FupDup

IMO I'd rather have Broadsword reworked so that every power worked like Parry (different powers giving different defense types so every power is useful), making it a set that sacrifices offence for defense.

Sentinels: "Am I a joke to you?"

If you want to lean into the "support" role, you could try Radiation Armor because it has a power that heals nearby allies (and damages enemies).

You can get Essence of the Incarnate from either Miss Liberty's TF or Lord Recluse's SF. Or you can craft it with some Incarnate Shards. However, I prefer just using thread-based components for crafting alpha slot items because it's way faster and easier.

The end costs would likely be combined together in addition to the armor effects.

There is a difference between tactical/strategic complexity and just pushing more buttons for the sake of pushing more buttons. That is what aethereal is trying to say. Another analogy would be difficulty in games. Increasing enemy health and damage does make the game harder, but at a certain point it can become a sort of "artificial difficulty" that is just a chore rather than a true exciting challenge. Or, in this game, stuff like Paragon Protectors popping Moment of Glory and being nigh unkillable for like 5 minutes. It's not difficult. I can go make a sandwich or something and not be in any danger while I wait it out. It's just tedious. As for aethereal's specifics, one part of me does agree that some of our toggles do feel artificially spread out across multiple powers just for the sake of filling up the "required" 9 power slots. However, if we did consolidate some, then we would have to figure out other thematically-appropriate things to fill in those gaps with. And we'd have to reevaluate set bonuses since we wouldn't be able to stack as many defense or resist sets on an armored toon. So while the suggestion appears simple, in practice it's like pulling bars out of a jenga tower.

An interesting thing about player power is that too much of it can actually backfire and make you feel powerless, if enemies die way too quickly and you never get a chance to even target them before they get deleted by your teammates. And obviously, nerfing players to feel like you're slapping baddies with pillows also makes players feel weak. Such is the great "Power Paradox" of balancing.

For Numina, I'd be fine with the sweeps if they were no longer zone-specific. We would be able to pick whichever zones we wanted to kill the villains, which would allow for some optimization/streamlining since most of them spawn in multiple different zones.

Team and multi insps can't be combined like singles, so I tend to avoid unlocking them since they clog up your inventory real bad. Making them combinable would be a great QoL update. And supers too for that matter, but those don't drop randomly so those are less needing of an update. In my personal SG base I have a single insp collector filled up with a bunch of supers, which I can call upon when I absolutely, positively need to nuke something from orbit if I'm having trouble solo.

In regards to hero/villain access, Scirocco was meant to become a hero and bring patron pool access to blueside along with him. The OG devs were pretty close to finishing the arc too, with completed cutscenes having been posted on youtube. If the live server had held on just a little bit longer we might've had that. 😞

Battleaxe needs a chainsaw skin for parity with Broadsword and Katana.

I haven't yet tried Dark Blast or Dark Armor on Sents (gonna get there eventually), but one thing to note is that they actually get a recovery power unlike other variants of DA.

In regards to origin, I'd like each origin to have its own unique incarnate arc. Right now the Ramiel arc makes sense for magic characters but cramps the style of everyone else. Some ideas: Natural: Go to ancient mountain temples, study under Tsoo monks Science: Reverse-engineer Crey's Revenant Hero Project to modify your own body Technology: "Borrow" some tech from the Rikti's homeworld Mutant: Harness the power of the Devouring Earth virus to change your DNA to become more powerful Magic: Drink magic juice from a magical well (the current Ramiel arc) All origins could access every arc in Ouros (or Midnight Club after Dream Doctor blows up the place). The mutant one could maybe be the science origin instead, given that Dr. Hami designed the Dev Earth in a laboratory...

Leadership Affinity: Making an entire support power set out of leadership toggles and like 2-3 clickies. Just like VEATs, these stack with pool leadership. Probably needs to include a passive recovery aura so it's not constantly drained of blue juice.

On one hand, many of the older faces do look a little too pixelated/blurry. On the other hand, some of the newer faces look completely uncanny and stick out from the rest of the game's art style like sore thumbs. I think that's a worse sin than the above. Any update to the older faces would need to be very careful to reduce the blurriness without going full derpface.

IIRC, the user Vanden proposed a purple healing set as an advertisement of his enhancement set building tool a few months ago. I'm not sure what the live devs' reasoning was for skipping over certain enhancement categories, but there are definitely a lot of holes left to fill in and this is one of them. As for the HC devs, they've only added a few new sets that weren't on the live server and I've seen people say on the forum that they don't intend to ever make anything as strong as purple/winter sets (I don't know of any official source on that). But yeah, I wants more enhancements to collect. I wants them all.

In theory at least, Willpower is supposed to be that because you're literally using the power of your mind to withstand damage. In practice not so much...

Shield Defense for Sentinels.

Shotgun Blast: A blast set that has a bit less range than others but scaling damage that maxes out at point blank. I'm not sure if the range/damage scaling thing is possible, and also it might be hard to fill out all of the 9 power slots. Yes, I know that IRL shotguns can shoot pretty far but this is meant to be a stereotypical videogame shotgun.

Arsenal Blast: For fans of arsenal-based boomer shooters like Doom or Serious Sam, every single attack in this set has you pull out a different weapon (not a unified frankenrifle like AR currently is). You'd get an SMG, Shotgun, Grenade Launcher, Plasma Rifle, Flamethrower, Railgun, Minigun, and Rocket Launcher. This is what AR should've been.

Submachine Gun: Basically taking the Huntsman powers from SOA's and making a full blast set out of it, with a few additions like Aim and Full Auto to fill it out. It would basically play like a revamped Assault Rifle that focuses on shooting bullets (with 1 or 2 grenades) instead of being a frankenrifle with like 12 different guns strapped together. Explosive Blast: Literally a blast set filled with a wide variety of different grenade types. The T9 would be a revamped LRM Rocket that isn't interruptible but only has normal range in exchange. Almost everything in this set would be AoE (except maybe 1 or 2 powers) so that would be kinda nuts. Sniper Rifle: Self-explanatory. In terms of feel it would have slow but meaty attacks like a long-range version of Battle Axe. Its special gimmick would just be having a higher base range than other blast sets. It would focus mostly on single-target, with its T9 being a monstrously powerful single-target attack instead of an AoE nuke like everyone else gets.

Adding additional tiers of incarnate powers would trivialize the level 45+ content even more than it already has been, and would likely require a rebalancing of hardmode content to account for them. So...probably not. I would however like to see additional incarnate powers within the existing tiers we already have, which would be a horizontal power expansion rather than vertical.

It reduces the number of times you need to die in order to get them, which does literally make it easier/quicker. So let's say that currently you accrue 10k debt when you die normally, this suggestion would let you get 20k debt per death. That does make it easier. I actually don't mind that because the redside accolades are already quite a bit harder/longer to earn than their blueside equivalents while providing identical benefit, but we can still be honest about it. If this had no effect, then there would be no point to even make the suggestion to begin with. So clearly it has to help at least somewhat, in order to justify this thread's existence.

The reason is because the HC team doesn't want to potentially get sued by the big comic companies, which did actually happen to the original devs back on live (but the devs won). The problem is that the "target audience" you need to convince of this argument isn't HC, it's those big companies that get overzealous about IP protection, because they are the ones who caused this rule to come into being. On the bright side, we can still do "homage" or parody characters as long as they're different enough from the source material. It can be an interesting creative exercise to try to walk that fine line between being based on an existing character but still having some plausible deniability. And I say this as somebody whose first toon on HC was a straight carbon copy of an existing character (Reaper from Overwatch, but I generic'd him after the rule announcement just to be safe).

That line of reasoning would make sense if PAPs couldn't be purchased off the auction house for inf... ...But they can, which means people with tons of inf can in fact just dump a bunch of cash into it if they don't feel like farming them the "organic" way.