esotericist

i don't know if you got a personal response or not, but i know that powerhouse definitely discussed those issues. also, that goes both ways: just because you think your position is solid doesn't mean the devs have to change what they're doing to match your desires. is the only "acknowledgment" you consider valid "undoing the thing I disagree with"? because again, there was actual discussion in the threads. technical reasons. it's not currently easy to give the power choice*, and the attempt to swap those powers (so that a more useful power was in the tier 1 slot) went poorly. there were statements to the effect that a more general solution for all ATs might be pursued at some point in the future (but obviously no specific promises could be made about what might happen, or when it might happen). * yes, it's "possible" but I get the impression there's collateral damage for a powerset that already exists, rather than setting it up that way to begin with

the concerns about bruising were not brushed aside, they were responded to more than once. powerhouse gave firm rationale for why it wasn't being kept, and why it wasn't as good for party composition as it appeared. powerhouse reported they even did focus testing on alternatives internally, but they didn't work out. we lost a thing, sure, but the concerns were heard, and were acknowledged. i personally hate that it's gone myself, and i view tankers are more of a support AT than anything else*, but to pretend that the concerns were not acknowledged is in pretty stark defiance of the actual history of the discussions. * as I see it, aggro management is just another form of mez, but instead of the critter not being able to attack, they're just being forced to attack something that can take it instead of something that can't

MM pets weren't the only reason that player pets were set to ignore recharge; as I recall, there were some controller pets that would break fairly severely with sufficiently high recharge.

Essentially, yes. It's possible to rework a .net program to target mono specifically (and mono itself targets 64-bit, and has for years), but that's unfortunately quite a fair bit of work. If you have access to a virtual machine (virtualbox or parallels will both do the job) and are willing to run windows in that, that's the best option to use mids on a mac right now.

being hateful doesn't stop being hateful just because people have hated before the moment in which you're being hateful.

I would like to again point out that the tanker changes were always marked as experimental, meaning they were always going to be tinkered with for a while before the team decided what they wanted to do with them. And they still are marked experimental. I don't believe the holdup there is really the bickering; I think there really is a lot of evaluation for what the desired result will or won't be still happening. The pet changes are not marked experimental. My expectation is they're checking for whether or not the changes work as expected for a larger populace, and whether or not there are actual implementation errors, and that this will happen much faster than the tanker changes regardless of other factors. Now, for actual feedback on the actual changes: I've gotten most of my final Mercs/Time build in-game (only 'most' because I was getting bored with slotting and wanted to play) and just went touring some 50 content at higher difficulty than I normally would play mercs on (even as a time manip character). There's a new learning curve here, trying to ... well, unlearn expectations for how my minions behave. The strength of "go to" with an all-ranged squad is.. really, really phenomenal, now that I have a team that actually can be set up in a firing line while I go play around with the enemies in melee for debuff purposes. Knowing that I can, at any moment, fall back to the rally point to drop a temporal mending or refresh farsight, and know for a fact I will hit my entire squad, absent knockback concerns? Priceless. Absolutely priceless. Admittedly I haven't set up a demon summoning character yet*, but I do think that having the "ranged only" property applied to demons would be a mistake, now that I've felt the AI changes in action. It would be greatly mitigated if we could issue appropriate "goto" commands (all, or specific pets) using the new positioning tools that "powexec_location" gives us, but I haven't seen anything to that effect anywhere. if for example, I could tell the whole squad to "goto" my current target with a macro/binding, that would help greatly with that kind of scenario (as well as others). but I definitely wouldn't hold the extant changes up to add such tooling. I just question the demonlings/ember demon being included. *I don't have a build on-hand for that, so I'd need to do a bunch of research before i could test it properly since it's been actual years since I played the powerset

I'm confident pvp-only concerns will not hold back an initial deployment of tech that has been begged for literally over a decade. I'm also confident pvp-only concerns will not be completely disregarded for subsequent iteration, where those concerns have merit. I'm further confident that concerns which are not pvp-only but have general merit will not be disregarded simply because they are coming from a pvp-focused player, because pvpers are players too. (and while I am definitely not a pvp player, I think tagging the "lolpvp" label on things is pointlessly demeaning, so I would beg you not to do that)

finally got game working in 32-bit (64-bit is a problem for another day). freebie-leveled a mercs/time to 40 (similar to my build on live). went to peregrine island. proceeded to be more *substantially* effective than anticipated, considering I had not a single enhancement slotted (not even TO/DO/SOs). will do a more proper test later (once I can dig out the plan for my build), but I am very optimistic about this.

As soon as I can actually get the game to work again, that's my first stop.

Note that the Tank changes are still marked with "Experimental" but the pet changes are not. I don't actually think the tanker changes will be holding this back, and it's being evaluated separately.

I don't currently have a working install of homecoming (Recently moved to a new computer and getting it working in linux required more thinking than I had at the time), but I think I'll have to fix that when this goes live. My Mercs/Time was languishing, but this could help a lot. I do agree with others that the demons should probably not be considered "ranged only"; they are clearly designed to move as a group, and clearly are all meant to rely on melee damage more than the pets in sets like Bots or Mercs.

The LFG version of the mothership raid is instanced, yes. You can still do the "open world" version of the raid, of course, but this gives more control (and hopefully less lag) to leagues trying to make things run smoothly.

As far as I'm aware, even paragon studios intended for any origin to be able to take any pool. Sorcery was available to anyone regardless of origin in I24 beta, and I can not recall nor find any evidence they intended otherwise.

Other people have mentioned this before, but I would also like to chime in that I believe dropping Bruising in favor of a raw damage increase isn't the right answer. Whether you want to think about it this way or not, Tankers have always been a specific kind of party support, and Bruising contributed to that. Finding a way to make Bruising more pertinent and less painful to apply seems much more appropriate than simply dropping the party support ability entirely.

I had been wondering about that myself, but I have never played a /devices blaster far enough to have direct experience with the gun drone so I don't know how survivable they actually are. I'm not really sure what that change is meant to solve.

My /ninja training blaster has such envy. I don't suppose there's any plans to make ninja training's faux-Hide feature more.. ahm. Combat relevant, eh? Because 30 seconds is a wee bit of a high threshold.

Obviously the solution is to make the medic the commander unit in the squad. Nothing can go wrong with this plan.

Aid Self, once you grab Field Medic, is also an endurance sustainability tool. I think this is a heck of a lot more valuable than people think, especially since as noted above you can use it in place of a rest to keep your blue bar filled between spawns to keep kicking ass. In my eyes it's mid-tier for attractiveness because of this. It's not intended to be a safe in-combat heal, if you can't actually engineer safe circumstances to use it. Judging it for not being a safe heal seems rather baffling, especially since as noted above you can try again fairly quickly afterwards if need be. It's a highly situational tool that requires either beneficial circumstances or careful planning. And I personally think that's fine.

sadly, i'm currently levelling one of those unicorns, so i am in the process of reducing the quantity of unicorns in the world. i am a monster.

I've had that problem with proliferation of powersets in the past. As an example, for me the Forms toggles were the set-defining power for Staff Fighting, and that got tossed for the Stalker version. (and in general Stalker versions of sets tend to jettison powers I consider Highly Interesting in favor of the AT-specific powers that I find Generally Uninteresting. That they're "necessary" for stalkers has always struck me as an error of design). Having that happen with super strength would be unfortunate, but for good or ill there's ... well, quite a lot of precedent.

And this right here is why I ask for citations on claims of this sort. Thanks for giving an authoritative statement, Leandro.

Hm. Didn't realize those attacks were quite that long.

You don't need to redesign mercs entirely. To fix the DPS problem, just adjust the DPA upwards a little closer to sane. Keep the same animations, increase the damage a bit, and that problem is solved. Doesn't even need to match the DPA of other sets just as long as the window is narrowed (and the below problems are tackled). The utility power problem is already fairly thoroughly understood wrt the cooldown stuff. Just look at how some of the newer sets are rigged up and that becomes pretty clear. Almost anything would be better than serum. While I'm obviously in favor of my leadership-toggle-or-clickie suggestion, the gun drone idea would at least give Mercs a mule for the recharge intense pet auras. And I wasn't even the slightest bit joking when I said that I'd accept it with serum's cooldown. It'd be that much of an upgrade over Serum.

I'm utterly bewildered at this idea. To be clear: I think with work this could be technically feasible. That's not one of the problems with the suggestion. But I am unconvinced it's a worthwhile addition to mercs; without a radical shift in the actual powers available to the mercenaries, this wouldn't actually provide substantial tactical benefit. Outside of the utility powers not being on reasonable timeframes, mercs spends very little time idle. They're fairly constantly attacking, especially once you have the full kit (i.e. the level 32 upgrade). So you aren't actually going to meaningfully increase the offense capability of the attack pets (the only serious damaging power which needs faster recharge time is LRM, and it's not as impressive as it should be in the first place), nor will it meaninfully impact the "defense" capability of the medic (an extra heal and an extra casting of stimulant. Yay?). It would allow a spec-ops to deploy its mez again, but the jankiness of the AI is such that it will probably still waste it anyway. Further, I am completely convinced this is not even remotely in line with the actual conceptual design of the powerset. Ultimately, you're proposing trading one poorly-fitting mostly-useless power for an even more poorly-fitting mostly-useless power. I'd sooner have the gun drone. On Serum's cooldown.

It's really funny, sometimes, how many problems can be solved with polite, patient communication. But it seems like "willing to actually talk with people" is a superpower not everyone has access to.