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Looks one of the global channels. Okay, all of the global channels.

Street Justice/Electric Armor scrapper - third Sister. I wanted something like the scaling +Res in SR, because I was watching the Rocky films when I was thinking about this character, but I don't want SR (not a fan of click status protections). A straight Resistance set with the scaling +Res unique IO seemed to be a reasonable compromise. I also wanted to step away from weapon-based sets for a change of pace, and Street Justice looks like it'll fit my tastes. Plus, I can throw Cross Punch in seamlessly and it'll work visually with the rest of the attacks. The Amazonian adventure continues as The Penitent Woman (still working on the name) wanders aimlessly following the disbandment of the Sisters after Legionette ran away and Antianeira left to search for her. Robotics/Radiation Emission mastermind - I played a Bots/TA to 50 on the original servers, but I stuck to my preference of not taking travel powers, so I missed out on having flying robots. I've also never used the rocket boots costume part. That's really all the reason behind this character. I want rocket boots and flying rocket-booted robots. And I wanted a sentient hyper-optimized data access network, but settled for an operational platform (heuristic experiential learning intelligence, aware). Illusion Control/Trick Arrow - A former actress who uses stage magic and a prop archery kit she "borrowed" from a movie set's technical effects department. Mystic Flight for wire work. Phantom Army set to clone the character, the clones being her body double, her stand-in and her terribly mistreated personal assistant made up to look like her. Phantasm is her co-star, but she's got first billing. She does all of her own stunts, folks! She's the Star of the Show!

Looks like the chest slider was bumped up, too, so it's a D-cupquake. Or is it an E-cupquake? So hard to tell this graphic engine. Anyway, the layered references are nice. Or, I could say... nice puns, babe. It's a shame there's no butt slider. NicePuns/HotPuns would be a good duo character for someone to play with Cupquake.

I use a phone to go online, and it stays plugged in, sitting in a window where it has slightly better signal strength. So by the time I can normally reach it to take a better picture, one which shows the size difference, they've separated. But May is smaller than she looks in the picture I posted. She is growing fast, though. I can already see the difference between how she looked a week ago and how she looks now. It's amazing what being fed, safe, comfortable and cared for can do for an animal. The animals most in need of love are the ones who seem to appreciate being loved the most. That's been my experience, anyway. And my life is empty without a cat. I need a companion, and I can't have a human companion, but a cat fills the void admirably. Jessica was born to live with me, though. Cats typically hide when they enter a foreign environment. Jessica was excited to be here. Purring, tail erect, inspecting everything, indicating approval, and she didn't hide. She was overjoyed to be in my cabin. She... knew she was home, that's the best way I can express it. I honestly don't believe she could have lived anywhere else, or with anyone else. She and I connected the moment I held her for the first time. May reacted like an ordinary cat when I brought her home, but she didn't stay hidden for long. Or very well. The purring made it obvious where she was.

I wouldn't know healthy from unhealthy. It's been 20ish years. Maybe I should abstain from role playing, too. 😮

Jessica, the tortie on the left, and May, the kitten I rescued a little over a week ago. The picture distorts their respective sizes. May is barely 1/3 the size of Jessica. They decided they were going to be friends a couple of days ago. Fortunately. Both were strays. I took Jessica in about a year ago. I was completely happy with just her, but May needed a home, too, and I've always felt that Jessica would be happier with a little buddy to play with, so I coaxed May out from under the house where she'd been living (that took about ten days) and brought her home.

No, I don't mean ERP. No, I don't need an example in this thread. Or my Inbox. Or in-game. Or in person. I don't talk much in the game. I don't have any global channels in my tabs, and since I'm playing in the middle of the night, there aren't as many people around as there would otherwise be, so I'm generally left to my own amusement. But I do, very rarely, receive a /tell. And the latest one had me wondering about this topic. The character I was playing when the /tell came in was my sentinel, one of the trio of Sisters I've been working on. The badge I selected for this character, was Silent Sentinel. It was appropriate for the internal story I've developed for her, and since I'm always alone, it was doubly appropriate. Being silent is part and parcel of playing solo, after all. So when I saw that /tell, I actually had to pause and figure out if I should respond, and if so, should it be role-played (which would've been an uncommunicative ellipses), or an actual reply. My real world sensibility and manners won the momentary internal battle and I responded politely. So when do you break character? What's your self-imposed limitation? Do you just use whatever chat formatting is generally accepted as speaking out of character on your server (or in your social circle), or do you remain in character at all times? If you're only speaking with people you know well, perhaps even people you know in reality, do you stay in character then, or do you talk with them like you would at work or at the PTA meeting or wherever? Or do you create your characters to reflect you, thereby allowing you to always be in character without actually role playing? What if you've had a bad day? What if you're having the best day of your life and want to scream your triumphs to the world? Do you have personal rules for role playing, or do you just go with the flow?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I just put this motorcycle together! DON'T RAIN ON MY FIRST RIDE!

Are DoTs. Damage over time.

As I said earlier, effectively, corruptors don't have an inherent unless a target is below 50% health. Lieutenants and below emphasize the visibility of this, but the issue isn't that the inherent isn't useful on "trash mobs", rather than it's too limited in general. Fury or Domination aren't restricted to only building up when attacking certain critter classes, or critters below an arbitrary stat threshold, to make an example. Cosmic Balance or the endurance reduction of Vigilance require the player to be part of a team, but that's still a less stringent conditional requirement than Scourge's conditional restriction. An inherent which can only be leveraged when using the slowest method of combat (DoTs), or on low health hard targets, isn't broadly applicable and useful in the same way all of the other inherents are. It needs to do more for the player, rather than making the player work hard to get anything out of it.

I did. We're looking at the same issue from opposite perspectives, with the same end goal. Yes. That was established on page 1. That's where we're approaching from different sides. I agree with your conclusion. But I disagree on how to arrive at mutual goal. If you improve sets before archetypes, you're creating restrictions on how you can improve, or alter, archetype attributes. Let's say you buff the least popular sets. Give them all greater utility, stronger buffs/debuffs, make them "meta worthy". The underlying archetypal issues are still there, but since the sets are all performing well, you can't really address those issues in any meaningful way because that disrupts the work you did to balance the sets. That leaves you with very few options. You could nerf the sets for the archetypes you improve, but that's going to be poorly received. You can leave the sets alone and let one or two support archetypes have overpowered aspects, but that puts you back to square one with the other two or three archetypes. You can ignore the problems, like mastermind endurance costs, or Scourge, and tell the players to just deal with it. Or you can try to wiggle the archetype problems, but without wiggling the sets, too, you don't have much room to make any changes. If you address the archetypes first, then the sets, then you have fewer limitations on how you proceed. Or you can address the sets so all of the support archetypes are performing better, but find that trying to do anything with Scourge ends up doing the same thing. What you believe can happen, can happen any way the problem is approached. It's always going to be a balancing act, regardless of which way you try to do it. I'm simply saying that it's easier to balance if you work with the foundations before trying to do anything with the walls. The archetypes are the foundations. If the foundation isn't solid, you'll spend the rest of your life reinforcing and fixing the walls, and praying that the roof doesn't come down on top of you. By addressing archetype issues first, you're giving yourself a lot more leeway in how and where you make changes to the sets and individual powers, without resorting to nerfs or being forced to leave a problem unaddressed. And, again, I'm really not married to making Scourge into a blaster-stomping inherent. I'd prefer something that leans more toward something like what I popped off of the top of my head earlier, something more... defendery, for lack of a better word. Something that would emphasize what a corruptor is and does, without infringing on any other archetype's demesne. More damage, for lack of anything other option, would at least be useful to and valued by players, but I think there are better options now that different people are looking at the mechanics.

You can make a power or a set more popular in the meta, but you're making that power or set more popular for all of the archetypes. You're nudging the meta, not really shifting it, because the archetype differences are still going to be there. Players will still see corruptor numbers, defender numbers, and make threads like this. The archetypes, as whole units, are what determine where they fit, or don't fit, in the meta. If you want players to diversify and expand the meta, addressing the archetypes themselves is where to begin. Addressing powers or sets will only make those powers or sets more popular on the same archetypes in the meta, not shift the meta to a more even distribution of archetypes.

They do miss their beatings, though.

I agree. With every word. But Scourge is where the problem starts, it has to be where the problem is addressed. A better ratio would address that, but, as you note, it would also piss off blasters as much as an increase in the base damage would. A flat crit value, independent of enemy health, would also improve it significantly, but then scrappers would be up in arms. No change leaves corruptors with a crap inherent and no real self-definition. More damage would help differentiate more fully them from defenders, at the very least. Some kind of modification to the Scourge:health ratio would be a step in the right direction. 1:1 was a starting point. 0.5:1 scaling up to 1:1 after X% health. 0.75:1 scaling up to 1:1 after Y% health. Etc. Changing scale values is easy, so a bit of poking at the tables and testing would give a good balance point, and that 0.75 base damage mod would actually mean something in comparison to the defender 0.65, rather than simply be a footnote. Personally, if I had a hand in making Scourge, or had license to revamp it, I'd redesign it from the ground up. The effect would be to reverse or steal enemy buffs, more in keeping with the concept of the archetype, and where there were no buffs present, cause a PBAoE buff (centered on the corruptor) or an AoE debuff (centered on the target) of some kind (something like +/-Special, a MaxHP debuff, or even a flat +Damage if nothing else) centered on the corruptor. This would make them more valuable on teams, allow them to perform better solo and give them a unique inherent which would always be useful, in any situation.

They've reached the point of grooming one another. And sleeping side by side occasionally. I came home yesterday to find them snuggled up on the bed together. Jessica moved before I could pull out the phone to take a picture. She's a greeter.

I have fewer characters than the number of available archetypes. I do not (currently) have more than two characters of any archetype. I do not have TA on all of my characters which have access to it. That's all.

Corruptors would still deal less than controller damage at least 50% of the time, and only have a chance to deal more damage the other 50%. Additionally, when Scourge did kick in, corruptors would be dealing 2.0 scale damage, multiplied by whatever -Res debuffs they had active. I don't have to reach for a calculator to be certain that there would be corruptor builds capable of dealing more damage than blasters. That would be seriously problematic. Setting aside the furor it would cause amongst blaster players (rightfully, because it would be horribly unbalanced), it would create massive extremes in damage output, fluctuating wildly between sub-controller and better-than-blaster. In the end, the problem still wouldn't be fixed, just covered up by other problems. As others have noted, the problem is in Scourge, not the base damage scales. Corruptors simply don't have an inherent unless the enemy has less than 50% health. When they are fighting enemies below 50% health, the inherent's value is too dependent on critter class. It's worthless on anything below bosses. Underlings, minions and lieutenants, even with + level modifiers, are too easy to defeat already, and Scourge is just over-kill the vast majority of the time. Scourge needs the health scale restriction re-examined. 0% chance above 50% HP doesn't benefit the archetype at all, and 2% chance below 50% HP doesn't benefit the archetype where it needs it the most, against the most common foes. A 1:1 Scourge chance to enemy health ratio would be better, less likely to divide the community and go a very long way toward improving corruptor damage output without making it so reliable that it begins overshadowing scrapper, brute and blaster damage.

Thread created by @GM Miss. Miss = not hit. Conclusion: Regen will have a ToHit debuff added. it will affect the player, not critters. Regen nerf confirmed!

Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. *rings the bell* Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. *rings the bell* Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. *rings the bell*

Let's talk about A New Dimension, A New Team. It's the first story arc handed out by this guy. The arc begins with a surprising well designed mission. The spawns are larger than normal, and the critters used for the spawns have powers which can work together to make the mission more challenging. But, you also start with a bunch of combat NPCs who are capable of handling the spawns without you, so even "weak" characters aren't forced to slog through anything more difficult than normal, unless they choose to. Additionally, you don't even have to fight, you can just bypass everything, go straight to the end and move on if you wish because the objective is just a few hundred yards away, across the water, and there isn't a single critter between you and it. This mission gives you a lot of freedom in how you complete it. That's really smart design. You can clear it, you can only fight the spawns you want to fight, you can lead your posse around and let them do the fighting for you, you can skip all of it and go straight to the end. You have options and can play according to your preferences. Unfortunately, that's the highlight of the entire arc. It's all downhill from there. The second mission is very straightforward, you go to a place to talk to someone. The first problem with that is, talking doesn't net you a single experience point. The second problem is that, if you don't know which dialogue option to avoid, you can complete the mission without gaining anything but the standard mission completion reward. That's... not great. Having the option to complete missions without fighting, yeah, that's a positive thing, because an MMORPG really should have more than "kill moar stuffs" to engage the player. But the fact that one of the options leads to mission completion immediately should be emphasized. Strongly emphasized, because this contact is automatically inserted into your contact list at level 30, just when players are looking for the next big story arc or mission to help them reach the next couple of levels. And that's the bad design part on this mission. As interesting as it is to have a non-combat mission, it should always be noted. The player should be made aware that the mission doesn't involve combat, and has an option which completes the mission and deprives them of the opportunity to engage in combat. The third mission is the one which you have a chance to miss (or decline by sending someone else to "do it", if you know what the dialogue options mean). It's an average, standard mission. The fourth mission drops the ball again. The problem isn't with the enemy group, or the task, it's with the map. You're sent to a warehouse in which every door is closed. Take twenty steps, open a door, repeat. You spend as much time opening doors as you do defeating enemies. That's pointless busy work for the player. The doors aren't locked, with keys "hidden" on named enemies, like what occurs in some other missions. The doors don't open in a special way, requiring players to open them in the correct sequence to open the final door (which would be interesting). Clicking a door isn't a grueling chore, it's not something to throw a temper tantrum over, and that's not the point. The point is, they don't serve any purpose. They have no relevance to the story. They're just a speed bump deliberately place in front of the character. The person who created this mission didn't place spawns just on the other side of the door, to give players a surprise or increase the potential challenge. The doors weren't connected to the story in some way. They don't trigger alarms if they're opened. They're just there to make the player click on them. That's bad. Engage the player, don't bore them with pointless mouse clicks. The next couple of missions are, again, relatively standard. You've got some combat NPCs again, but they're not particularly sturdy, or devastating, so you're doing the heavy lifting. This is normal for this game. Combat NPCs aren't intended to be remarkable, so no bones about that. What is worth noting, though, is the unannounced AV/EB at the end. This is one of those quibbles which both Cryptic and Paragon heard so many times that they listened... but apparently, the designer of these two missions didn't get the memo. There's no warning when you're talking to Marchand. There's no "you might want to bring a friend" highlight. That suggests that the designer expected the combat NPCs to still be with the player, and useful, when he/she reached the AV/EB. The bad design parts here are the lack of info and the failure to appropriately buff the combat NPCs. If you're going to send the player up against a surprise AV/EB, give them the tools they might need to complete the mission. If you're not going to give them what they need, give them the appropriate notification so they can prepare. The last mission is the worst violator of good design philosophy, though. It's not a mission. No, it is not a mission. It's "Click OK to continue" half a dozen times, plus a cutscene. Click OK to continue. You walk in, click OK to continue several times, watch a cutscene... and that's the whole thing. That's it. You just sat through "Click OK to continue" being used as an alternative to the endless Black Queen monologue... PLUS A CUTSCENE. That's atrocious. It's reprehensible, and I do know what that word means and intentionally used it. There's no reason, at all, for this to be in the game. This is City of *, not Windows 95 Software Installation Simulator. Every line of dialogue could've been delivered at the beginning of the following story arc, or as a clue in the previous mission, or by sending the player to actually see the characters in different places, or even as a souvenir. A player should never be sent to a mission door unless there's a mission on the other side. Making the player click OK to continue several times and admire your positioning of NPCs is not a valid mission. And "Click OK to continue" just doesn't constitute a mission. Using Click OK to continue to drag an arc out so it reaches some mandatory number of missions is not good design. Using Click OK to continue to wrap up an arc isn't either, not when there are better and less tedious alternatives. Do it right, without Click OK to continue, or don't fucking do it at all. Every time I run this arc, I find myself wondering if it was a rookie's first attempt that no-one more experienced even looked at. It's that poorly done. The good parts are only mediocre, and the design flaws drag it so far down, I don't think it can be redeemed, or is worth the time attempting to do so. Set it on fire and walk away.

I know the real base value is displayed somewhere, without the 30% buff. Checking a power using the [Power Name] linking system should work. Teaming and looking at power info would work, too. But in the character creator... yeah, I see what you're saying. Might be something the HC team could spare a little time to fix. The math approach is still valid, and simple enough for anyone to do (computer, smart phone, pencil and paper, everyone's got something they can use to make the calculation), so there is that option for anyone who needs the info. Could see about making a post in the Defender forum and having a GM sticky it so more people are aware.

In Mids', click the green button on Vigilance. Outside of Mids, divide the base damage by 1.3 when the Vigilance buff is active.

I never claimed to speak for anyone. That is what I said, and it was neither an attempt to put words into other peoples' mouths, nor an arbitrary self-appointment of importance. Statistically, the majority of responses in threads which propose PvP activity which, in any way, has an impact on PvE are negative. The majority of people, the general sentiment. At the top right of the page, you'll find the word Search... Use it.

No.