Luminara

They might not be barren. Try to impregnate one and tell us what happens.

When I play Legionette, even with 10 points of Hold, Sleep and Stun protection, I'm Held, Slept and Stunned. The teaming incentive provided by mez is still there. Empowering the minority won't remove that incentive. It won't make anyone useless or unwanted. If the existing incentive proves to be insufficient, there are always other incentives that can be tweaked, modified, improved or added. And there are plenty of other reasons for players to team already. Merits, Incarnate rewards, special enhancements, more rapid inf* and XP generation, greater likelihood of valued drops... friendship. Fear of change, fear of being unwanted, fear of being left behind is no way to live, and no way for a game's future to be decided. We move forward, or we're just existing until the end comes, and nothing remarkable or worthwhile comes from a life, or a game, constrained by fear.

No-one's invulnerable to mez now. Status protection defers the effects until sufficient magnitude is stacked, but it doesn't make the protected individual invulnerable to mez. I've been mezzed through mag 10 protection many times. The point of proliferating status protection isn't to make everyone impossible to mez, it's to even out the wide disparity between the ~88% and the ~12%. The ~88% can shrug off three mag 3 mezzes. The ~12% can't shrug off a single mag 2 mez. The ~88% have 0.0s animation time attached to their damage mitigation toggles when suppression ends, and those damage mitigation toggles only ever have to be activated a single time, immediately upon acquisition (barring detoggling after entering "personal story missions"). The ~12% have varying animation times attached to their comparable damage mitigation toggles, up to 3.3s, or the click powers they're required to activate provide comparable damage mitigation, and those clicks and toggles have to be reapplied with every spawn, and the toggles turned back on every time mez disables them. The ~12% have to spend still more time trying to counter mez by using their own status effects pre-emptively, presuming their primaries or secondaries offer status effects, and always have a 5% chance for that attempt to fail (missed). The ~88% spend 0.0s countering mez and have a 0% chance of failure because status protection is a buff. The ~88% is better equipped to deal with the loss of control due to mez already, due to toggle reactivation after suppression being automatic, but they also tend to have a larger pool of HP to buffer them. Some of the ~12% have heals or +Regen, but neither is usable while mezzed... and some of the ~88% also have heals and +Regen, which they can use despite one or two mezzes landing. The ~12% have to dedicate at least part of their inspiration inventory to one specific inspiration. The ~88% have the option to utilize a more diverse selection of inspirations. The ~88% have higher damage output across the board, allowing them to progress quickly through content, and this is magnified by their ability to shrug off most mez. The ~12% have lower damage modifiers and scalar values, even accounting for the -Res in their primaries and secondaries, and are required to progress at a much slower pace, thereby magnifying the temporal discrepancies between them and the ~88%. After all of their extra clicks and re-toggles, they're slowed down further by their lower damage output. The ~12% have one pool-based option to deal with mez (i don't include Acrobatics because it doesn't prevent Stuns or Sleeps, it's only mag 2 Hold protection, and there aren't any critters with Holds of mag 2.9 or less of which i'm aware). Not a great option, but since it's there, it's pursued. The ~88%, not having the need to pursue that option, can exercise more lateral choices in character design and play style. How many points of disparity do I need to list to make it apparent? Lack of status protection costs that ~12% significant amounts of real life time and compromises build diversity, neither of which should be sacrificed on the altar of teaming or the retention of "the way it was when the game was released". The ~88% aren't forced to play Issue 0, the ~12% shouldn't be, either. That is the point. Not immunity to mez, but a less drastic gulf between the two groups. Mez is still, and will always be a threat, but that threat is disproportionately higher for the ~12% than it is for the ~88%, who fold when a mag 2 effect completely shuts them down, whereas the ~88% soldier on without ever realizing there was a mez.

Wait, Spanky was actually... Steamy Spankbot? NEMESIS' SEX TOY?! EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW. Ew.

You left out stalkers, dominators, Kheldians, Soldiers of Arachnos, controllers with Indomitable Will and/or pets which hold aggro exceptionally well, blasters with their triple-stacking mag 1 status protection ATO, and masterminds who let their henches do the heavy lifting. And the defender/corruptors playing a primary with status protection. Because teaming should be optional, not a mandated solution to a problem which only exists for a minority, and that only because the design bible was thrown into a shredder shortly after the game launched.

I believe I can bolster your position with some more pertinent facts, @Bill Z Bubba. A Break Free lasts 30s. If a player expects a mission to take 10 minutes, that's 20 Break Frees he/she's going to be toting along to make it through the mission without being mezzed. How many inspiration slots do we have at level 50? Oh, look at that, it's 20. Let's see, what would a status-protected character carry, since he/she doesn't need 20 Break Frees... well, he/she could stock up on Lucks, but since that status-protected character has self-affecting toggles which only suppress, and don't require the character to engage in animation time when the suppression ends, they don't necessarily need Lucks. How about Insights? Eh, really not necessary most of the time, but it's nice to have one on hand for the occasional Blind. Okay, we have 19 more slots to fill, let's see... hell, let's just stick a CaB, a Respite and a Luck in there, the "Justin Case collection", and pack the rest of the tray with 16 Rages. We don't need to enter a test environment to determine which character would complete that hypothetical mission more quickly, more easily and in less jeopardy, it's patently obvious. So it really does come down to e-mailing inspirations to oneself to make the claim that the balance between the haves and have-nots is maintained by inspirations. Without that, there's definitely no parity, in any sense. Using the e-mail to yourself option to sidestep the 20 slot limitation, yeah, that's on the shady side of legitimate, but it is still, technically, legitimate. Still, it doesn't benefit the unprotected characters as much as it benefits the protected ones. Claiming items from e-mail takes time. Click the e-mail, click Claim, click the next e-mail, click Claim... even if it's done with a macro or bind, that's still time spent. The unprotected characters are already spending extra time on animations for click and toggle debuffs, this just stacks more time against their completion run. Animation time which status-protected characters aren't spending, because, even if they're mezzed, their self-affecting toggles they automatically restore without animation when the mez ends, and they may never need to claim anything to keep going, and still be faster, in less danger and having an easier run. I wholeheartedly agree with you, the very notion that the situation is "fine" because a defender/corruptor can pack his/her e-mail with inspirations is beyond ludicrous, because it ignores the fact that characters with status protection can pack their e-mail with inspirations just as well, and drive their own performance edge even further away from that of the characters with no status protection. It's a given that everyone has access to inspirations, in the general sense, but that everyone has equal access to different load-outs of inspirations is not, not even with that extra 100 in e-mail. The characters with status protection always come out ahead when inspiration use is factored in, because they're less reliant on them in general, and rocking status protection which frees up their selection of inspirations overall. Stating that characters without status protection are balanced by inspiration use in the current game is completely disingenuous misinformation based on speculation in a vacuum, independent of the facts, and not even remotely reflective of the reality of the situation.

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.