esotericist

i feel this is a gross mischaracterization of the dominant argument. the argument as i was presenting and understood from others was not "it has to be amazing to offset what else you have to take", but "it's not amazing, and look at what else we're saddled with while we're taking it" i don't take rune of protection because it's 'overtuned'. i take it because it provides a utility i cannot otherwise get. it also provides a utility whose impact is not directly comparable to the other analogous powers, so its uptime isn't even remotely an apples to apples comparison. the only reason i considered the power at all usable is that it had a meaningful availability ratio. why is adjusting the intensity of the power not an option? this is the same trap that makes T9 powers terrible, and i don't think we want the origin pool powers to fall into it. please let a power that provides an interesting benefit be available more often than "sometimes i guess?" i'm not prepared to believe that the uptime percentage of the power alone is what makes it 'overtuned', and i have to echo others in wanting to know by what metrics this determination is being reached. to be clear: i like rune of protection because it helps reduce the probability that a bunch of my toggles get shut off because i got hit by a stray low magnitude mez. it doesn't keep me from getting mezzed if i get focused on by a bunch of enemies with mez at once, and it certainly won't save me from high threat crowd control enemies, but it keeps me from having to frantically re-apply my toggles as often. the power by no means obviates the inevitability that this will occur, but it substantially reduces the frequency of it. and the damage resistance is pretty much incidental as far as i'm concerned. given that, wouldn't bringing back the magnitude so isn't equal to melee AT mez protection make more sense? reducing the duration by such a savage degree renders this "basically break free plus an orange insp, except taking a power pick instead of the far less painful inspiration tray slots". and at that point in the evaluation, it doesn't even matter that the prereqs kinda suck, they'd have to be themselves not just acceptable, but above average to make this interesting enough to pursue.

@Voltak hey, uh, did you really need four posts in a row of lots of lines of text? there's a middle ground between that and text walls without line breaks, using a technique called "paragraphs". it could greatly improve both readability and communicability if you were to try to group your thoughts into related sets of sentences in that fashion. also, you seem to be presuming an awful lot about the motives of other people, while also disregarding the positions they express. if someone wants to, sometimes, occasionally experience this kind of gameplay, having to either burn a build slot or make a character explicitly for it, is an excessive grade of investment for a "hey, it'd be cool if we could <x>, anyone else wanna?" kind of activity. i know a lot of people who would love to make use of this without having to go through the immense effort of putting together a build explicitly for it. i might even occasionally do so myself. please consider the possibility that this is in fact a good faith effort on the behalf of the people asking for it, and not somehow a sinister attempt to impose their will on strangers through the use of an optional difficulty knob which can be just as punitive to a stranger as the already existing options. communication is obviously key for anything like this, as already has been acknowledged.

it was already 2.03s for all three summons. edit: like, i'm all for buffing mercs whenever reasonable, but this is actually not a place where mercs are worse off than the other MM primaries.

my position is: if it's a problematic power, then yeah, sure, action might be required. but please demonstrate that it is actually problematic, and how the action taken addresses that problem. as other people have noted, what you have to take in order to get rune of protection in the first place is somewhat questionable. making those bits work usefully in a build is hard, and for most builds you can get better, more practical results investing elsewhere. probably even with better slotting options. and speaking for myself, i'd prefer nerfs to other aspects of the power before reductions to availability. what it provides how often is what matters to me, not the magnitude of what it provides. i don't want to be unbeatable (and this power can't get me that even as-is), but i do want a build option that's meaningful. as alluded to above by others, i've always skipped T9 armors because they're usually not meaningful build options in my eyes. but that's just me.

i see the path to victory now. get the badgers on board, and everything else slots into place.

i rather like the "slider" suggestion, "rule of <x>" for set bonuses (since there's different grades of tolerance for this), along with the additional "no IO features" and "no enhancements whatsoever" steps we already have some stuff kinda like this in the o-zone settings, so this stuff in notoriety makes a lot of sense to me.

i haven't exactly been active lately, but i'm trying to get back into the game. my "main" character, such as it is, is a mercs/time "tankermind" build. for complex reasons not worth going into here, i am intentionally not getting incarnate powers on the character. even with that constraint i'd barely managed in my build to get rune of protection to slightly better than 50% uptime1. but despite time being a rather strong set, because of the minutia of mercs2 i'm limited in my options for dealing with a lot of problems. i pretty much designed my entire build around trying to make rune of protection help me survive difficult spans of spite. going from 90s up/~86 seconds down to 60s up/~116 seconds down is a pretty big swing for a mm that is tanking for pets. if there turn out to be valid, necessary reasons for rune of protection to be nerfed, i will be sad, but figure out how to adapt. but please, provide those reasons? "let's make it consistent, but incidentally savage the survivability of the characters which relied it" isn't very nice. notably: it doesn't serve exactly the same role as the 'equivalent' powers in the other pools. they all clearly have different purposes in what they provide. how is duration parity meaningful given that? 1 notably, i use it on demand rather than as part of any rotation, due to lacking anything else to bridge the spans with. 2 while i'm excited about trying the full auto changes, mercs is very much lacking in reliable control options, and barring a substantial redesign i don't see spec ops becoming viable utility

the quick-upgrade is expensive but convenient. dealing with IOs is a hassle for many players, especially early on. this is a valid tradeoff. there is no need to substantially cheapen the costs of the DO/SO, beyond potentially increasing the income rate of low level new players (which is covered by making DOs drop instead of TOs, and possibly by the hypothetical that Faultline proposed of adding a "free brainstorm -> rare salvage -> AH" step to the invention tutorial).

meanwhile, i'm asking for half XP.

this hasn't really been true in practical purposes since the atlas park/mercy island revamp. you can go to the FBSA contacts to start those paths directly, but you have a fairly narrow window in which to do so due to how quickly you can outlevel them.

i am both physically and cognitively disabled. on a bad day, it can take me literally hours to get through a single mission sometimes, and that means it can potentially take me multiple days to get through even a small story arc even with multiple hours per day of play time. consequently, i pretty much 'have' to solo most of the time, and it doesn't make sense to ask a friend to devote a character slot to the flashback arc in advance if they're not going to be there the whole time (and odds are they probably won't because my schedule is not their schedule). but what this means is, if I end up needing help on a specific mission for some reason, I can't actually get someone else to show up; i'm in a task force, so i can't add somebody new mid-stream. also since it's a task force, i can't switch to another arc if i decide I want to do something else for a little while, then come back later. the task force model makes it an activity trap for me; i frequently need to task switch in order to manage energy and attention. being locked into "i have to keep doing this one thing or i have to start over later" is extremely frustrating.

doing more arcs is pretty much my motivation. flashbacks are misery.

want to take a moment to thank you verbally for all of your posts in this thread. i wholeheartedly agree with pretty much every point you've made. semi-tangentially, i actually kinda want a "half xp rate" option at the P2W vendor, because turning on/off XP is tedious when pertinent

Folks looked in game, compared from live, and found that twilight grasp was unmodified except heal magnitude, and tar patch was unmodified except resist magnitude. This isn't hard to determine, and it's standard for city patch notes not to litter them with specific numerical details. It was pretty much the policy of paragon studios that if you wanted exact numbers, you loaded up and looked at the in-game numbers; and homecoming seems to have largely kept with that

it's good to believe in things. unfortunately, believing in things does not make them so. for the vast majority of the lifespan of the game prior to closure, blasters were one of the most popular archetypes, across their powersets. they were also provably, by all of the metrics available to paragon studios, mechanically one of the worst archetypes for their ability to actually complete content. we have many, many other examples over the lifetime of the game of things being popular that were terrible, or things being unpopular that were good. popular only means exactly that: popular. it has zero reliable correlation with any mechanical facets.