Yoru-hime

This thread title was a bright spot in what's otherwise been a really rotten week. Count me in.

Stalkers in general, but ninjas in particular. It felt like the Ninja Blade/Ninjutsu or SR combo used to be everywhere. They still show up, but it doesn't feel like half of all Stalkers you see anymore.

You're not going bonkers. Masterminds get Dark Miasma, which has the fear and the hold. It's only Controllers that get the modified Dark Affinity for their secondary.

It was like that when Darkness Affinity was released. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Issue_22 Fearsome Stare was moved to the Darkness Control primary instead of the secondary for Controllers. Petrifying Gaze was also swapped out. As for the why of it, I don't recall exactly what the Paragon devs said at the time. Personally, I suspect that having that much mez in a Controller secondary was deemed problematic.

I have a great deal of respect and gratitude for the GMs and Devs of the Homecoming team that give up their free time so I can spend mine playing CoH again.

I just reopened No Man's Sky for the first time in a long while. I'm feeling the urge to wander and explore for a while.

The Shock change helps somewhat. For reference, at this point, I think it's about as good as Time Crawl or Infrigidate. I'd probably take Shock as it is at some point in my build to help accelerate AV/GM fights, but I wouldn't question someone who decided to skip it and would commiserate with those in other ATs who were stuck with it. Outside of extended encounters with hard targets, a single-target zero-damage debuff still isn't something I want to use. Shock does generate Static but if I'm burning activation cycles to generate Static and not for the actual effects of my powers, that's an issue in and of itself. A moderate damage element like Auroxis suggested would make it where you could reasonably drop a secondary blast power from your chain and/or build and use Shock instead. It'd eliminate the choice between contributing DPS and building Static. There could be concerns about balance when porting to Controllers though. I'm not going to rehash the buff side concerns since nothing meaningful has changed there.

I've got a PB but I find myself feeling far more "Master of None" than "Jack of All Trades" when I log her in. The problem to me is that versatility isn't very useful in CoH. Any group of any set of ATs can clear 90%+ of the content, making the ability to change roles as needed at best an occasional convenience and certainly not worth the price paid for it.

This is where I am on Static. It feels more like something that's there because "new sets must have a gimmick" rather than a needed balance to the power of the set. Even if Static was always full, I still feel like this set would be struggling, especially in the late game.

Short answer: I disliked the way they took Statesman out, but I don't really want him back. Long Answer: In general, I hated SSA1. It did feel like they were just sweeping characters into a waste-bin wrapped in melodrama and badly done cliche. The writer was so ham-fisted that they had to italicize every word related to death, just in case you'd forgotten that the point of this story was to kill off characters. That said, personally I did not like Statesman. He created all the storytelling problems of a Superman-class superhero with none of the likability or modesty of Clark Kent. His removal felt needed. It cleared the way for virtually every other character to grow and fill the space. On the other hand, I really didn't care for the removal of Sister Psyche. She was a humanizing influence on the otherwise incredibly tiresome not-Batman and she had a new protege she could mentor while dealing with her failure with Malaise. It felt like there was a lot more room to do interesting things there than kill her just off so we could eventually watch Manticore implode. The only way I'd be interested to see Statesman come back would be with a fraction of his old power. It'd be interesting to see him adjust to not being an unstoppable force of nature/law unto himself.

Back on live I was never been able to get my ice controller to work for me. I loved her look, the concept fits the character just right, but playing her was never something I enjoyed. She felt like she never had the offense to really hurt her foes and the soft control didn't provide enough mitigation to keep her alive long enough for her foes to slowly bleed out.

I've tried playing this alone for a while on a level 22 Defender kitted out with +3 SOs. Wow... This makes Empathy look solo-friendly. I took my primary off my bars for half a mission and it made no notable difference to kill time or survivability. I'll test more if this becomes more functional solo, but this was definitely not an enjoyable powerset to play without a team.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers this story. The RNG goblin is all in your head except for when it's not.

The edit is what hurts my brain. Did he forget the apostrophe in HERO'S or something?

Announcing your escape plans is a sure way to get caught.

A surge of Gremlins. A terrarium of Snakes. An office party of Automatons.

What I'm observing with this event is how powerful -tohit debuffs are at low levels. Misses already hurt more at low levels in that you have fewer powers to use and less mitigation to keep you upright while waiting for the next one to recharge. When the enemy starts stacking abilities that magnify your chance for those misses, it can really have drastic effects. I was curious, so I took a level 12 Stalker out to ToT alone with the combat attributes up, and here are the numbers I see. For reference, a small yellow inspiration is worth 7.5% to-hit, and the DFB buff is +12% to hit. Just about everything a Vampire, Sorceress or Ghost does drops your to-hit by 7.5% for several seconds. A single Vampire briefly stacked me as high as -30% to hit at one point. The Witch is relatively gentle with only a -6% to hit debuff on her dark blasts and nothing on her dagger. On the other hand, the Crone's PBAoE to-hit debuff is a glorious -30% to-hit for anyone foolish enough to get within melee range of her, plus she has a full retinue of other powers that all carry a 7.5% to-hit debuff on top of that. A single Crone no problem layering over 50% to-hit debuff on my stalker. on top of all the damage and other things she was doing to try to kill me. With these debuff numbers, Shard's story sounds quite reasonable. If he was dealing with aggro for two or three characters at once, 40-60% to-hit debuff stacks were probably pretty common once a fight was going. This isn't just an event problem, since the Circle at low levels use a lot of the same powers on Spectrals. I think that Crone power is straight lifted from Spectral Demon Lords. I'd suggest that we perhaps look at scaling enemy debuffs below level 25. Once we're level 30 or 40, we can absorb this kind of debuff and still function reasonably well, but at level 10-15, those are some very harsh numbers to fight through. Halving them would still make for a noticeable effect and a challenge at that level, but one that the player can be reasonably expected to have the tools to overcome, rather than just praying for generous RNG to get them through.

Can it be like TV wrestling and only do 5% of the damage it looks like it should? 😉

This is a brilliant and ever so appropriate solution. Who would people in Paragon City cosplay as? US, of course!

You have to be running at +4 for the exemplar to kick in and now and then it can be bugged. Drop the arc and restart the game, then try again.

You're almost there. Most enemies start with a 50/50 chance to hit you. Your 45% defense is subtracted from that 50% chance. That means that 45% defense reduces most enemies' chance to hit you from 50% to 5%. It's called a soft cap because while you can have a lot more defense, nothing will reduce their chance to hit below that 5% floor. There are exceptions, of course. Snipers and Drones have higher to-hit and Rularuu eyeballs pretty much ignore defense completely. Incarnate content also starts with a default 64% chance, instead of 50%. If you really want to dive deep on this, here are some wiki links that explain a lot of this better than I ever could. I don't think anything with respect to this has changed from the wiki's I24 data to today. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Defense https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Resistance_(Mechanics) https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Limits https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Cascading_Defense_Failure

Thank you all so much for this thread. I'm just about done building out my AE character. She's running a lightly-modified version of the new Rad/Fire in the original posts. The primary modification I made was to take Temperature Protection earlier. I was trying to follow the build as written, but I found the character feeling ineffective as I left behind the Level 1 EB maps in the mid 20s and tried a real fire map, even with full generic IOs. The fire resist in the 60% range just wasn't getting it done. I used a respec at level 25 and swapped Temp Protect into the Weave spot, Weave went to the Maneuvers slot, which pushed Assault off to level 44. Once I did this, my fire resist jumped to very near the cap, I could start boosting spawn sizes and the levels started rolling smoothly again. Really, if I were to do it again, I'd have set up a leveling build leading into a respec in the 40s somewhere after doing the required patron arc. I should have done that to start with, but I got lazy about it. 🙂 Right now I'm trying to decide on a priority list for T4 Incarnates. She's got all her T3s, but turning off bonus Influence to grind more Empyreans for VR components makes me sad.

Removing the slot is a bigger deal than it sounds, given the ability to use that slot for things like Stealth or KB protection. It gives the idea of taking the pool power some extra value. I'm not sure if it's enough, though. If I were implementing this, I'd consider making Ninja/Beast Run one of a set of options including a No FX Jetpack, a more concept neutral Sprint+ and other similar, unslottable travel temp powers. You can keep your Ninja Run if you love it, or revoke it and trade it in for one of the others if it fits your concept better like we do with Origin Attacks.

And then you have to go back to add something and you end up faced with the devil's choice of trying to do this part better and risk the new stuff and the old stuff not playing well with each other or just doing it poorly again for the sake of consistency. 😄

This is, sadly, not uncommon for a lot more than MMOs. It happens naturally unless a group is vigilant against it and tries to creep in even when they are. It's a culture thing far more than the fault of any one developer. The voices from on high want features that they can push out the door and they want them produced quickly. The infrastructure work needed to make said features integrate into the larger software well and smoothly so we don't hate ourselves for this later? Well.... Infrastructure work rarely moves product, so they're not as interested in that stuff, just get something working now and we'll dedicate time to refactoring the code "later". The coders are coders because they like writing code. Writing documentation is dull and tedious and there's always that next problem to solve instead. They'll get back to it "later". Keep adding release after release like this, one bolted on top of the next, and spaghetti is the nice word for what you end up with. I've heard the "job security" theory over and over and someone always says that they know someone who knows someone who intentionally does this, but I've never seen anything like this. It's far more likely to blow up in your face when you have to untangle your own mess than actually make you seem irreplaceable. Even if someone told me they were doing this, I'd be skeptical that they're just trying to make their bad habits sound cool.