Sakura Tenshi

Basic idea of this thread is to suggest new looks for old NPCs, but no reason we can't also talk about new powers for mob NPCs to make fights more interesting. Starting things off, I was playing around in the Dev/NPC costume editor to revamp the Five Origin contacts of Atlas with some new looks. Some more extreme than others. Starting off with Azuria, I actually came up with two separate looks, one was to largely embrace Azuria as we pretty much know her, just made using player assets (and a ToV belt yet available to us) With the second one there's not too much of a difference, though I also gave her a CoL belt dyed red to break up the line between her top and bottom as well as a bit of quasi-Gypsy inspired look with a 'jewelry' on her arms and a purple bandana around her head. To further emphasize Next up is Dr. St. John Smythe of SERAPH, an apparent inventor and long-time liaison for SERAPH, I didn't want to change too much in his design, but the limits of the costume creator forced my hand a bit, gave him the breakneck fat bellied turtleneck because turtlenecks are cool and as a nerd he might not take the best physical care of himself. Next up is Prince Kiros Nandelu, I didn't change his overall look too much besides giving him white eyes to signify his mutation (able to see ultra-violate and infrared spectrum) and fancied up his suit to make him look more princely. Also gave him black pants since I don't know how many men these days wear navy blue pants. And now we turn to Rick Davies who probably had the most extensive changes as a side effect of there being no flannel shirt option (could have sworn there was), I went with a very geeky look since he's a forcibly-retired-due-to-war injury nerd and gave him a look to compare and contrast with his sister. (a beard and green sweater, clear prescription glasses, and somewhat formal attire) And finally Susan Davies, who I largely tried to not change too much besides giving her a shirt instead a blouse and throwing on dark sunglasses. Once more she's kind of meant to compare and contrast to her brother with dark, unnecessary sunglasses, a more casual look, and not being bald. There's my initial crack at updating the five starting contacts, feel free to pitch and discuss your own I'll probably add more in the future.

Well not the same, stacking the ninjutsu mez protection is useful since that includes a bonus psi damage resistance. Two clicks and you can end up with 66% psi resist. edit: to clarify, I think what we might consider is that click next protections should actually apply an additional buff to make them worth a bit more than their “one-time” endurance cost. Otherwise their only virtue is that you can keep your mez protection up even during end crashes.

As I explained earlier the broadsword lunging charge isn’t a “magical” teleportation anymore than shield charge is. It’s supposed to be a rapid charge rush attack that uses teleport due to limits of the game’s engine. Your other counter arguments are valid but not that particular one. I will admit that the katana example I gave was directly supernatural, but in the end all three ideas were only examples. My issue with APP attacks is that they too can often be theme breaking due to a lack of variety, and as mentioned these need not all be actual ranged attacks but can incorporate foe pulls and gap closers as well.

I kind of get what you mean, but since this wasn't a teleport pool revamp suggestion, I sort of left it out, plus I could see an argument made that since a scrapper is a melee class, you'd want enemies right in your face, since teleport foe can be grabby by anyone, even non-melee fighters like controllers and so forth, it might be a good idea to give the option to choose a bit where you dump a foe, like say on top of a tar patch or a bunch of caltrops. I do agree teleporting foes needs to work on bosses and higher level foes as well, but the concept of such a change isn't supposed to be 'magical teleportation', it's only teleportation within the game mechanics, the idea was more electric melee using electro magnetism to pull an enemy in.

Well, back on live, I had proposed the idea of using a similar 'branching power pick' solution as a means of expanding powersets without raising the level cap, violating the cottage rule, and so forth, with the primary example being 9 alternate powers for Assault Rifle meant to allow Assault Rifle to focus down on four themes (Shotgun, automatic rifle, sniper, and demolitions). Unfortunately, my grasp on balance was bad then as it is now and there wasn't much interest for it. I think that could have been a 'more elegant' solution from the player side but probably a bigger headache coding side. So at this point I'd be happy to leave Assault rifle to burn in the trashfire that it is and create a bunch of different powersets that let you focus on type of ranged weapon and stick with it instead of running around with a hideous franken-gun that makes zero sense.

So, there's very little reason to take Scrapper Provoke, this much has been established, but we can't really get rid of the taunt due to cottage rule (which should be respected, also I must remind the cottage rule means 'you can't change what sets can be slotted into the power as it will make the guy who put a purple set in very angry'), but I had an idea from tanking in Final Fantasy XIV: just throw some damage onto it! Make Scrapper taunts into reliable 'ranged' attacks, and they don't even need to be strictly ranged attacks either! For some examples: Katana: Calling the Wolf > Air Slash The katana user now does Sting of the Wasp animation which releases a wave like Focus from Claws that strikes the target, taunting them and dealing moderate lethal damage. Broadsword: Confront > forward dodge heavy Lunging Thrust The broadsword wielder takes the Stalker's Assassin's Slash quick animation starting stance and then teleports to the target completing the attack with moderate lethal damage and thrust animation And since we have targeted teleports that will drop us off in front of a foe, why can't we have ones where we don't need to pick where we drop our opponents off and set them in front of us? in otherwords: pull-to attacks. For example: Electric Melee: Confront > Magnetic Lash Electricity sparks in the user's hand and they do the 'siphon life' animation from dark melee, the target is then 'pulled' (actually teleported) to the user, possibly using one of the outline bodies as afterimages to show them 'rushing' towards you while leaving a trail of electric sparks in the air, causing knockdown (no damage this time, sorry) and taunting them on top of teleporting them to your feet. So that's some of my proposals, any thoughts from all of you on if you'd like to see this or even your own ideas on what other melee sets could get for a ranged attack taunt/gap closer taunt/pull taunt?

Too radical for this game.

Sakura's big dumb list of rough powerset ideas I'm gonna start off with stuff that should be possible with few to no new animations, and while I don't have the full powers list worked out, I do have some ideas as well as the powerset gimmicks. Also, as a waring, my sense of balance is awful. Marksman's Rifle (For Blasters, Corruptors, Defenders, and Sentinels) Basic premise is that you are a sniper, the base range of this set is longer than usual so Blasters, corruptors, and defenders benefit from a base range of 100ft and Sentinels 80ft on most attacks in addition to most attacks having a modest -def and -res component as you 'draw a bead' on them and to represent the accuracy and lethality of a long-ranged rifleman, as a possible icing on the cake, the Marksman's Rifle has a special gimmick built into its attacks where some will deal up to +35% more damage if the Target is at certain HP thresholds, specifically some are meant as 'openers' and deal the extra damage if a target is over 80% HP while others will deal bonus damage at below 30% HP. Marksman's Rifle's weaknesses could include long recharge times which can kill having an attack chain, lacking a proper aim power (instead it gets 'Mad Minute' which is a +recharge power), high endurance consumption, and limited AoE options. The Marksman's rifle would probably user a lot of stance animations not unlike beam rifle with some ideas for them to go into a crouching fire stance we see NPCs use as emotes. Also, idea for the Tier 9 would be 'painting the target' for an off screen air/artillery strike. Boomstick (for Blasters, Corruptors, Defenders, and Sentinels. Name pending) Boomstick is a dedicated shotgun powerset which sort of goes the opposite path of Marksman's rifle. Where MMR is supposed to be long ranged and single target focused, Boomstick throttles the range on Blasters, corruptors, and defenders to 60ft and sentinels by 40ft with a lot of AoE options (primarily cone), but that's alright because Boomstick is meant to be the ultimate Blapper/Scrapinel/Corrscrapper/Scrapfender set. Unlike most lethal oriented sets, Boomstick possesses a lot of debuffs in many of it's attacks to mitigate incoming damage with -dam, -tohit, and -rech as your unrelenting, in-your-face assaults suppress opposition, and when that's not enough, each attack builds stacks of 'Crowd Control' which caps up to 5, when unleashed with certain attacks such as the Tier 9 Slam Fire where you can knock down even Reichsman or a buffed out Lord Recluse with irresistable knockdown and knockback for the duration of the attack, leaving them helpless and giving yourself and teammates breathing room. Alternatively it can be used to cash in to grant the user 15 seconds of +15% defense to all, +20% damage resist to all, and a modest mez protection of up to magnitude 5 on sleep, hold, stun, fear, confuse, and immob. What Boomstick possesses though in ferocity it does lack in raw damage, only two or three ST damage options, and its own tendency towards knockback combined with its low range means you can put your enemies out of firing range (naturally, this set would lack a snipe attack) Power Armor Weapons (For Blasters, Corruptors, Defenders, and Sentinels) This one I don't even have much an idea for a gimmick for, but the idea would be to take some of the powers from Robotics MM pets, PPD shell armors, and Malta Titans and let players enjoy playing the ultimate killbot or ironman with top wrist mounted laser blasts, underarm miniguns, back mounted rocket packs, firing off a laser beam eye snipe, and plasma beam palm sweeps, all popping out of the body and returning just as quickly. I NEED THIS. These next two actually are based on both ideas from the old live suggestions and ideas forums as well as similar pitches made here. Riot Control This one could be fairly simple, using a grenade launcher as a weapon, this could allow for a natural alternative for control powers using gadgetry and traps. (how about some 'instant razor wire' for a group immob?) Tactical Genius (For Defenders, Corruptors, Masterminds, and controllers) this one shouldn't need much in the way of animation work, basically a natural (or psychic/seer) spin on a buff/debuff set with some light controls. Some ideas include granting group stealth, pointing out disadvangeous terrain the enemy can walk into, slowing them down and negating defenses, moral boosts that grant heals overtime, and rallying cry used by the Cimerorans. Also so you can hear villains scream CREEEEEEEEED! as your max scaled party tank appears from behind a tiny trashcan and basically Assassin strike's a target. Okay, now I know we're kind of getting into silly stuff, either because animations just are not there or because it'd be a bit redundant, and maybe I played too much For Honor. Shieldless Shield Defense (maybe call it 'Warrior's Defense'?) Basically exactly what it says: a shieldless version of shield defense to get the nice mechanical benefits... Namely shield charge and grant cover, and let it be coupled with powers which normally can't use shields like Katana, titan weapons, claws, or maybe because you don't want the weird frankenstein armslam it does to several overhead attacks like air superiority, default haymaker, and havoc punch. Also this would open "Shield Defense" as an option for Sentinels! Spear Melee (For Scrappers, brutes, stalkers, and tanks) Of course it would need different animation sets, perhaps two sets since I ideally envision could still be paired with shield defense so you too can become a hapless town guard. A lot more thrusts than sweeps (though not entirely absent) and a focus on lethal damage. Some animations might need to be stolen from For Honor's Nobushi and Valkyrie and FFXIV's Dragoon class. Glaive (For scrappers, brutes, stalkers, and tanks) While this one would only need one new set of animations, the idea was to give a high AoE option like a bit of a more damage reasonable Titan Weapons, but really it's so we can have halberds, guan dao, and scythe slingers for the edgy. Honestly, there's a lot more I could think of, but this list alone is kind of a doozy, and I think I'd prefer to just make adjustments to existing powersets first.

I think some of the psy-melee giant telekinetic fists could also work for a watery melee stuff.

Actually, have a few ideas myself on how to do a Dominator illusions power would involve removing spectral terror and replacing it with a cone fear, standard phantom army but make it the level 32 power, and replace phantasm with 'Phantasmagoria' a PBAoE stun (from a swirl of dazzling, seizuriffic colors). Possibly bump up Invisibility, make a group PBAoE click buff. Edit: as an alternative to the cone fear, make it a 'contagious fear' effect, possibly with an increased fear duration if the target is asleep. Call it 'Mass Hysteria'.

I think part of the issue is that some sound effects are tied to the models and animations even. No idea why the live devs did that but they did.

To clarify though, isn't the issues that the numerous pets Illusion makes use of is simultaneously overpowered and underpowered for doms? Overpowered because craploads of pets, only one of which is killable. The downside though is that the three pets do not help build domination, nor do the two stealth powers, forcing the dom to rely on only a handful of controls and their attacks. Illusion for doms would need to be massively different, because, to be honest, the controller version as is is a crappy control set that relies more on DPS pets than actual controls.

Well, the thing I see with the Cottage Rul,e @archgemini24, is that, in theory at least, it's the only rule in the game where powers are 'balanced' around IO sets. Specifically as I can tell, the core of the cottage rule is "don't mess with the sets/enhancements that can be slotted into it, otherwise it's fine". So turning a single target melee power into a ranged AoE hold is just right out. But we can be additive to abilities and only slightly subtractive to others. For example, I've long kicked around the idea of how to improve Elude from Super Reflexes would look a bit like this: Lower defense buffs to maybe +22.5% instead of the full +45% (should be enough to push an SO'd SR character into softcap in any event) upon activation, Elude grants a +30% ToHit Buff as well as a +30-50% Recharge buff as well (because you're moving so fast, you're able to @#$% attacks faster and enemies are easier to hit) This consequently would call for a recharge time increase too. possibly bonus would be that, upon activation, the user releases a 35ft radius PBAoE debuff aura with no line of sight requirements. The debuff severely lowers defense, tohit, and damage (even when they start to hit you, you can pull away from attacks) but most of all, movement and recharge (say, like 35%). About everything else would stay the same, +recovery (need it for the +recharge), crash, and 2 minute duration. It doesn't provide direct damage resistance, but debuffing enemies could help mitigate things, and the core idea is to let an SR character basically have a Quicksilver moment. And it still lets you slot everything you presently can slot into Elude, but has a lot of additional benefits to it, and possibly can now slot more things.

@Grouchybeast It's not so much that I feel Incarnate content's taken over, but it can feel like all the newer stories are tied back to the incarnates and/or praetoria. Dean MacArthur/Keith Nance, Vincent Ross/Roy Cooling (lesser degree), New Praetorians/Mr. G (well, obviously), Revamped Atlas and Shining Stars, Admiral Sutter and Mortimer Kal. They all kind of have the shadow of the coming storm, the praetorians, or incarnate plotline looming over in the background. There's exceptions like Shauna Stockwell and Eagle Eye, Laura Lockhart/Brother Hammond, and Grant Easton/Bane Spider Reuben, and yes, there's a backlog of a lot of old story arcs, but to be honest, a lot of those old story arcs are kind of a boring slog in many ways, even the Indigo and Veridian Arcs suffer from 'issue 1 writing syndrome', shoot, not even the villainside stuff is spared from heavy 'tell don't show' writing. Now from my stand point, Kallisti Wharf has also just become a surprisingly quiet and clean part of Paragon, and it feels like it'd be ruined with looming cosmic scale threats and endless masses of level 50 spawns. I kind of would like the idea of KW becoming a sort of 'peaceful' zone where at the very least most spawns are in a default non-aggressive state, maybe have a few 'indoor' areas with active and agressive mob spawns like some of the missions in revamped Atlas, and otherwise actively aggressive spawns only appear in a few events, maybe even tying it to repeatable content?

@MTeagueGonna be honest, I want more incarnate, stuff but I kind of agree with you. I feel like Kallisti Wharf would be a good place to kind of step back from all that stuff. My ideal content for the zone would take things back to a bit of basics: heroes helping people, villains seeking self gain, vigilantes punish the guilty, and rogues are all about their bottom lines. if I were to throw in incarnate stuff, it would be restricted to some specific TFs or a new trial. (though my ideal would be using Croatoa for Incarnate stuff and continue/conclude that story. Celtic myth is crazy, yo.)

>Adding more functionality to origins without locking people into things and even actively expand on their origins. >Expanding on the Tip mission system with more tip missions >Tyrannical post

I admit, I am annoyed we can't beat enemies via knocking them off rooftops and other high places, or couldn't be defeated by knocking them into traffic.. I'm not sure how you'd code it, but it'd be cool if anything below an elite boss took not just fall and 'collision' damage from vehicles, but took extra damage and could be defeated through it., kind of giving knockback a use in fights.

Honestly, might have to bite the bullet and make a 'Temporal Stasis' hold lock power. Admittedly, in the scheme of things, it was a little odd they changed Dark Miasma so much for Controllers but left Time Manipulation unchanged.

@Tyrannical >The 'Avatar' wields all four elements I see what you did there...

As I mentioned, ultimately my friends had an idea of what to expect, the real issue, at it's core is that once failure happens, the chance for recovery is effectively impossible. So my challenge for any of you is: Do this mission and die. Then try to get back into the fight with the ambushes always waiting for you. You'll either need to die a lot, use the base exploit, or log out. Again, this would actually be honestly better if you did just fail the mission and get booted out. But it's frustrating to constantly lock us into a cycle from which it becomes impossible to escape without exploits.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind it if a team wipe was a 'mission fail' that forced restarted the mission (as that would basically mean you could respawn out of the mission and try again with an adjusted strategy), I do get we should have maybe tried it at a lower difficulty or done it a different way. In fact, we had done this mission before on a team we built expressly to be as well balanced as possible (they struggled), so it was natural to assume maybe we could have handled it. But the design issue comes from the fact that once you fail, it's basically impossible to recover within what could be suspected as the developer intentions. I highly doubt they had planned for players to either be forced to log out, repeatedly die until an enemy's strongest powers were on cooldown, nevermind the base teleport exploit. In the end though, the root problem is still that these types of ambush mobs lock onto players and will track you across the map (happened when we did managed to get out and reenter with one teammate dropping at one end of the map then the mob flying over towards me at the other end) and just as egregiously nearly negates an entire archtype (the stalker) with this kind of programming on top of all the other frustrating aspects of it.

No offense, but this kind of seems like a bit of a mess. For one thing, it's only hold is an AoE one which will probably be painfully long cooldown, and every single Control set always has at least one ST hold. The next is that the AoE stun requires a corpse, which limits your options for controls that actually mitigate damage. (Immobilize is honestly worthless in many respects). A time control set sounds interesting, sure, but with what you presented it's honestly going to be frustrating and lackluster.

Hellions (and skulls until they were updated) have Submachine Guns (gunner, the ones wielding the UZIs) and fire burst, the Buckshot Lt.s are the ones you're thinking of, and that was it. The skulls got updated to include the Death Head soldier with a full assault rifle that had Burst, Heavy Burst, and Lead Spray. (which makes them a real pain in the ass. Also upsets me because I feel like a third Hellions/skulls Lt. should have used thugs MM Dual Pistols)

We were at base difficulty, but as a team of 4 with two of us sidekicked up, it meant that for half the party the mission was +1. We were a controller, a stalker, a dom, and a fort. So what's the lower difficulty "break the team and run solo"? @Onemantankwall @aethereal Ah, and here's the 'git gud, challenge should be frustrating and painful!'. We were getting locked down by timestop bosses with holds, forbidden knowledge lt.s with immobilizes, crystal balls and ice clouds with massive collective -recharge and we would be hit with this all before we even finished the respawn animation. It was not a damn challenge, it was impossible until we cheesed the system using the base macro.

So, I'm running the finale of the Ward arcs from Night Ward where you defend the Midnight mansion. I have three friends with me and the spawn size when Ward turns against you is literally impossible because not only do you face multiple bosses, all with control powers and ward himself who is an elite boss, but the respawn location is just off to the side of the mansion itself, and if you die, you are in aggro range of the mobs and even respawn in base forces you to teleport at the mansion in the mission instead of in your base. You are stuck in a cycle of dying and returning only to be held and killed again. Edit: the problem isn't the location of the hospital, it's that the ambushes are permanently aggroed onto players, meaning the second you spawn into the mission or even if you can survive getting up and fleeing, the mobs will lock on and follow you, even if they downed another teammate on the otherside of the freaking map. What moron at Paragon studios came up with this?