Luminara

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.

Hey, remember how this proc was flagged to ignore enemy level when I27 Page 7 was released? It didn't work. The flag is on the summoned pseudo-pet, but the effects still vary with enemy level. Poke it again, but use a sharper stick.

They say the same thing to us. They say that you build in a manner that doesn't support the play style you want, slot in a manner that doesn't support the builds you create, and play those characters in a way that doesn't work for their builds and slotting. When you complained about running out of endurance, people pointed out that not spamming Force Bolt to keep enemies out of melee range (on a build that had Hover, for Christ's sake) and using your other attacks instead of avoiding them or putting them off until the mid-20's would solve the problem. When you complained about your damage being too low, people pointed out that not restricting yourself to your T1 attack would solve the problem. When you complained about AV damage output, people pointed out that not deliberately closing to melee range of the AV would solve the problem. When you complained that your solo builds can't solo, people pointed out that not dumping slots into PFF while leaving your attacks under-slotted would solve the problem. Every post you've ever made to complain about the game has the same root, the way you build, slot and play. Every one of the linked threads, and so many more that the forum software would reach out and slap me if I tried to link all of them, is because you refuse to build your characters That's what all of those threads say to us. That's what every post you make says to us. You hamstring yourself in every way possible, blame the game for it, ignore advice, deny responsibility, manufacture scenarios, withhold and sometimes falsify information, argue when you're called out or corrected, refute the possibility that you could be wrong, disappear to sulk, then circle right back to the beginning and repeat the cycle again. You're so determined to not be wrong, to not adapt, to not move one inch forward that you've spent two decades making one post over and over and over again. The only thing that's changed is the timestamp. Bullshit. I played my first 8 characters on Homecoming to 50 without seed, without teaming, without P2W buffs, without anything but the characters themselves, and every one of them was slotting IOs from level 7 onward. And IOs are even cheaper now than they were five years ago, I know that for a fact because I engage heavily with the market. Stuff that I used to sell for 3.5-5 million inf* isn't moving now, despite being listed at 2-2.5 million, and those are the "expensive" ones. You can get lower-valued IOs for 100,000 or less, convert them and have everything you want, and still have piles of inf*, if you wanted to. You don't use IOs for the same reason for the same reason you complain about the game being hard, because you refuse to change anything about the way you play. Because you create the problems you have. Addressing those problems necessitates addressing the root. You.

It's an intentional difference to spur more activity villain-side.

I'm not a Marine and I felt that burn.

I'll give you nothing for all of them. When should I expect delivery?

No, because the slots being theoretically reallocated weren't being efficiently used, if they were used at all. It doesn't preserve balance, it disregards it. And it doesn't do it in one direction, by simply making every character "better", rather it also allows players to make characters which cannot achieve baseline metrics and places them in the same space with the even more godlike tankmages that the change would permit. Moreover, the constraint of not being allowed to move those default slots is a balance point for which there is no counterpoint. There's no adjustment to modifiers or scalars or attrib tables that can restore the middle ground. Buffing or nerfing enemies or powers would only give a positive outcome for one subset of players, while exacerbating the problems experienced by the other. The gap, the spread between excelling and struggling, can't be reduced by any other systems or mechanics because default slots fill a unique balance role. There's nothing else in the engine which can be adjusted to provide the same, or even somewhat comparable results, nor could anything be created to resolve the balance problem without completely redesigning the game. When I resort to hyperbole, it's mocking, snide, derisive and blown far enough out of proportion to be obviously satirical. This ain't that. That's a player problem, not a game problem. I had it, slotting most of my characters relatively similarly. I realized that I was piling redundancies on top of redundancies, special and Unique IOs crammed in even if the character never needed them, comparable powers slotted identically, building safely and according to a generalized, all-encompassing pattern. Once I pushed my builds out of my slotting comfort zone, I discovered a lot of squandered potential. Now, as often as I find myself muttering, "One more slot... if I can find just one more slot...", I also find myself with one slot that I cannot, for the life of me, find a really good use for.

It's a perfectly feasible theory. Stark creating independently functional suits (Age of Ultron), parts of suits (Iron Man 3), pilotless aircraft (Age of Ultron and Civil War), Redwing (Civil War) and the attack drones from Spider-Man: Far From Home, all after the events of Iron Man 2. And all of the Hammeroids were at the Stark Expo, so he would've had first access, possibly exclusive access (he did successfully tell the U.S. government to go fuck themselves when they tried to eminent domain his tech), to everything. In Iron Man 3, he's shown to be suffering from insomnia and working manically for days, effectively tripling his productivity, so he would've had more than sufficient time to deconstruct, reproduce and improve on Vanko's tech before we see the Iron Legion, Redwing and other examples of his drone tech. So yes, plausible and, in fact, likely. As I said earlier, he did create a new wingsuit for Sam, which means the old one went... where? When he redesigns his arc reactor in the first film, he tells Pepper to destroy the original one, but she turns it into a display instead. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Vulture is stealing Chitauri, Sub-Ultron and even Stark tech, right out from under the noses of guards and Stark Tech security measures (he's in charge of the Department of Damage Control). By Iron Man 3, he has every suit he's ever made, sans the Mark II that Rhodes has. So he's not destroying things any more, he's stashing them. Ant Man infiltrates the Avengers facility and steals something, which tells us that even his most advanced anti-theft tech isn't infallible. So we have a high degree of certainty that the original Exo-7 is sitting in a warehouse somewhere, just waiting to be swiped. Whether it'll show up in future films... it's kind of a one-trick pony, and may not bring enough glitz and glitter to justify having another winged hero or villain. The Vulture's wingsuit is more interesting and, in some ways, more advanced (the wings are shown to be at least partially prehensile in Homecoming), which further overshadows the Exo-7. It would have to be beefed up to justify an entry into Armor Wars.

Viagra.

Level 1 Level 1 (because we acquire 2 powers at level 1) Level 2 Level 4 Level 6 Level 8 Level 10 Level 12 Level 14 Level 16 Level 18 Level 20 Level 22 Level 24 Level 26 Level 28 Level 30 I didn't fail to account for the inherent powers, I addressed the idea of having default slots in primary/secondary powers freed for reassignment, of which there are 17 by the time a character reaches level 30. Not 10, not 8, 17. The discrepancy is a result of your assumptions about how the slots would be used, not my ability to perform basic addition. 17 slots no longer locked to specific powers is 17 slots players could move to other powers. Whether or not all of those would be moved is irrelevant, the mere fact that they could be moved is what has to be considered for balance. What you propose creates a situation identical to the conundrum that Cryptic faced between launch and Issue 5. Game balance was impossible because players were ignoring the expected slotting schema around which the game was originally balanced and, instead, six-slotting their attacks with Damage enhancements, six-slotting Tactics and Hasten to bypass the lack of Accuracy and Recharge Reduction enhancements in those attacks, and using powers like Conserve Power to compensate for the lack of Endurance Reduction. In essence, players had more slots than they knew what to do with, because they were using their slots in an unconstrained manner. Cryptic couldn't simply make enemies tougher because they couldn't guarantee that all players were doing that. Nor could they simply go big on enemy damage in hope of defeating player characters more rapidly so couldn't do things like dumpster diving and map herding, because, again, they couldn't guarantee that all players would have sufficient Defense/Resistance/-ToHit/-Damage to handle it. They couldn't do anything to counterbalance player choices within the enemy portion of the balance equation without negatively impacting players who weren't making those choices. Tighter constraints on player characters only solution, thus Enhancement Diversification. The same holds true here. Default slots create a baseline from which developers can formulate basic performance expectations. They assure that every power can be slotted, and thus usable to a minimum degree, without forcing reliance on potentially unavailable powers. Teammates cannot be guaranteed. Buffs from external sources, like mission NPCs, or P2W vendors, cannot be guaranteed. Pool powers cannot be guaranteed. *PP powers cannot be guaranteed. But a default slot does guarantee that a player can slot for Damage, or Recharge Reduction, or ToHit Debuff, or Stun, and even if the player doesn't make use of that option, its existence allows developers to designate minimum enemy strength. Default slots also create an upper limit by preventing players from doing exactly what you propose, using every available slot in a maximally efficient way. Not permitting all slots to be assigned freely is one of the balance decisions which allows developers to create challenge without making encounters impossible for characters who don't have all of their slots yet, or who don't slot the "right" way, or who don't follow specific build patterns. Like the common "Remove pool power prerequisites" demand, this will never be on the table because every form of balance in the game relies on its existence as a balance point. And pinky swearing on your great aunt Tilly's ashes that it won't be a problem, or trying explain that it wouldn't be as bad because it only works out to 10 or 8 or even "a couple of" slots, or presenting the supposition that it could be okay if players follow the build patterns you outline... these don't support your argument, because the problem of balance would still exist, and in a game with IO sets and Incarantes and nearly free P2W buffs and temp powers, it would be disastrous. It's not happening. Let it go.

All of the Hammeroids were destroyed when Vanko set their arc reactors to overload, and I doubt Vanko would've left schematics on Hammer's mainframe, or left them unencrypted and accessible to anyone but him or someone equally intelligent. So the military would've only had fragments to reverse engineer, and as of End Game, there was no indication that they'd accomplished that. They hadn't even deconstruct and copied the Mark II armor that Rhodes wears, and that was a primary plot point in Iron Man 2, so it's either too advanced for them to understand, or there wasn't enough left to figure it out. In Ant Man, Sam's wingsuit is branded with the Stark name and logo, implying an upgrade... but also potentially suggesting that the originals were also created by Stark, and if that was the case, the military wouldn't have any more success replicating it than they had with Vanko's stuff.

It was in The Winter Soldier, and the implication was that he and Riley were the only two. When Sam decides to offer to help Cap and Natasha, he hands them a folder with a picture of him and Riley. https://marvel-cinematic-universe-guide.fandom.com/wiki/Bakhmala There are only three people in the photograph, Sam, Riley and one person in the background of the picture, behind and to the right of Sam. Sam and Riley are wearing wingsuit harnesses and clad in black, the third man is in desert tan and appears to have something around his neck, so he was probably a high altitude pilot (the neck piece would be a helmet seal). Riley was killed in their last mission, hit by an RPG, so should be the only living person trained to use the Exo-7.

Balance is... an abstract concept, like gravity, or sunlight, or why water flows, for the average person. It's there, it's real, and it affects them, but it's not something they think about, ask how it works, wonder what would happen if this were changed or that worked differently. It is what it is, and they don't question it because the answer isn't pertinent to their lives in a practical sense. To understand balance, the same scientific principles and approach one applies to astrophysics or geology is applicable. Read a lot. Experiment. Observe results and try to reproduce them. Formulate a theory and test it. Change one variable and test it again. Repeat until the theory is verified or refuted... then move on to the next thing and start over. Most people don't do that. Some can't, some never realize that it can be tested, some believe it's a waste of time, some expect that "it'll sort itself out", some assume that discovering the answers is too hard, some expect someone else to know the answers, some are convinced that they know enough and what they propose won't be "a big deal"... and yes, some people don't care because personal satisfaction is more important.

17 additional slots available to use in other powers which didn't have those 17 slots available previously. Hence the word extra. And that's on top of potential IO sets and set bonuses (which provide the functionality of extra slots), and the Alpha Incarnates (which actually do provide the value of additional slotted enhancements in relevant powers). Not happening. Maybe one of the other server groups will try it, but HC won't.

Okay, hit me! So... a victim of domestic violence chances into a powerful... technomagical Rikti gem... and leads an army of female assassins (because we really need another Knives of Artemis in the game)... to steal things...

We'd have a lot of powers being literally unusable due to not being able to slot them until the next level or a respec to allocate a slot, as opposed to the existing system which, by granting the default slot when a power is taken, guarantees usability out of the box, not to mention complaints and support requests from players who, accustomed to the way the game has functioned for 20 years, didn't know the default slot wouldn't be assigned to powers and failed to add them during respecs. Game balance in the 1-31 range would also be shit-canned (17 extra slots would not be an insignificant amount of power creep), and sorely disrupted in the 32+ range.

That would cause a lot of real confusion for players trying to get Unabashed.

SOs aren't why he has issues. How he uses SOs is. Historically, he hasn't used his slots or enhancements well (that's the nicest way i can say it), and his complaints and arguments are identical to those in the past, indicating that he's still not using slots or enhancements well.

For fuck's sake. How many goddamn times does this shit have to float back to the top? @GM Crumpet, @GM_GooglyMoogly, @GM Impervium, @Widower, someone lock this.

Under ordinary circumstances, I'd retract that part of my post, state that I was wrong and apologize... but this doesn't disprove what it I'm saying, it emphasizes it. Note the lack of the enemy levels in the first post. He started with a plan to "prove" that enemy damage is excessive, set up a test environment that he could use to demonstrate his "point", deliberately withheld information that might be used to counter his predetermined conclusion, and jumped on the soapbox. That is his modus operandi to a tee. He's been campaigning to have enemy damage nerfed since he started posting on the old forums in 2006, and it's always gone down this way. And it's not because he engages in bad faith arguments, he actually believes there's a problem, but because the "problem" is his concept builds which are incapable of performing above -1/x1, slots them in the most abysmal ways, the self-defeating tactics he uses and his denial that the problem is on his end. I've seen him go through exactly the same motions in more threads than I want to remember. He presents faulty "evidence" which fails to pass the most basic falsifiability tests, and backs it up with "Trust me, bro!". When asked for screenshots or combat logs, "Trust me, bro!" again, even though he'll try to bolster his position by saying that he checked the combat logs. When asked for details, he's evasive. When people point out that damage can been mitigated in a variety of ways, including avoided, he refuses to even address it. When confronted about discrepancies, or even what's possible in the game, he accuses others of bad behavior. When he's incapable of defending a statement, he says, "Well, some of you apparently know a little more about the game than I do, so it's possible that things might not have gone that way, but I'm not saying that I was mistaken, just that I may have misremembered." And when he's backed himself into a corner, when he's let it slip that some of the factors in question weren't as he portrayed them to be, and has nothing left, he drops his "You're missing the point! It's not about who's right or wrong, enemies deal too much damage!" bomb, because that's the agenda. Adapting the game to his poor build strategies, bad tactics and questionable judgement so he doesn't have to adapt to it. So while I laud your impartiality and willingness to believe, I don't share it. I've been down this road often enough to know all of the landmarks and the destination. And he posted while I was typing this up. Exactly the kind of response I outlined three paragraphs above. Welcome to 2006.

Oh, so when you repeatedly make claims which are proven to be false, it's not because you're trying to promote a narrative in which the game is unfair and push this campaign to have all enemy damage nerfed so you can solo AVs with your... concept builds, it's because there's just been a slight misunderstanding... every time? https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=legacychain_serafina Serafina's strongest attack only deals 1028.5941 damage, and that's at level 50 and using the AV tables, not the EB tables, but somehow, through some wild misunderstanding, she "hits (you) for 1400 damage"... on a /Elec brute with minimum 26.25 Psi Resistance... at level 36-37... And this report of 11,000 damage, or even the 3000 max that the AV could deal, at his max level (which you weren't fighting), if your defender had a massive pile of -Res stacked on it, that could not have occurred because you were had Steamy Mist active (20% Energy Resistance), even if the TF were set to Enemies Buffed, was a moment of confusion on someone's part, something that the rest of us somehow misread and definitely not an exaggeration? And even in this very thread, AE AV Level 50 KO Blow damage: 1715.5765 points of Smashing damage (all affected targets) but, somehow, even with your character using Temp Invulnerability (30% Resistance Smashing/Lethal), and the enemy not having any other powers, thus not capable of stacking any -Res on you, this attack managed to deal nearly 50% more damage than the attack is actually capable of, isn't a false report on your part, it's just that none of us know how math works... or something... Do you want me to keep going? Should I pull up the original forum archives and show your posts from the old days, in which you falsify data in exactly the same way and push for exactly the same agenda, and backpedal exactly like you've done here? Really? Really?

From the episode, Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges, when Koval, head of the Tal Shiar (Romulan intelligence), states that there is no Section 31 and accuses Sloan (the Section 31 on DS9) of fabricating it. Koval is later revealed to be a double agent, working for Section 31, and the events of the episode were a ploy intended to pave the way for him to assume Senator Cretak's seat on the Romulan Senate, specifically because Cretak is loyal to the Romulan Empire and might turn against the Federation during or after the Dominion War. But Koval being a double agent is a pretty good indication that the Tal Shiar did know about Section 31... and at the same time didn't. He might've learned of them, but he would've kept the information to himself, and after he was turned, he definitely wouldn't be spreading intel about them around, because it could've cost him his life. If the Obsidian Order knew anything about Section 31, it would've come from Garak, who would've learned of its existence in the aftermath of the episode Inquisition (when Bashir is holodeck-napped by Sloan)... but anything Garak could tell them would've amounted to little more than rumor, and Tain's actions in the episode when he gets his entire secret fleet destroyed by trying to take on the Dominion proves that the Obsidian Order was too arrogant to accept that something like Section 31 could exist, much less be a threat. And the Klingons had no comparable organization. They just don't think or act in a way that would allow it. There's a distinction to be made here, though: the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order aren't just intelligence organizations, they're also secret police. Space Stasi. They weren't well-kept secrets, they were known and feared, and they utilized that fear to gain a degree of independence from their respective governments. And Section 31 wasn't an intelligence agency at all. They might've shared intel with the Federation government (or the Romulans, or the Cardassians, or even the Klingons, whomever was necessary to realize a goal), but they were completely autonomous and capable of enacting their plans without governmental assistance. No reports filed, no committees to answer to, nothing, just them and what they felt was "best" for the Federation. Klingons would never tolerate anything like any of these organizations. Did they have one or more intelligence agencies? Of course. Did they have something like the Big Three? No, it's not something their societal or cultural structures would allow to exist. So Tal Shiar maybe but unlikely, Obsidian Order maybe but it wouldn't have mattered because they would've dismissed it as an ordinary and inferior group, Klingons no.