Rudra

Precisely. The slowed character isn't less invulnerable, the slowed character can't protect their vital points as well any more or get out of the way as well. So they are easier to hit and hurt. The only thing I can see "Command Silence" doing is turning off any Leadership powers until it wore off. That's it. Simply because leading does require active coordinating and silencing the leader will prevent that. (Unless they have non-verbal communications available such as hand signs.) (Edit: Or if they were a team/unit that drilled and fougth together enough to no longer need verbal direction, which would also render silence useless against their teamwork and coordination. Like with Malta. Or the Tsoo.) Edit again: Also, can we consolidate this discussion on 1 thread? This two separate thread discussion is frustrating.

Taunt has a -100% range strength effect. At -100% range, if it reduced the power's actual range, then melee characters would not be able to attack the Tanker at all. (Edit again: Neither would most ranged enemies.) Because they have no enhancements that can improve their range and a range of 0 cannot hit past the character itself. And yet? Mobs will still blast you or shoot you or debuff you as they move closer to you. Hurricane does not stop melee mobs from hitting you with melee attacks either. (Edit: What I notice inside the enemies' Hurricane? Is that -37.5% ToHit keeps me from landing my attacks until I get built up enough to counter it.)

I am neither refusing to acknowledge that nor am I arguing against it. My point is that Levitate is not a useless power. We would not even be having this discussion except for the fact you specifically called Levitate a useless power. (And then you comment how Lift is a good power despite being the exact same power, just a little more powerful.)

Welcome to City of Heroes where simply evidencing you have KB powers can get you booted from the team. Unlike KB, I haven't seen people complain about Confuse except here on the forums. So you lost me.

Are you sure they spawn indefinitely? I've cleared them out without them returning on several playthroughs.

So you suggest Taunt and Confront have their -Range effect retracted too? There are so few powers with -Range effects, and I saw a good opportunity to expand that list. Even if you leave it out, reduction to cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, heals, and control effects is huge. If you don't think it is, I'm not really sure how experienced you are with this game's mechanics. Power Build Up is massive when used before activating your party buffs or large scale enemy debuffs. Weaken from the Poisons set is used to debuff these stats on enemies, not just damage reduction. It ruins the effectiveness of literally anyone you shoot with it. To the point where any shields a Ruin Mage is applying to allies are at 93% reduced effectiveness. Most other buff effects are halved. It's just objectively false to say that's negligible or useless. So much of what enemies do is so much more than damage. Often the hardest enemy groups to fight aren't hard because they have high damage, but because of the secondary effects of their abilities. Tsoo Sorcerers are a great example of this. Most of what they do is -ToHit, healing, and control effects. They have almost no damage, but are the primary threat in most fights against a bunch of Tsoo mobs, to the point where players make a point of specifically taking them down first. CoT Ruin Mages have tons of buffs and debuffs that make fights a nightmare too, and require players focusing them down. Having a player in the party who can nullify a large portion of these issues while the threat is eliminated is impressive. No. My argument is that Command Silence, in commanding enemies to be silent, has zero mechanical effects. It would affect nothing at all. Like how the post you are quoting says, it "would be a truly useless power". Edit: -Range makes targets move to you, it does not reduce their powers' ranges. Edit again: And who is to say the Circle mages are even using incantations? They are multi-millennia old mages. Ancient mages and true masters, in both comics and fantasy, tend to no longer use incantations for their magic. It is second nature to them, an automatic channeling that can only really be prevented by preventing them from using motions to focus their magic. As for the Tsoo? They are more chi masters than mages. They even have Chi Masters as a mob type. So silencing them will do absolutely nothing to disrupt their abilities because they are manipulating their own chi, their allies' chi, and the flowing energy around them. No incantations required. Not affected by being silenced.

There are other aspects of the power set that can compensate? But the power itself is useless despite not needing other powers to compensate for it as is? Your argument is broken. Yes, there are immob's that have -Fly. None of them do anything to stop your enemies from attacking you though. Levitate knocks fliers to the ground and it prevents them from attacking until they get back on their feet. With a base 6 second recharge, it doesn't take much for that Mag 12.463 knock up effect to keep almost any target in the game unable to do anything but take damage while you keep slamming them into the ground. Levitate was the power you specifically called out as useless. And it obviously isn't. That is my point. That is my argument on that specific topic. Because a power does not fit your conception of what a set is supposed to be does not make the power useless. Especially one as useful as Levitate.

Note that the quote you have says "pets from pets". Any pets summoned by pets, such as mobs that join your team including the Dream Doctor, do not grant players full XP as though you dealt the damage. They grant 0 XP for the damage they do. Any pets summoned by your character or your teammates are still part of your team and their damage counts as damage inflicted by the team. Any further pets do not. They are no longer part of the team. Their damage is part of the team's. They award nothing to the team for the damage they contribute. Of course you can. Just like I can construct a solid Mind Control power set that is all confuses and still have it meet the power fantasy without breaking the game or making players feel like they're giving up something for doing their job right. You are talking about a power set that has 9 powers from a theme with hundreds of variations across comics, anime/cartoons, and games. The Mind Control power set does a very good job of presenting players a wide variety of standard mind control effects to choose from and make their characters with. Like the reward and satisfaction of being able to put targets to sleep while you focus on higher priority threats? Like the joy of watching your enemies tear themselves apart like many mind controllers across several comics, anime/cartoons, and even movies do? You are focused on a single interpretation of what mind control means, and so you want the rest of the set to conform to that very specific iteration. This is the same argument made by those demanding KB go away and be replaced with KD. Just because other players don't know how to leverage an effect, especially when they are willingly negating the effect such as with sleeps, does not make a power bad. For crying out loud, players often prioritize debuffers' debuff anchors for elimination. It doesn't matter if you target a minion off to the side or the AV in the group. Where ever the debuff player places their debuff anchor, immediately half the team (or more) turns and blasts the anchor to oblivion, and then complain that you did nothing to help. Or how players skilled at using KB can herd mobs into the team's kill zone, but because they dared to use KB, they are inundated with hate for it. So who cares what they say? You can't win with those people, so ignore them and just play.

Not if you moved beyond his tracking range and the Freaklok was the at the time closest ally. If you never lost him for his tracking ability? Then yeah, it is.

What reliance on sleep? Mind Control has 2 sleep effects. A ST one and an AoE one. It has 3 hold effects, 2 confuse effects, a damaging knock up effect, and a terrify effect. That is not a sleep effect reliance. I am so tired of this argument. The mobs are not your character and to the best of my knowledge, cannot be coded to suddenly be part of your character. The mobs are not part of your team. They function like pets from pets such as Dream Doctor's phantasms. They are inflicting their own damage and the game cannot track that damage as belonging to your character or team. For that reason, the devs applied a multiplier for confused mobs that you cite to deal with that.

Seeing how that does not work in the instances that already do something similar, like Captain Castillo and Belladonna Vetrano, I would rather not. Levitate isn't useless. First, unlike an immobilize, it can bring a flying target to the ground. Second, also unlike an immobilize, the target is knocked up and then then knocked down, forcing the target to have to wait until after the power finishes its full animation and then stand up before taking any further actions. (Edit: It is a Mag 12.463 Knock Up before any enhancements after all.) Even if your character forced the enemy to be silent, they can still see you, their weapons are not suddenly sawed offs or other shortened versions, their blasts are not suddenly limited range versions, their buffs don't suddenly stop being effective and neither do their debuffs or heals or other control effects. So a "Command Silence" ability would be a truly useless power. Please stop trying to change power sets to fit your preference instead of the theme the set already possesses. If you want a different mind control set? Propose a new power set with a different name.

They weren't. The sirens have been raging since the day the game launched. Mayhems and Safeguards weren't added until CoV launched or after.

On blue side, you spend approximately the same amount of time being a go-fer or courier as you do red side. I'd say more time since there are more missions and a lot of them require you to drop off some nitnoid that makes no sense for you as the hero to have to drop off. And in comics, when you read from the villain perspective at least, and is also sometimes shown from the hero perspective, the villains are always competing with each other or fighting with each other. They spend more time trying to seize power and territory from each other than they do fighting the heroes until you get to the top tier villains.

You can also make a suggestion/request for the stations to be silenced if you desire.

Blue side isn't in neat 5-level increments either. Positron: 8-15 and 11-16 Synapse: 15-20 Penelope Yin: 20-25 Admiral Sutter: 20-40 Moonfire: 23-28 (Kheldians only for team lead?) Citadel: 25-30 Ernesto Hess: 25-30 Katie Hannon: 30-34 Manticore: 30-35 Numina: 35-40 Dr. Quaterfield: 40-50 Sara Moore: 40-50 Justin Augustine: 44-50 Faathim: 44-50 Ms. Liberty: 45-50 Dr. Kahn: 45-50 Blue side has two advantages in TFs. An 8-15 TF, and a whopping 17 total TFs that are not co-op for players to choose from for variety.

Once you hit level 15, yes there is. All levels starting at 15 are covered. Virgil Tarikoss in Cap au Diable: 15-20 Silver Mantis in Sharkhead Isle: 20-25 Mortimer Kal in Sharkhead Isle: 20-40 Operative Renault in Sharkhead Isle: 25-30 Ice Mistral in St. Martial: 35-40 Dr. Aeon in Cap au Diable: 35-50 Barracuda in Grandville: 45-50 Lord Recluse in Grandville: 45-50 Sure, blue side gets 17 Task Forces to red side's 8, but at least 4 of those are Shadow Shard ones. (I am not counting TFs/SFs that are co-op like Lady Grey, Apex, and Tin Mage Mk. II.) I grant blue side has much more variety. However, if a player wants to, (s)he can level up just doing SFs starting at level 15. (An 8-15 SF would help equalize things though.)

My Signature Power is I summon a mighty 4-winged angel that heals the team. My Signature Power is I cause a great stone dragon head to rise out of the ground and encase my foe, maybe even dragging the foe underground (a la Black Hole except with an invisibility component). My Signature Power is I turn the ground in an area into lava. My Signature Power is an overwhelming gravitational field that pins foes to the ground. My Signature Power is... you see where I am going with this? And then beyond that, there is the balance component. What effects/options can be combined that would be OP? How do you address those combinations? Do you scale back the damage to compensate? By how much? What if the ability does no damage but still guarantees victory? To make a custom Signature Power for each and every character for each and every player will need a considerable amount of dev involvement to scale and balance. Possibly even model and animate. Things like that work well in pen and paper games. Though even at that, the game master has to review the proposed power and make sure it isn't too powerful or unbalancing for his/her/their game. And they become much more difficult to implement in video games.

Thanks for the clarification/correction.

Okay, you've completely lost me. Every time I think you are saying one thing or commenting on something, you say no, that you are talking about something else. So just consider me no longer part of this conversation. My last comment is I oppose the OP. And I will leave it at that.

Please read my posts to receive answers to these earlier in the thread. I looked. And I looked. And I looked. And you give no examples. And if you are referring to Pain Domination's Soothing Aura? That is a PvP effect. And I will not consider a PvP effect for a PvE discussion.

Yep, that is every Paragon City police station. (Been a while since I went into a Praetorian one, so not sure if it carries over there too. It is definitely every blue side station though.) (Edit: It's been that way since the game launched back on Live. So it isn't a bug.)

I don't really care what you think. You know why? Because I am using myself and the other players I've met with alt-itis as Player B. And while I don't have 842 characters? I only have 5 level 50s. (Maybe less? I have to go back and count them.) And those other players I've interacted with that also have alt-itis? Have more characters than me, and less level 50s. So it doesn't matter what you feel about those numbers. Your argument fails. You just refuse to accept any other possible scenario than players with lots of characters having them all at max development and dumping their bonus gains into a single character. I'm done with this conversation. I'm done trying to get you to realize what you feel is happening is not what is actually happening. You refuse to contemplate what it means to actually make and play lots of different characters. And because you assume they are all at your few characters' level of progression, then they must also be dumping everything into a single main character. And for most I've played with or spoken with or otherwise interacted with? It isn't. Stop asking for handouts when you already have the advantage.

Fine, let me make this even clearer. Player A has 3 characters. Player A has been playing since HC launched (openly). Player A's characters are all level 50, have more than one T4 incarnate power available per incarnate slot, and has acquired every veteran level reward the game allows. Player B has 842 characters. Player B has also been playing since HC launched (openly). Player B has 5 characters that are all level 50, have one incarnate power available per incarnate slot, and maybe 30 veteran levels for each of those 5 characters. Player B also has 837 other characters ranging from level 6 to level 49. Those other characters are in need of enhancements still. Even the level 49s are lacking enhancements. And Player B? Is still making yet more characters that will also need to be developed. With less characters, you can progress much, much farther at a faster rate than a player with lots of characters. (Edit: So those greater rewards being reaped you think you are seeing? Are being spread out over a lot more characters because they all need them,)

You are not literally getting less rewards. That is like claiming a person in a family is getting more food than a person that eats alone at the same restaurant. Yes, more food is going to the family's table, but that is being split up between more people that need to be fed. You can accumulate more rewards by focusing on a single character or a few characters than you can by having tens or hundreds of characters. Players with more characters have more characters they have to develop and progress. So what if they cycle characters to get double merits? There is a high probability each of those characters are spending those merits on themselves. Your argument is broken. It does not work, because you think that because players cycle through alts for double merits, they are pouring all those double merits into a single character without allowing for the possibility each of those characters needs those merits for themselves.

I can't speak for others with alt-itis, but you know where all my merits and inf' goes? To getting enhancements for my other characters. And probably around 90% of my characters are still hoping to get enhancements. You know why? Because players with lots of alts do not have lots of max'ed level, fully incarnated, max vet levels achieved characters. We have lots of characters. And most of them need to be developed. So your argument that you are being penalized for having less characters? Is purely your perception, not the reality.