Luminara

That's replacing one gate with other gates. It seems that the question shouldn't be whether or not gates should exist, but which gates should exist, and in what manner they exist. Gates have always existed, they always will. The only way to remove all gates is to do just that, make every character fully kitted Incarnates at level 50 +3 on creation and give them full access to every bit of content, along with all of the tools necessary to do it (-Regen, -Res, high damage output, etc.). I don't think I'd be playing that game. I don't think many people would. Part of the core experience in any RPG is growth, growth requires gates. Story gates, leveling gates, progression gates, acquisition gates which make the experience meaningful and personal. Without gates, it's just putting dolls on a shelf, and that won't hold interest indefinitely when the dolls come out of the costume creator fully complete.

The only changes to procs being worked on, discussed or considered (to the best of my knowledge and ability to find, here or on the closed beta forum) are a bug fix and a re-examination of the PPM formula with the intention of smoothing out proc performance inconsistencies between types of attacks and not work counter-intuitively with Recharge Reduction enhancements. There's no sweeping nerf on the way. There are no drastic changes to proc mechanics or behavior planned. There's nothing to be concerned about. Use procs. Or don't. But don't base your decision on the expectation that they'll be snatched away the moment you reach for them. That's not going to happen.

Fair points. The bar has moved significantly upward from 3 +0 minions (even before shutdown), and TA was always intended to be used on large spawns, not single-targets. The 15% Res isn't going to make that much difference with multiple +X enemies, nor will a few points of status protection when facing packs of mezzers (you'll still run into 3 or more mezzers in a single spawn if you jack up the team size setting). The set will find its own balance in play.

Disruption Arrow, Entangling Arrow, procs. Provoke and debuffs are enough to pull aggro off of a good tank. A good tank using Taunt. And aggro can be viewed as binary, in that you either have it or you don't. Stack your Holds. Ice + Ice. Ice + EMP. Ice or EMP plus Hold procs in other powers. Bosses only have mag 4 protection from status effects. That's neither what I said nor what I implied.

50% -Dam to everything in PGA, Glue all but guaranteeing that they'll stay in PGA, 70% -Dam on 1-4 harder targets if using Ice Arrow (more aggressive slotting and use of Ice Arrow can bring this up to 10) , and now you can stack 15% Res to the small amount of damage those targets can deal, plus have status protection. Even scaled down to controller and corruptor values, it's veering into tank territory with mitigation that intense. For masterminds, allowing them to hit that level of mitigation is sensible, given their base hit points and ability to tank for their pets, or simply allowing their pets to do their jobs, but for the other three archetypes, it's a bit much. Oh, well. I'll use it on a petless mastermind and make the engine cry some more.

The final arc in the RWZ. Big Rikti butt, Lord Nemesis butt, you, Fusionette. Like locking a couple of cats inside an aviary. Oh, and Jim Temblor tags along, too. And a friendly Rikti. Mostly you and 'Nette.

The travel power comment hearkens back to I5, when I started experimenting with skipping travel powers completely. I slotted up Hurdle and used that instead, and found that it was comparable to Fly in speed. With IOs set bonuses, Hurdle can surpass Fly's speed sans Afterburner. My main is sitting at almost 66 mph Jump speed. New players, which included every one of us at some point, tend to turn on Sprint and forget that it's on until we run out of endurance and it shuts off. Sprint is also rarely slotted for anything more than a Stealth IO mule, so the endurance cost, in concert with active use of powers (attacking), leads to that moment of realization that we might have survived if we'd paid a little more attention to our toggles and turned off what we didn't need. It's a lesson typically learned around level 4 or 5, when there's a Hellion or Skull gnawing on our corpses.

I'd rather see something more interesting, like a short Confuse or Stun PBAoE. Either would be thematically appropriate and potentially useful.

Seriously, Emmy, who keeps tissues in their kneecaps? Use a box like everyone else. Then it'll be cozy and amongst its own kind when it falls asleep.

While I was cutting, splitting and shouting at firewood, it occurred to me that there may be, in fact, a problem with the hit chance formula. Granularity. We're not rolling an icosahedron (20-sided die) when we make hit checks, we're comparing an XX.XX% number to a YY.YY% number. That's 10,000 possible rolls. 10,000. Ten thousand. We refer to "capped" hit chance as having a 1/20 chance to miss, or, alternatively, a 5/100 chance. But it isn't. It's a 500/10,000 chance. And while all of those are mathematically identical, functionally that leaves 500 chances of failure, not 1 or 5. Granted, that still means 9500 of the rolls are going to be hits, and over time, it should average out that way, but 500 possible miss rolls on every check is... nuts. Precision down to the hundredth of anything is the kind of thing you need for piston ring tolerances and rapid production machinery gearing, not a video game hit check. The formula seems too precise. Too granular. Too many possible rolls for players to miss. That's clearly why they had to code the streak breaker and apply it to hit rolls. It's not there to throw players a bone, it's there to compensate for the overly-complex nature of the hit formula. And the 95% cap would actually be creating that problem by permitting those 500 potential rolls to exist. It's ensuring that no matter what, the player would have 500 opportunities to miss. The margin for failure is much wider when viewed from the perspective of the actual math, rather than simply considering it to be equivalent to 1/20. Furthermore, the streak breaker itself lack the same granularity. It's too broad in scope, with huge margins differentiating between thresholds of forced hits. Consequently, players are royally screwed by that mechanic if they're 00.01% below a threshold, or they're forced to slot extra Accuracy or ToHit to go above a threshold, thereby sacrificing slotting for something else, and even slots in something else. There's no parity between the cap, the formula and the streak breaker, they're all using different approaches in an attempt to reach the same goal. Having thought about it from that perspective, I think the HC team needs to spend a little time poking around in these mechanics, maybe trying a few alterations. The streak breaker should match the granularity of the hit check formula, the hit check formula just doesn't need that level of granularity with the cap in place, and the cap is counter-productive to preventing streaks or working within the confines of the streak breaker thresholds (in fact, the cap is completely pointless at 95%, it should be at 90.01% since that's where the streak breaker kicks on with a forced hit after one miss. functionally, they're stepping on each others' toes). Frankly, I'm surprised the engine hasn't shit itself into oblivion, trying to juggle all of that. @Jimmy, thoughts?

Lusca doesn't want a hug. Cyclopes go commando. Look at the health bar. Travel powers aren't necessary. Let the spawn move away before using an Awaken. Inspirations drop frequently. The mechanics. Look at the damn health bar. Melee isn't scary. Swan dives from skyscrapers are best done when the spawns below are -10, not +5. Turn off Sprint. Co* is better than WoW. HEALTH. BAR. LOOK. AT.

Yes.

Entangling should be the same for all archetypes, since it doesn't use any pseudo-pets, so the spelling error should be showing on all of them. There was an earlier report of it up-thread. Flash Arrow, Ice Arrow and Acid Arrow should all also be powers without pseudo-pets, so errors or bugs in those will show up on all archetypes as well. The rest of the powers are where unusual bugs might pop up, since some of them have different pseudo-pets for different archetypes. Before anyone asks, or starts shouting, creating archetype-specific versions of powers with pseudo-pets was necessary at the time, because they didn't obey archetype scales or modifiers. This allowed the relevant powers to be scaled to the appropriate values when used by anyone other than defenders. At any rate, test the pseudo-pet powers, for anyone still interested in testing. Note everything and, where possible, compare across archetypes. Whatever anomalies are likely to pop up will probably be in Glue, PGA, Disruption, OSA or EMP. I think that one's been around forever. Could be because Flash Arrow was a version of Smoke/Smoke Grenade, which had already been through a few changes before it was adapted for TA. Could have something to do with the Illusion Control sparkly eye graphic, which was where that came from. Could just be the engine, it's always had spastic moments.

The cornerstone idea of TA is supposed to be not needing to affect oneself because one is affecting enemies instead. Prior to these changes, it didn't do that very well. With these changes, there may be no particular need for the TA to be affected by EMP Arrow's buff (the highlights are some +Resistance and +Status Protection). The improvements to Flash Arrow and PGA by themselves bring a massive increase to the survivability offered by the set. When stacking Ice Arrow's -Damage on top of PGA's, it's almost directly comparable to scrapper Resistance numbers. Flash Arrow's increased -ToHit can be layered with much less +Defense than previously required to reach the soft cap. For all intents and purposes, an SO build can become nearly impossible for critters to hit, and on the rare occasion when they do hit, not feel more than a tickle. I believe the reason there's a push back against excluding the TA from EMP Arrow's Faraday Cage buff is because it includes status protection. That's every squishie's Achilles' Heel... but it's a little less problematic for TAs, mechanically, because debuffs applied by TAs don't suppress, whereas toggles do, so any debuffs laid down by the TA will continue to work while they hunt for a Break Free, or pop that Sorcery pool status protection power, or wait it out. A TA is going to be more survivable than any primary reliant on toggles (foe-affecting toggles drop when mezzed, self-affecting toggles suppress when mezzed) with some of these changes, so theoretically, TA would be a little unfairly strong in comparison to other primaries if it also affected the caster with EMP Arrow's buff. @Captain Powerhouse isn't trying to turn TA into a god mode set, just bring it up from the bottom. That said, I still remember being mezzed so often that I nearly quit playing entirely when I was leveling my Kin/Elec defender using only melee attacks. I probably know more intimately than anyone else how maddening status effects are because of that experience. And I wouldn't be averse to having some "fuck you, Bad Guys With Mez" from EMP Arrow, just so I never have to repeat that experience again, ever, when I'm playing squishies. But with everything TA has going for it in this update, I can understand the need for some kind of limitation. If people look at the mechanics and numbers, I believe they'll see that need as well. But the pets really need the buffs from EMP Arrow. Not because masterminds deserve anything extra, but because their pets are their powers. The improvements have shown to be effective in testing, bringing mastermind TA up several notches from where it was, but the pets being excluded from EMP Arrow will have to change if they're to reach the same potential as other archetypes using TA. They have lower debuff values, so the extra +Resistance from EMP Arrow would help them out in the way they most need it, and it would leave them open to playing SO builds instead of being forced to dip into IOs for the pet-only +Res and +Def uniques to make up for the weaker debuffs.

@Captain Powerhouse! Flag it to allow pets to be included. Excluding the caster is one thing, completely denying the caster's pets any benefit is another entirely, especially on the archetype most in need of it. Except Daedalus. That asshat pulled an entire room of Cimerorans on my level 48 sentinel this morning. He can be excluded. Preferably with a baseball bat. A spikey baseball bat. Filled with lead.

Oh, I wasn't implying that. It's the social anxiety disorder thing. Physical contact or close personal proximity give me panic attacks. I try to keep a distance of a few feet between me and anyone else.

Tea mates. Friends who fancy a cuppa.

In fairness, there was at least one other obvious commonality. You. That's not an accusation. I'm not suggesting that you don't bathe often enough, or that you verbally assaulted your friends in your supergroup, or anything of the sort. I've certainly found you to be pleasant on the forums, and though I've never sniffed you (no. i said no. take two steps back. TWO steps.), I assume your hygiene is acceptable. But an analysis which ignores specific data points to focus on a hypothetical solution is... bad. Bad science. It's cold fusion and anti-vax science. Just pointing that out.

Dragging? Dragging? Look at that glee! Witness the delight on that face! This man can't be dragged anywhere, he goes willingly where his nipples lead and he leads by nipple, not example! 😁

A rip-off of Green Arrow. Who was a rip-off of Batman. And Robin Hood.

Yes, OSA causes critters to run away when it's ignited. It's a specific flag, Avoid, applied to the critter AI. They'll also try to escape a Glue patch, but that's an AI response when it can't reach a target (the AI has moments of unrelenting stupidity when its pathing isn't clear and concise), not an Avoid, so it's less reliable as an anti-alpha mechanism. PGA pulses a mag 2 Sleep, so there's little retaliation from minions. Historically, TA has only caused chaos when teammates realize the person with the bow and arrows isn't an Emp. It's really more focused on battlefield movement management and enemy debilitation.

Caltrops is T2. The commentary was about T1 powers, which aren't optional for three of the four archetypes with access.

A waypoint marker system would be easier to implement. The mini-map would need to be adapted to allow multiple waypoints to be selected, so the player could create a route, and TP would have to be reworked to make it use waypoints, but the actual teleporting from waypoint to waypoint would be dead easy, that's just a command to fire up TP again after X.X seconds. It would be up to the player to lay out the route without kissing buildings or cliff faces, or my private highway (power lines).

The engine doesn't allow that. In fact, I don't think I'd be off the mark in saying that it was specifically designed to prevent it. Obstacles would have to be actually removed in some way, because even if they were rendered without textures, thereby making them invisible, the geometry would still be present. Phase shifting could, theoretically, be adapted to work on geometry, but it would require completely new code and significant revision of a major part of the engine to integrate it.

I didn't donate. I haven't in the past, and I don't know when I'll be able to in the future, with my ~$80/week income. So I'm interrupting this thread to say thank you to all of you who do, did, have, and will. I love Co*, but I love the forums and community just as much. It's the only way I can socialize without risking panic attacks. All of this makes my life better in ways I can't easily explain, and won't waste this space trying to. I just wanted to say thank you. The HC team is doing the work, but there wouldn't be any work to be done if it weren't for the people who paid for the servers and services. You.