Luminara

A level 50 character exemplared to level 30 isn't just losing a few powers or IO set bonuses, it's also subject to enhancement devaluation. And while the level 15 character sidekicked up to 25 doesn't gain powers or slots, it does gain increased enhancement values. That's an important aspect of the zones' auto-leveling effect. That's the only thing that makes it possible for the level 15 character to participate. Removing that exemplaring effect in addition to letting the level 50 character keep all powers and set bonuses doesn't widen a gap, it creates an insurmountable obstacle. Even sidekicked to 50, the level 15 character is nothing more than a defeat waiting to happen at that point. It's no more a threat to the 50 than the Skulls in Perez Park.

Wouldn't this place low level competitors at an extreme disadvantage? Even if the zone automatically sidekicks them up to 50, they'd still be working with fewer powers, fewer slots in the powers they have, and they wouldn't have the benefits of enhancements like Superior versions of ATOs and Winters, or purples like native 50s. Or will 50 be required to enter the zones at all? That would be fairer, and avoid the potential problem of players taking high level PvP characters into the zones and beating the stuffing out of SKed low level characters... which would be akin to walking into an elementary school and punching every 7 year old in sight.

"Partially" is not complete. "On the way" is not here. "Eventually" is not now. You believe a solution is already complete, or potentially near enough to make no difference, but instead of simply saying that, you actually told me not to ask the HC team to look into it. I don't know if you're deliberately being contentious, a busybody, or just socially inept, but I neither seek nor require your permission or approval to post anything, and I am not the person with whom to try that shit. If your only contribution is to tell someone not to post, take your own advice.

When? Page 97? There's no timeframe for when all KB will be changed to use the new system. This problem exists now, it needed to be brought to the HC team's attention now, not in a few months or years.

KB mag 0.75 or below causes KD, KB mag 0.76 and above causes KB. Or is it 0.74 and 0.75... I forget. @arcanaville was the one who clarified the exact breakpoint, back on the original forums. At the time, we were all throwing around the 0.67 number as gospel, then she dug up the scalar and modifier values and schooled us. The majority of KD powers were set to 0.67 KB specifically to prevent -1 critters from being knocked back (0.67 * 1.1 = 0.737) by powers expected to cause KD, so players would have a sense of continuity. But until the HC team finishes switching over to the new vectored KB system, anything above 0.75 is currently KB. And the powers I listed, which are unlikely to be the ones, suddenly change to KB because they scale up KB mag with character level. The magnitudes should be locked, but for some reason, they aren't. Focus was KB, originally. A lot of melee powers were. Cryptic want bananas with KB when they originally designed the game. Then they increased the KB mag in most of the melee powers months after launch, because they felt it was "more comic booky". It wasn't until after the forums went nuclear, and they did a check on powers taken and realized that damn everyone was skipping the melee KB powers, that they went back in and revised most of the melee KB to KD. The inaccurate description for Focus is a holdover from the earliest days of the game.

"Hold on, team, Betty Blast-butt isn't here. Betty, what's going on?" "I've got some damn dust in my jet pack's carburetor, it's bogging when I throttle up." "Come on, you haven't learned to fly yet?" "Look, last time I 'threw myself at ground and tried to miss', I didn't miss. I'll stick with the jet pack."

Lash, the second attack available to masterminds in the Demon Summoning set, states that it has a chance to knock a target down. However, the KD scales with character level, and at level 27 it crosses the KD threshold and becomes KB (0.76). 25 levels is a long time to become accustomed to how a power functions, and KD switching to KB is a rather marked change in functionality that players are not given any reason to anticipate, or notification which allows them to prepare for it. The effect should be consistent, either always KD or always KB. There are other powers which scale KD to KB in this manner. Dual Wield and Empty Clips in the Thugs set are two examples (Empty Clips is locked at 0.66 for other archetypes). I believe it would be worth spending some development time to sift through KD and KB powers to locate anomalies like these and deal with them.

Is this a mastermind set, or marriage?

Sorry. But they really do want that pizza. Delivered to me.

Nullifies the lecithin from the brains and prevents it from tanning properly.

That's ridiculous. Seat covers, vellum, shower curtains, but not hats. Human skin just isn't stiff enough for hats.

I have no freezer, no refrigerator and no oven. I'm always hungry.

They want real Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Supreme. Dripping with cheese. Some parmesan sprinkled on top. 2" thick garlic-buttered crust. They also want it delivered to me.

Instant 50s for PvP. Restricted to PvP zones. I expect a short term spike in PvP recipe and enhancement prices, but not a long term effect. Because it's PvP. The server with the slash command to auto-fill slots with enhancements? Think about it.

Encourages RMT, not acceptable to this development team. Fails to enforce the requirement. Anyone can get any badge any time without any effort, without even being present while logged in, simply by allowing another character to carry them, the same way they can get XP, inf*, drops. And this adds market stress the same way insta-50 does. The market relies on input, a character instantly leveled to X, regardless of what number you attach to X, generates nothing to input. Increased demand, decreased supply, inflation rises. No.

Have to say, the arguments against 8s of suppression are on point. Locking everyone out of offensive toggles for longer than they're currently lost due to mez, based on an estimated average animation time for edge cases running four toggles, isn't an improvement. That's like... setting every animation in the game to root for 3.3s because edge case powers have 3.3s root times. If you're dead-set on using suppression duration as a proxy for animation time, it needs to be modified by the number of offensive toggles available to the character. Suppression duration 2s * number of offensive toggles taken. Or just use the cancel effect already available and make offensive toggles work the way defensive toggles do. K I S S.

Not thrilled, but I understand that motivation behind the change is the betterment of all players. So I'll live with it.

Not too long ago, there was a relatively new player prancing around the forums, rather proudly boasting of having kicked people off of teams for... not playing defenders the way he/she believed they "should" be played, not playing tanks the way he/she believed they "should" be played, et cetera. This person treated teammates like employees, and was the kind of boss no-one wants to work for. That's why we can't just compromise. There's no argument to be made, no discussion to be had, because there is no way on Earth that micro-managing, anal-retentive dickheads should be given control over other players' decisions, and that is exactly what this entails. No-one can force another player to stop in the middle of a story arc or *F, whip up a build in Mids', perform a respec and slot "appropriate" enhancements... but you can bet your banana split that the instant a KB->KD toggle becomes a reality, everyone with a stick up their ass and a swollen ego will leap at the opportunity to impose their will on others. We are not going to spoon-feed people like the one I'm not naming more opportunities to treat others like shit. Not on my watch.

3 points, 4 points, it wouldn't be worth it at 6 points. Three sets offer -KB for a single slot, which doesn't represent a slot investment if one only uses the default slot. Two sets have it in the 3-slot position, one set at 4 slots and another set with it at 5 slots. Having to spend 5 slots for that little -KB isn't worthwhile. And the other set bonuses are no better than what can be obtained elsewhere. You can spend fewer slots using four Devastations, two Basilisk's Gaze and a single -KB IO (three default slots in three different powers, four added slots), enhance three powers instead of one, gain more +HP and still have one slot to use elsewhere. Four Devastations, three Thunderstrikes and a -KB IO use that extra slot and give you 2% Recovery in addition to everything else. Without the Superior upgrade path, the set is under-tuned, to the point of hornswoggling players into wasting slots. It should be renamed Underwhelming Force.

6 slots for 3 points of -KB is already a bad investment when that bonus can be obtained with a much, much lower slot cost. It doesn't need to be worse.

Already fixed in beta.

I haven't forgotten how long it took to hit 50 on the original servers. What takes a few weeks, solo and without the 2XP option, used to take several months of teaming and grinding. Story arcs, badge missions, entire zones we once relied upon to keep progressing are now leapfrogged, out-leveled before we even realize they're available. I haven't forgotten what a monumental task acquiring IO sets used to be. If you weren't firmly entrenched in marketeering and actively defending your "niche"; or aggressively farming, to the degree of spending as much time doing that as you spent working at your real job; or suffused with influence you acquired before aggro and AoE caps were implemented; or just the luckiest son of a bitch alive, chortling as high value drop after high value drop landed in your lap; then you spent the same amount of time grinding for inf* to make nifty IOs for your 50 that you spent leveling to 50. I haven't forgotten that one of the tipping points for my decision to stop playing was the lack of solo Incarnate growth options. When Issue 19 went into beta, I ran the numbers to figure out how long it would take to build a T4 Alpha enhancement using only shards. 7-8 months, and that was on a character built to farm rapidly at +2/x6/+Bosses. 7-8 months of unrelenting grinding to complete one Incarnate slot, as opposed to a few hours of casual play now. I'm satisfied with current reward structure. I'd expound on how satisfied I am, but the forum software would throw my post back at me and scream before I ran out of adjectives.

The 5- and 6-slot IO set bonuses are almost always positional/typed Defense. Typed/positional Defense bonuses traditionally fill the 3- and 4-slot positions (2 for Basilisk's Gaze), and many of those are neither rarely used nor trash (Aegis, Reactive Armor, Thunderstrike, Basilisk's Gaze, Blessing of the Zephyr, Sting of the Manticore, to list a few). You don't "have to" slot full IO sets.

0% Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative Defense?

How much Defense does that character have? Were you using Weaken and Venomous Gas? How do you have those two powers slotted?