Luminara

And still be limited to 0.65 ranged/0.55 melee damage scalar values, 400% damage cap and extremely limited access to high damage attacks. If the game can survive tankers, who already have status protection, excellent Defense/Resistance, self-healing and options for improved recovery and regeneration, being bumped up to 0.95 melee/0.80 ranged scalars and increased AoE radii, instead of being told to "get a team" so they can progress at a reasonable pace, it can handle defenders being allowed to survive more comfortably while they plink away with their shitty blasts. Shit delivered more rapidly (100% +Recharge in Adrenalin Boost) is still shit. Shit with a pitiful +Damage buff (Fortitude) is still shit. The game isn't going to collapse in on itself if defenders survive combat more comfortably or pewpew more quickly, any more than it has with the improvements made for other archetypes.

No, it wouldn't be overpowered, nor would it break anything. It's a mantra entrenched in 2004 release day mentality, stuck in the oldest rule set on which the game was founded, when toggle mutual exclusivity was a major balance factor. Toggle mutual exclusivity was specifically intended to encourage players to team, and click buffs were restricted to not affecting self on support archetypes so they couldn't bypass that encouragement. Toggle mutual exclusivity was removed because Cryptic put so much mez in the game that tankers and scrappers were skipping everything except their status protection toggles and T9 god modes, those being the only powers they could keep active due to that obscene amount of mez. But after removing toggle mutual exclusivity, Cryptic left support archetypes twisting in the wind by failing to make their click buffs affect themselves. Auto-hit debuffs which perform the same general function, such as -ToHit and -Dam, are ongoing evidence that comparable self-buffing capability wouldn't make a damn bit of difference, but, curiously, the fact that those prove that the idea of support characters would be overpowered if they were safer or less reliant on others is never mentioned when people start arguing against making click buffs like Ice Shield or Fortitude self-affecting. In other words, it's holding some people to one set of rules and allowing others to ignore those rules. The word for that is discrimination, and people who advocate it don't typically look for or accept proof that they're wrong. Like the mez situation. 2004 release day rules for support archetypes, 2021 rules for everyone else. "And when everyone's special... no-one will be." - Syndrome

Nor did I construe it as such. We're good.

I'm not worried that I might be seen as less of a <whatever> because I'm not one-shotting everything in sight. That's not what I base my self-worth on.

Staff Melee. Two cones and a PBAoE. Guarded Spin -> Innocuous Strikes -> Guarded Spin -> Toe of the Camel -> repeat. No need to Tab, just stick to the chain. Its's like shoving bad guys into a Cuisinart.

Characters who rely on toggled debuff/control mitigation are screwed by a 0.01s mez, no better than if they were chain mezzed, since those toggles have recharge times and animation times. Radiation Infection adds exactly 0% survivability when it's shut off by a momentary Sleep, for instance, and continues to add 0% for as long as it's recharging and until the animation for activating it has been completed (at which point, some twat nozzle minion Stuns or Sleeps the character again, shutting off RI again, rinse, repeat).

Pewpew. It's pronounced pewpew.

Defenders.

There is no competition for Air Superiority. Air Superiority is two fistfuls of awesome sauce.

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Flea Austin. A flea barely alive. Developers, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic flea. Flea Austin will be that flea. Better than he was before. Better... stronger... faster. He is... The Six Million Inf* Flea.

The muscle attachment points. The striations left by bone growth where the muscles attached, the structure and thickness of the bone, the locations of those attachment points, the proportional sizes of the attachment points, they all tell us about the overall structure of the animal's head. If the head were elongated in the manner you describe, the attachment points would express that elongation. Forensics. Real science.

It's real science. The sizes of bones or bone fragments can give a relatively good indication of the size of the animal. Bones tend to grow in specific shapes, too, so one can discern what the animal looked like based on the bones or fragments. Muscles were attached at specific points when the animal was alive. Those attachments left impressions - increased calcification, indentations, striations and other signatures. Careful examination of those clues and comparison to known contemporaries and/or similar animals will reveal the general musculature of the creature, which also tells you much more about it's appearance. The porosity of the bones can reveal whether the animal was exothermic or endothermic, in some cases. Paleontology is really just forensic analysis of fossils.

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. 😜