biostem

The greatest, most humble goblinoid has arrived!! I present to you, the self-appointed "TideKing":

I pretty much use small inspirations right away. Depending upon the character and my need for inf, I may hang onto medium or larger inspirations, to combine them into ones that sell for more on the AH or into ones that particular character needs...

I think the female lead put it best in the 1st Blade movie, when she said, (and I'm paraphrasing here), that "Vampirism is an STD..."

And? What makes you think any random selection of 5 players *should* be able to take down what is supposed to be a significant zone enemy?

I think a more feasible option would be free costume change tokens purchasable with PAPs...

@Troo clearly, that's an example of a TTTT...

Do you prefer your TT's with a rag-top or spoiled?

Clearly the OP has succeeded in catching prey with the bait they set out...

I would argue that much of the "hatred" stems from necessary game mechanics - essentially, these "signature heroes", (and villains, for that matter), can't actually do anything - they stand around, give out quests/TFs, and sometimes make appearances in missions, but due to the multiplayer nature of CoH, can't have any meaningful impact on the rest of the game. If this were a single-player game, they could have more of an impact, as could each player's individual contributions. From a more general standpoint, it would be cool if, for instance, a player defeated one of them as a villain, switched sides, then encounters them again, and they acknowledge their prior defeat and/or other such accomplishments...

I mean, we basically "gamble" with every reward that is RNG-based. The only difference here is that you have to pay some in-game inf to participate. I'm not advocating for accepting real money or any sort of real-world gambling...

No doubt! While I, too, very much enjoy my Crabbermind, I find the lack of support powers makes me feel like less of a leader for my pets, and instead them being a bit of a distraction for the enemy and some extra DPS. But survivability-wise and in terms of ease of use, that SoA doesn't feel naked without their pets and is much more durable. It's definitely good to have both options, but it does make me wonder if a full AT could somehow skirt the line of individual survivability whilst still having a full entourage with them...

I think this is a big sticking point for any future/hypothetical pet ATs; MMs try to be both the "I have lots of disposable minions" and the "I have a few very powerful enforcers" AT, never fully achieving either. Controllers/Dominators, and SoAs to a certain extent, have a "set it and forget it" style when it comes to their pets, where you tradeoff direct control, (no upgrades or ability to issue commands, to contend with), for simplicity, (just select location and cast, with all powers immediately available and no level penalty). In cases where other ATs can get access to multiple pets, they tend to overshadow MMs, IMHO - such as a "Crabbermind" deploying all their pets + incarnate ones, whilst still benefitting from their own armor toggles, direct attacks, and possibly even stacking leadership powers...

Baby steps - let's implement what is doable first. Let's imagine they did add the swimming animation as an optional flight pose, but left everything else as-is. You could easily rationalize that those "stuck" at the bottom simply don't know how to swim or something. It's a much more feasible option than trying to implement some sort of pseudo-underwater environment. Also, Champions Online has an underwater area, and frankly, I hate how they basically replace all of your travel powers with faster swimming, while there...

There is an animation for swimming on the surface of water. I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt that as a new flight pose...

New sets are absolutely possible! The big question is how to create, what I think would be a new archetype, (per your OP), into the existing game, which would both have its own unique playstyle while also fitting in among the existing ATs. Could you flesh things out a bit more? Cheers!

Hmm... I wonder how difficult it would be to implement an in-game lottery - you buy tickets for some amount of inf, and every week there's a drawing - the winner gets like 90% of that inf, and the rest goes "poof" as a way of removing some inf from the market...

I like some of what this thread proposes. Something similar has been proposed before. What I would do would be to replace the personal attacks from the pet sets with appropriate armor toggles, while the secondary set consisted of melee attacks. The APPs for this AT would include the ranged attacks that were stripped from the pet sets. I would also have the passive ability for this AT be two-fold: 1) Those armor toggles also generate a PBAoE effect that grants some of their benefit to your pets, and 2) Add a single-target taunt effect to the melee effects, like what brutes get. The armor powers would need to be tweaked, and some other adjustments would be necessary for the primary sets, (likely, each pet primary would end up with 2 general armor powers and likely 1 status protection power): Beast would get super reflexes, regeneration, or maybe bio armor Demon Summoning - fire armor Mercenaries - invuln or willpower Necromancy - dark armor Ninjas would get ninjitsu powers Robotics - invuln, elec, or energy aura armors Thugs - invuln or willpower

Animation-wise, it absolutely fits. Damage-per-activation or Damage-per-animation time, though, I can see how one may view it as "slow"...

While flurry may not be a great power, it does fit the theme of the speed pool...

I think you're looking at the wrong thing as the cause of lag, here; It's not the GM itself that causes significant lag, it's all the people congregating around it and activating all sorts of powers, not to mention any passive/toggle effects they may have going on...

Only issue is that those powers existed within the set before unrelenting was added, while flurry's been there all the while... Personally, I think there was this philosophy with the early dev team that if a pool power "steps on the toes' of any AT's role, (in this case, the taunt effects), then those powers must be dramatically reduced in effectiveness.

Oh no doubt, but frankly, without the -range component, they are nearly useless unless you are already in the faces of those enemies...

I feel like the single target and AoE taunts need at least some -range component, even if it was less than what tankers/brutes/scrappers get, (and those powers are autohit vs regular mobs, IIRC, already).

I've had really good results with a dark/sr or dp/nin sentinel!

Well, probably would need to eliminate the phase effect, unless this only applied while within its AoE, which would, IMHO, cause more frustration, especially since it's a toggle...