PaxArcana

Nonetheless, "the Cottage Rule" should only ever be a word of caution, not a /JRanger.

All of this applies to Masterminds as well, of course - though we get some of the powers in a different order. I agree 110% with the joy that is "one cast, whole team" for the Shields. As an MM, it makes "gearing up" so much faster, simpler, less-tedious, and waaaaay more END-friendly. And I'm still at only four robots, not the full six!! For Forcebolt, I have another suggestion. In addition to the usual knockBACK, what about also adding a massive KnockDOWN to it? So things you can't send flying, you can at least put them off their feet? I LOVE the idea of Detention Field being a toggle!! So far I've been avoiding it on my Robo/FF ... But I'm going to disagree with the suggestions for Repulsion Bomb. not because I think it's okay - I don't, I think it's crap - but because I want to go in a completely different direction with it. Literally. I want to rename it Implosion, have it work exactly as it does now .... but, in a much larger area, and instead of knocking everything away from it's center, knock things TOWARDS the center! ForceField has three other "get away from me" powers (Repulsion Field, Forcebolt, & Forcefield). It really never needed a fourth. So how about we give it a brand-new tool: a way to CLUMP UP enemies, to gather them into a smaller area. A way to set them up for an AoE attack (by a team-mate, by an MM's pets, from an APP or EPP, whatever).

Yes, 5% is the floor for chance-to-actually-connect with an attack. For both players, and NPCs. OTOH, your experiences were strangely different from mine, playing Bots/FF straight to level 50. Including a long slogging grind from 38 or 39 to 42 (ran out of content, during i7 or i8 - outlevelled the paper in one zone, wasn't high enough in the next). That slog was against Longbow, specifically, too. With the difficulty dialled up, even. ::shrug::

HAHAHA thats awesome! Very creative, congratz! Thanks - and, as your reactions hows, it's brought enjoyment to more than just myself. But, the funny thing is, it took me only moments to do. Sure, sure, while making the costume, I had the "little girl in a robot suit" idea in the back of my mind the whole time. It informed my choices for body type and scales (short and THICK torso/limbs/etc). But the actual bit in the bio? Ten seconds, fifteen tops. :) I've seen - and back in the Paragon Studios days, DONE - much more extensive background writeups. :) Especially for the alts I had in the Young Paragons SG on Virtue (concept: teenagd heroes, 13-19), since that group was a "light RP" one.

Bots/FF ... how far did you get? How did you slot your FF stuff? I had a Bots/FF on Live, the only character I hit level cap with (though I had a couple others in the 40s, blueside). I slotted heavily for defense, ran Leadership toggles, bubbled everything as often as END permitted, and 99% of the time, the robots were funtionally untouchable. (AVs and GMs were a problem, but you're not supposed to solo them, anyway.)

Yeah, also what Blastit says. That's what Teaming does to your XP rate, in fact: since you're sharing that XP-per-kill with people, you get a LOT less XP that way .... per NPC foe. But your team will chew through five, ten, TWENTY times as many NPC foes in a given span of time, than most people could manage solo, so ... :D

I do have the latest patches, RikOZ. And re-validating didn't trigger any replacement downloads.

I, for one, am in full 110% support of the idea of making Frostworks a pure Absorb power. :) And I'm in favor of it, because it would be different. Heals aplenty are in the game ... but Absorbs? Not so much. And if people are so convinced that Absorb is worth less than MaxHP, here's a thought: maybe it should give more Absorb than it gives MaxHP. Maybe, every ... say ... 2 points of MaxHP are worth 3 points of Absorb. So, if you converted the .... upthread, I saw +535 MaxHP cited? That would become +800 Absorb. Does it regenerate, no. But it's more points than you'd've gotten, otherwise, so ... :)

Right. Hence why +45% Defense will effectively soft-cap your pets against them. OTOH, mobs that are +0 to you, are as much as +2 to your pets. For example, with your Tier 1 pets: Level 1-5: you have one pet, it is -0 to you - a +0 enemy is +0 to the pet; 45% Defense soft-caps them. Levels 6-11: you have two pets, they are -1 to you - a +0 enemy is +1 to the pets; 50% Defense soft-caps them. Levels12+: you have three 1 pets, they are -2 to you - a +0 enemy is +2 to the pets; 55% Defense soft-caps them. :) And remember, a Lieutenant counts as +1 more than their actual level. A Boss counts as +2 more than their actual level. And so on. So there will be times you want even more defense than the list above suggests.

Slightly, yes. XP for defeating enemies will be based on the enemies' relative level compared to yours. If you set yourself to "-1/x1" (which makes the game spawn mission-map enemies as if you were one level LOWER than you really are, making it all a slight bit easier), then all those enemies will be worth a few XP less. But the end-of-mission awards, IIRC, should remain the same. You could always pick up a +25% XP temporary power, from the P2W Vendor, to makeup for it, and a little bit more. That will reduce your Influence awards by 25%, mind you, but that should be survivable. Write that stuff up, put it in the Background section of your character's ID / Details page. Even if you don't actively RP, people will read that and enjoy it, maybe fire off a compliment at you. For example, I made a blaster (Beam/Devices) the other night. Huge body, floating metal ball for a head, lots of cybernetic/robot pieces. My concept was "little girl in a suit of power armor". And I wrote in my Background: An eleven-year-old girl in a suit of power armor, fighting badguys. What could possibly go wrong? Which was worth a couple chuckles from people who read it, while waiting for more people to add to the DFB team I had just joined. :D

Pro Tip #1: you can get Jetpack temporary flight powers. It's literally equipment, not a superpower. Pro Tip #2: get Ninja Run (or the Beast run one, maybe). IT STACKS WITH SPRINT, and is almost as fast as an unslotted Superspeed. I call it Ghetto Superspeed as a result. :)

Just one channel. Everyone specifies red, blue, and/or gold when posting to it. And server, of course. :)

Um, whatever the client defaults to? I don't even know how or where to change that. :) E:\Documents\Tequila\Homecoming Which is where the Tequila installer put it. (The orange bit is, I assume, a Homecoming-specific folder; it has .pigg files and a \data subfolder.) There's a folder there, \Screenshots which is empty; I did not create it, Tequila did. Certainly not. :)

Maxim 37: There is no Overkill. There is only open fire and reload. --also-- Maxim 34: If you're leaving scorch-marks, you need a bigger gun. :) https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries

:D Thank you. :D

It's not the most bleeding-edge machine, but it's reasonably good, still. :)

DXdiag report attached. :) DxDiag_20_6_19.txt

Every time I try, no matter what keybind I use, the result is always the same: Crash to desktop. When I restart the client, and try to log in: "This account is already logged in." :'( Were screenshots intentionally disabled by the dev team?

.... and it happened again. Logged in, same character. Went to the sewers, punched my LFG:DFB macro a couple times, got an invite .... up comes the enter/decline popup ... "11 of 8 have accepted" ... ugh.

Getting us all on one server would help. I plan to migrate my villains to the higher-redside-pop server myself, today or tonight.

Chairkicker, you need to find a Kinetic defender to duo with. :)

+1 The current penchant for pets to go dashing off in pursuit of a runner - or just because they have the attention span of ADHD squirrels - is seriously annoying, and I don't recall it being such a huge problem back before Sunset.

+1 Just tried it now, got same result as OP.

So, made a new alt to try a Beam/Devices Blaster out. Beelined for DFB, of course, as the fastest way to get up to the early teens and start getting a good feel for the setup. This is all on Torchbearer, if it matters. ... First run went brilliantly - got invited within seconds, we rolled in and flattened everything in our path with ease. Then ... then things started going wrong. Team leader couldn't queue us for another run - they said they were up to "50 of 8 have accepted", but we weren't being pulled in, and all of us didn't get an X-of-Y popup like normal. So we decided to drop and reform the team. Except I couldn't be re-invited - the system insisted I was already/still in a League. (I wasn't, of course). I was able to clear that by relogging to character select. So, at that point, we've got the band back together, we all queue up, and ... ... the team breaks, completely, when we load in. Invites can't be sent, none of us are exemplar'd or SK'd, no-one is getting ANY XP at all. Total flustercluck. If the server keeps logs, my character was Sokohime@PaxArcana, and this was just a very short while ago.

Letting the then-Community Manager, Lighthouse, tick me off badly enough (with a horribly unjust action) to unsubscribe around Issue 14's launch ... and then not resubscribing again, before the game was shut down. That was my biggest mistake. :'(