Luminara

In the flight feedback thread, I outline how a player can attain an unsuppressed Jump speed of 59.05 mph (63.31 with the Agility Radial Paragon alpha Incarnate ability), to which you responded with the following - It doesn't really matter whether you intended 54% to mean 54 mph, or 54% of capped Fly speed (55.23 mph), for the purpose of this response, because it clearly demonstrates that your assertion about ground-based characters lacking equivalent unsuppressed movement is wrong. I'm interested in how you arrived at this conclusion, that characters on the ground lack comparable unsuppressed movement in comparison to flying characters, considering that you posted that response more than two days before you made this incorrect statement.

Haven't got a clue. I know I have roughly 50 million on the character I'm levelling right now, but beyond that, I haven't been keeping track. The low market prices and ease of acquiring inf* have alleviated any pressure to collect it. If I need it, it's a few converter rolls away, so I don't pay attention to it.

It's basic food preservation knowledge. Freezing, dehydrating, smoking, canning, salting, pickling, et cetera. Human bodies are still mammalian bodies, and we've been preserving mammalian bodies for food for millennia. Freezing would still leave the body subject to desiccation, and possible aerobic decay, though. For optimal storage, it should be frozen in water, completely submerged, to prevent air from reaching it, or sealed in plastic with a vacuum sealer, then frozen.

Cryptic and Paragon freely ignored fundamental concepts of their own design whenever they felt like it, but never, and we have the patch notes proving this, thought far enough ahead to fully appreciate the ramifications of every change they made. They gave status effects to multiple critters, to lowly minions, with the intent that everyone would have to pay something, in some way, to deal with it. Tankers and scrappers would have to use their status protection toggles instead of their Defense/Resistance toggles, blasters would have to obliterate the mezzers as quickly as possible, controllers and defenders would have to lock down the mezzers immediately. And then... they just abandoned that plan. They changed part of their design, and disregarded the impact on the unchanged parts. Animation times, to make an example, weren't a balance factor at that time, so the fact that defenders, controllers and corruptors (i'd include masterminds here, but henches can be viewed as extreme damage toggles that don't drop when the character is mezzed, for this discussion) had to pay an animation time tax to deal with status effects wasn't even something they'd considered. Even when it occurred to them that animation times were relevant and had an impact on the game, they still did nothing to address the discrepancy. They compounded one oversight with another oversight. The status effect systems in place were created for a completely different model of the game, one that hasn't existed since Issue 1, and only squishies are still expected to adhere to that aspect of that model, while every other archetype runs around in a vastly different model. You liken this to Jenga, where pulling out one piece puts the whole thing at risk of collapsing, but here we are, almost two decades later, and it still hasn't collapsed, despite everything that's been done. They ignored the fundamental concepts of their own design, and created this problem in doing so. Not us, the players, and not us, the people pointing out their mistake, them. Cryptic and Paragon. Blame the people responsible, not the people responding.

Suppression was added some time before Issue 5, but not before Issue 4, as far as I've been able to determine (i'm almost 50, so my memory of what was in Issues and patches fifteen years ago is... spotty). Prior to I4, travel powers had a 50% ToHit debuff (SS and SJ had that added in... I2 or I3, to " bring them in line with Fly"). TopDoc's movement guide, dated June 20, 2005, refers to travel suppression as "new". I'm not going to dig through the Wayback Machine to locate the threads that travel suppression spawned when it was added in order to nail down an exact date, but I do recall that many players conflated that addition with the implementation of PvP specifically because they were both added around the same time. As @Jacke and @Wavicle have noted, though, the developer explanation at the time was to clamp down on players using travel powers to zip in and out of combat range, with no reference to PvP as a motivator. The HC team disabled it in PvP zones, not Paragon, so there's no reason to believe Paragon was reconsidering their stance on it. And the HC team likely left it enabled in PvE for the same reason many things exist in PvE, because critters are morons who need all the help they can get. Suppression doesn't affect base movement, only specific powers, like pool travel powers, Ninja Run and the various clones, etc. If you want to get around travel suppression, pick up +Movement Speed bonuses and use Hover, Combat Jumping and/or Sprint, and slot up your Fitness powers. As I previously indicated, Hurdle + CJ + Movement bonuses + Agility Radial can push you up well past the original Fly speed cap. You can also make Hover as fast as the original Fly speed cap with numerous builds and creative slotting (Accelerate Metabolism is godly for this, for instance). There are also two +7.5% Run Speed IOs, one unique (Synapse's Shock), and one which can be slotted five times (Gift of the Ancients), so you can build up a pretty decent amount of running speed using the same IO slotting methodology you'd use for jumping or Hovering. Hover will cap at the old flight speed cap, jumping and running will be above 60 mph if you're "doin' it right", so you'll be more than fast enough for any combat situation.

That was addressed in 2005. The durations of status effects inflicted by minion class critters was reduced across the board. The purpose of relating that experience wasn't to give an example of what happens when we're mezzed now, but to emphasize the difference in survivability when mezzed and to indicate that I've experienced this issue from every side (well, i've never been a critter, so i don't know how they feel about being mezzed to death by players...).

The simplest, most direct and obvious measurements I can think of would be how rapidly you can move from spawn to spawn, how quickly you can exit damage patches (which would also give you a damage metric with which to compare to your live build), how it feels when chasing a runner, things of that nature. Test it in actual combat, see how quickly it takes you into and out of melee range, and into and out of ranged attack range (for example, can you fast snipe a critter and fly away quickly enough to prevent retaliation?). Can you reposition your cones more easily than before? Line up a couple of critters quickly for Cross Punch? Are you able to better control the aggro you have by leading foes where you want them to be without waiting as long? You're examining combat mobility and how it affects your approach to the game, so looking specifically at it from that perspective, using it in missions and during combat, would tell you what you want to know. Being flight-related, improved combat mobility may not be of immediate obvious benefit, since having three degrees of free movement is already pretty powerful in relation to what most critters can respond to, but there are still ways you can test, analyze and make conclusions about how well, or poorly, Evasive Maneuvers is working as a combat mobility power.

Everyone is going to have different concepts of what's "fast enough", but my personal breakpoint for running is 26 mph. Anything less than that, I'm pushing that W key harder and harder, subconsciously trying to squeeze a little more out of it. But you're right, most people don't look at the movement speeds beyond "Am I at the cap" and "Am I debuffed". The best way to provide evidence of something related to movement is to show it in action. For example, when I started using Hurdle as my only travel power, just showing up at the mission door before the entire team had assembled was all the proof most people needed to realize that it wasn't as restrictive as they'd thought. Using Hurdle + CJ, I could leap over spawns and fire off something like Explosive Arrow at the right moment to turn the KB into KD, and others could see that I wasn't just madly hopping around the room. Repositioning by leaping, to get out of dodge, to pull critters back into Glue Arrow's Slow patch, to line up Tenebrous Tentacles better, showed others that even without Hover, one could hover blast effectively. Speed is an important factor in combat mobility, but showing what one can do with that speed and mobility is just as important. Being fast enough, whatever that may mean on an individual basis, isn't quite enough to make something compelling. Seeing what one can do, though, makes a much stronger impression.

I'm leaning heavily toward the prison wallet theory.

To expand on that, with two 50+5 Jump IOs in Hurdle and 67.5% +Movement bonuses, and CJ toggled on, you can jump at 59.05 mph. 63.31 mph with Agility Radial Paragon. Unsuppressed. Eat my dust, @Jimmy. 😜

Fantastic idea. @Jimmy, do me a solid and disable all toggle/click status protections for a week, would you, dear? Nothing would go further toward highlighting the problems with status effects than this. Make everyone equal by making everyone a squishie. Critters can move in Co*. They're not leashed to a specific point on the floor where they spawn. Little fuckers spend enough time running all over the map when you start to deal some damage to them, so I can say with a high degree of certainty that they can walk over to your melee character. For which they're taxed, paying in animation time. There isn't a single control, soft control or debuff in the entire game which doesn't have an animation time attached. The squishie pays by spending time on every single critter he/she wants to control or debuff. Then the squishie pays again with drastically lower damage scalars. We're playing at a gross disadvantage in damage output because we're "force multipliers". This ignores that all sets don't have force multiplier powers like -Res, or great defensive powers like +Def/-ToHit, it's just universally applied. And pays a third time with drastically lower HP and "force multiplier" buffs which only affect teammates, controls and debuffs with hit checks (ever wonder why i adored TA for so long? no fucking around with hit checks on key powers). What, exactly, is the tax on status protection? Something on the order of 0.26 endurance per second? What? No dodge animations interrupting your attack chain? No damage debuff applied to reduce your damage output as compensation for having always-on status protection? No HP debuff? No reduction in Resistance or Defense? Nothing but that little toggle cost? You needing to close to melee range in order to use your powers doesn't mean the same thing doesn't happen to squishies. All controls, debuffs and ranged attacks aren't set to 80' in this game, and all squishie primaries/secondaries don't come with built-in Stealth options. Squishies are mezzed before they can act in exactly the same manner you're trying to portray melee being affected if they didn't have status protection. You know what the real difference is? Squishies don't have status protection, so they actually do go through this scenario. Seen, mezzed, fucked. There is no range limitation on that, or bonus lube for having a ranged set. Story time! This one goes way, way back. My first 50, The Black Whip, an Invulnerability/Super Strength tanker, was bopping around the Rikti Crash Site. Out of nowhere, I hear the sound of toggles dropping. I'm looking around and I see a blue light. Sapper hit her with his sappy beam, drained all of her endurance and shut down everything in a split second. That sapper then proceeded to poke her with his sappy beam gun... for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes. 20. T W E N T Y. It took that long for the miserable little twat nozzle to defeat her. All it did was poke her, keep reapplying that mez and dealing a small amount of damage. Every time I thought the mez was done and started to move away, it poked her again. I was sobbing by the time Whip collapsed and I could revive at the hospital. Bawling. Snot running down my lips, the whole deal, it was disgusting. It was the worst experience I've ever had in this game. In any game. Shortly after that, Cryptic toned down mez on critters. It's something that can't happen to melee characters now, at least not the way that happened. The mez won't last long enough to prevent one from turning a status protection toggle back on... and if the mez was what shut down the status protection toggle, as opposed to endurance drain, it won't even have to be toggled back on, it'll just start working again, because they also changed how toggles are affected by mez around the same general time. But it can still happen to squishies. It does. And squishies don't have 3000 HP, like Whip did. They don't have auto resistances, like Whip did. Mezzed squishies can't queue up a high damage attack and one-shot a mezzer when they're free, like a scrapper or brute can. I've been in both sets of shoes. I know the deal, and I know that there's a disparity at work here. You need status protection to be able to do anything at all, on a melee character? The exact same truth applies to any character. Mezzed is mezzed, friend. It doesn't matter if you were mezzed from 60' or 6', you're still mezzed. The problem with the system now is that when your melee character is mezzed, he/she is ten times as likely to move on without a hitch, whereas when my squishie is mezzed, she's in serious trouble. I can't do anything when I'm mezzed any more than you can, but you can survive being mezzed much better than I can, even if all you do is take a break to make coffee. If mez is supposed to matter in this game, if it's supposed to mean something, why does it only matter, why does it only mean something, to those without status protection? Why is it only relevant to the characters with the lowest HP, lowest damage scalars, highest animation taxes for dealing with it? If it's intended to be an important part of gameplay, why isn't it equally important for everyone, rather than only important to squishies? If mez is supposed to be a cornerstone of the game and something that all players have to deal with, why aren't you paying the same taxes for it that I do?

Blasters can continue to use their T1 and T2 attacks through mez. And they have higher base HP than defenders/corruptors/controllers. Controllers have the lowest damage scalars, like masterminds, 0.55 melee and 0.55 ranged, and none of their primary powers deal much damage. How much damage does a mezzed defender or corruptor deal? What is the value of a detoggled buff/debuff, or a buff/debuff that can't be used because the character is mezzed? How much benefit does a character see from a 25% Resistance debuff if the character can't attack? How much survivability is added by a 15% ToHit debuff if the toggle which kept the debuff active was deactivated by mez? On long recharge timers, making then unusable for every spawn. And they have hit checks. Remind me, what hit checking does Fallout Shelter perform? Is that power only available once every other spawn, or every third spawn, or once per mission? You left out KB, KD, KU, sniping, Hover, temp pet tanking and a few other staples. I'm not new to Co*. I'm not new to playing squishies in Co*. I'm not even new to playing the weakest, least effective squishies. I also know that a tank can now deal more damage, more quickly, and with none of the risk I face on my squishies. That's not balance. Tanks were supposed to be a low damage archetype, that was their trade-off for being the most survivable. Now they're high damage and maximum survivability. I'm not complaining about tanks, mind you, I'm simply using that as an example of the imbalance between squishies and other archetypes. Squishies are the only ones being held, strictly, to an old, dead standard, taxed out the ass for reasons that aren't valid in the game these days, and it's inappropriate. I'm not posting about Rune of Protection. I don't have it on any of my existing characters. I don't have any builds planned to use it. I'm neither for nor against the change to it. I am posting about the gross inequity in status protection. Treating squishies like a lower class citizen in regard to status effects is a festering wound in this game, a cankerous boil that needs to be lanced. The longer it continues untreated, the worse it will be, and the more painful the treatment when it finally happens. The inequitable archetypal taxation has to be addressed. The only two outcomes are resolution, or revolution.

Using controls takes time. If you're facing three Tsoo Yellow Ink Men, that's time you have to spend mezzing each one. Does Unyielding work in a similar manner, forcing you to perform an animation for every mez you encounter? No, you're not rooted in place and locked out of your other powers while the toggle is dealing with the mez for you. This allows the toggle/click status protection user to progress more rapidly and respond instantly to other threats, while the squishie is forced to pay an animation tax just to proceed. Using controls can fail. There's always a 5% chance for a control to miss. Does Active Defense miss? No, of course not. Active Defense ensures that those three Tsoo Yellow Ink Men won't put your character to Sleep. But controls, due to the hit check mechanic, offer no similar guarantee. Controls don't deal much damage. Squishies already have low damage scalars, and they're required to use their least damaging powers to lead fights so they can prevent themselves from being mezzed. Meanwhile, other archetypes are leading with their strongest attacks, because they can ignore mez. They mop up all three of those Ink Men in seconds, while the squishies are still trying to prevent themselves from being mezzed. Break Frees aren't Rages, or Insights, or Lucks. Archetypes with toggle/click status protection can afford to bring some variety to their inspiration tray. Not only are they exempt from the status protection animation tax, and the potential for missing with their status protection, and dealing more damage by using their more powerful attacks to start fights, but they can also carry more combat inspirations to improve their efficiency and speed. Range is poor at providing defensive benefits in Co*. It doesn't offer increased Defense. There's no +Res_For_Being_At_Range modifier. Enemies can move into melee range. If the squishie's controls, the controls he/she was forced to use to make up for not having status protection, actually did the job, then range becomes a penalty, not a bonus. Those enemies are, presumably, mezzed, but the squishie is paying yet another tax, that of ranged damage being lower than melee damage. Don't say "teams". Cryptic started moving us away from that solution a long, long time ago. Paragon did nothing to steer us back toward it. The HC team opened up multiple "team only" avenues to solo players, so clearly, they're no more intent on forcing players to team for basic things than the previous developers were. The "team if you want status protection" horse died so long ago that it's not even a decomposing pile of bones at this point, it's dust. Squishies have to pay animation taxes, damage taxes and HP taxes "for having debuffs and controls" (everyone has some controls, and some debuffs, but everyone doesn't pay the same taxes, oddly). Any one of those three would be a sufficient limitation. All three together is... well, it leads to threads like this.

If you don't have toggle or click status protection: You're paying an animation time cost to protect yourself by pre-emptively mezzing the mezzers, opening your fights with a low-to-no damage mez; you're forced to use that mez on multiple foes, which ramps up the animation time cost significantly; and you're always at risk of missing, leaving yourself open to mez and unable to retaliate. OR You're paying an animation time cost to protect yourself by ToHit debuffing the mezzers, opening your fights with a click or toggle which deals no damage. These are unlikely to miss and more likely to be AoE/PBAoE, but still leave the player open to lucky hits which inflict mez, and in the case of offensive debuff toggles shut down. OR You're keeping your inspiration tray, e-mail and/or AH inventory full of Break Frees, which means you have no spare slots for heal/damage/defense/endurance inspirations, and are still subject to a hard limit, depending on when you run out of Break Frees. OR You're sacrificing powers in your build to acquire as much Defense as possible, through pool powers and/or IO set bonuses, in hopes of preventing status effects. OR You're dipping into Sorcery/Melee Core/Clarion. The arguments are that there's a massive discrepancy in how much time some archetypes have to spend preventing themselves from being mezzed, in comparison to how little time other archetypes have to spend performing the same basic function; that archetypes with status protection toggles and clicks have no 5% chance for their protection to fail and leave them helpless; that the archetypes most capable of taking the hits while mezzed are also the ones least likely to be mezzed, whereas the archetypes least capable of taking the hits while mezzed are the most likely to be mezzed; that reducing the duration of RoP will lead players to pursue the other options more, thus lessening diversity; that carrying around 20 Break Frees means not carrying around an assortment of other inspirations, thereby decreasing progression speed. More basically, the argument is that there's a serious balance problem in how status effects affect different archetypes, and some players feel that this problem needs to be addressed, rather than one of the partial solutions nerfed.

Lies. He flipped them.

Looking at this thread caused my latest respec to fail. I want a refund. And a ponicorn.

It's not about what might happen. It's not about being right, or proving someone else wrong. It's not about initiating change. It's about what is happening. It's about understanding, so we can approach discussions from an informed perspective. It's about bettering ourselves by asking questions and looking for answers. If the only thing that comes out of this thread is a little more knowledge, it's worth continuing indefinitely.

HOOP! There it is! HOOP! There it is! Also, I chase the ones that make squeaky noises. They're more fun to catch than the ones that just lie down and accept their fate.

Batman has Batsuits stashed all over the world, and keeps a suit in his briefcase, and in his Bentley, and in the Batmobile, and in the Batjet, and in his office in Wayne Tower, and... well, you get the point. The X-Men have suits stashed with their transportation. The Flash has a suit in his special ring. Hulk no wear boots! Puny footwear! Superman... is apparently always wearing his suit, but where does he hide his boots? Does he wear shoes a couple of sizes larger than he'd normally wear so he can wear his super suit boots all of the time (with socks over the super suit boots (wouldn't that force him to wear shoes three sizes too large (at this point, he's either running around with Rob Liefeld feet, or clown shoes)))? Are they hidden in the old prison wallet? Does he make new boots every time he changes, using his Super Cobbling power? I should've asked myself this question 40 years ago... but how often do you look at a man's shoes?

Wonder Woman and Legionette. Best super-team ever.

I'm attracted to desolation. Wandering the wasteland in the Fallout 3 and up games, looking inside the remnants of houses, scouring office buildings to see what little props and easter egg scenes the developers set up, walking the length and breadth of the sewers and subways, just taking it all in. I do this in reality, too. There are hundreds of abandoned homes scattered all over the counties near my cabin. I stop once in a while when I see one, go inside, see what kind of life someone had, try to figure out when the last time was that anyone lived there. I'm looking at the past, but I'm also looking at the future, because everything will fall down, eventually. Our impermanence sits all around us, hinting at what's to come. So Boomtown is my favorite map. It's the most desolate and ruined. I also hate Boomtown more than any other map, because I can't go inside any of those decrepit buildings. I can't explore. Unless I have a mission in that zone, I can't enter a single structure. It's a harsh reminder of how lacking some of the development in this game was. They could've echoed what Bethesda did with Fallout 3. Instead, it's just empty and unused, a waste of potential.

No. Make the same character, power-level it up if you prefer, enroll the new one in a different SG. Rinse, repeat as necessary to play the same character across multiple SGs. The only real difference, then, is the name.