Luminara

One of the theoretically possible models of time travel is to link two singularities via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, then move one of the singularities. Doing this should allow travel into the past, through the wormhole. Thus, in theory, it's possible for your method to have the opposite effect, to create a temporal loop, continually sending us back to 2020, if it should happen that a second singularity were connected to yours. It would be 2020... forever.

I'd go the other direction. Debuffs at full defender scalar values, very limited or no self/ally buffing. Few toggles (i wouldn't give this archetype any toggles beyond status protection and movement options), de-emphasize control (absolutely no AoE controls, no more than one single-target Stun/Hold per set), and melee attacks at the Kheldian scalar. Focusing on debuffing would require attention to one's surroundings, planning, strategic positioning, tactical assessment of situations, careful use of powers or appropriately designed builds to avoid being left without a threat response... that would be both interesting to play, and an actually new archetype. Melee/buff or buff/melee, that's just a rehash of existing melee archetypes.

That's not evil, it's evolution. This is evil. Evil. Winged demons. Unholy minions of the underworld. Tormentors of every other living thing on the planet. Being an asshole isn't something evolved, it's a choice. Geese choose to be assholes. That makes them the most evil thing known. Oh, they also have serrated beaks AND TONGUES. You'll run afoul of that far, far more frequently than you'll be likely to encounter spiky duck wang.

That is baseless slander propagated by geese. Geese are evil. Ducks are angelic.

I know where the docks are. That's where you go to find sea men and master baiters. I want ducks. Ducks in my hands, ducks all over me, ducks ducks ducks! No ducks in the mouth, though. I don't eat friends.

I checked every channel for ducks. Every single channel. THERE ARE NO DUCKS IN ANY CHAT CHANNEL. The thread title is misleading, and I demand a refund. 😠

Certain situations can occur, like facing multiple Tsoo Yellow Ink Men even at +0/x1. You'll never encounter more than one critter with a Hold in a spawn at +0/x1. You'll only encounter more than one critter with a Stun in spawns under similar conditions once in a while, and then it's only a chance to Stun. But Sleeps... yeah. You can be chain-Slept and killed even when the damage is minor. It's a long, slow, horrible way to be defeated. That's what makes Sleeps worse than Holds or Stuns. Even at default difficulty, it's the most prevalent status effect, and it's not dangerous because it's widespread, it's dangerous because when critters with Sleeps can spawn, they can spawn en masse.

DS9, Season 1, Episode 19 - Duet. This is when I fell completely in love with the show. This episode. Summary follows: I was hooked at that moment. The acting, the character development, the intensity of the stories... DS9 did everything right. It didn't always have great writing, amazing acting, perfect stories, but it was always better than anything else that was on. And no, it wasn't Roddenberry's Trek. Roddenberry's Trek portrayed people as perfect most of the time, and as inspiring as it might have been, it's hard to see ourselves in those shoes. We aren't perfect. We aren't angels. We can't relate easily to that. DS9 showed people as they were, and as they wanted to be (Roddenberry's idealistic representation), without glossing over the flaws and character defects, and that made it accessible to everyone. It made it relatable. It was honest about people. It acknowledged that people are flawed in so many ways, but it also showed that in trying to meet that ideal, in struggling with ourselves, with our demons, with others, and constantly trying to meet expectations we know we can't hope to achieve, that's when we become better people. That's DS9. That's what made it the best Trek.

If you voted for proper pizza, without pineapple, you would've been authorized to use a montage from a good Rocky film. 😛

I do. I created a similarly restricted character in Issue 5. Don't waste time on Acrobatics. Stuns and Sleeps are far more common than Holds, and you'll have protection from neither. That was one of the problems I ran into, and why I eventually respeced out of Acrobatics and changed tactics. Your best anti-mez is going to come from Air Superiority or Rune of Protection. Air Superiority is Knock Up, and it's not a chance for KU, it's guaranteed (barring KU protection and animation issues, both of which occasionally occur). Put the mezzer on its ass and keep it there, and it can't mez you. Of course, you can't do that with Air Superiority alone. Even if you drop the recharge time low enough to spam it, it doesn't override its own animation, so it won't knock a critter up when it's in the process of being knocked up or standing up. You need to chain it with one or more other attacks, and you need to use it at appropriate intervals, meaning, when the critter is back on its feet. Rune of Protection is complete protection from status effects, but it's on a long click timer. It can't be made permanent. Best you can likely hope for is about 50% up time, but if you proceed slowly, or use it as an always-available Break Free, and don't deliberately push up the difficulty so you're facing multiple mezzers in every spawn, you should be fine with it. Barring either of those options, the Presence Pool has two Fears; the Fighting pool has Boxing and Cross Punch, both of which have a chance to Stun; and the Force of Will pool has a couple of powers with chance for KB. Stacking your own mez is just as effective as having status protection, and if your primary/secondary offers anything useful, you can leverage that in conjunction with pool options. Building up massive +Def also works, if you're using IO sets, and with several pool powers offering +Def, it's reasonably easy to make it work, especially if you're layering it with -ToHit (which is in Weaken Resolve, a Force of Will pool power). When you make it to 35+ and can start looking at *PPs, you'll have additional options. More mez of your own, more soft control, more +Def, et cetera, and might be able to redesign your character around that. Lastly, learn which mechanics you can abuse. Powers which cause critters to scatter, like Caltrops, to make one example, can prevent mez simply by keeping the mezzer occupied with running away.

The writing is supposedly better on the other side, so people play villains. That doesn't make them villains, or villainous, merely discerning. Also, I play heroes, and I'm nice. Ish. Look, my cats like me, so shut up. 😛

By examining the way it interacts with other powers and determining whether the cost is worth the investment. Sometimes one or the other is perfect. Sometimes one has better stats, but doesn't bring anything particularly useful. Sometimes neither is worthwhile. It's not what any one power does in, of and by itself, but what it does in conjunction with other powers. If the T1 is "bad", I flip the primary/secondary and look at it from the other archetype. Trick Arrows is, obviously, going to be my example. I've never been a fan of Entangling Arrow. I'm still not a fan of it, even with the shiny new 20% -Res added in I27. It's just not a compelling power for me. So I typically skip it if I can. It's one of the reasons I rarely play corruptors - I love TA, but I don't love everything in TA, and I don't want to be forced to waste a power selection on something I won't use. I'm probably not representative of the majority, but I just don't like powers which are designed only to be used in extreme emergencies or once in a blue moon. That's what most T9 powers have been, historically, and I've rarely bothered with them. Some T9s, I will take. EMP Arrow. Rain of Arrows. Some, I never take and never regret skipping, like scrapper and brute T9s. I can always find another way to do what I want to do. Does it do something contrary to what I intend to do with this character? Knocking foes out of patches, for example, or DoTs which break Sleeps when Sleeps are my primary form of damage mitigation. Does it do something that another power does, but not as well? Then it's probably not worth using. Does it fit into the attack chain? If it's an attack that doesn't actually serve a purpose, or throws off the flow of the chain, it might be better left unselected. Do I have to build in a special way to make this power viable? Sometimes a power looks really good, until you realize you have to redesign your entire character to make it work, or slot your powers in ways you'd rather not. Is it necessary? Often, we consider something appealing in the planner, but when we finalize our character at 50 and start looking at it again, we realize it serves no purpose, or offers nothing compelling. But, really, only you can decide if any power is worth it or not. Sometimes, the animation alone makes a power worth having. Sometimes, powers are worthwhile as IO set mules. Sometimes, we just like to have a power "just in case". Sometimes, we take a power we don't need and never intend to use, because we're fond of it. Pick what you like. Respec later if you want or need to. The worst that can happen is that you learn a little more about the game, what you like, what you need and what you can do.

A video game originally designed to allow players to vicariously experience being a superhero was always going to appeal to a specific subset of the population. Guardians of the peace. Defenders of justice. Protectors of the innocent. Promoters of equality. It stands to reason that the forums would reflect that.

Several months and pages of discussion, and only a couple of brief DS9 mentions and side conversations. YOU ARE ALL DISAPPOINTMENTS TO ME AND YOUR OTHER PARENTAL UNIT.

Do you see this, boys and girls? This is your brain on pineapple pizza.

Any attempts to stage a coup d'état in my Lumiverse will result in having the walls of reality collapsed on and about your head. Now remove yourself, and your gastronomical horrors, from your cubicle. And you just lost your severance pay.

You're both fired. SECURITY! Escort these people from the building.

Keep up, slowpokes. 😛

It's bad in Croatoa. Striga wasn't much better. I think tweaking powexec_location to raise the target location slightly above ground level would probably fix that issue, as well as others reported when using other powers with the command.

The fuckiness to which I was referring was the DDoS activity, which was definitely occurring.

4/6 Clouded Senses and 18% +Def, or 4/6 Dark Watcher's Despair and 16% +Def is all that takes. Combat Jumping/Hover + Weave + both 3% +Def (All) IOs nets you everything you need to complement Flash Arrow. But that really emphasizes what I'm saying - 18% isn't much without Flash Arrow, and if you're waiting for Glue or OSA to recharge, you're going to see a lot more incoming damage when that ambush comes waltzing up from behind, intent on giving you a thorough physical by removing your organs and checking them visually. TA is pro-active, not reactive or passive, which creates the mechanical hole that other sets don't experience. They have heals, they have toggles which persist on defeated foes, they have PBAoE Defense/KB/whatever, they have reactive and passive options which help them mitigate damage even when they aren't actively aware of or countering it. TA is definitely not overpowered. As long as we're weak to ambushes and summons, we'll never have to worry about nerfs. The debuff values of every power could be quadrupled and we'd still have that the potential to be squashed like insects on a windshield by an ambush or a critter summoning reinforcements while our key powers are recharging. Us knowing how to manipulate the game to make TA perform well doesn't equate to TA performing above standard, or above the HC team's expectations.

This was followed by a redirect to a Captcha page. Definitely some fuckiness occurring.

Heh. Parthenia's +Def is shit. I refuse to build for soft-capped Def and maxed -ToHit at the same time, it renders one or the other pointless, and I refuse to allow Flash Arrow to be pointless. I play TA to use TA powers, not to have a bunch of mules for set bonuses so I can run around not using TA powers. +Def, for me, on my TAs, is extra, not a primary goal. Just enough to close the gap between Flash Arrow's debuff and the soft cap, and no more. That allows me to build more well-rounded characters and pursue set bonuses I want, rather than spending my entire slotting budget on mitigation and leaving them weak in a wider variety of ways. I'm perfectly comfortable with TA having a weakness, and having to live with that weakness in order to build my characters the way I envision them, because I spent years dealing with multiple TA weaknesses and having to find ways to compensate for them. I just wanted to point out that TA is not god mode, that it does have a hole, just like everything else in the game. That hole is with certain mechanics, rather than damage types or positions, but it's no less a limiter than other holes in other sets. If anything, it adds to the game, expanding on what we define as a weakness/hole, and offers the potential for future sets with similarly unconventional weaknesses.

Forums were as slow as a standard mid-day for me, at 4 a.m. this morning, which was abnormal. Nothing unusual in my latency in the game, so it wasn't on my end, or, for a change, Verizon being the king dick of the universe. Then a DDoS prevention screen from the server came up when I refreshed one of my open forum tabs a few minutes ago, and several pop-up post peeks just say "there was a problem displaying this" or something when I hover over posts. DDoS seems most likely, given that page that came up. Questions are, who and why?