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Luminara

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Everything posted by Luminara

  1. I'm not seeing anything, since I can't download the beta files due to my limited Internet capability. That's why I asked. That's always been the case, yes. But the case was previously half, not three quarters. Assuming that everyone reads the beta forums, goes to Brainstorm to test and stays up to date with changes is a mistake. If the power doesn't specifically tell players that they lose most of the Defense, the older players who think they know how the power works based on previous experience and/or comparison to other powers with similar effects are going to be unpleasantly surprised, the new players who don't know how the power works are going to be unpleasantly surprised, and both groups are going to raise a ruckus. Don't expect a nebulously worded patch note and word of mouth to do the job. The description needs to be clear on what's happening. We don't need a 75 page thread of complaints and arguments about Stealth three days after P2 goes live.
  2. That should be specified in the description. "If, however, you attack while using this power, you will be discovered and will lose your Stealth and 75% of the Defense bonus."
  3. Well, if no-one's going to address the questions, I'll go ahead and raise some potential issues anyway. Presuming the in combat Defense totals in this version of Stealth are half of the out of combat totals, the power is now better than Superior Invisibility. That's a first tier pool power out-performing a controller primary power. As it stands, it's also better than Weave, a fourth tier pool power, since it offers twice as much out of combat Defense and total invisibility to boot. That doesn't strike me as appropriate. If, however, the added Defense is all out of combat, and all lost when the character clicks a glowie/is hit/whatever, then it should be noted that the in-combat Defense buff is only the original amount. That kind of information that needs to be front and center. If the Defense only suppresses to half, you're going to have Illusion controllers and a hell of a lot of people who invested in Fighting to get to Weave shitting themselves with rage; and if the Defense suppresses to a fourth, and it's not clearly and directly noted in the power's description, you're going to have an angry mob shouting about bait and switch tactics. Neither is desirable. And regarding Infiltration, I think the Defense portion is a poor choice. As a means of preventing foes from hitting the character during travel, it's too low to make any difference, especially considering the Stealth component of the power. The total is too low to have any appreciable combat value, either, presuming half of it is retained when engaging in combat activities. 0.875% Defense, even with archetype modifiers, isn't going to be worth slotting. This gives the impression that the Defense is only there to allow for slotting certain global/unique IOs, which, in turn, suggests that we're taking the first step away from SOs as the baseline. I think +Perception or +Sleep protection would be more befitting, to reflect the preternatural alertness of someone moving rapidly but stealthily. I'm not going to pitch a hissy fit if these powers go live without change, obviously, but I do think they'll come back to bite you (the HC team) on the asses if these points aren't addressed.
  4. Anyone else envision Igneous critters in cubicles, sipping coffee, tapping away on spreadsheets and muttering about TPS reports?
  5. Is that out of combat Defense added to the power as a discrete component, or was the overall Defense increased? Point of the question is to determine whether the power's in-combat Defense is half of the new out of combat value, or half of the old out of combat value. Meaning, is the in-combat Defense 1.75% or 3.5%? And is there any in-combat Defense here?
  6. Have you ever built anything out of Legos? In each package, they include a little instruction booklet or fold-out to show you how to put the pieces together and make whatever's on the packaging. The game is Legos. Archetypes are the little instruction booklets. You can follow the instructions, but you can also throw them away and just make anything you want.
  7. Zoning causing missions to be removed from the navigation window. powexec_location target failing to activate a power on a target within range, forcing the player to switch to manual targeting and activation. Having to adjust the camera every time I log in. PBAoEs not hitting anything because a lag spike fooled the server into believing I wasn't in the middle of the spawn when I activated them. Needing two tray slots for every macro - one for the macro, one for the power so you know when the it's recharged. Pop-up windows. Reward text obscuring everything on the screen for a couple of seconds. Frames per second turning into seconds per frame when multiple Nemesis Jaegers fire off their booms at the same time. That weird Stealth fade that still leaves some things, like masks, visible, and causes the entire character to flicker like a television with bad antenna reception when you pan the camera around. Contacts who offer only street sweeps and Security Chief missions. Leveling up mid-mission and receiving a reduced mission/story arc completion reward as a result. Spelling errors in the game's text. Transit helicopters, and the Striga boats, having ten year long pauses between clicking and zoning. The volume of the sound effects for the portals in Portal Corp., the waste outlets in the sewers, and Hover. Having to set up power trays all over again after a respec. That jarring moment when a mission boots you for failing to protect X. Escorts/hostages failing to follow Stealthed characters. The screwy hit boxes on destructible submarines. Blinded lasting forever and a day. That one neighborhood in Faultline which plays music for five minutes.
  8. Some people are natural leaders. Some people have been trained to lead. Most people fall into neither of these categories, and even in an imaginary world, even if it's just selecting a mission, they feel that it's beyond their capabilities. You can't coax people into accepting a leadership role any more than you can coax them into doing anything else that they don't intuitively understand, or haven't learned. They have to realize that there's no harm in trying, and no reason not to try, but that realization won't come in a chat window. It has to come from looking within oneself. Be patient, share your knowledge and encourage those who are interested. Let the rest be teammates.
  9. Is there a transcript available?
  10. Travel power combat sets. Flight could circle an enemy and swoop down for one attack, pick up a critter and drop it from a height for another, etc. Leaping could perform multiple types of kicks and attacks involving parkour. Combat which actively utilizes travel powers, rather than simply exist in the same game with travel powers. Unfortunately, I suspect most of the attacks would be slow, in terms of animation time, and extremely unpopular.
  11. When I have an epiphany while staring at Mids'. When I wake up at 3:43 a.m. and log into the game before putting the kettle on the stove for my morning coffee. When I level up to the mid-teens and realize I should stop long enough to slot some enhancements. When I don't mind using powers with longer animations. When I try to design a second costume and give up after an hour because the first one is already perfect.
  12. Today is π Day. RESPECT THE π.
  13. I'm one of the most aggressively unconventional players, bending archetype boundaries and making the game play my way. You're defending a pre-packaged, shrink-wrapped archetype and rabidly attacking people who suggest changes simply because you're comfortable. Which of us needs to crawl out of the box? I make it part of my life philosophy not to associate with people who advocate and encourage criminal behavior, say, for instance, trying to convince the HC team to commit fraud. You'll just have to play with yourself.
  14. Take a look at melee archetypes. They have attack sets paired with defensive sets. Their defensive sets, generally speaking, are character-oriented. In other words, clicks or toggles which improve their survivability by increasing the character's Defenses, Resistances, Regeneration and other character attributes, or affect multiple foes simultaneously, such as PBAoE debuff toggles/clicks, to accomplish the same goal via reverse action (debuffing ToHit instead of buffing Defense, or debuffing Damage instead of buffing Resistance). Effectively, they gain the benefit of mitigation on every foe they encounter, which gives them the survivability they need to do what they were designed to do. That's synergy between melee attack sets and melee defensive sets. Dominators lack that. The control sets don't synergize with the assault sets in that way. Single-target controls provide single-target mitigation, which decreases in effectiveness as the size of the spawn increases. A dominator isn't going to be able to Hold or Stun 17 critters with his/her T2 single-target control. That dominator's single-target Immobilization does even less in terms of mitigation, and the same statement can be applied to the AoE Immobilizations. The very low amount of mitigation offered by the first three powers in every control set fails to synergize with the assault sets in the way defensive power sets synergize with attack sets. This means dominators are reliant on their AoE/PBAoE controls for effective mitigation. However, most of those AoE/PBAoE controls are on long recharge timers, which restricts their availability. This is also not synergistic with assault sets in the way defensive power sets synergize with attack sets. A scrapper with a +Res toggle active doesn't have to wait for the toggle to refresh between spawns. A brute with a +Def toggle doesn't have to worry about suddenly losing his/her mitigation halfway through a fight because the +Def "wore off". And even the clicks in defensive sets are designed with short enough recharge times, long enough durations, or balanced recharge:duration times, allowing them to be effectively permanent. AoE/PBAoE Holds have extremely long recharge times and comparatively short durations. They can't be made permanent, by any means, even under the effects of Domination. AoE/PBAoE Stuns can be overlapped for a few seconds, but that introduces the problem of blowing your AoE/PBAoE Stun to finish a fight, then having to wait for it to recharge before starting the next fight. Do scrappers have to wait for their +Res toggles to recharge before jumping into another spawn? Do brutes have to go make a cup of coffee while they wait for their +Def toggles to recharge? Of course not, because their defensive powers were designed to synergize with their offensive powers. But dominators, because their controls don't synergize with their attacks in this way, are forced to either eat the loss of mitigation they experience when their AoE/PBAoE Holds and Stuns expire or aren't available, or park their asses and wait. AoE/PBAoE Sleeps, in terms of mitigation, are very poor. They're only mitigation until you wake the spawn up, and they don't go back to Sleep in most cases. Fears are almost as impoverished, because they allow an enemy to make an attack if you attack it. Both of these do, at the least, prevent entire spawns from dog-piling on the player, briefly and only so long as the player doesn't use any AoEs/PBAoEs... which is also not synergistic with the assault sets in the way defensive sets are synergistic with attack sets. Tanky Tankerbabe doesn't have avoid using The Lotus Drops because it might make Invincibility ineffective. Stalker Steve doesn't have to take Rending Flurry off of his tray because it interferes with Proton Armor. Where they experience synergy between their primaries and secondaries, the dominator does not. Confuses are a source of mitigation which is long enough in duration, short enough in recharge, and effective enough to be considered comparable, up to a point. Single-target Confuses can be partially converted to AoE with the purple Confuse set, and even if one doesn't use it, the durations of single-target Confuses are long enough, and the recharge times short enough, to make them worthwhile as a mitigation tool. A good player can even Confuse an entire spawn with a single-target Confuse and have enough time to jump in and issue a beat down. But even Confuses aren't really synergistic with assault sets in the way defensive sets synergize with attack sets. Every control also has an animation time. My brute with Rise to the Challenge toggled on doesn't have an animation time cost to pay for every foe who comes within range of the PBAoE. My sentinel doesn't have an animation time cost for every attack that her Energy Aura toggles deflect. But your dominator has to pay the animation cost in almost every case. Even those Confuses have animation times. That works against your assault powers, not with them, not synergistically. The set filler powers can provide mitigation, but the animation time cost is still there, the mitigation varies wildly and some of the powers aren't synergistic with the assault sets for the same reasons I explain above. Earthquake, to make one example, is great mitigation, when it's recharged, and when you pay the animation time cost, and when you're fighting something that isn't resistant to KB, and when the KB triggers. Contrast that with Conductive Aura, which is an example of proper synergy with assault sets. CA only has two conditional variables - is it on, and is there at least one foe within the radius? There's no animation time cost to pay for every foe within the radius of that power, no variable which disables the mitigation if foes within the radius have a certain type of status resistance. Most of the control set filler powers don't have that synergy with assault sets, though. The pets are broadly synergistic with assault sets. There's no argument about that. They provide mitigation in the same way that defensive sets provide mitigation for melee, by allowing the player to flip the switch once, then get down to business and not having to worry about that protective aspect of their character needing constant maintenance and attention. But you can't control which targets your Fire Imps are attacking. You can't make Singularity focus on whatever's punching you in the face. Nor do you have any guarantee that your target(s) will turn their attention to the pet. That's not the same as the synergy present in the interaction between melee archetype defensive sets and attack sets. It's not even the same as the synergy present in controller use of control sets in conjunction with their buff/debuff secondaries. It's functional mitigation, but not synergistically reliable in the same way defensive sets are. Additionally, control sets are much more adversely affected by purple patch mechanics than defensive sets. The dominator has hit checks with increased chances of missing (on AoE controls which already have reduced hit chances), reduced control durations, lower debuff values, greater likelihood of soft controls like KB failing to have any meaningful impact on survivability... contrast that with, say, a Resistance toggle. Higher level critters might hit harder, but that toggle is still providing X% mitigation. It doesn't suddenly have 0% mitigation because it can't miss, it can't have a reduced value, it can't suddenly fail due to critters having resistance to a status effect or debuff. It's synergistic with the archetype and the melee attack set with which it's been paired, in that it provides a consistent and reliable mechanism for mitigating damage. That synergy doesn't exist in that way in control sets and their interaction with assault sets. Control sets just don't synergize with assault sets the way defensive sets synergize with attack sets. They don't synergize with assault sets the way every other archetype's primary/secondary options synergize, because they weren't designed to. They were designed to be complemented by and synergize with buff/debuff sets, and to restrict their mitigative potential. That's a key point. Control sets were specifically designed to limit how much mitigation they could provide. Redesigned, in fact, to do impose that limitation. That's what dominators have. Primaries designed to work with ranged buff/debuff sets and provide limited mitigation which encourages players to lean on their buff/debuff sets and/or teams to compensate, and secondaries which weren't designed with those factors in mind. Synergy is when things work cooperatively, in a complementary fashion. Not when things are at odds, but can still be made to work. Anyone can make anything work in this game, given sufficient patience and determination, but that doesn't mean everything is synergistic. There are plenty of ways to work around the lack of synergy between control sets and assault sets. IO set bonuses, perma-Domination, pool powers, relying on debuffs, the same tools we can use to make anything else work when synergy isn't present. But working around the lack of synergy doesn't make that lack disappear. Trick Arrows doesn't synergize with Energy Blast attacks, because TA has multiple AoEs which stay in one location and Energy Blast has multiple KB powers which knock foes out of those AoE locations. Players can slot their Energy Blast attacks to turn the KB into KD, or use Hover and stay directly overhead, and make it work, but that's working around the problem, not addressing the lack of synergy between the two sets. That's where dominators are now. They have primaries which encourage one thing, and secondaries which encourage something else. They're not synergistic, they're schizophrenic.
  15. Unimpressed. Their primaries aren't well suited to their secondaries. There's no consistency within the archetype. Some primaries pair better with some secondaries, but in general, none of them actually work well together in the way that every other archetype's primaries and secondaries do. The primaries, being ports of controller primaries, typically promote ranged play... but the assault sets are a mish-mash of ranged, melee, single-target, AoE and PBAoE with no real focus on anything. Single-target controls aren't complementary to melee play (in the sense that mezzing a single foe still leaves two or more other foes free to curb stomp the character), AoE controls are too limited in availability (due to long recharge times) to complement melee play well, but the archetype has low HP and has to use controls to provide mitigation, so playing a melee dominator is frustrating (either a lot of waiting for AoE controls to recharge, or a lot of frantic Tabbing to mez individual targets). And playing a dominator as an exclusively ranged character... it's really, in all honesty, worse than playing a sentinel. Dominators don't need a buff, they need direction. They need designed and implemented synergy between their primaries and secondaries. Not discovered synergies, like stacking +Regeneration from two powers, or layering -ToHit with Weave and Link Minds, real synergy. I'd swap the primaries and secondaries and redesign the control sets to complement the assault sets more appropriately (some PBAoE control toggles, like Oppressive Gloom, Choking Cloud and World of Confusion, would go a long way toward making dominators more melee-friendly, for instance). But as long as the archetype continues to give the impression that it's confused about its own identity, I don't think it really has any role. It's a niche, at best.
  16. Still waiting on the rest of the test results.
  17. I don't think anyone plays Co* to impress others. People can already solo the hardest content in the game, with sufficient ease that they impose their own challenges just to feel like they're accomplishing something. Look at some of the longer discussions right here on the first page of this sub-forum. Unlimited power doesn't seem to be the thing that most want. Something to do with the power they already have... that might be a better course.
  18. A long, long time ago, right after ragdoll physics were added, I was on a team. Yes, a team. Yes, me. Can I finish this story, please? I'm trying to add context to my suggestion. Stop interrupting me. You're as bad as my cats. ANYWAY, we're cleaning up a spawn in one of the generic office maps and I whack a critter with Air Superiority. Critter does its little flip... and a Martial Arts scrapper kicked it before it landed. The goon went soaring halfway across the room, smacked into a wall and slid down in a boneless heap. It was one of the most glorious moments in my Co* life that it's still as vivid today as it was when it happened. So I'd redesign knockback from the ground up. I'd retool the mechanic to make KB itself deal damage by adding an impact factor. KB a target into a wall and it takes extra damage, the extra being dependent on the force of the KB, the type of surface and the distance traveled (although once the target passes the apex of the KB trajectory and begins to descend, the extra damage would be reduced, perhaps even replaced by falling damage calculated from the apex to the point of impact). I'd turn KB itself into both a more useful tool and a more rewarding effect. Maybe, just maybe, more people would use KB powers, and experience what I did all of those years ago.
  19. Pretty sure they won't add that to the game.
  20. That's called "arousal".
  21. Plant/Earth dominator. Could also use Dark Miasma for dirt powers, so Plant/Dark controller.
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