Luminara

In 2004 and 2005, I played a couple of the "least effective" characters it was possible to play at that time, a Trick Arrow defender before the buffs to TA in Issue 7, and a defender who only used melee attacks. I learned a lot from playing those characters, but the most important thing I learned is that most people honestly don't care what you're playing or how you're playing it, as long as everyone is having fun. You're good enough. And if you're having fun, you're doing it exactly right.

Are you playing for your own entertainment, or to impress others and meet their expectations?

It's Wormhole doing the work for my Grav/TA. Even though critters aren't supposed to overlap, for a brief moment, they do when they're teleported as a group and dropped at the reticle. In this shot, I'm hitting one well outside the range of melee attacks. That's Wormhole in action. Sands of Mu is queued before Wormhole's animation is complete, and it activates before the critter models are even fully visible after Wormhole's teleport moves them. They stack, my cone hits the melee cone limit and then the spawn spreads out to a normally spaced distribution, but they're still taking damage from Sands. Should work similarly with Fold Space. Can't say for certain, though, haven't taken that power on any character (yet).

Yes, they stack. Use Siren's Song first, though. It deals damage, damage breaks Sleep, there won't be a Sleep to stack if you use it after Mass Hypnosis.

I keep misreading the title of this thread as "Meatplot". Which suggests a whole other kind of story. Or seven.

Is that the thread in which I examined one of those proc bombs, compared it to traditional IO set slotting with one additional proc and found that the damage output was not, in fact, better when the power had six procs, but also that the hit chance, endurance usage and cycle time were all significantly worse when used as a proc bomb, and that the proc bomb's recharge time (which was already worse than the traditionally slotting) was dependent on the Force Feedback proc in another power, which could miss and drop the proc bomb's performance over time even further? And this is evidence that procs need to be nerfed? Hm...

Switch to IOs, obey the Law of Fives, apply the Rule of Threes to survivalism (an extension to the rule which practicing survivalists typically follow is that one should always try to have at least three possible survival uses for every item carried in a survival situation), win at the game and life.

You're not a blaster.

Some characters are just experiments - am I going to enjoy this, does this work with that, can I do this kind of thing, etc., and I'm not terribly attached to them (yet). Some are recreations of characters I had on the original servers, and I want them more for the sense of recapturing what was lost than because I need them or care about them deeply. But when the costume is just right, the name is on point, I'm really enjoying the way this works with that, the concept I had in mind suddenly coalesces, and there's a real sense of attachment... a story happens. Something comes to mind and has to be written for the character to feel complete.

Not sentinels. I didn't say it was unplayable. In Issue 11, BAB revamped almost all of the weapon animations in the game and rejiggered the sequencers so with or without the weapon drawn, the total animation time was identical. And even if he hadn't, it wouldn't have been relevant for TA because TA's debuffs weren't powerful enough to allow a player to drag out the process of debuffing by cycling blasts between debuffs, the set historically required the player to go full monty to achieve a reasonable modicum of survivability. Debuff, debuff, debuff, then blast. I mained a TA/Dark for almost 6 years. I played more TA/* and */TA combinations than I care to think about, including the TA/Archery defender I leveled to 50 before Issue 7. Redraw was never a real issue for TA. The abysmally low debuff values, the long recharge times, the lack of any means of aiding a team more directly if the controls/debuffs failed to mitigate damage sufficiently, the overabundance of control in a defender primary, the years-long bug which prevented OSA from being used as a reliable damage source and deprived the player of the OSA target when he/she had an ignition failure, the migraine-inducing pulsating ring graphics in Disruption Arrow, the lack of any customizability of the powers themselves... take your pick. I'll also note that Archery had buggy post-animation pauses in Aimed Shot and Ranged Shot which were fixed multiple times (they didn't stay fixed until near sunset). Getting a TA or Archery bug fixed was never a priority, either, it typically took months (if not years) even with me and others talking with Castle on a weekly basis. So any imagined time saved from redraw by pairing TA with Archery was lost in the periods when the Aimed/Ranged Shot animations were on the fritz, which was a not inconsiderable portion of the life of the sets. Disruption Arrow and OSA were the only location AoEs in the set. And Disruption Arrow wasn't restricted to ground placement, you could put it anywhere, including straight up in the air. It would just hang there, a big, pulsing globe. You activate OSA, it creates a target, you hit the target with Fire/Energy damage, fire happens. Or you use the target as a focal point for targeted AoEs, then make fire happen. That's pretty straightforward. EMP Arrow wasn't an "anti-machine" power. It had a damage component which only affected critters flagged as Electronic, but that was flavor, not the primary purpose of the power. EMP Arrow was a mag 3 Hold with a 50% chance for an additional mag 1 Hold. It also had a comparatively long duration (nearly 30s base at level 50, twice the duration of controller primary AoE Holds), and being able to use it at range, rather than in melee (EMP Arrow was copied from EM Pulse (Radiation Emission T9)), made it the hands down best AoE Hold in the game. "Machines" had nothing to do with what the power was or how it was intended to be used. I wrote the book on TA. Twice. You... give the impression of having just read some power descriptions on the very recent iteration of TA and mistaken it for the historical version of the set. I don't think this is a conversation you want to have. Mechanics have no specific board. And if you don't want to veer off into a side discussion, don't start a side discussion.

So, basically, you made a pole dancer who carries her pole with her.

You have enough inf* to pay someone to abuse you, if you're really that into it. Or, hell, skip the carpal tunnel syndrome and really abuse yourself by watching something like Jason X or The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

I use /powexec_location self Wormhole on my Grav/TA controller, queue Sands of Mu while Wormhole is animating and achieve full target saturation (five critters in the cone) every time, and Sands has a narrower cone than Cross Punch.

Because players strenuously objected when the 5th Column was replaced by the Council and frequently requested their return, and Paragon saw an opportunity to do that while adding to the depth of the game and richness of the Column/Council story.

There are things that aren't fine and far more desperately in need of redress, and the HC team is not only unpaid and doing this in their spare time, they're also an extremely small group of people. This isn't a game development studio working together in an office building. They're not working with practically unlimited resources. They don't have 25 hours in the day and 8 days in the week. And they're not going to drop everything to polish sentinels while leaving everything that they consider to be more critical twisting in the wind. Sentinels aren't unplayable. Other things are, in the context of the current direction in which the game is going and where the HC team would like it to be. So those other things are being addressed first. I lived with TA being the absolute bottom of the barrel for six years on the original servers, you can put up with sentinels being less than perfect for a while.

A couple dozen posts over the course of six weeks in a single thread isn't high activity. A year ago, you said that sentinels were fine, other than Opportunity needing a revamp. You gushed about how good sentinels are (not an exaggeration). If coming back and finding that one power isn't exactly what you want it to be has completely redefined your perspective of the entire archetype, then it's not the archetype or the power, it's you. So what's really bothering you? Relationship troubles? Family drama? Wonder Woman 1984 disappointment? We're all here, lay it on us. As I explained already, the current development team have their own prioritization in addressing issues. If sentinels aren't currently performing so poorly that they're dead last in any metric, and none of the primaries or secondaries are drastically under-performing in comparison to other primaries or secondaries, then they're not at the top of the list to be dealt with. They'll get to it when more immediate and important issues, as determined by them, not you, have been resolved. Derogatory shouting won't make them get to it any sooner. I'm equally positive that the majority of people would prefer that you didn't. No-one wants to play a hybrid dominator/crab/sentinel with copypasta mechanics. Let it go.

Well, he's carrying a shield now...

There are a handful of savant-level geniuses who have isolated a bug that no-one else can replicate, because the rest of us aren't that smart, and that can't actually exist because the code isn't structured in such a way that would allow it, according to @Faultbro, and everyone is just "gaslighting" when they disagree. Or, a shorter explanation: comedy gold.

Where do you think they got the ingredients for those pumpkin spice lattes from?

What he/she said.

And now we have a universe with this. I wonder if that could be done with cheesecake...

I can get naked IRL. I can describe myself stripping down to my birthday suit in a tabletop game. But in video games, I can't seem to get all of my clothes off, no matter what I do. I have to get someone else to undress me (nude mods).

The HC team didn't create sentinels. The faulty power descriptions, the changes to powers, the design of the archetype, all of that occurred eight years ago, when a completely different group of people were in charge (SCoRE). And the HC team has their own prioritization of what needs to be addressed, and different skills and levels of capability with the existing tools, so they're doing what they can when they can, in the areas of expertise in which they can best contribute. That they haven't addressed sentinel issues yet is neither an indication of lack of interest nor grounds for accusations of laziness, only that they haven't gotten that far down the list yet. But don't let facts interrupt a perfectly good tantrum. Please, carry on. I'm sure the people who spend their free time working on the game, with no compensation beyond the expressions of gratitude from others, are delighted to be called to task and verbally abused over things they didn't do or for failing to acquiesce to your whims.

There was a small company who made a whole bunch of Co* fan films. They were... hold on, trying to remember the name... oh, yeah, Marvel Studios.