Luminara

I spent most of yesterday afternoon running around various zones with one of my level 50+ characters. Out of consideration, I went to level-appropriate zones initially, but discovered that almost none of the spawns were, in fact, level appropriate. Barring a couple of presents which spawned some 48's and 49's, all that shit conned grey to me. Presents in the Fab, grey-cons. Presents in north PI, grey-con. After one-shotting enough of them to get the Cold Warrior badge twice, I found myself wondering why I was bothering. No drops. No inf*. And not a population of 100,000 players sharing the same space, so no real concern of leaving a high level spawn that might decimate a lowbie. In other words, I realized there was absolutely no incentive to defeat those spawns. If they'd conned white, or even blue, I'd have continued to beat them down, just for the Candy Cane drops, but even that was off the table. Removing the Alpha Incarnate enhancement wouldn't have turned those wastes of time into something rewarding, either, so I gave up and adopted the "Fuck it, they'll despawn or someone else will deal with them" attitude, went to a lower level zone with a higher Mysterious Gift density with an easier collection route and went about the business of working on Toy Collector. With 200 presents to open for the Toy Collector badge, and only 100 critters required for the Cold Warrior, it's easy to acquire the badge before one is 1/3 of the way through Toy Collector, so there's no impetus provided on that front, either. As it stands, the game actively encourages players not to deal with those spawns by providing zero rewards while also offering identical foes, which do reward the player's investment of time, in Father Time's missions. Yeah, I became that asshole, at the event design's prompting to do so. "Don't bother with this crap, Lumi, just click and go." Winter Horde critters spawning from Mysterious Gifts need to spawn with no level, giving players a reason to defeat them (event drops, regular drops, inf*, XP), and not putting lowbies at serious risk of insta-gib if they stumble across abandoned spawns. And other players wouldn't feel like garbage collectors when they came across abandoned spawns, they'd get something for the time they spent cleaning them up. I'll probably be an asshole again later today, when I start working on the badges with my main. And again when I go after the badges on other characters. I don't want to, but that 2-3s I spend using an AoE/PBAoE, plus the travel suppression time, for 0 inf*, 0 drops, 0 badge progress, makes being an asshole the most viable option. That's not good design, and it really should be addressed.

@Aurora_Girl is an expert at taking dirt naps. If there's a floor, she'll find a way to kiss it. Frequently and with unholy glee. It's part of her charm.

Could the letterboxing have a "Disable" option added? Please? Letterboxing made sense when many players were using full frame displays, but the entire world has moved on to widescreen. And I'm really not that interested in gawking at Nemesis' codpiece while trapped in a cutscene.

Sounds more like a savaged brute. 😄

Pulling with Nova might not be the optimal approach to every situation, AG. Just a thought.

Then ask questions. I have social anxiety disorder and I can ask for clarification when I feel it's necessary. Rather than point your finger at someone else and complain, speak up. Not doing so brings the blame full circle. "You decide your own level of involvement." - Tyler Durden

"And I win if you don't click, because I'm right by default."

They never sold out (i have no issue with artists who do. everyone needs to eat, everyone has dreams). They do what they want to do, when they want to do it, the way they choose. The down side of that is, despite exposure in films, television shows and video games, they're really only known through word of mouth. Their publisher isn't pushing their singles on radio stations, no deals worked out to get their albums mass attention, they just package the music and make it available for KT to sell on their website. I'm grateful just to have that much. Free's vocals and lyrics are perfectly complemented by Somers' production and instrumental work. If it takes them eight years between releases, that's fine, because whether it's magic or reality-bending science or sheer talent or plain dumb luck that they're capable of doing what they do, I want them to keep doing it forever, not blow it all in a few years and burn out permanently.

Free Dominguez and Bruce Somers.

It's a Slow set. Cryo Freeze Ray doesn't Slow.

Member was a word people used to refer to a penis, without saying "penis", in the past. So we're all dicks now. Actually, we're all multiple dicks now. Bags of dicks. Members. Plural. Go ahead. Try to rinse that out of your brains. 🙂

Apoptosis. Yes, it should affect the Hamidon. But we can presume Hamidon Pasalima was aware of apoptosis and specifically designed his creation without the necessary molecular triggers or pathways, giving it a sort of immortality. And, extending the presumption, he also must've known that it would not be invulnerable to external trauma, so keeping the mitos "alive" once the primary structure was destroyed would allow him to extend that immortality through reproduction (by giving the mitos the capability to grow into new Hamidons). Of course, that would require the mitos to have some means of communication in order to control the population of Hamidons (multiple Hamidons would lead to conflict over resources), which could be discovered and exploited in some way... but not in this game (sadly).

Didn't we go through this when Steam proved successful? All of the major game publishers came out with their own platforms, and they were either horrible or packed with crap except for one or two games, so the publishers eventually went back to selling on Steam simply because their own platforms proved to be unpopular and unprofitable? We can send probes out of our solar system, we can create antimatter, but we can't learn from our failures, apparently. None. I have a 15Gb/month data limit. No point spending money on a streaming service I'd only be able to use for about six hours out of each month, especially since that would make everything else I do online a test of my patience (throttled data rates tend to be worse than 56Kbps dial-up).

"Do not try to predict the Soon™©℠®. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth." "What truth?" "There is no Soon™©℠®." "There is no Soon™©℠®?" "Then you will see that it is not the Soon™©℠® that predicts, it is only yourself."

I'm not even dating the forums, it's way too soon for an engagement! Oh, god, what will our kids look like? 😧

Yes.

Those were enabled when the forums were initially launched. They were mislabeled as "warnings", though.

I thought it meant we were supposed to toss water on the paint... Hm... no-one go in the green room for a while.

Ignore post, please test.

HOW I MINE 4 FISH??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

*blink* *blink blink* *furiously scratches out Item 457, "Engage players with motorboat chases in innertubes as a distraction while taking control of world"* *crumples up Master Plan for World Domination* I was so close... so close.

I wouldn't recommend any of those. 4 enhancements is just too far, even taking the Uniques/Globals into consideration. Travel power speed is hard-capped. Once a character is there, the character is there, and with all of the powers, set bonuses and other slotting options we have, we can get there without even trying, and certainly without 4-slotting our travel powers. ED, on the other hand, still allows players to garner some small improvement when they're in the red. It may not be much, but not much improvement is better than no improvement at all. And that gives players a lot more incentive to use those slots in other ways. They can shave 0.11s off of the recharge time of a power, or reduce the endurance cost by another 0.2, or increase the Defense offered by 0.1%, and that may not be ZOMGSOAWESOME, it's still more than 0% increase from over-slotting a travel power, while also giving them the benefit of the same T5 bonus and doing so for a single slot. @Booper is asking us to justify increasing the T5 bonuses, but even with T6 bonuses, these sets wouldn't justify usage beyond 2 or 3 pieces, and, frankly, the bonuses they offer at 2/4 and 3/4 aren't any better than what's already available in other travel sets. The final bonus has to be something the player couldn't obtain otherwise to make it worth over-slotting for travel speed, specifically because over-slotting for travel speed is the least beneficial use of slots. Every other possible use of those slots is superior. A 7.5% speed cap increase, so those slots wouldn't feel entirely wasted. A 1% bump to the hit chance cap, from 95% to 96%, would guarantee that the set with that bonus would be the single most popular set in the entire game. Some DDR, as @Sovera suggested. X% chance for 5s of 50% Endurance Discount. X% chance for +KnockUp on all attacks. Scaling Regeneration with HP loss. A Flemish Giant that appears and wiggles its nose at enemies. A 4s cameo appearance of Statesman's ghost giving the player a thumbs-up (dual finger guns would be more amusing). Animation/Activation Time reduction. Reduction of travel power cost to combat travel power cost when in combat. Removal of suppression. Replacing all attack animations with a Fonzie emote. A 4 piece bonus for a travel power, which isn't going to benefit beyond 2 pieces, has to be not only desirable, but something the player can't exceed or replicate by spending two or three slots elsewhere. None of these sets offer anything that players can't pick up elsewhere, and due to the travel speed caps, they further encourage players to avoid using them. They should be 3 piece sets, or they should be reworked from the ground up to make them worth the 4th piece.

All of the travel powers (except Teleport) already cap with very little enhancement, and the set bonuses for 4-slotting the new travel sets are already easily obtained by adding one more slot to a power which a player would have at 5/6. The bonuses for slotting 4/4 don't really pay for that slot cost in comparison to those other slotting options. A 4.5% Resistance bonus can easily be obtained, for example, for the cost of one additional slot in a power which the player would otherwise slot with 5/6 of a set. Why 4-slot Super Speed or Speed of Sound when one can already hit the Run Speed cap with two slots in the power, three or four +Movement Speed bonuses (all of which are acquired in the process of enhancing other powers more effectively than enhancing the travel power) and Sprint? Why invest heavily in Flight powers when the Flight Speed cap is achieved with practically no effort and the slots offer much greater return on investment from spreading them around? If players are going to "waste" slots by adding enhancements which provide no appreciable gain beyond their set bonuses, why would they do so by stuffing them into travel powers and gaining a single T5 bonus when they could gain three or four T5 bonuses by putting those slots into other powers? It's not that the T5 bonuses are undesirable, it's that the slot investment doesn't pay off in comparison to existing options. If you expect players to use these new sets, you need to make them compelling. They have to be worth the slot cost. These aren't. If you give players a choice between "wasting" three slots on a travel power for a 4.5% Resistance bonus, or "wasting" 1 slot on another power for the same bonus, they're going to take the second option every time. Same with the +Range bonus. Yes, it's higher than the 2 piece 5% bonus offered by Bombardment, but the player can build up 15% +Range, twice what you're offering with the TP set, with 2/6 Bombardment in multiple Ranged AoE powers, or 10% if they're limited to two Ranged AoE attacks, which is still more +Range for a lower slot investment, and that's if they actually want +Range (it has a lower overall build value than other options, such as +Recharge).