Luminara

They're not supposed to spawn as bosses if your difficulty is at default. That bug was fixed a long time ago, when Cryptic was still running the show, but the recent redesign of the Council may not have properly applied the fix. File a bug report.

He summons a Dark Servant, which activates Chill of the Night as soon as it's summoned. He also uses Chill of the Night himself. That's 60% -ToHit. Both of those are PBAoEs... and you had your ranged henches parked right on top of him. Of course they couldn't hit. And he uses Chill of the Night within a minute of spawning, if not sooner, so you spent 15 minutes completely ignoring both the Dark Servant and the EB's actions. As usual, you did it to yourself. Shocker.

What? You? No. Nooooooooooooooo. I refuse to believe it.

This is two spawns, clumped together in this intersection. Two spawns again, separated only by the pillar in the middle of the intersection. Again, two spawns. That was at an intersection like this, the T branching type. I can post plenty of screenshots, but these make the point suitably. Every Oranbega is like this, and it's not just the intersections. In the tunnels, if you see one spawn, the other is 20' away, every time, then a loooooooooooooooong stretch that's completely empty, and then two spawns packed back to back again.. In smaller rooms, there will often be two spawns so close together that they look like a single spawn, like that first screenshot. There's no spacing between spawns until you hit the larger rooms. What this means is whatever your difficulty setting, it's effectively doubled, because spawns are so close together that you're forced to fight two at once. I like fighting the CoT now that they're not the same Guides, Behemoths and Death Mages in every spawn, but they do get to be a bit overwhelming when they're doubled up, and the empty tunnels between the double spawns aren't very exciting. This isn't happening with any other enemy group, or with CoT on any other type of map that I've run, so it has to be a spawndef bug or waypoint bug with Oranbega maps. Poke them. And while I'm on the topic of CoT spawns, the "ALL GHOSTS, ALL THE TIME!" spawns defeat the purpose of the CoT redesign. They're not challenging, they're not interesting, they're not even a speedbump. There aren't even any ghost bosses, so they're just boring. If these spawns aren't a bug, it's bad design and needs to be refined. The "ALL GALAXIES, PLUS A SINGLE TOKEN REPRESENTATIVE OF THE REST OF THE COUNCIL!" Council spawns make no sense, either. That one odd man out that's always with them indicates that they're supposed to be a mixed spawn, but they're not. The random dude/wolf is always a minion, so it's not a leader or overseer keeping them in line. That spawndef should be looked into, too.

The Hallowe'en event don't offer much incentive for characters who already have the badges. They're one and done, time to move on to the next character. Thing is, some of us don't have, or want to make, an infinite string of alts, we want to play the characters we have, but it feels a bit... outgrown with Hallowe'en. There isn't even the small reward of random holiday inspirations that we can collect during other holidays, or temp powers we can buy. Some event salvage that isn't very valuable, XP that we stopped counting a long time ago, and the same drops we can get doing everything else. It stops feeling like Trick or Treating when there are no treats. I'll also posit that not rewarding players for defeating the EBs after they've earned the badges has a deleterious effect on other players. There's no incentive to stay and fight that toilet paper-wrapped asshole, or the floating framerate destroyer, or any of the EBs, if you already have the badges, so they're abandoned, usually right in someone else's path. The same thing applies to the lower ranks that spawn. When there's no reason to stay and fight... Could the badge counters be reset to 0 once the badges are granted, with a conditional IfBadge=Owned check added added to each (all of the Hallowe'en ToT badges), and grant some kind of lesser reward when the badge conditions are met again? The reward granted doesn't have to be the same thing, in this case, Aethers, but something would be nice. One Monstrous Aether, or one Reward Merit, or one Anniversary token, or a charge on a temp power. It doesn't have to be a big reward, but something would be nifty, and might help reduce the knock-and-run that leaves behind ambushes for other players.

You guys can't just throw pornography out like that without a NSFW warning.

I'd rather not be forced to turn the difficulty up to +3 or +4 to experience the updated enemy groups.

T2 inspirations are stronger because they're less common drops than T1 inspirations. T3 inspirations are stronger than T2 inspirations because they're even less likely to drop. This change would effectively equate to an increase their drop rates, which would necessitate a significant reduction in the drop rates of T1s to balance that. The end result would be T1s dropping far less frequently, T2s being moved to the current T3 drop rate, and T3s dropping about as often as converters or purples. Basically, it'd fuck over everyone who didn't buy and convert T1s in mass quantities, or buy T3s from the AH, and cram their e-mail full of inspirations. Not doing that sounds like a better idea.

I'd summon it. I'd summon it hard.

One of you abandon the mission and speak to the contact again. In all cases where missions are offered in a random order, you can synchronize with one or more other players by doing that.

Only possible if it's changed to summon a pseudo-pet that uses a PBAoE Heal, like the defender/corruptor ATO procs. And that would mean either the damage or the Heal would have to be reduced to about half its current potency, for balance. Given that it's an attack, I don't believe that would be an appropriate change.

I'm not here to pay attention, I'm here to get paid.

So, you're saying that you're not going to spend the next 79.5 years making 954 alternates to existing sets (presuming each takes one month to redesign with different secondary effects or mechanics, rebalance, test, fix, test again, fix again, beta test, fix again, beta test some more, tweak, release to live, fix again)?

Morality missions aren't subject to the tip mission limit, you can still acquire them even when you're at your tip limit, and acquire tips even if you have morality missions in your tip inventory. Keep killing stuff. They'll drop eventually. Tips can drop from -50 foes, so if you have one or two good AoEs, go to a low level hazard zone and blitz spawns. But you might want to double-check those two tips you have, one or both might be morality and you overlooked it.

If you consider being told to just ask for the new set or sets you want as "seeing a way forward", sure. But if that were the case, you wouldn't be arguing with the people who said it. Bad spin is bad.

There is no alternative, no modification that makes it work, with an idea like this because it not being feasible is an across the board problem, not an implementation problem. The why of it not working was very clearly explained. It doesn't work because the time and manpower required doesn't exist to copy every set two or three times, redesign the copies to do different things, fix problems, test them, et cetera. You're asking for up to 477 entire power sets to be duplicated at least once and possibly twice, with revisions to each duplicate, new mechanics, specific adjustments designed to differentiate each copy from the original or other copies, from people who take almost a year to make changes to fewer than half a dozen sets... and still make mistakes, like making Chilling Ray bypass the streak breaker entirely, or forgetting to remove the radius tags in Thunder Strike so it actually had a 10' radius, instead of the 7' imposed by those tags (it took them six months to fix that), and who have stated that they will not be making any more powers like the sentinel Master Brawler/Practiced Brawler fork because it was complicated and time-consuming. Your idea leaves no room for improvement, no possibility of refinement, because it's a non-starter. It is not feasible. The answers you've received have been as constructive as humanly possible because your proposal cannot be implemented in any way. Not just in the way you envisioned it, but at all. So unknot your knickers and move on.

+3 AV designed and intended to be tackled by a team and being debuffed by one defender that isn't even a specialist is such a blatantly contrived bullshit argument that it's pathetic. Live in shame.

In what way do you feel that the explanations, facts and references to developer statements which made it clear that the idea wasn't a feasible approach failed to be constructive?

If it hasn't happened after 20 years, it's not going to.

The powers are only the end point. Every time something, a mechanic, an effect, a modifier, an attribute, is changed, everything has to be checked, double-checked, tested and anything that's broken, fixed. Then the fixes have to be checked, double-checked, tested and possibly fixed. And they still miss things, because they don't have the time or manpower to find every problem. Even with scores of dedicated beta testers, bugs are missed, go live and have to be fixed later. Sleeps were changed to be auto-hit in PvE. If the power does something else, that still has to perform a hit roll. That introduced a problem with some powers, a problem they have yet to address. Sentinel Ice Blast's Chilling Ray and all versions of Frozen Aura have Sleeps, and auto-hit those Sleeps in PvE, but because that Sleep is auto-hit, the streak breaker counts that as a forced hit and will never force a hit for the damage roll. What this means is you can attack with Chilling Ray or Frozen Aura, or any power that Sleeps and deals damage, and miss an infinite number of times. The Sleep will take effect, but the damage won't, because the streak breaker never forces the damage to hit. No, they aren't going into the power definitions and making adjustments for Invulnerability or Earth Control on a weekly basis. But they are changing things in the engine, things which affect sets like Invulnerability and Earth Control, and that means they're constantly looking at powers to find problems caused by those changes. Active development means constant maintenance.

Doubling or tripling the number of available power sets, resulting in doubling or tripling the maintenance, doubling or tripling the work to fix bugs or make changes, and doubling or tripling the delay between updates isn't really within the scope of the existing development team. This isn't Ubisoft or Bethesda.

He wants to impose his preferences on the populace. Dictate how everyone else plays. Make others experience the game the way he thinks they should. Not the way it was designed to be experienced, not the way three development teams have agreed it should be experienced, not the way others enjoy experiencing it, but his way. Small wonder that he's been handed a bag of dicks and bottle of thin, watery catsup by a group of people who spend a not-insignificant amount of time beating fascists to death in the game.

I don't have Increase Flight Speed on this character, still happening.

My take is 60%. Welcome to da Fambly.

Further testing has given even less explicable results. When I started testing, I used several different characters, including one that had unlocked the Alpha slot, but not crafted any Alpha enhancements yet, and had not unlocked any of the other Incarnate slots. On that character, there was never a change in Swift's buff, regardless of how many times I zoned, or which map I zoned into (mission, base, world), so I focused my attention on level shifts. I went to the last page of my characters to access the one and only level 50 with no enhancements, an Elec/Rad dominator with no Veteran levels, no Incarnates unlocked and no buffs of any kind. Everything is empty, the stats are default. On this character, not one stat changes when I zone. This morning, I unslotted all of the Incarnate powers on the character in the screenshots in the bug report. All of them, all six, not a single Incarnate slot populated by anything... and Flight Speed was still lost when zoning. I zoned in and out several times, each time I changed zones, the character was reduced to 83.71 mph Flight Speed, then a few seconds later, went back up to the correct 84.30 mph. No level shifts, no Incarnates slotted at all. Swift's buff is still varying when it shouldn't be, though. I have Swift slotted with a single 50+5 Flight Speed IO. Replacing that with a level 50 IO results in 84 mph Flight Speed, 0.29 mph above the discrepancy, so boosters can't be the culprit. Removing the IO completely drops my speed down to 82.75, almost 1 mph less than the observed discrepancy, so the IO also can't be the culprit. And no combination of IO level and boosters that I can contrive in Mids' hits the discrepant speed. I went back to the unenhanced, default 50 Elec/Rad dominator and slotted a level 50 Run Speed IO in Swift and zoned several times. No change in Swift's buff, no change in movement speed. I repeated the test above with Sprint toggled on, and no enhancement slotted in Sprint, with the same results. Movement speed was consistent with every zone change. I repeated the test again with a level 25 Run Speed IO in Sprint, same result. Movement speed was consistent with every zone change. I repeated the test again with Infiltration toggled on, with no enhancement slotted, same result. Movement speed was consistent with every zone change. And on several of the Infiltration-using characters I tested, Infiltration only had a LotG: Defense/+Recharge IO in the default slot, no Run Speed enhancements of any kind, so I think enhancements can be conclusively removed from the list of possible culprits. Testing with a level 30 character, Swift's buff never varies. I have another level 50 character that currently has neither, but with a full suite of enhancements slotted, and like the Elec/Rad dominator, is not displaying variability in Swift. I'm going to run this character through some missions to see what happens when Veteran levels begin accruing. If that doesn't trigger the bug, I'll move back to Incarnates. All of the available evidence indicates that it has to be one or the other. Fuck. Why can't I find the easy bugs?