Luminara

Master Illusionists working in concert with two Illusionists. Ring Mistresses are, comparatively, pushovers. Only one Sapper is ever in a spawn. Four Gunslingers, though, or four minions using Tasers, neither of which is uncommon, can stack 12 points of mez. You missed Rikti (Mesmerist lieutenants and bosses), Arachnos (Tarantula Mistresses and Queens, Fortunata Mistresses), Crey (stacking Stuns from Tanks, which encompass the full range of minion through boss now), Longbow (Nullifiers, Wardens)... I could spend half of the morning listing enemy groups which can stack mez, but I have things to do, so I'll summarize. From the mid-teens onward, almost every enemy group contains at least one type of mezzing critter, and the higher the difficulty setting, the more that appear in each spawn. By the time you reach 50, you have mez coming in at you from all sides, and ramping up the team size inherently allows more mezzing critters to spawn. Mag 10 status protection is no longer a guarantee of immunity at that point. Of course, when you're not forced to wait out the mez, then turn your damage mitigation toggles back on (and subsequently have them shut down again by the next piddling mag 2 Stun or Sleep or Hold) because those toggles are only suppressed, it's easy to overlook the broad proliferation of mez throughout the game. That was the trade-off in Issue 0. Now, in the game which has seen every status-protected archetype's damage output increase several times while those squishies are still on their original scalars and modifiers, in the game which has enabled the status-protected archetypes' toggles to remain active while the squishies' are turned off, it's a caste distinction.

Out of a total 2115 primary/secondary combinations available in the entire game, 1855 have some means of achieving status protection, if we include Indomitable Will (controller Psionic Mastery), the blaster ATO and T1/T2 "ha ha, I can still kill you" anti-mez ability (as well as their varied status protection options in the secondaries), and masterminds' "my powers work even when I'm mezzed" functionality (henches). ~87.7% of the possible permutations are given a free pass in the mez department, without touching the Sorcery pool, or Break Frees, or the P2W amplifier which grants status protection. And the remaining 260 defender and corruptor pairings are fucked, because "the design" says they have to be. And these are the ones most in need, because they're locked into that imbecilic toggle-drop rule which states that their toggles are subject to being shut down simply because they use the other side of the tohit or damage equations. All of the other combos in the game are free to affect foes at their leisure, whereas the ~12.3% who need their toggles to function because they don't have the same status protection options... are denied. They either take it up the ass, burn inf*, fill their trays with Break Frees, or get used to spending 2/3rds of everything they do in-game waiting for Rune of Protection to recharge. This is an outdated philosophy, it's based on an abandoned design, it's biased, it's unbalanced and it's bullshit. It's not even rational at this point. These are defenders and corruptors, with 0.65 and 0.75 damage mods, and comparatively low damage attack scalars and HP low enough to be in serious jeopardy with only a couple of good hits. They're not brutes. They're not scrappers. They aren't one-shotting Hami. Refusing ~12% of the players the same freedom afforded to the other ~88% is discrimination, not balance, not good design. And it's not even a question of power creep, it's a matter of quality of life. It's not having to retoggle twice every minute. It's not having to hoof it back to the mission after being mezzed and hammered into the ground (because those toggles provided the only damage mitigation they had) again and again and again. It's not having to carry a tray full of Break Frees instead of Insights to counter -Perception, Rages to buff their damage, Respites and CaBs to move along more quickly, et cetera. It's equality. Allowing that remaining ~12% to experience the same quality of life that everyone else enjoys wouldn't destroy the game. Mez is still a threat, even with mag 10 status protection. We can still bite off more than we can chew. It's time to stop forcing defenders and corruptors to settle for crumbs. End the inequality.

No, they weren't particularly good at balance. But they had a foundation. They had a plan, a road map for where they were going and how to get there. The idea was feasible, it simply needed a better implementation. Instead, on the way from Tampa Bay to Chicago, they set the map on fire and ended up in Albuquerque.

That's what made GDN so inexplicable. There were several improvements to Defense, plus the reductions to critter Acc/ToHit, before GDN. And when Cryptic decided Defense was a problem, instead of revisiting some of the previous adjustments, they took a hammer to it. "Okay, guys, now that we've fixed all of the oversights and problems with this mechanic, we're going to add some new ones! You're welcome!"

Elude was originally a toggle. And players couldn't attack when it was active.

Differentiation between sets.

Case in point: my human-form Peacebringer with perma-Light Form has always-on mag 3.1 Hold/Sleep/Stun/Immob, and that's sufficient for me to prefer playing that rather than any of my defenders or corruptors, despite the ten year long animation time on Incandescent Strike (which sucks and swallows when it misses), and crap AoE output from Solar Flare and Luminous Detonation. And as much as I love that character, I fucking hate playing her. She's so slow. So damn slow. I'm reminded of the time I was jumping along in the Rikti Crash Site with my Invuln/SS tank and was tagged by a sapper. After my blue bar went bye-bye, that sapper spent the next 20 minutes poking me with his cattle prod, keeping me perma-Stunned. 20 minutes. 20 goddamn minutes. That's how long it took for that thing to defeat my character, and I never had a single chance to escape. I was sobbing when it was finally over. So here's a thought: maybe that should happen to everyone. Triple all critter mez values for a day and allow them to perma-mez everyone. I'm willing to bet my boots that the justifications for denying squishies status protection would vaporize faster than liquid helium in a hot skillet.

Yes and no. Mez was part of a trifecta of design choices which were all made to work together: toggle mutual exclusivity, mez, and extreme power effects. With all three in place, critters posed a real challenge to every archetype. Tankers and scrappers had the option to shrug off mez, but it cost them their other damage mitigation toggles, so they were facing a threat no matter how they played. Blasters, controllers and defenders lacked that option, but were given abnormally strong power effects in its place, allowing them to both progress at a (theoretically) comparable pace solo and offer value to teams. Like a table with three legs, it was stable. Then Cryptic took a Sawzall to one of those table legs, toggle mutual exclusivity. Not that they can be blamed for that, as it really was a bad design choice. It violated their basic design principle of allowing players to log in, bounce around in a few missions and log back out with a sense of satisfaction. The melee archetype players really were taking one kick in the groin after another with toggle mutual exclusivity and the inability to predict which toggle was "most" useful in any given situation, because every situation was fluid and constantly changing. But the entire game was designed and balanced around that table having three legs, and in removing one of those legs, they created multiple other issues. They could've made only status protection toggles mutually exclusive with other toggles and achieved their goals of promoting teaming and easing the frustration of constant toggle juggling (and with toggle suppression, it would've been a huge quality of life improvement, allowing players to skip turning anything on or off other than the status protection toggle). They should've gone through the entire game and revamped mez, but instead, they just reduced it a bit so non-melee archetypes weren't quite as likely to be perma-mezzed as before. And they would've realized that a lot of over-powered abilities could be scaled down and retained their value, if they hadn't developed a "mez is challenge" tunnel vision. So now, yes, mez is done horribly wrong. But that's because the design philosophy was reliant on that trifecta, and 1 + 1 + 0 != 3. Now mez isn't an encouragement to team, it's an annoyance for the minority of archetypes with neither inherent access to status protection nor personal bodyguards to defend them when they're being mezzed/take the mez for them. Mez ceased to be the great leveler, the universal threat, the reason for "I ain't teamin' wif no-one!" players to team, and became a punishment for playing a defender or corruptor (like having shit damage output solo wasn't punishment enough). Yes, I know that you know all of that. Others don't. And I haven't bitched about mez yet this year, so this was a good place to start.

In which you will be spending eternity. My loathing for bad science is only equaled by my distaste for poor grammar. 😛

Even if there were a development which allowed it to scale up, it would still require mass comparable to the object to be moved. Particle density in deep space averages 1,000,000 per cubic meter. There simply isn't enough mass available to move a spaceship through space this way, even if all of the nearby mass is collected, concentrated and confined near the ship. Perpetual motion devices don't exist within the physical framework of this universe, and that's what this is, an attempt to create a perpetual motion device, like White's previous effort (the EmDrive). I believe the Higgs field will be more promising for FTL, but we're still likely a quarter of a century away from verifying its existence, and probably twice as long before we figure out how to manipulate it.

Any build can be pared down to a minimum of powers necessary to perform its expected tasks. Simply leveling up is one of the things which promotes this, as we gain access to and slots for more advanced powers and eschew the use of earlier powers. Consequently, most builds have an excess of powers, powers we don't use, powers we don't want, powers we don't need, and even powers we're forced to take and can't respec away. At least having the choice to replace some of those powers with mules gives us some appreciable utility out of our excess.

Some powers grant Toxic Defense, some don't. This is one which doesn't (currently). Maneuvers does, but Weave doesn't, to give a couple of other examples. Until/unless the HC team explains the rule behind which powers grant Toxic Defense and which don't, we can only assume that this is by design. Toxic Defense was added recently.

Meant to type physicists. Thanks for peer-reviewing!

I'm reviewing the published paper, and from what I'm seeing, no, no-one's discovered anything. First, it's a theoretical physics paper (and none of the authors are theoretical physicists), not an experiment. Nothing was created, observed or discovered. That's not to say that theoretical physics has to rely on anything but mathematics, but until some evidence is observed, properly analyzed and verified, it's just that, math and guessing. The video is hype and click-bait. Second, it's speculation on the Casimir effect and how it could be used to create a warp bubble-like effect at the nanoscale level, not a potentially applicable technology applied at the macroscale level. It's doubtful this could be scaled up, even if it proved, experimentally, to be viable, as the Casimir effect is limited to a distance of a few billionths of a meter. Not a few billion meters, a few billionths (nanometers). Third, the lead author previously built an engine which was claimed to have violated the laws of physics. That turned out to be a false positive in his team's measurements due to their improper accounting of variables. With this paper, he declined to publish the data associated with it, offering only summaries and references. That's sketchy, considering his past history of observational bias. Lastly, wrong forum. This belongs in Off-Topic.

I use the mace for culinary purposes. Sort of like an impromptu Slap Chop, but more RRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH. Mmm... maced potatoes...

I completed both sides with my vigilante Ice/Willpower sentinel this morning, solo. Didn't encounter this bug, but I already had every available contact unlocked, and am at 50+3 on that character, so those may be variables (level and contacts waiting to be spoken with) in reproducing the problem.

Flying cars have already been prototyped, some with the intent to go into production, but they've never been legalized or mass-produced, and likely never will unless they're controlled by something other than a human driver. People can't drive ground-based cars now without crashing into everything between them and their destination, no government in their right mind would allow those same people to fly.

My personal rules for boosting are: If it's a common IO and I'm not at the cap for whatever it does, I boost it. I have a single ToHit Debuff common IO slotted in Rise to the Challenge on my main, and it's boosted to +5 (the other five slots are occupied by 5/6 Panacea). If it's a */End purple IO, I boost it. I do not boost any other purples, only the */End. Purple sets offer more than enough Accuracy, Recharge and * (the specific attribute for the set, like Hold or Damage) for all purposes, but shaving a little endurance usage off of these powers is never a bad thing. If I'm frankenslotting the power, I boost the frankenslot IOs. If I take Stealth and slot it with 3 Def/End IOs, for example, I boost all three of those. It's like getting an extra IO without the slot cost. I'll break these rules in a heartbeat if doing so will achieve a desired outcome, such as perfecting a gap-less attack chain, but I tend to stick to them for most of my characters and slotting approaches.

The +X boosts will apply all the way down to level 1. The enhancements will perform as though they were 5 levels higher. Example: if you do exemplar down to level 1, those enhancements will perform as though they were level 6 (which, the way exemplaring hammers enhancement values below level 25, equates to "not much better"). The set bonuses on those level 50 Preventative Medicine IOs will be lost at level 46, when you go more than three levels below the level of the IOs.

If you +5 a bunch of level 20 IOs, yes, they'll perform like level 25 IOs, they'll continue to perform like level 25 IOs all the way up to 50+3, and you'll keep the set bonuses. But they won't perform like level 30 IOs, or level 50 IOs, whereas attunement will allow them to do just that. You'll be shorting yourself potentially critical attribute increases in the long run by boosting them instead of attuning them. And if you boost them at any level above their minimum, you'll be locking yourself into that level as the lowest level at which you can exemplar without losing the bonuses conferred by those IOs in the set. Attuned, they'll function as whatever level you're currently at, and not drop bonuses until you exemplar below the minimum level for the entire set. Yes, the same applies to LotG +Recharge IOs. You can boost them, but you're better served by using attuned ones instead. You also save merits/inf* by attuning them, if you do it by unslotting and selling them on the market, then buying the same IOs in the attuned version. Whatever losses you might incur from the sales are more than offset by the costs of boosters and catalysts that you won't have to purchase.

If @Yomo Kimyata were driving the price of unslotters higher, that would benefit new players, as they can acquire ~200+ merits at level 1, without engaging in a single second of combat, and turn them into unslotters to sell at those flip-inflated prices, netting even greater profits than they otherwise would.

Jet packs have been around for decades. My favorite thus far is the one Yves Rossy designed in 2006, a winged jet pack not terribly dissimilar to the ones in the game (a wonderful example of science fiction preceding science). In 2012, he appeared on an episode of Top Gear (Season 18, episode 5) in a race against a rally car. He's still performing demonstrations as recently as 2020. And someone out there is having fun in California right now.

If my conclusion is accurate, there is likely no fix. Movement after a K* occurs isn't a flagged or notated type of movement, nor is it likely that it could be flagged or notated, as the duration is varied in multiple ways. A Suppress MovementControl/MovementFriction flag couldn't be tied to the K* magnitude without potentially infringing on a player character's mobility unnecessarily. Nor would a suppression tied to the expected duration of the K* work, for the same reason. There would inevitably be suppression of the movement variables when no suppression would be warranted, leading to situations no less frustrating than being knocked around. Imagine, for instance, trying to jump away from a critter, only to discover that you can only jump straight up because your MovementControl and MovementFriction have been suppressed. The movement code and/or the related variables would have to be rewritten from the ground up, and probably the K* code rewritten again in concert, to resolve this by redefining what constitutes movement altogether and treat K* as an entirely separate, non-movement, mechanic. I doubt we'll see that happen, given the scope of such a project. This has nothing to do with K*-weak critters. I specified that with the following line.

No, not the film. Something's been nibbling away at the back on my mind for a long time. I noticed it on the original servers, but never paid much attention to it. This week, while I was hammering away at badges for Legionette, I ran the Founder's Falls safeguard mission numerous times, and it started to gnaw at me again. Certain critters, Council/5th Column Wolf critters and Crey * Tanks, for example, can be kept on their backs with practically any K* attacks. A gentle tap is enough to knock them down/back/up. One of my cats pawing in the litterbox will send them flopping and bouncing around. They're so susceptible to K* that it's even reliable when they're in the middle of an animation, and we've all seen critters ignore 100% Chance to K* powers when they're animating something (because the animation sequencer is a dick). Yet, there's no K* weakness listed in their attributes, and this is not something which began after the KB code overhaul, it was happening from the earliest days of the game. There's an unaccounted, unrecognized variable at work here. I suspect that this is occurring due to an unexpected interaction between MovementControl/MovementFriction and K*. The critters which seem to be affected by K* in this way all have extremely high MovementControl/MovementFriction, and K* is, essentially, movement imposed on the target. And if it is an interaction between MovementControl/MovementFriction and K*, wouldn't that also have some implications in our use of combat mobility powers and travel powers which offer high MovementControl/MovementFriction, leading to our extreme dislike of K* on our characters specifically because the very powers we've relied on for in-combat mobility have been making K* more likely to happen to us as well? I also find myself wondering how many of the K* powers were balanced with lower damage because they were tested against the wrong critters, against critters which had excessive MovementControl/MovementFriction, and gave the impression that they were too strong to warrant a higher damage scalar, even with low K* chances, because they were so "good" under those test conditions.