Luminara

I was going to total up the primary/secondary combinations, but you threw in pools, and now I'm all "Nope, too much work." https://cod.uberguy.net/html/index.html You do it.

Move those 4 extra slots out of Stamina and into attacks, slot for EndRdx.

It wasn't "most NPC attacks", it was a comparative few. Some Arachnos, a few Council, a power here, a power there, not everything in the game. The majority of NPC powers were unchanged. Player testing during the beta proved that the net effect of the changes were negligible. And in the two years since the changes, there's been no hue and cry over it, no uproar about typed Defense toggles like Scorpion Shield or Heightened Senses being neutered, no hullabaloo. Most people didn't even need to change anything in their builds or play style. It was also "common knowledge" that ED would "destroy the defender AT". It was "common knowledge" that it was "impossible to play without travel powers". It was "common knowledge" that teams needed a "healer". It was "common knowledge" that S/L is "heavily resisted by everything". "Common knowledge" tends to be about as reliable as homeopathy and parapsychology, and just as easily disproven.

There's been no nerf of any kind to Scorpion Shield. The only documented change was to the power icon, in 2019, and there isn't a single post anywhere mentioning an undocumented change. It never was. Defense is an absolute, it mitigates everything an attack does. Resistance is a variable. it mitigates damage but allows debuffs and controls, and it's dependent on other variables, such as HP, Regeneration and/or Healing, Debuff Resistance and Control Resistance or Status Protection, to be as effective as Defense. That's why hybrid mitigation sets like Willpower use such a wide variety of effects to protect the character, rather than simply slapping together X% Defenses and 2X% Resistances.

There is an inherent difficulty in the game, but how it's exposed is dependent on the player. I think the dominator archetype is the best representative of this. If you're playing with SOs, saving Domination for "big" fights, and focusing on concept over combat efficiency, it's in the combat that the player feels the difficulty. If you're building the way most players appear to (based on posted builds and advice), you're juggling Hasten and Domination, plus Ageless or Barrier, following build patterns and selections according to "common wisdom", then it's the act of playing the character where the player feels the difficulty because it's a lot of extra effort to keep that character rolling. If you're building for perma-Domination without Hasten, piling up damage mitigation so you don't need Barrier, squeezing every bit of performance out of IO sets, then the difficulty is in building the character to work that way. Each approach represents a comparable investment of time and energy. In the first case, the player's time and energy are spent almost exclusively in the act of defeating enemies. In the second, the player is capable of defeating enemies more easily, or tougher foes, but the time and energy not spent on enemies is instead spent on maintaining the character. In the third, the player is spending almost all of his/her time and energy overcoming build restrictions beforehand, so there's no build maintenance required, and only as much effort defeating enemies as the second case.

Or it is the therapy.

I'll be outside, setting up the explosives to guarantee the NPC ain't makin' it out in one piece. Anything that restricts me to 14.92 mph deserves to die.

It's a scripted event, there's nothing you can do to hurry it along. Just wait.

No-one's obligated to start, lead, join or even remain on teams, so there is no "their share" for leading *Fs. Nor should there be. A lot of people don't want to lead, which is why they wait for someone else to do it. Many people can't lead, and trying to force them to do it would result in losing them as players. Some people shouldn't be allowed to lead, because they're martinets, or trolls, or so grossly incompetent that putting them in charge of other people would be disastrous. And as you adequately demonstrated, there are already plenty of incentive to participate in *Fs (accolade power, badges, reward merits, drops, XP, inf*). If the horse doesn't want to drink, it's not going to drink.

The Regeneration bonus has always been Unique. What you may be remembering is the bug (which isn't actually a bug, it's an oversight that still hasn't been addressed) that allows the Regeneration bonus to stack if you change maps, which you can exploit to stack as many times as your ping and load times allow (i built up over a dozen stacks one night, entering and exiting a mission just to test it). July 24, 2007.

The direction of the arrow indicates a buff. It should point down, as it's a debuff. It's also missing the semicircle at the bottom, which indicates debuffs. This is used for Common IOs and TOs. The graphic for uncategorized Accurate ToHit Debuff sets uses the same upside-down graphic, and also has no debuff semicircle at the bottom, but I don't know if that's used anywhere in the game (these images are from CoD, which uses in-game data). The color is also problematic, it's nearly identical to the yellow used for Accuracy, with a hint of shading at the bottom. It should be diagonally blended, with enough contrast between the colors to make it easily distinguishable. Both of these should be flipped to follow the game's iconographic conventions, the debuff semicircle added and Accurate ToHit Debuff's coloration adjusted.

In other words, you had an incentive to form teams for *Fs. And apparently that incentive is working. I thought of three ways this can be exploited before I finished reading the sentence. It also occurred to me that it would encourage selfish players to try to lead when they didn't know what they were doing, refuse to relinquish the star to someone who did, and have an adverse impact on others. Unnecessary, and, frankly, unrewarding for most players. Leading to a glut of uncommon and rare salvage on the market, bottoming out prices and significantly reducing potential income for players who don't farm *Fs. Counter-proposal: make friends, play with them, no more drama and no need to pile potentially problematic extras on top of the incentives you already admit to having.

The streak breaker finally forced a hit.

The freedom created by the complexity of the Invention system in conjunction with the archetype and pool design, as opposed to classes with skill trees and gear. Player-defined attack chains and a wide range of utility options, instead of pre-defined abilities with little variance. The grand scale of design in zones, which give the impression of being in a world, rather than being on a world map. And butts.

Want != need. If the game needed origin-specific sets, it wouldn't have lasted for 20 years without them. Nanotechnology. Sub-dermal implants. Cancerous growths controlled and shaped with electromagnetic radiation. Magnets. Microchips controlling genetically modified plants. Special computer helmet which grants telepathic communication with plants. Intelligent plants brought through a technologically created portal to another universe. Magnets! It's called "imagination". Try it. You'll find that everything in the game works when you use it.

Lieutenant, boss, EB and AV ToHit can't be debuffed below certain values, which does vary by rank, but that's not due to a rank mechanic, it's because the minimum ToHit attribute was set to a higher number for each rank. AVs don't even have a rank variance mechanic, they have specific powers, like the Purple Triangles of Doom, which alter how they're affected by various powers (debuffs, controls, damage). https://cod.uberguy.net/html/archetype-data.html?at=boss_archvillain https://cod.uberguy.net/html/archetype-data.html?at=boss_elite https://cod.uberguy.net/html/archetype-data.html?at=boss_grunt https://cod.uberguy.net/html/archetype-data.html?at=lt_grunt https://cod.uberguy.net/html/archetype-data.html?at=minion_grunt Attributes, the basic stats which define ranks, aren't dynamic. They don't change unless a developer changes them and they can't be changed on the fly. The purple patch adjusts various outcomes (how much damage you deal or take, how strong your debuff is, how long your control lasts, etc.) based on level differential, but there is no equivalent mechanic for rank. Your 14.7s Hold will last 14.7s on a minion and 14.7s on a boss. Your 25% -Def will be 25% on a minion and 25% on a boss. Higher ranks of enemies can have powers which affect how your powers perform, but that's also not rank variance, it's just powers. Your 24% -Damage might be less on a boss, but that wouldn't be because a rank mechanic scaled it down, it would be because the boss has Resistance to damage (Resistance resists both -Resistance and -Damage), and even that would only be applicable for the type of Resistance the power grants the boss (if it resisted Smashing damage, then it would also only resist your -Damage for Smashing, not for the other types). Same answer. If your attack deals 100 damage to a +0 minion, it deals 100 damage to a +0 boss, barring any Resistance to that specific type of damage that the boss might have, because rank doesn't use a special mechanic to scale things up or down. If you went into the definition file for that +0 minion and set it to Boss, your attack would deal exactly the same amount of damage it did when the critter was a minion. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html Every enemy in the game, with a complete list of all powers, including auto powers and hidden powers which don't show up in-game, can be found there.

Origins are part of the RP in MMORPG. They don't do anything for the same reason costume parts don't do anything.

That isn't a bug, it's caused by client:server latency. The game client has to communicate with the server, then the server has to process what the game client said it's doing, then it has to respond. So ping + Arcanatime + ping, or somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5s, depending on the quality of your Internet connection. So what's happening is, you're moving into position and firing off your PBAoE, non-targeted cone or location AoE, but the game thinks you're not there yet, so it doesn't make any hit checks. Wait at least a third of a second before activating the power.

We already know you did. You've linked your OnlyFans page several times, remember?

He can handle losing. Not being right is what he won't abide. He won't change his builds, because doing so would be accepting that he wasn't right. He won't change his slotting, because doing so would be accepting that he wasn't right. He won't change his play style, because doing so would be accepting that he wasn't right. He can't be wrong, so the game must be.

I don't think I've ever saved on any of my characters, so squinting and making less than cordial observations regarding the parentage of 1990's-era UI designers was my Plan A. And Plan B.

You can minimize the chat window by clicking the little 🔻 in the top right corner, and maximize it by clicking on the 🔺on the top right of the chat line border... but the damn thing is the same color as the interface. I damn near had a heart attack when I accidentally clicked it a few minutes ago and couldn't, despite being a veteran player, remember how to restore the chat window. That's when I realized that this kind of thing has been REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING for a really long time. Those little buttons to dock/undock windows. The scroll bar on the map or in the Options window. All of the interactive widgets are the same color as the rest of the interface. Which means they're either easily missed, or almost goddamn invisible. See what I mean? See how well that blends in with the rest of the window? See how easily it's overlooked? See how frustrating that is? I wasn't even trying to click it, I just twitched and suddenly my chat window as a single line, and I'm reaching for the toilet paper and nitroglycerine pills. And look at the scroll bar. That tiny blue slider blends in with the rest of the window too well. They all do. This has subconsciously bothered me for 20 years, and now that I'm in my 50's, squinting at the screen through a pair of 1.5x reading glasses with smudges, stray cat hair and specks of dirt on the lenses, it's starting to consciously get on my nerves. I have to hunt for every damn widget. Hey, here's a radical idea that no-one in the history of computing has ever considered: do something to make them stand out. Set the color to contrast with the UI or window color. Or increase the contrast or gamma. Put a thick black line around them. Fucking hire Clippy to jump out and annoy the player when they pass the pointer over them. Something. Anything.