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for_steamy.mbd That's a starter template for you to fiddle with.

Time to make an Energy blaster named "Snarky's Bestie".

I have Ill/Savage/Ice (The Pack) and Dark/Martial/Dark (Captress). I've been playing both for quite a while, and they're the two I'm most likely to be found playing. If Illusion Control had been available for dominators when I made my Dark/Martial, I definitely would've made Ill/Martial instead. The only reason I haven't deleted these two and made an Ill/Martial is that I like both of the existing characters, their play styles, too much. On the /Martial side, +Damage, +Damage, and if you can swing it, +Damage. /Martial is Damage-lite. Without a pile of +Damage, it's going to feel like a petless mastermind. Your attack chain is going to be... frustrating. I've tried every variation of chains possible and the only way to make a chain without Cross Punch is to skip Dragon's Tail and Masterful Throw. Yes, that sounds ludicrous, because Masterful Throw is the best attack in the set and Dragon's Tail is a "good" PBAoE, but the problem is that every attack in /Martial is fast and the recharge times on those two are slow. You can't build an attack chain with either, or both, that doesn't require frequent pauses while you wait for them to recharge. I know that sounds like I'm hating on /Martial. I'm not. My Dark/Martial is one of my all time favorites, and I've respeced more than three dozen times in an effort to make it work with those attacks. It just doesn't. I'm sitting on 175% global +Recharge (155% from IO set bonuses and 20% from the empowerment station buff) and Dragon's Tail and Masterful Throw still aren't viable for a chain. No matter how many ways I arrange the sequence, with one or both of those powers, it's only functional if you're using the piddling T1 as filler, or take every attack and use all of them. I don't build that way. It's inelegant, and trying to reach the 6 and 7 keys with one hand makes it too easy to hit the wrong keys when you try to go back to WASD. So you'll be working with Thunder Kick/Trick Shot/Spinning Kick/Explosive Shuriken. You can replace Spinning or Explosive with Cross Punch, if that's your preference. Put the Ascendency proc in Thunder Kick, it'll get you triple-stacked very quickly, and keep you there. Don't waste a selection on Envenomed Blades, or, if you do take, don't waste a slot on it. The damage it adds isn't even enough to call it "negligible". Put Spinning Kick right after Thunder Kick in you chain. The animation transition is slightly faster than if you use a shuriken attack after Thunder Kick. Thunder/Spinning/Trick/Explosive/repeat. Illusion: dominator PA doesn't taunt, but you don't need them to tank for you unless you're fighting AVs/GMs. For everything else, Gleam is your damage mitigation. If you are fighting AVs/GMs, Spectral Wall and Spectral Terror will shave off some of the Defense you need to stay alive, and PA will pull some of the aggro away from you, so you won't have to build quite as heavily for Defense/Resistance. Really, you can easy-mode most content with nothing but Gleam and PA from Ill. They're that good. You'll want a Slow from the *PPs. Stunned enemies can't fight back, but they can wander aimlessly and screw up your AoE targeting. That's especially frustrating with Spinning Kick, since it's not targeted. Dark (Tar Patch) or Ice (Sleet) would be better than the Psi Mastery APP, for that reason. Tar Patch for the strong Slow, Sleet for the Slow + Knockdown. With Ill's ability to neuter entire spawns in a blink, Psi doesn't bring anything noteworthy to the table (you don't need Indomitable Will, you have Domination). Ice would probably be the least thematically appropriate, but Sleet does recharge 60s faster than Tar Patch, so it's up for every fight (if you're competent at building), whereas enemies have to be pulled into Tar Patch. Ice also has Hoarfrost, and you'll want a heal of some kind at some point, because Murphy's Law always applies (not Soul Consumption, though. the recharge:duration ratio is terrible). Fold Space makes Tar Patch just as viable as Sleet, since you can use it to drop things right at your feet, if you want to go deep into Teleportation. Put the Soulbound Allegience proc in PA. Yes, it works, and yes, it's worth the extra slot. Skip Phantasm. It gets stuck in doorways and ceilings and thin air, so much so that I finally gave up on it on my Ill controller and never took it at all on my dominator. When my controller did have it, it was more annoyance than assistance, and I haven't missed it at all in the four years since I dumped it. Be prepared for some KB. Spinning Kick is KD, several of PA's attacks are KD, there's going to be some squirting. PA by itself will cause that. It's not frequent enough to be irritating, even with a KD patch like Sleet active, but it will happen occasionally. Shouldn't bother you since you'll have two ranged attacks. You can easily perma-Dom an Ill/Martial. With just IO set bonuses, the Offensive Amplifier and empowerment station buffs, you can have perma-Dom by the mid- to late-30's. My Ill/Savage is at 162.5% global +Recharge (without Hasten, Ageless, Offensive Amplifier or the empowerment station buff, and not including the +Recharge from Blood Frenzy stacks), and my Dark/Martial is at 155% (again, that's just IO set bonuses). At Incarnate levels, Agility or Spiritual will put PA firmly into perma- territory. Yes, either will slightly reduce proc chances, but perma-PA is worth it. Slot the Launch: Jumping/Increased Jump Height if you can, it stacks with the START running powers and you'll find it handy for improving your mobility (i use it with Athletic Run on my Staff/Willpower brute). A second slot in Hurdle would also bump up your Jump speed considerably (that also stacks with the freebie runs), if the slower movement speed starts annoying you. Go to one of the PvP zones and buy Rampage from the vendor. Pop it while you're there and you're at full Domination. Saves a few minutes of building up Domination by spamming a PBAoE or interrupting a snipe over and over again. It doesn't work outside of the PvP zones, but if you're perma-Domming, you only need it once per play session.

Knockback Increase (the empowerment station buff) is identical to slotting a +0 KB SO. It increases the mag, but doesn't affect the % chance. No buff in the game does, no debuff on enemies, no enhancement, nothing. The only way to alter the % chance is if a developer either adds a Global Chance Mod effect to the power and sets another power (Aim, for example) to activate that effect, or the power is copied to a redirect with a different %, which is functionally the same as using Global Chance Mod if nothing else is changed. More work to set it up in the power def, but ultimately the same thing.

"Chance of" can't be increased or decreased with enhancements, or other powers unless a specific power activates another hidden power which sets the percentage higher (example: Fusion in /Radioactive Assault). Knock has no duration, thus the design permits the mag to be enhanced instead. Magnitudes other than Knock are not subject to enhancement.

Click Show Log on any container in the base (top right corner of the container window). Scroll to the bottom to find the asshat's name. Type /petition, select Harassment and Conduct, fill out the fields with the relevant information. If a GM needs to know what was stolen, they should already have access to the log, but if they don't, they'll likely request temporary membership with an appropriate rank to let them check the log. The GM will probably restore what was taken as part of the process of dealing with the problem.

Toggle mutual exclusivity. Status effects in almost half of the attacks used by enemies, including KD and high mag KB. "Holes" in every damage mitigation set. One-shots on characters without sufficient Resistance. The Hollows. Terra Volta. Both the original and the redesigned Hami raid. Controller damage. Top Dog. The game is littered with examples of design decisions based on a disregard of whether or not any given character had any specific ability. You bet your ass they would've designed a fight which required some form of flight if Group Fly had been more accessible, because that was the approach they used to encourage players to team. If you don't have X, team up with someone who does.

Nope.

@Snarky finally goes full Twilight.

Design and balancing of content requires a reasonable expectation of player character performance. Restricting power availability narrows the gap between lowest and highest character performance, which allows developers to make content which is neither overwhelming for the lowest end nor a cakewalk for the highest end. In other words, the easier it is for players to access something, the more it has to be designed around in order for content to be fair and accessible to everyone. Let's take Group Fly as an example. There's content in the game which requires Flight of some kind, the Seed of Hamidon in First Ward. If Group Fly had no prerequisites, that content would have been designed with the expectation that many more players would have taken Group Fly. The Buoyant Membrane power would not have been created, which would have made the encounter inaccessible for some players, and the developer response would have been "Team with someone who has Group Fly." Acrobatics is another good example. If Acrobatics were "free", meaning it had no requirements beyond reaching level 20 and/or having any two pool powers, many more enemies would have high mag KB and Holds with long durations, and there would be no -KB IOs. This is the foundation of all of the power restrictions in the game. From the requirement that every character has at least one power which deals damage, to the base recharge times on powers, to the level cap, every restriction that exists does so solely to give the developers both minimum and maximum character performance expectations around which content can be created and balanced. Limitations on character strength create the baseline for content creation. They're not there exclusively to control power creep, they're also a constraint on content. They're what ensure that there are no cliffs which are only surmountable by a handful of builds, or content which is so easy that it can be quickly and easily handled with unslotted Brawl.

Why does Purge need to be named? Purge is already named! Purge is Purge!

Sounds like a heapin' helpin' of bole slaw.

You're not going to get Weave and Unrelenting or Fold Space just because you took Combat Jumping and Infiltration. That's not happening. Pool restrictions exist specifically to prevent that.

That should currently be possible with leagues. The minimum distance requirement (100 yards) to receive rewards is still there, but that's a sizeable area in which to pack characters, and there are a lot of places in the game where spawn locations are dense enough to permit everyone to fight without overlapping. The rewards are also better than what you've proposed (inf*, drops, higher XP). That reintroduces the problem of players who aren't participating in the activity having greater difficulty traversing the location. Larger spawns in their path between points A and B, spawns appropriate for hazard zones, popping in unexpectedly, not giving players time to maneuver around them. 2004 Hollows. The death run to the Icon in Steel Canyon. Debt Express. Not fun times. Then there's no point to those missions. If all a player has to do is wait for passersby to do the work, there's no reason for the missions to exist at all. Those "Defeat X Carnies" missions have a purpose, are in the game to give players something to do. Those "Defeat X Council" missions in the middle of story arcs or TFs are there as part of the story. Change the system so anyone defeating those enemies counts for the mission or story arc or TF, and they're no longer relevant, and while some of them might be excessive (Numina, again), it would better to redesign the content than to implement a change which turns them into "go to Zone X, stand in Y for 10 seconds" missions. It would also be horrendously confusing for players who didn't understand that the reason one street sweep mission automatically completed was because someone else was street sweeping in the same neighborhood, but another mission is just sitting there, the counter not moving, because no-one else is out there. No. If you're not actively engaged with a nearby enemy, not teamed with someone who is, or not in a league with someone who is, the only thing you get is a notification in the chat window. No kill credit, no XP, no inf*, no drops, no badges, nothing. That's one of the fundamental design principles of this game. All rewards are dependent on participation, and simply being in the general area when other players are active isn't participation. You can set up macros (computer macros, not game macros) with any halfway decent keyboard or mouse software, and even low-end input devices come with that kind of software these days. It's bundled with the drivers. And for those with bottom shelf crap that's just doing basic input, there's freeware that does this. And the game can't distinguish between a person pressing a key/button and a computer sending keyboard/mouse input to the game via macros. It's impossible to create any anti-AFK measure that a simple macro program can't defeat because it's impossible for the game to distinguish between macro input and manual input. There are population caps on zones. When a zone is population-capped, a new instance of the zone is created. Atlas Park 2, Rikti War Zone 3, etc. Players attempting to enter a capped zone are given the choice of another instance of the zone, or waiting and continuing to try to get into the capped instance. Zones with specific events which draw large numbers of players together in a tightly comparatively constrained space have lower caps (The Hive, The Abyss, RIkti War Zone) to prevent crashes and severe performance issues. Let's take a theoretical character, Shumkunkle, and throw him out in the wild streets of one of the cities. He's in one of these neighborhoods with XP distribution. With the amendments you've included, he's facing hazard zone-sized spawns which pop much more quickly than normal, grinding for a miniscule XP bonus, if there's a bonus at all after the restrictions have been factored in, facing greater risk of defeat, receiving zero additional rewards and has to worry about someone else horning in on "his" turf, or keeping his end of the XP train moving forward for everyone else. Does he have incentive to team? Maybe, but since he can team and do any other content which offers better rewards, he's not actually incentivized to team for this content. As I noted at the beginning of this post, players can already set up a league and go street sweeping... but no-one's doing that. No-one. That's why you started this thread, because no-one is doing it. And while there are a variety of underlying factors, such as comparatively few players being comfortable leading, league management being a headache, and bugginess with leagues, a major problem is lack of incentive. It's just not worth it now, when players can go do other things and receive much better rewards, so why would they do it for a tiny bump in XP and nothing else? That's what I mean. Restricting the distribution system enough to ensure it was balanced would still leave it below all other activities, even below what's currently possible now, but it would have to be restricted to prevent it from being abused. They can't give merits for street sweeping, they certainly can't give merits for watching others street sweep, there's no chance for special drops, no extra inf*, no badges, no HOs, no Empyrean merits, just a lot of work for an XP gain that's not even comparable to any other teamed activity, or solo activity for players who can build decent characters. If you want players to engage with open-world content, they need incentive that makes it at least as worthwhile as other content. Like a badge for clearing all of the spawns in a neighborhood, one for each neighborhood, and an accolade for clearing all of the neighborhoods in a zone. 20 years ago, one team, not even a full team, could accomplish that by dumpster diving, but with aggro limts and AoE limits and spawn leashes we have now, it would take a league to clear an entire neighborhood, two in the larger neighborhoods, and it would be worthy of a reward. A +1 to the Long Range Teleporter so players could use it an extra time before the recharge kicked in, for every zone which they've earned the corresponding accolade. Or a zone-appropriate NPC non-combat follower, a groupie who's hanging with you because he/she's impressed or grateful. Or a 50% discount at all of the stores in that neighborhood. Something to excite the player's interest, to encourage the player to participate. A badge would be incentive enough for some people, but an XP distribution system that offers less than standard play in every other aspect of the game? That's going to be wasted code. Empty your salvage and recipes. Play solo for an hour. Tabulate the net value of the salvage and recipes you received, using their vendor value (for things you'd just sell at a vendor) or the average of the last 5 sales for the stuff you'd sell on the market. Let's say you net 5,000,000 inf*, to make it easy. Now multiply that total by 100. That'd be why drops would have excluded from the distributed rewards. Even in league play, drops are determined within teams, not league-wide. No-one's getting 48 rolls on drop tables at Hami raids or MSRs, they're definitely not going to allow it in your hypothetical distribution system. The economy would be ruined in less than day.

I think this would be construed as a direct assault on farming unless the restriction were specific to open-world content. And if it was set up that way, it wouldn't act as encouragement to participate in open-world content, as it offers nothing to make it more desirable than, or even equally desirable to, TFs, Trials, raids, scanner/newspaper missions, tips, or even plain old story arcs. It isn't even comparably rewarding for people who just want to street sweep, since they can street sweep now and gain inf* in addition to XP. In fact, for anything other than power-leveling, it's pointless, and for power-leveling, it's over the top. Let's take 100 level 25 characters into Talos and have everyone defeat one minion (96 XP at level 25). Everyone in the neighborhood would receive 96 * 100 = 9600 XP. If they do that four times per minute, 9600 * 4 = 38,400 XP per minute. In just over 2 minutes, everyone's level 26 (85,200 XP to go from 25 to 26). At level 49, a minion is worth 2464 XP. 2464 * 100 = 246,400. 246,400 * 4 = 985,600 XP per minute. That's almost exactly 5 minutes from level 49 to level 50. Rough estimation: somewhere between 3 and 4 hours to hit level 50, doing nothing but beating down minion every 15 seconds. No bosses, not even lieutenants, just minions, and not taking 2x XP or Patrol XP into account. Start tossing in those variables and you have players lazily cruising to 50 in about 90 minutes, and the only reason it would take that long is because they'd have to move once in a while. I can't see any developer with any sense allowing that, so it'd likely have a massive XP penalty attached to keep it in check. So now what's the point? The XP rate would be crippled so it wasn't any better than any other option, it offers nothing else in the way of rewards... and, what, people jump at the chance to do it, and get a warm, fuzzy feeling about being shafted because they're being shafted amongst company? They're not difficult to complete now. If players start taking over neighborhoods, and remember that enemies can't respawn until there's no-one near the spawn point (the only spawns that can are in the starter zones, like the Hellion Lieutenants around the lake in AP), there's nothing left for others unless all of the street sweepers pack up and leave. Yes, that the same code used in the starter zones can be applied universally. That would resolve that problem, but introduce the problem of players just parking in an optimal spawn point and putting an AoE/PBAoE on auto. And it would be even faster, since they wouldn't be wasting part of that 15 seconds moving on to another spawn to hit the 4 minions per minute quota. 10 minions served up every 60 seconds, courtesy of the server. Since they're being fed their minions, there'd be no incentive for players to roll on, so players trying to complete street sweeps for missions would find it even more difficult to locate un-owned spawns. https://massivelyop.com/2024/03/07/over-42000-people-played-city-of-heroes-homecoming-in-the-last-month/ So, over time, every neighborhood would be full, or full enough to make finding specific enemy groups in specific areas troublesome. That's not sounding like an improvement to me. Synapse, Citadel, Manticore, Numina TFs. Numerous story arcs in the 20's, 30's and 40's which require defeating 10-40 Council, Crey, Nemesis, Freakshow, etc. (there's at least one story arc which has three street sweeps in a row) Random "Do this before you can unlock my story arc" missions which require street sweeps (50 Carnies or 50 Malta from contacts in PI, both very time-consuming because both groups spawn comparatively infrequently and typically only in smaller numbers). Go do a Numina TF. How much more "fun" it would be if all 16 of the street sweeps itook significantly longer due to other players clearing out all of the spawns you needed to hit? It's already unpopular because of all of the street sweeping, I can't imagine this having a positive effect on it. Those are the the problems I foresee with this. Without draconian restrictions, it's obscenely abusable, and it would make certain TFs, story arcs and missions much more difficult, or all but impossible, to complete unless the player "got lucky" or logged in at a time when most players were asleep. With those restrictions, it's horrendously punitive for anyone who isn't in a neighborhood with the zone capped, reducing their XP to 1% of what they should be receiving per current standards, and since there's no inf*, it's not even as worthwhile as participating in any other content in the game. You also don't address drops, which presumably would either go the way of inf* (making the whole idea even less appealing), be subject to the same drastic nerf as XP (basically shoving an ICBM up the ass of anyone who wasn't in a neighborhood with the zone capped), or unchanged from the current rules (good luck finding anything on the market for less than the equivalent price in reward merits).

In the same way it encourages door-sitters to engage with farm content? Also, with every zone now being a farm and players obliterating spawns faster than they can render, how do you ensure that players with Defeat X of <enemy group> open-world missions can actually complete those missions?

You have to complete arcs, not badge missions.

What kind of dam? Compression? Gravity? Beaver? What puts the starch in your shorts?

"You weak, sniveling, pathetic little nothing! You misspelled four words on your essay and used an adverb where a pronoun would be appropriate! DO YOU THINK KINDERGARTEN IS A JOKE?!"

Secondary Mutation roots. All of the sub-powers. You know, the powers which have zero effects on enemies, or teammates, or pets, and shouldn't root. Yeah, those. They root.

They call them "brassieres" there.

You disappoint me yet again, @Snarky. Where's the sarcastic response? Where's the cutting remark? You're not earning that name. Allow me to provide some examples: "Don't-give-a-shit-listed!" 'Oh no! Anyway..." "And?" "FINALLY." "If you'd communicated that much during the TF, it wouldn't have been a clusterfuck." "Whatever will I do without your brilliant leadership? I mean, other than be happier and more successful." "You're still here?" "That's nice." "Damn, now how will I experience complete and utter incompetence..." "Maybe you should lead with that next time." "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, FREE AT LAST!" Step up your game, Snarkleberrycrunch.

Whiner. 😁