Frunobulax

By power pools I was thinking leadership/fighting etc for newbies/fresh 50's trying to squeeze out survival because they don't have io's/don't know about vendor buffs yet and such. Sorry I misunderstood, I get agro when I think I see people attacking newbies, to me it's like punching puppies especially in this era of extreme powercreep where people sometimes forget that not everybody's there yet, and how ridiculously wide the gulf is between a player has modern knowledge and resources and one that doesn't. Obviously multiple travel powers is silly if there's no plan for dealing with mobs when arriving at whatever destination and if it's a vet who spec'd without low level's in mind they could at least spam temps, which is more then good enough for getting through a synapse, and a saving grace for some combos that wish their low level blahs were their own fault and thus preventable.

I prefer that to the mindless dregs whining about how things don't go perfectly in a low lvl tf that's possibly full of new players. Try getting over yourself a bit, and and you may find that your ability to enjoy yourself will improve.

For low level, one stun grenade > any amount of theorycrafting about your 9 slots or whatever. As I've demonstrated in front of you over and over.

Seems like a pretense to insert the word "dwindling", which feels dishonest to me. But that doesn't mean that I have to post in bad faith too, so I'll add that for me personally this game fills the role of the greatest hack n slash ever made (for many reasons but primarily because it has superjump). That's how I view it and enjoy it so there's not much that anybody involved with running or even changing this game here could do to make me never play again. I do take long breaks for work, but that has nothing to do with my thoughts or feelings about the game.

I think that many of my characters would use that slot to offset some of the consequences of having too many procs. Unless another proc could fit on the power.

You could also just design your own farm. The entire point of farming in AE is to gain the most money/xp as you can in the easiest and most efficient way possible. So you could tailor the fights to your character strengths and weaknesses, and even tactics. Alternatively, you can mostly patch whatever holes your character has to hang in whatever farm you find and like by simply using insp. The important thing for farming is obviously surviving, and killing. It doesn't matter how you accomplish that, you could use insp and incarnates as crutches the entire time and if you crush everything to your satisfaction, your alts are still leveled, and your pockets are still full of loot. You won't be quite as quick as somebody who achieves the same dmg/def/res caps and has also sorted their procs and recharge, but you'll gain the resources to change that if you so choose. You can stuff your mail with inspirations to retrieve at will, and you can use macros to combine incoming insp drops to what you want. You can search inspiration combination macros to achieve this. Here is an example of syntax used: /macro smallR "inspcombine Sturdy Enrage$$inspcombine Insight Enrage$$inspcombine Respite Enrage$$inspcombine Catch_A_Breath Enrage$$inspcombine Break_Free Enrage$$inspcombine Luck Enrage" that will turn insp to reds. You can of course do this with any size and colour of insp, and shore your toons up that way. If you box you can stuff your alts mail with insp too, and then just window over and hit return when your own supply is running low. You probably won't have to do anything like that once you get used to the macros, but the option is there.

I kind of agree that there are lots of people on HC who for whatever reasons often seem very eager use anything they can as a pretense to puff themselves up at the expense of a stranger, and I agree completely with your thoughts on difficulty, but I strongly disagree with you including cyclone as an example. I would have asked for that, if I had thought of it. What a tremendous change. It is one of my favourite buffs to any skill in the history of mmo. I love cyclone and what its done for some of my characters such as my ice/axe's that got way more fun to play overnight. Anyways I have no issues with the rest of your post. I just love cyclone, spiritually, emotionally and especially physically.

There are lots of players like that. If you do KM's you'll probably meet quite a few people who are very obviously done needing or worrying about anything, and are a farm unto themselves wherever they go.

I favour a compromise where we keep the requirement of being able to follow the advanced strat of "hit just one thing for one fight", but we also throw in op's clicky busywork, and put those glowies behind the barrels.

A hami that disables IO's.

I constantly end up being the initiator on my stalkers and I always run stealth. Dive in, ae from stealth, backstab #1 priority mob for proc to buff my next ae, then prioritize from whatever's left, if anything. You are probably leaving damage (that could help you retain agro) on the table for no reason unless you're pulling with proximity agro for some specific reason.

I had a fun one not long ago where most of us were the new Marine set and we learned how well their buffs/pet thingy (that none of us had access to ourselves at that level) stack, and how well that works out for multiple mm shadows. Luckily I was on a corr with a snipe so for our second attempt we just pulled the mm's one by one. I've always wondered if those shadows inherit our procs. I've never noticed because I usually lockdown and/or kill me right away before I can get the upper hand and slaughter me and then steal my wallet off of my corpse and go to my house and pretend to be me and talk trash me to my family while I drain my bank accounts and take out as many loans as I can under my name.

Don't forget the proc for sleep powers which isn't as great as the real power obviously but for the low investment of one slot I like to fit it in when I can even if it's just in the bio aura or whatever.

I always feel bad for Hopkins so I hope he reads this thread and starts strutting around for a bit until the next batch of alts show up to humiliate him at work.

I frontload the character with everything they're ever going to use, and build as I level because mucking around with my vaults/obtaining sets I've run out of slows down my alt creation to a few a week. Also I like to level in missions and tf's and pretty much every group has io'd 50's absolutely overpowering everything with gear that the mobs were not designed for, and if I'm coated in cheese myself then I'm not at the mercy of our lack of tactics, nor do I have to stand around watching them kill stuff if I don't feel like it. And I like being capable of being able to help a newbie with a roomful of mobs that they've been abandoned to by the rest of the group, on any setting or combo. I build to level (or to check things out that I've never tried before), and then I usually respec at 50 at least once. I don't use mids or anybody else''s builds or whatever. I really like just doing my own thing and then ruminating about it and making adjustments. I also make a secondary build that's just standard enhancements, to swap to in the rare group I find where everybody else is only in the gear that existed when the content that we're playing was created. As for my actual strategy for creating a character, I usually make some stupid pun or concept that is almost never serious, and then I consider what at/powers would best embody the stupid pun, or add to whatever theme or joke. And then I slather it with influence and make it work. Some characters are anti-synergy, some are (probably, I don't pay any attention but math is math) on meta, some probably become the meta down the road after changes on this living server. I don't even care about performance/viability on paper, just what I can actually squeeze out of the character myself in real time. Today's third stringer could become tomorrow's all-star anyways, these devs make some great changes and have raised the viability of lots of my characters over the years here on HC.

If you ask me about the subject in game, I'll tell you how convenient I feel kb>kd is for freeing up your positioning priorities. And I actually do carry some SA's to hand out to new/returning players because I know what it's like to not even know that Io's exist while trying to navigate modern expectations. But ultimately, I don't care what anybody does provided that nobody cares that I will deal with teamates creating situations in which I can't land my ae's by creating new situations for me to ae. If it can even be knocked, it's whatever, realistically. And if Op is genuinely using KB to herd stuff together/knock 90°/make corner piles/etc then mobs aren't actually being scattered, so whoever is complaining about KB is just doing it as a pretense to be a busybody or something like that, I don't think you owe them any response beyond some variant of "stfu".

Or not, it's lame and maybe a bit sick to make a habit of scurrying to the forums to whine about people who might still be learning or even just made a mistake. Especially from a player like Snarky who is no stranger to dying to even cons themselves. To anybody reading this who is new enough to take Snarky seriously: Don't let this kind of pointless attention-seeking deter you from trying things that you're not always 100% perfect at. It's absolutely ok to learn a game by playing it. It's even ok to fail. Be open to discussing tactics if something isn't going well, and you're fine. To salvage a lesson from this sad thread: Check your combat logs to learn about what you're being hit with. You can copy and paste it into a document out of game and examine it at your leisure with the find command from whatever program you're reading it with, or possibly with parsers that you can find searching this forum. Respect Longbow at all times, they can have heinous combos that absolutely can and will humble you in an instant if the stars align against you.

The same thing has happened to me 4x in the past few days. I get mapserved, and then I can't log back in. Nothing has changed on my machine since before this started happening. I have played here since early '19 without this problem.

Maybe people are crashing more? Last night on a *raid my game randomly froze up and gave the windows 10/11 prompt you get when a fullscreen program crashes. When I came back online I was in Pocket D, and the leader tried inviting me right away and then again after a relog, and I was denied with some message that iirc was "instance can not be formed" or something like that. I've been playing off and on since early '19, I have a huge family and while they don't all play regularly, I've physically seen this game run on quite a few different computers including a few potatoes and I've never seen that happen before. I have been on enough raids that if I even tried guessing at the number it could probably be credibly used against me to argue that I should not be able to sign legal documents by myself. *No, I absolutely will not stop referring to group+ content in any game as a raid.

Forever. If it bothers me, I'll move in front of them, which would be really easy to do because they're using hover.

Not impossible, I've done it a bunch of times. What we did was I kited Mary through the ruins while potshotting the rest of the mobs the rest of the group whittled down whenever her pathing gave me breathing room to help out, until she's alone and then it's a textbook slog, as pathing allows. It's not pretty, and it sure isn't quick, and I'd never bother with this while sober, but it is for sure totally doable.

I always have some kind of idea and then I try to create it through my costume and power choices (usually). I've only ever used one costume that I did not create myself. I made a zombie mm and I'd never seen the default costume before as mm's were new to me, so when it came up I decided to use my original idea on some other character, and kept what I thought was a funny random costume, a Satanic Gimp.

I have made a lot of characters and I am way past slotting properly, now I just try to find the lines I am comfortable with for any given combo as they actually play out as far as non-damage considerations go, unless I am leaning into a gimmick/concept for the hell of it, and then I build for whatever that is specifically, and slap the basics on around it.

I like it when the enemies fight back. My only bad pug experiences are when people are being rude to each other or something like that. I can't really help to teach a person a thing about attitude if that's even possible with them, but for everything else, having to actually play the game does not bother me. If somebody's at least trying, that's enough for me to enjoy myself. If not, I can just prioritize getting myself through the content instead of clearing for/vendor rezzing the dead. Like people have mentioned above, you can just gimp whatever with some purples and reds. Mostly reds. The nuclear option of mild preparation is almost always there. And for the very few things that can't be solved with some consumables, that's the attraction for that specific content in the first place.

My agro cap onto myself