all other Sentinel stun blasts get. It shouldn't be fully dependent on alternate ammo or mega proc bombing to function.

In regards to this issue, I once had the idea that people should be able to create duplicate names, but the first one gets some kind of special designation and the others after that point are branded as #2, #6, whatever. One of the devs told me that would be pretty hard to code in terms of database stuff and it might run into issues with multiple players sharing the same name and you try to do a /tell or whatever with them. So that's out of the question unless we get a COH2 or something that finds a way around these issues. As somebody who admittedly is camping a bunch of names, I think that some kind of name release policy would be completely fair depending on the exact amount of time we consider a character to be "active" and characters gaining immunity at level 50. I think it's fair that if I'd want to keep some of my camped names that I'd have to put in a tiny bit of effort logging in to them periodically. As the saying goes, if you don't need to shit then get off the pot.