Luminara

They're not useless, they're early selections. Powers acquired later tend to obviate early selections. But if the game permitted players to bypass everything but the strongest and/or most utilitarian powers, other problems begin to surface. How, for instance, do you make an attack chain at level 8 with Total Focus and Energy Transfer, if the game permitted one to take those powers at that level? Your global +Recharge is hilariously low, you don't have the slots to dedicate to making those two attacks great... it's a non-viable approach. While you're standing there, waiting for something to recharge, you're being beaten to a greasy smear. That's why restrictions like this were implemented in the first place, to ensure that players weren't trying to make a non-viable character. Archetypes, pool limitations, they exist to guarantee that players never make a choice so bad that a character can't be played. The game needs powers like Boxing and Kick. The game needs T1s and T2s and T3s, in pools, in sets, in *PPs. Those are the powers we use to get to the point where we can complain about how useless they are. No, they aren't great, but they're not supposed to be. Great comes later. Before we reach great, we have to settle for good enough, for things we know will be useless later. Additionally, circling back to my original post, once you do this for one pool, it has to be done for all pools, including *PPs. That opens up a nasty can of worms. Several cans, in fact. Cans we really don't want to open, such as, if we remove the prerequisites for pool and *PP powers, shouldn't we also remove the level requirements on primary/secondary powers? Or, if we're making it even easier to access the most commonly taken pool powers, what are we adding to replace the powers being skipped so players don't go ape-shit on the developers when they decide they're being "forced" to take "useless" primary/secondary powers? Or, if we can get everything we want without paying power selection "taxes", and we don't want "useless" primary/secondary/*PP powers, why can't we have six pools, or eight, or just remove the pool lockouts altogether? Lastly, Fighting isn't mandatory. There are other Defense and Resistance powers available to every archetype. Every character, every build, is a balance of compromise, a blend of choices we make. If those compromises, those choices, are removed, we end up with a bigger homogenization problem than we already have. Look at the Fitness pool, where is that now? Look at the comments made about Hasten and how it should be inherent, since "everybody takes it". How far down the road of making "good" powers inherent do we go before we stop and realize that all we're really doing is removing customization and personalization? Yet another can of worms to stare at as they wriggle around on your plate.

It takes more than oblique sexual references to get a thread locked. Believe me, I know.

Because if it's done for Tough and Weave, it has to be done for Misdirection/Tactics/Spring Attack/Invoke Panic/Enflame/Burnout/Fold Space.

Pro-tip: behaving like a lesion-covered foreskin doesn't win friends and pacify enemies. Especially after you've been caught plagiarizing other peoples' contributions. And this isn't your house. You don't give orders here. You aren't entitled to place restrictions on who can say what, where. If you can't tolerate responses to threads, don't create threads.

And more quickly than we realize, since he'll have new tires.

Hope he didn't crack. Buckle under the pressure and upthrust his middle finger. Crumble due to the strain. I tremble at the thought of the aftershock.

First article you've read since 1882, I see.

Please. These patch notes are obviously faked! Look at the shadow on "Soon", the lighting is all wrong! And if you zoom in on "Respec", you can see that there's no pixel bleed! I know 'shopped patch notes when I see them, and I'm looking at one now. What are you hiding, "@Troo"?! Why are you afraid to let the truth be known?! #FreeThePatchNotes

Kinky.

Well, PA taunts override the click aggro, and the mummy went down so fast that I was surprised. That's my last real "weak" character.

And it doesn't even have to be one of your regular characters. 5 minutes in the character creator, name SPC43893Mule, empty the salvage bin, transfer, /altinvite SPC43893Mule, dump, delete.

Sodium, Silver, Radium and Samarium. Not bad on a sandwich, but it gives me the worst heartburn.

Because we're horny. WAIT! I meant bored! Bored!

Mender Silos' notes. Simple!

Note to self: avoid @Snarky's toilet.

TA/Dark defender holds up well against the EBs. Mummy can't be Immobilized, but Slows keep it out of arm's reach. Still a pain to whittle down. Werewolf is resistant to Immobilization, but I can stack enough to lock it down. Crone didn't even attack, just floated there, Immobilized, while I tore her apart. Reaper's not a threat. Haven't gotten a vamp to spawn, but since I'm at range, and loaded with AoE, his pet won't help him, and he's nothing without his pet. Not as fast as Grav/TA, no big attacks, no Containment, and a lot more running around to avoid the mummy's melee attacks, but these EBs aren't proving to be troublesome. I'll do Ill/TA this evening. That's my squishiest squishy, 100% dependent on PA to keep the damage off of her, so if there's going to be a stopping point, it should show up with that.

TA is, with the exception of EMP Arrow, entirely active mitigation. It's all clicks. No buff toggles, no click buffs, no PBAoE debuff/damage toggles. Ambushes are the counter to that, they can't be affected until they're present and in range. If you know they're coming, when they're coming, where they're coming from, and OSA isn't recharging, yeah, that works. The quickest recharge time I've managed with OSA is 39.1s, though, and when I use it, it's not behind me, it's in front of me. Bit difficult to drop OSA in two places at once, or drop it when it has 20s of recharge time remaining. And for Glue to be used to counter ambushes, again, you have to know they're coming, and know where they're coming from. Take that Vigilante morality mission which sends you after Ghost Widow, for example. Several of the ambushes in that mission spawn within tens of feet of your character, but they don't spawn from a specific point, so setting up a counter is flipping a coin and hoping that you win the toss. In the Cloud of Odorous Smoke tip mission, you might get lucky and have the Nictus spawn outside of the room with the seed carrier, potentially forcing them to cross a Glue patch to reach you, or you might have them spawn in the room, and there's no fixed point where that happens. Plus, if you're using /powexec_location target, there's no guarantee that either Glue or OSA will activate at all (might get Out of Range messages, even if they're in melee range), or that either will be effective (can spawn under the map, and when that happens, their effects aren't always applied to foes in the sphere). I pointed this out when the TA revamp was in beta. Ambushes are TA's weakness. Active mitigation requires activity, and activity requires targets, locations, strategic knowledge of enemy capabilities, line of approach, target vectors. In the past, TA had so many weaknesses that, while being ambushed was obviously one of them, the requirement to lean heavily on controls and multiple debuffs in every fight overshadowed its vulnerability to ambushes. The revamp improved TA's performance admirably, but in doing so, highlighted ambushes as its "hole". Every set has a "hole" of some kind. For instance, Rad, as powerful as it is, can be completely shut down with a single mez disabling the toggles and preventing the use of its heal. TA is less vulnerable to mez, but if you don't know when an attack is going to occur, or where it might come from, there's really not much you can do about it, except wait and hope you're not already engaged in combat and incapable of responding instantly. And, for whatever it might be worth, I approve of that. Everything should be countered by something. Ambushes counter TA. Obviously, ToTing is a different situation, but Slows don't do anything to prevent the Reaper from Fearing you (hm... have to take my Dark/Martial dominator back for another pass, see if i can Fear the Reaper), or the vampire from summoning his ambulatory Hershey bar, or the mummy from debuffing you, or the crone from toggling on Hurricane, et cetera. OSA is of absolutely no benefit with these EBs if one is "saving" it, it has to be used on every door because the spawns aren't predictable, which means you're waiting for it to recharge on most doors, slowing your progress considerably out of a desire to progress safely. I take the more reckless approach of knocking first, then using OSA if it's not trash or a treat. I'm just not going to wait ~20-30 seconds between doors.

I decided to take my Grav/TA controller on a round of ToTing this morning. That's something I'd been avoiding, as TA's weakness is ambushes and these are, in essence, triggered ambushes. Ambushes you can prepare for, but still ambushes. I expected that the first EB that spawned would flatten her in second, especially since my standard combat approach is to Wormhole everything to me, from a "safe" distance. The opening seconds were when I thought I'd encounter "make or break" situations, but it wasn't a problem. All of the EBs are susceptible to controls. The mummy takes the most stacking to lock down, but once it's done, there's no coming back. I didn't even have to look at Mr. Darkity Dark's Dark Servant. OSA, Fissure and Cross Punch kept it bouncing around and melted it like chocolate in a frying pan while I focused on the big guy. Those are the two which have proven to be the most trouble on my other characters. The other three were just target dummies. I'll test my Ill/TA and TA/Dark next. Those are now the ones with which I think I'm most likely to run into trouble.

They can be placed in salvage storage in bases.