Luminara

I'm not the person for that job. I can post, but I can't log in to the game between 8 a.m. and 2 a.m. Verizon blah.

*hides a pineapple pizza in one of the event bases*

All of my TA builds have at least 7 TA powers, some 8 or 9. I still need to rejigger them for the changes, but I'm waiting for an update to Mids' because I'm too lazy to hunt down and change or add everything myself. I've only experimented a little with dual builds, but enough for me to be comfortable relegating both Ice and EMP to the secondary builds on all of my characters (soloing AVs or punching pylons isn't the kind of challenge i look for), for end game/TF team-only usage. I could probably justify putting Acid into the secondary builds as well, since I rarely need a Defense debuff, much less two of them. So this will actually free up 1-3 selections for me... Room for Combat Teleport! Woo!

It's the only version I've watched, and it still made me want to reach into the past and punch everyone involved. In the groin. With a lead weight. Studded. The plot in that was actually worse than the plot in JL. They wrote the end, then tried to write the rest of the movie from that point, working backwards, creating massive leaps of logic and plot holes that you could fly both Ego and Mogo through, side by side. I loved the WW intro. I loathed everything else. Frankly, if the director's cut of JL is in any way more like BvS... You could tell that Ezra Miller's dialog was Whedon's work, it was decent and the character was actually good, if underused. Ray Fisher did well, too, and there was definitely some Whedon there. So I fully expect those to be ripped out and replaced, and that's going to be the death knell. My soul, Warner! MY SOUL IS BLEEDING! STOP IT! Why can't they just use the animation team to do the writing and directing? They've done some fine work, and even their stinkers have been better than BvS or JL. Except that one with Brainiac. No, not the one voiced by John Noble, Matt Bomer and Stana Katic. The other one. The one we don't talk about. *twitch*

Eh. Get some sleep first. You'll be better off for it.

When it's done.

The last time we did that, Castle nerfed TA. 😞

Then Acid loses all of its function beyond that situational use, and we become reliant on PGA or Disruption being recharged, or enemies being in the PGA or Disruption field, to gain the benefit of the -Def. What purpose does Acid have with that change, if it's only really useful or necessary at the very end of the game when you're debuffing AVs? It's inappropriate as anything but a T9 without the -Def, and it's inappropriate as a T9 if all it does is debuff a few debuff resistances by 40%. Also, in some of my post beta builds, Glue will be mandatory. As I note in the previous paragraph, neither PGA nor Disruption is going to do anything unless enemies are inside the radius of their AoEs. OSA's recharge time is too high to be an every spawn tool, even with perma-Hasten and maximally slotted +Recharge in OSA. Glue's going to be one of the most vital tools in my arsenal, the one which allows all of my other tools to be used. My TA/Dark can handle spawns without Glue because she has Tenebrous Tentacles. My Grav/TA will be fine without it, too. But my Fire/TA? Oh, yeah, she's Gluing those mothertruckers to the floor so she can Rain and Breath them to hell and back. And my Beasts/TA is absolutely going to want some Slowing going on. I think Glue is going to be a key power for any build without an AoE Immob or another source of AoE Slow.

I don't have a problem with that. The game having specific and limited critters with resistance to debuffs, that's okay from my perspective. Outside of the AV class (has anyone tested anything on GMs?), I don't think there are many (not referring to specific enemies, like the EBs in the Rikti War Zone story arcs, but specific critters within enemy groups), they're not typically difficult to defeat, and there are enough tools in the kit now to deal with them even if they are harder. I see these debuff resistance debuffs as being situational, or something we can potentially build around to leverage, not a critical tool to ensure our survival or make combat bearable. I do think the problem with -ToHit resistance and ToHit floors and how these two interact make the debuff almost useless on anything but minions, and it being ultimately unnecessary on minions, needs to be addressed, but the rest of the debuffs to debuff resistance are okay where they are, even with the occasional enemy ignoring them.

It was bad because it was written badly, and it had to be written badly because it was a sequel to an even more badly written film, and the bad writing couldn't be unwritten without a complete reboot (Flashpoint). It was bad because it portrayed Aquaman as a litter bug, thief and pig. It was bad because it continued the portrayal of Batman being near the end of his run as Batman. It was bad because the villain was poorly chosen, unimpressive and overly annoying. The fact that Whedon couldn't save it, despite rewrites and reshoots, is the most impressive thing about the movie. Sorry. Not attacking you, the movie just... rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

It did. As a matter of fact, I was going through @Redlynne's post history, looking for the content that I remembered being colorfully detailed explanations of how bad Necro/TA was. Turns out, it was Ninja/TA. Also noticed that she hasn't posted in months. Hope she's okay. Anyway, the two most difficult sets to play with TA have been tested and shown to be working pretty well. It doesn't seem to be at the "I have to play at +0/x0 because TA is bad" place where it was. It also doesn't seem to be abusive or exploitable when used by Defenders, so the high end isn't in the wrong place. I think that's about where it should be.

The "I'm going to vomit in your shoes at 5:45 a.m. so it's just cool enough to be horrifying, but still fresh and gooey" look around 1:31 made it. Also, that's the first time outside of a Zack Snyder or Michael Bay film that I've seen someone turn 5 seconds of video into 2+ minutes. I kept expecting fifty cars to explode.

Snyder, the casting choices, the implied tone and direction of the story, the writing in the JL material thus far, et fucking cetera. *cough* Warner Brothers is hurting my soul.

My fault, I should have made it clear that I was asking for that reason, rather than because I take pleasure in the feel of cold, rotting flesh rubbing up against mine, heady with the scent of decay and formaldehyde. I mean, I don't. Like it. That. It. NOT that there's anything wrong with that. Just not my thing. I'm not judging, I'm just saying, ew. 😶

Could also be that Batman reboot with the Twilight kid.

My understanding of Necro/TA prior to the changes was that everything was hard mode, and your henchcorpses died if there was a stiff breeze. @Redlynne has expounded on the awfulness of Necro/TA, at length and quite descriptively, numerous times. I think this is the best indicator of what the changes have accomplished, and definitely a notable improvement. What problems did you feel you were still experiencing? Were there any moments, other than the two group aggro, that stood out for you? Was it a tedious slog, or a rapid pace, or something in between? Give us your thoughts on the experience.

Nature and Sonic T1. Dark and Poison T2, AoE. Four other sets with access to -Res by level 2 at the very latest (corruptors, controllers and masterminds), two of which are AoE, and all of which not only have stronger -Res than this version of Entangling, but also have other effects which are both more powerful and more desirable than a single-target Immob. The problem here is that you're conflating similarities between different sets with intentional common ground, while also ignoring differentiation between sets where it doesn't fit the concept of thematic identity. If you were correct, every tier would have identical effects across all of the thematically similar sets. They don't. TA and Traps both have a T1 Immob, but after that, they go off in separate directions, each having a distinct identity resulting from different powers, or different tiers of availability in superficially similar powers. Six of the available 13 sets have an AoE heal in the T1. Are they all "healer" sets? Is Kinetics a healing set? Is Radiation Emission? Absolutely not, they diversify in a variety of ways, even within those T1s. In fact, only one of those six has a focus on healing, because, despite being superficially similar to other sets, they're all distinct from one another. If bullets can reduce resistance, thematically, according to you, why doesn't Assault Rifle have -Res? I have a blade on my Staff/WP brute's staff, and blades thematically cause Lethal damage, but all of my attacks deal Smashing damage. If guns, grenades and arrows are an acceptable method of applying -Res, why don't all guns, grenades and arrows apply -Res? Where's the -Res in Archery, if this is the case? If some grenades cause knockback, be they fired from an over-under launcher on a rifle or from a bow, why don't all grenades cause knockback, if they're intended to share a common theme? You've created your own verisimilitude with this. That's awesome. I mean that, it's absolutely fantastic. That's exactly what we're supposed to be doing in Co*, it's exactly how the game was designed. But it's your verisimilitude. Yours. Not mine. Not @Wavicle's. Not @Trickshooter's. Not @Tater Todd's. Not anyone else's. It belongs to you, exclusively. No-one's verisimilitude is the same, we each have our own. We all use our imagination to tell our own stories and make everything fit. There is no picture on the top of the jigsaw puzzle box, there's just the puzzle pieces, and no right or wrong way to put them together. That's what makes our characters, our stories, so precious to us. That's what made the game so memorable, so deeply loved, that we're here again, eight years after shutdown, playing on servers operated and maintained by other people who loved it in the same way and for the same reasons, and love it so much that they give up their free time, time they could spend with their families and friends, time they could spend pursuing other hobbies, time they could spend unwinding from their real jobs, to keep working on it, fixing bugs, adding features, making new things for us to add to our stories and fit into our wildly varying verisimilitudes. It's up to you to make sense of what's in the game as it fits into your story, because it's your story. Your imagination is limitless, and this game gives you the freedom to roam as far and wide as you care to, to discover just how vast and complex that limitlessness really is. Run with it, and if you can't come up with a better explanation for the changes that don't fit within the verisimilitude you've created for yourself... go find Nemesis and beat the answers out of him. 😉 Legionette's staff doesn't cause Lethal damage, by the way, because she blunts the edge and point. She's just trying to prove that she's not weak or tremulous, not murder everyone she runs into. Verisimilitude, mine.

Ask five people to define "fun", you'll get eleven definitions. Ask this kitten to define "fun", I get my sock pulled off. *sigh*

People who don't play TA or Archery.

The single-target hold wasn't unique to TA. Dark had Petrifying Gaze before TA was even a concept. Ice Arrow was based on the same Hold that was used for Ice Blast's two holds, Ice Control's single-target Hold, Petrifying Gaze, etc. Just an entry copied and tweaked. The AoE was EMP, from Rad. He didn't even change the base stats, he just added an 80' range. Entangling was Web Grenade. Flash Arrow was Smoke Grenade from Devices. Which, technically, was also Smoke. Glue was Snow Storm, turned into a PBAoE on a pseudo-pet, and tweaked to increase the Slow. Disruption was from the unreleased, at that time, Sonic. Disruption Field on a stick. PGA was new. New new, not sort of new but similar to a power that inspired it, new new. Acid was new new, too. OSA was new, but Castle felt it was justified because Sleet, Ice Storm and Freezing Rain had some similar effects. He spent the most time on OSA, making and connecting the different pseudo-pets. Ice and Flash could, I suppose, be referred to as sort of controller-based, but since they were shared powers, not really. All of it really came from defender and blaster sets, and his intention was never to make a controller secondary, he just couldn't come up with enough ideas to flesh out the entire set, so he swiped what he needed. If NC had given the studio the resources they needed to hire enough staff, he would've gone back and made some revisions, but... *shrug*.

Only one? Share Pain. Taken directly from Empathy, changed to deal damage to the caster and buff the caster's damage, and put into the Pain Domination set. Is it still an Immobilize? Has the basic function of the power, immobilization of a single target, been changed to something it was not before? Does it teleport the caster into melee via use of quantum entangling instead of immobilizing a target? Does it summon dead sea turtles which were killed when they became entangled in a net, instead of immobilizing a target? Does it inflict a Hold by summoning a spider to entangle a target in webbing, instead of immobilizing a target? No. It's still a single-target Immobilize. It has an additional effect, reducing that target's Resistance to damage, but that doesn't change what the power is. I'm sorry, I wasn't implying that I, you or we players had stopped caring or asking, and I should have made that clearer. Whether or not we agree with the cottage rule, the simple fact is, this is the HC team's server group, not ours, and we're obligated to abide by their policies as long as we play here. And they want the cottage rule to remain in effect, according to what I read on the closed beta forums. That takes discussion of replacing or removing powers off of the table. Everywhere in Co*. Every archetype has modifiers which alter powers, specifically to ensure that some archetypes are better at some things, and other archetypes aren't as good at those things, but better at others. Every archetype also has certain expectations from a development standpoint, which leads developers to change specific powers to make them "more suitable" for different archetypes. Every critter uses modified versions of powers available to players. All of what you see as powers are just entries in tables. They're not hard-coded, they're lists and references. Cryptic and Paragon frequently took existing powers and tweaked them to make "new" powers, by doing little more than adding a new entry with references to specific power IDs, scales and effects. With some animations, which were recycled in many cases, and effects, which were comparatively simple to add to the animations, they've got "new" powers. Fire Breath = Frost Breath = Bile Spray. Blackstar = Nova = Dreadful Wail = Psychic Wail. Dark Obliteration = Explosive Blast = Explosive Arrow = M30 Grenade = etc. Same powers, modified for different archetypes by removing or reducing some effects, adding or increasing others, and changing the particle effects and animations. You just happen to be here and noticed when it was happening to a power you're looking at, but it's happened over and over again throughout the life of the game. It's not a new thing. It's a little less common than -Def, but more common than -ToHit. It's not limited to specific archetypes, or specific types of attacks, it's scattered all over the place. Damage being added to Entangling Arrow when TA was ported to blasters is exactly the same thing you're referring to with -Res being added for TA now. It's an effect which didn't exist before and which changed the usage of the power. By your explanation, that was wrong and should be reverted, as should all similar changes you mention. But if it's okay for blasters to have an effect which is pertinent to their role added to powers, then it should also be okay for defenders to have an effect which is pertinent to their role added to powers. Either it's all wrong, or it's all right. Without being exhaustive, you left out radiation, negative energy, fists, knees, sticks, space guns, swords, being really cold, and an insane amount of other ways. -Res is all over the place. Almost every archetype has access to it. There are even a few IOs which inflict -Res. -Res is not restricted to the chosen few, it's everywhere. What? TA is available to corruptors, controllers and masterminds as well, and the only powers which aren't directly available are defender pseudo-pet powers which have to be specially modified for the relevant archetype and substituted for the defender originals. OSA, for example, has at least two versions currently in existence, one specifically for defenders, and one for everyone else. The defender OSA has defender scales, the other one has controller scales. Entangling Arrow is not a pseudo-pet power, it doesn't require special modification before it's proliferated to the other archetypes because the game does it automatically by reading the entries on the tables and making the adjustments itself. All four archetypes have the same Entangling Arrow. The archetype scale modifiers alter the base stats for the power when other archetypes use it, but it's the same power. @KaizenSoze and @Monos King have already reported on using the set as non-defenders. Ask. Read the thread. You're basing your suggestion on the misperception of -Res being highly restricted. It isn't. In the entire game, soup to nuts, there are only two archetypes which don't have access to -Res in a single power. Peacebringers and Warshades. Every other archetype has access to -Res in primaries, secondaries or *PPs. This isn't a secret debuff or a secondary effect locked away behind triple power-up combo moves that only work if you're using a specific set, it's common. Look at the different sets for the archetypes. Look at the powers. You can see just how prolific it is with a few minutes of mousing over powers in Mids'. You have yet to explain why any effect is objectionable or acceptable beyond your own rationalization of how things should work. You've also made some mistaken assumptions about how things do work, such as only defenders having Entangling with -Res, and -Res being limited in availability, and that means your rationalization may need to be re-assessed. You mean why should Entangling be better than Web Grenade, the only other T1 power in defender primaries which is an Immobilize? Note that - THE ONLY OTHER ONE. Also of note - Traps was created one issue after TA, and followed the same general design principle, including stealing the same Immob from /Devices. But to directly answer your question, Entangling shouldn't be the golden child compared to Web Grenade. Web Grenade should have exactly the same treatment, a revision based on an assessment of the set as a whole and addition of an effect to make it better. Furthermore, blasters have Immobilizes because blasters were originally the squishiest archetype in the game. They were debt magnets. Immobilizes were one of the few options they had for keeping enemies at range, or giving themselves time to move out of melee and pop an inspiration or use Aid Self. Immobilizes made sense for blaster secondaries in the context of what blasters were and how much they needed even a little control. Even a zero damage Immobilize was useful and usable for blasters because it helped them stay alive for a few more seconds, long enough to defeat whatever was smashing their faces in. So you can't make that comparison of Entangling versus all other T1 Immobilizes because it's taking the entire discussion out of the context of what's relevant, nor does it work if you limit it to only T1 Immobs which you categorize as as device-themed. It doesn't matter if blaster secondary T1 Immobs are good or bad when we're looking at a defender primary T1. That's apples to boulders. Yeah, they're both roundish, but they're not the same. The only valid comparison you can make is to Web Grenade, and as I said, that should be buffed, too, as opposed to your express wish that Entangling be held back in order to maintain parity. You shouldn't have to make that choice on any archetype, because primary powers are always supposed to be better than secondary powers, which are always supposed to be better than pool powers. That you, that we, have had to rate a T1 pool power as a superior selection to one of our primary powers should be infuriating, not a pleasant relief. It's pissed me off for almost two decades. One of our core powers was so bad that any pool power was better. Junk Kick was better. Provoke was better than Entangling Arrow, for Christ's sake! At least that could hold some decent IOs. Entangling wasn't even good enough to be a mule. So for the worst power in our set to finally be better than pool powers, to finally be worth taking, to finally not be a frustration and disappointment when playing the other three archetypes, is not a bad thing, even if it means we have to revise our builds and plans. Do you really think scrappers take and use +Def (Melee, Lethal) attacks because they deal a lot of damage? They don't. The damage is crap compared to their other attacks, but the secondary effect, +Def (Melee, Lethal), is worth it, and the effect is definitely secondary to the primary purpose, dealing damage. Do you think people buy Throwing Knives from the P2W vendor because they really like the damage it deals? It's a source of -Regen, that's all that matters to them. Just like -Res, the game is littered with powers like these, powers with a secondary effect more valuable to players than the primary effect. Why should Entangling be sent to the back of the bus, when it's no different from any other power with a more appealing effect than its base effect? In your opinion, which you've developed based on the belief that -Res only occurs in certain sets or powers or animations which explain why it can occur, the belief that this is a change exclusive to defenders, the belief that there are multiple T1 Immobs to which Entangling can be accurately and fairly compared. All of these are incorrect, and if those are incorrect... In your opinion. I address that one paragraph above. Yes or no, is Entangling Arrow still an Immobilization? If the answer is yes, then the cottage rule is not being broken. Acid Arrow still debuffs. Yes or no. See above. No power is required to be identical to any other power, regardless of what the description says, the animation look like or what the power actually does. There's no rule, no design philosophy in place for that. None. Nothing, no developer, no GM, no unintentionally released memo, has ever said or inferred that any two powers have to be similar, much less identical. That is, in fact, the very opposite of everything in this game. Every development team went out of their way to make every power as unique and flavorful as they could, so players would have MORE choices, MORE differentiation, MORE ways to play the game. You have a narrow, almost singular view of how this is supposed to be, and please don't take this as hostility, but it's wrong. The fact that Entangling Arrow and the blaster version and Web Grenade and other powers happen to be similar is meaningless and irrelevant because they're not supposed to be clones of one another. That they happen to be functionally comparable isn't because they were intended to be, it's because Cryptic sold the game and walked away, Paragon never had the staff to revisit them, and no-one cared enough about them to do anything after the HC team picked up the reins, until now. Sorry, I truly am, but that's specious and erroneous. I'm not trying to sound mean or antagonistic, I'm really not, but you don't seem to grasp what made this game the wonder that it is. Hundreds of costume pieces, power color and animation customization, those are just extensions of the base ideology that drove the game in the first place, that being that every power was in some way unique, had its own identity, had purpose within the set or pool, and Entangling just failed to live up to that ideology. And advocating leaving it dangling because it's... thematically similar to a blaster power and another defender power? That's going the opposite direction, turning this game into another WoW clone, where everyone in a class is identical. No. Just... no. The resistance is because what's been done looks like it's working in the way it was intended to, giving us more time and freedom in how we use our powers. And we don't see a need to change things again, put everything on the back burner for another X months or Y years, because some people don't like which powers have which effects. It's not because we're afraid, it's because we just don't agree that something not making sense from someone's perspective is reason to send the whole thing back to the drawing board. Anything can be explained with a little imagination. Believe me, we've been coming up with explanations for head-scratchers in the game for as long as it's existed. When all else fails, we just refer to whatever doesn't make sense as a Nemesis plot. Entangling having -Res is a Nemesis plot. Send it to the live servers. Up to a point. The cottage rule states that a power won't be removed and replaced, or completely redesigned to do something entirely different. It has nothing to do with adding an effect to a power, as long as the power's base functionality remains unchanged. Yes or no, does Entangling Arrow Immobilize a single target? If the answer is yes, then the cottage rule has not been broken. Unlike the record I'm starting to sound like... And that's just an opinion. In my opinion, Acid debuffing things other than Resistance makes sense. I can explain it as a mild toxin, or a magical potion, or a mutagenic whatever, or a Nemesis plot, and not lose one wink of sleep. I can do the same for every power being changed, because the theoretical reason a power is doing whatever it does isn't in the game, it's in the player's mind. It always has and it always will be. We can have both. The powers can be improved as @Captain Powerhouse has done, and we can explain them however we like because we're the authors of our stories, not the developers. This is another misperception you've stated. It's not their job to explain why your mutant zombie from a science station orbiting Mars is using a magical bow and technological arrows, or how those arrows cause the effects they cause. That's on you. It's your character, it's your use of the powers, it's your story, it's your responsibility to create verisimilitude within your choices. You, not the developers. They make powers, you apply your logic to them to create verisimilitude. That's another of the core features of this game, we're not forced to accept that every time we apply -Res, it's because we used acid. My Acid Arrow might be lizard blood, or the compressed farts of frogs, or dollar store coffee, or a Nemesis plot. What yours is, that's up to you to decide and explain, because that's how it is in this game. That's one of the things that made it so memorable and beloved. That's why so many of us came back when we heard about it being available again. That's why we'll still be here until the servers are shut down again, and why we'll have copies of the server files so we can, if nothing else, continue to create our own verisimilitude on our laptops and desktops with our private Co* servers. The freedom of imagination and expression that Cryptic, Paragon and now HC gave us is something we love. Love it with us, rather than fighting to make the game obey arbitrary rules about verisimilitude. Live your story as you see fit and let the developers concentrate on continuing to enable that.

Kind of hard to miss anything with a 25' radius, though. I'm not aware of any critters which don't idle within a set distance from their central spawning point.

It's also single-target and relatively situational. The damage debuff might be useful on everything, but the other debuffs aren't necessarily as utilitarian, and realistically, instead of trying to pretend to be an AoE by firing Ice Arrow every time it's up, it'd be faster and more efficient to just attack and move on. So yeah, I think it's okay as is, too.

Necro is the real test.

Then we're looking at the resistance debuff for-ToHit only really being applicable to minions, which we can already manage quite well without it, and extremely situational cases (a boss with a ToHit buff, for example). If the debuff can't be applied meaningfully, in the situations where it's actually needed, it should be removed entirely and replaced with something more useful.