Grouchybeast

Well, now it will be an Issue 26, Page 5 issue.

Citadel is way the worst for me, not just because it's so repetitive, but because those cave maps give me motion sickness. 🤢

The problem with bugs is that it's so difficult to judge from the symptoms how hard they are to fix. Actually, it would be really nice to have a list of reported bugs, with a dev note saying whether they've been looked at yet, and what the conclusion was in terms of effort needed to fix them.

It's interesting that you noticed it on a blaster. A couple of weeks ago I was duoing my MM with a blaster, and he was complaining that breakfrees weren't working while he was held. I wasn't having any problem using them while held, so we couldn't figure out why he was. Then after a while they started working again for him. If they're bugged it's apparently something weird and intermittent.

Can you apply knockback to an enemy in the middle of the knock-up animation? Because epic knockup followed by epic knockback would be, well. Epic. Never, not here or on live, have I wanted a suggestion thread to become reality as much as I want this one.

At the Talos train station: "No, my phone doesn't take pictures. Does yours?"

Neopets, of all places, has a barter-based trading post. Actually, it's a hybrid because a trade can involve a limited amount of currency, but inflation meant that the value of trades can exceed the allowed currency amount many times over. Anyway, the answer is that people invented their own currency to use in barter -- in the case of Neopets, a couple of different high-value single-use items that could be bought in infinite amounts from a store. Bartering requires an enormously tedious amount of research to make sure that the exchange you're making is actually fair and that someone isn't trying to rip you off by offering useless junk. It's much faster and safer to ask for currency cap + four Baby Paint Brushes for your item than it is to sit there and figure out the value of an offer containing a dozen different books, four morphing potions, two food items, a weapon and a plushie.

My virus scanner threw a fit about Tequila, so maybe you just have insufficiently paranoid software 😉

I am also bad at video games! On teams, I like playing debuff-heavy defenders and blasters. Blasters are the lowest-stress AT of all, because you have no responsibility. Just shoot things, and if you die, oh well. The team will be fine until you get back to them. For the high-tech version, find a tank or brute, follow them, shoot things and if you die, oh well. Debuff-heavy defenders are nice because you don't need to worry about juggling buffs and actively keeping people alive, and on teams the debuffing really shines when facing AVs, when you'll likely have plenty of time to apply toggles etc. And the rest of the time, blast!

Make him Ice/Devices instead and call him Ice Qbe.

IIRC, characters all have a base Hold protection of Mag 1, so Acrobatics will actually stop any holds that are Mag 3 or less.

How about just replacing all of them with clones of Manticore?

Is there a badge for that?

I'm not sure this completely solve the usual issue with broadly scaling content, which is that the lower level zones will either be unplayably difficult for low level characters or very easy for high level characters to farm. But giving a significant power buff to low level characters to let them narrow the gap to the high level characters is certainly a novel way of approaching it.

So the powers enemy groups have access to would be determined by how many slots characters have unlocked? That's an interesting idea, and it could definitely work in missions. What would you do about groups with mixed levels, or zone street sweeping?

Well, I can only take that into consideration so far, without knowing how much more powerful they'd be. I just think it's odd to come up with a detailed system to make the game harder, and then immediately turn around and make it easier again so people will want to play it, especially if the premise is that there's a large unmet demand for harder content. Having done the full range of levels for the No Enhancements Ouro badges, I would say that it was a little tiresome but very far from impossible to fight enemies from 10-50 with nothing slotted. Of course, that's not quite equivalent because Ouro uses the exemping rules to restrict available powers, and at high levels I paired up No Enhancements with No Epics, so the proposed system would be significantly less restrictive than the badge requirements.

Wouldn't it have the opposite effect, though? If players have access to all the higher level armours, mez resistence, end management tools, heals etc, they'll be able to cherry pick the good stuff and be less reliant on others in the early levels. Even with no slotting, there are some tremendously good powers with no or low end cost, or very long durations, or where the main benefit of slots is better recharge. It would certainly do wonders for my level 1 fire/ice/fire blaster to have access to Blaze, Frigid Protection, Hasten, Rise of the Phoenix and Bonfire, even with no slots. Blaze has twice the end cost of Fire Blast, sure, but it also does more than three times the damage, especially with my level 1 access to Aim and Build Up giving it decent accuracy. (I've noticed with suggestions for increased difficulty that they often come paired with suggestions that immediately lowers the difficulty again.)

Switching to an 'emergency tanker' that has no Gauntlet does not seem like it would be very helpful to the team. Playing a tanker with no Gauntlet for most of the time would be...well, it's basically a low-damage scrapper with no crits, isn't it? Bruising doesn't exist on HC now, it was replaced by the damage scale increases, so this AT would also have its tanker damage scales reduced, which would be a global 16% damage reduction to all melee attacks. No Gauntlet means that they need to use their Taunt power to hold aggro, dropping damage even further since every Taunt is a missed attack. The alt-form tank version is also going to be one level lower than the rest of the team, which maybe won't make much difference at low levels or low difficulty but can run smack into the purple patch for people running at high difficulty or playing incarnate content. E.g. moving from +4 to +5 will roughly halve the effectiveness of a character's damage, debuffs , mez etc. Overall, the alt forms are going to face a minimum of another 10% reduction in their powers' effectiveness relative to their natural level whenever they are fighting enemies that are even-conning or higher to their 'real' level, on top of whatever losses come from the lack of the inherent. So our hypothetical alt-form tanker will be doing 25% less damage (at a minimum, remember) and will have no Gauntlet to help perform its actual tanking role. This feels gimped to me, yes, and to me, anyway, the opportunity to add six extra slots to pool powers doesn't seem like it would make up for that. ETA: I'm not saying that there are no weaker inherents where losing them would have a less significant effect on the AT. For example, it would be pretty easy to get by as a Defender -- in teams, anyway. Solo, of course, there's that 30% damage buff gone. But there would also be the Assassination-less Stalker, or the Fury-less Brute stuck forever on their Corruptor-level melee damage scale, cases where the inherent is critical to the basic functioning of the AT. 'Lose the inherents' is simply too broad a mechanism to create a balanced AT.

You can do that preemptively when you do the search, using the drop-down list from the search box.

Somewhere on the Crey Industries forums, the Paragon Protectors are rejoicing that they finally got MOG buffed like they'd been asking for for years.

The forum already does recognise the / character, but you need to put quotes around the phrase to get the result you want. E.g. a search for "fire/ice" will get 74 hits containing that exact phrase, while "fire ice" gets a single hit.

This is the part that has been cracking me up for the whole thread.

I feel like the number of times I ever find myself in a set of circumstances where being able to switch to a gimped version of a different AT would be really useful would nowhere near make up for having to play a gimped version of an AT the entire rest of the time. Especially when CoX is already so flexible when it comes to AT roles, and there are very, very few problems that can't be solved with a handful of insps.

It's a bit finicky, but I can usually get decent results by using the search box dropdown to search in one forum only and match on all terms. Occasionally I've had to refine it using some quotes to create phrases rather than use single words, but I don't think I've ever failed to find at least some builds.

Surely if Paragon City has taught us nothing else, it's that the peace is best kept with FIRE.