Luminara

Giant Monsters are level-less. That means you could have participated, dealt reasonable damage due to the level scaling code, and walked away with the badge (if there was one) and merits. Solo. If anything, you'd be guaranteed the rewards in that situation, since it was only you and the other player, and even if the other player had the most perfect build possible, he/she still wouldn't have been capable of dealing 91% of the damage and locking you out of the rewards. And you wouldn't have done enough damage to deprive the other player of the rewards, either. Pro-tip: Attack. Don't wait for an invitation. Don't ask for permission. Attack. You lose nothing, you take nothing away from anyone else. Regarding making GMs harder, I could solo GMs in I5. With no Damage enhancements. Unless they're ramped up to the point that they're impossible to defeat at all, nothing's going to stop people from soloing them. And GMs being impossible to defeat at all is GMs being rendered moot. They no longer have a purpose, they're just part of the scenery. How would you propose making GMs "harder", anyway? Double their HP? That's not harder, it's just tedious. Double their damage? Attacks which miss are still going to deal 0 damage, and it's very, very easy to make attacks miss even if you don't chase the Defense soft cap, if you know what you're doing. Damage debuffs also exist, and can, when used properly, neuter the hardest-hitting enemies in the game. Make their attacks auto-hit? That works to discourage teaming, not encourage it, because no-one needs a defender/corruptor/controller/mastermind to buff/debuff if the entity completely ignores the buffs/debuffs. So how do you envision GMs being "harder" without being even more boring, or obviating a third of the archetypes, or the change being imperceptible because it was poorly targeted and easily sidestepped?

/suppressclosefx 1 /suppressclosefxdist number This setting only suppresses your character's effects. It does nothing for effects from critters or other player characters, or environmental effects. Most (not all) of your aura and large splashy effects will be hidden with this setting, but individual effects, like bright flashes from kicks and punches, will still appear to some degree. /suppressclosefx 0 That turns it off. It doesn't change the distance set with the other command, it just shuts off the effects suppression. Setting /suppressclosefxdist to 17 corresponds to about 6 scroll clicks away from the character (camera distance). If you play with the camera closer, you can set it to a smaller number. If you play with the camera farther away, set the number higher. I don't recall the maximum distance. Experiment and see what works for you.

He's a baud mama jama.

Add a Signature mode. Let players select a Signature Hero/Villain/Praetorian and set up team matches against other Signature teams. The game already has the capability to do that, we're forced to play as something other than our characters in personal stories. So put it to use as a PvP option. Balance would be significantly easier, since there are only a handful of Signatures in comparison to the thousands of builds we can make. Then players who have no idea how to make a PvP build or what's considered good in PvP can dip their toes in and test the waters, in a controlled environment. Might even be fun for the experienced players. I'd play it at least a few times.

Catalysts make set IOs behave like purples, Winter enhancements or ATOs. They level with you, they exemplar with you, the values change according to your level. If you exemplar frequently, it's very useful to catalyze your set IOs. You can also purchase catalyzed (Attuned) IOs directly from the player market, for exactly the same prices as the uncatalyzed IOs (they're pooled), which is extremely useful for leveling. Do not catalyze purples. They don't need it, they don't benefit from it. Don't bother to try to catalyze procs, they don't need it and some can't be catalyzed (though converting catalyzed IOs will result in catalyzed procs, but that's really just a side effect, not a benefit). Boosters add a flat increase, but don't allow the enhancement values to vary. If you're frankenslotting, or only have one enhancement in a power, like a single Recharge Reduction in Hasten, you can use boosters on those to make them more potent. Do not use boosters on procs, that doesn't do anything but waste boosters. Do not use boosters on Winter enhancements, ATOs or other special enhancements which are already catalyzed out of the box, just upgrade those with catalysts. Do consider using boosters on purple IOs. If you need a little more Endurance Reduction in the melee attack in which you've slotted a set of Hecatomb, for instance, use boosters on the Dam/End IO. It doesn't break the set, and it does give you a little more value from the IO. If you never exemplar, you can use boosters and frankenslotting to wiggle a few more slots out of a build. As for what you get out of boosters when applied to set IOs, you don't see much information about that because it's complicated. There are IOs with two attributes, three attributes and four attributes, different Schedules (how enhancements in general are categorized), and some IOs don't even follow the expected conventions (example: ATOs and Winter enhancements which have Recharge Reduction/Special Effect are set to the four-attrib value for the Recharge Reduction, not the two-attrib value), so a list of every possible combination of boosters and set IOs would be... long. Very long. There is an equation you can use to determine what the final numbers would be (for a three-attrib IO, for instance, the numbers go from 21.2/21.2/21.2 to 26.5/26.5/26.5 (assuming all three attributes are Schedule A))... but it's easier to just open Mids' and hit the + key when assigning IOs to powers (use the - key to remove boosters). If you don't have Mids', download it here. There's a sub-forum with questions, answers and discussion about Mids' here.

Yeah. I was also on Liberty and Virtue, and stuff like that was happening in the PvP zones there, too.

Was it teleporting players into confined locations with no way out, and leaving them there instead of, you know, fighting them (Cryptic had to add openings to those lookout towers because of that)? Or spawn camping (Cryptic had to add a lot of extra drones and change some of the map geometry to give players a chance to leave their spawn points)? Or harassing an individual until the person left or logged out (Cryptic changed the bounty system to combat that, and it still didn't prevent it)? Or that dude who acted like a raging prick to everyone, then pretended to be doing "research"? These things happened. And they made bad first impressions. First impressions define perspectives, and this isn't a movie, there's no time travel or memory wipe to give people the opportunity to experience a second first impression. We might not have an overabundance of assholes in PvP now, but now isn't when the first impression was made for most of the veteran players, it was fifteen years ago. For my part, to address your overall query, I find the entire implementation of PvP in Co* to be pathetic. The zone maps are too big, too wide open, there are no tactical or strategic elements to them. There are no objectives, nothing to escort from point A to point B, nothing to defend, nothing to capture, nothing to construct or destroy, and the one potential option which could have served all of those purposes, base raids, turned out to be an elephant cock up the ass (oh, you spent three months collecting prestige and building this base? it's all gone, loser). There's no matchmaking system in zones, nothing to balance one side against the other except the power changes and global buffs when moving from PvE to PvP. There's no incentive to participate. None. There never was, not even PvP IO recipes. There's nothing PvP about PvP in Co*, beyond "fight other players", and that's not because it's distilled to the base essence of PvP, it's because it's uninspired and badly implemented. And shoe-horning it into a PvE zone isn't going to magically make it interesting, much less enjoyable, because it's still the same second-rate shit compared to anything else out there, in other games and in this one. Scanner/paper missions are more engaging than Co* PvP. Christ, we were supposed to have epic, furious comic book battles, and we ended up with stalkers or blasters ganking badgers, two tanks or brutes wailing on each other for seven hours, base raids designed specifically to extend subscriptions instead of entice players, a few zones with some PvE objectives we're supposed to pretend to be PvP-related, and us wandering around a three cubic mile area in search of a bounty which was invisible and in constant motion. Bo-fucking-ring. I'd rather watch paint dry.

Talk to Luna in Ouroboros. Buy Super inspirations, /ah.

Legionette, Staff/Willpower brute. Titanea, Shield/Elec tank. Captress, Dark/Martial dominator. Antianeira, Archery/Energy sentinel. Countercheck, Street/Shield scrapper. Empyreana, peacebringer. Maa Kheru, night widow. Spirit of the Taiga, Ice/Stone brute.

So, you want the set to be balanced in a vacuum, irrespective of pool powers.

Kinky. Wear a chainmail condom so you don't get paper cuts on your willie.

I want Shield Charge at level 26.

Right, leave the ones with the Holds, Sleeps, endurance drains, ToHit debuffs, Resistance debuffs, Recharge debuffs and Moment of JUST FUCKING DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE I HATE THESE THINGS for last. Fortunately, it's sooooooooooo easy to tell which ones have Stuns, and not only which ones have Stuns, but also which ones have 20% chance Stuns, which ones have 30% chance Stuns, which ones have 50% chance Stuns, which ones... Yeah, no.

Mmm... smut.

Life's too short, and unpleasantness in abundance, to waste time "sticking it out" when you're not happy. Quit the team, find another. There's always another.

What's "stun turn of flight"? Aerial acrobatics? I'd be down for some loop de loop and barrel roll animations.

Unfortunately, the army of the great Lord Nemesis has subsumed all of the available majors. Would you settle for a captain event and a few master sergeant events?

There's precedent. There were several other axe murders in the same period, including some which were believed to be perpetrated along a rail line, indicating that someone was using the railways to travel from town to town, killing people with an axe at each stop. That's a sneaky son of a bitch. With an axe. The evidence suggests that there was personal motivation in the Villisca case, that it wasn't random, or the act of a serial killer But the murder was never caught, so again, sneaky son of a bitch with an axe.

Wrong forum. Archetype questions belong in the appropriate archetype forum (Tanker, in this case), or in the Archetypes forum. The description of the power states, "As Power Surge wears off, the charge in your body explodes in a massive EMP pulse." That's the Hold. 22.35 second duration, mag 3, 50% chance for an additional mag 1 Hold of the same duration, 10 target cap. The Hold occurs when Power Surge expires, 179 seconds after activation. You don't know if you'll even be near a spawn when that happens. And if you are in combat for the full duration of Power Surge, it's highly unlikely that what you're fighting will be vulnerable to the Hold. Stick to slotting it for Resistance, Endurance Modification, or both, and ignore the Hold.