Parabola

@Maelwys- just wanted to say thanks for all the testing and analysis you are doing on this. Truly a heroic effort.

I'm wondering if we might not just be better off going back to the same area and target caps as everyone else for damage (keeping the 0.95 melee scalar) and implementing a beefed up punchvoke with greater area and target caps. So a typical pbaoe would be radius 8 with 10 target cap for damage but it punchvokes with radius 12 and 16 target cap. That way at least the damage would scale better between low and high target saturation.

Phase powers would be much more useful if they were able to forcibly un-phase phased enemies. Combine that with the trawl and just leave any enemy that is neither phased or trawled alone and you'd have a winner. Master illusionists and that one really irritating av beware!

Idle thought. Having less coverage from seeds and being expected to layer controls might feel better if those controls didn't interfere with the confusion effect so much. Could there be a way of coding vines and spore burst so they don't apply their effects to confused enemies (or some confused enemies)?

When the original tanker aoe buffs were made there was some mention of it being to increase a tanks ability to aggro more enemies. Of course given that damage dealt is a part of the threat equation this scaling back of damage would seem to be working against that aim.

Yes but kb has no duration so enhancement has always affected magnitude instead. For all other types of mez enhancement has always affected duration. Kb is very much in its own little category that I think the player base is used to (how to use enhancements to turn kb into kd etc). Anyway it sounds like people are having success with this power as it is so that's good. I still don't like the fact random mez powers can only be enhanced with hamis though, and the interaction with certain incarnates is great and all but that's another end game only thing.

If i recall correctly, the same flag that makes a mez's duration ignore purple patch also makes the mez's magnitude now be effected by purple patch and by extension enhancements. That means either you make the mez not be effected by enhancements at all, and have a static mez that is reduced by purple patch, or you make it enhancable. Otherwise its duration is effected by purple patch and you don't get the clean switch over between mezes every 4 seconds. Edit: This is how Cloak of Fear works as well. Hang on. So these two powers react differently to enhancement than every other mez power in the game? I get not wanting to be constrained by precedent but is this not going to be just a tad confusing?!

The best form of control is knockdown/up since there's no real limit to how much it loops especially if you have stacking sources like an Earthquake/Bonfire on a Frenzied Tide Pool. As much as I've disagreed with everything else Championess has said I have to agree that confuse has to be considered the best control effect. It's hard to argue with a control that makes the mobs kill themselves and buff you. That's not to say Seeds is where it needs to be, just that given the straight choice between holding, stunning, fearing, confusing, etc a mob I'll choose confusing every time. Many enemies even tend to herd themselves when confused if left mobile.

I've realised I really dislike random mez effects. Two main reasons. Firstly they can't be easily enhanced (hamis being expensive and end-game). Secondly working out how to stack enough mez magnitude to shut down bosses is an enormous part of my character building these days. There are more and more bosses that do something deeply annoying if they aren't mezzed. A random effect mez is unfortunately almost completely useless for this.

In general I like the sound of this - it's clever and solves an obvious problem. My biggest concern is that it's introducing another mechanic to the game that isn't going to be immediately obvious to players who are not well versed in what is going on under the hood. It's always been recognised that the interaction between global vs local recharge and ppm isn't an ideal situation because of exactly this issue.

I've long thought that the problem with confusion in this game is that there's nothing confused about it. Enemies affected by confusion know exactly who their enemy now is; it's exclusively their former friends. If confusion lived up to the name enemies would select targets at random from everyone on the battlefield, both friend and foe. That would make confusion a much softer control and it would also have addressed some of the power imbalance between seeds and mass confusion (seeds aggros so you'd always get random return fire, mass confusion doesn't so you wouldn't unless you attack further). Anyway, that's all very pie in the sky thinking now. I haven't had a chance to do any testing (and might not) but I'm very concerned that these changes seem to go too far. Creepers in particular is integral to the feel of plant and if it isn't a high damage patch of chaos and fun fx, then plant loses a big part of its usp.

Well... This is certainly an ambitiously sized collection of changes. No wonder it took a long time to get out of closed beta. I can see how some changes are effectively bundled up together but in all honesty I worry that this patch is too big for effective testing. New content obviously has the potential for a lot of bugs but my bigger concern is the number of changes to existing mechanics and powersets. The bar should be set very high for sweeping changes, as characters with significant player investment in them are being affected. The simple fact that there are two pages of feedback threads suggests that it is unlikely each change is going to receive enough focus. To end on a positive though, it's good to see the developer notes outlining the thinking behind the changes. Big thumbs up for that.

Sorry I don't recall. Lately I've given up trying this sort of run in favour of just completing everything in ouroboros. It's easier and there's no need to shut off xp so you are always progressing.

It never fails to make me laugh that the first arc, unlocked at level 5, has a 'this is what a trainer is' mission.

Among other balance reasons for not allowing set enhancements to be slotted in free auto powers this prevents the noob trap of slotting a stealth IO in a power that cannot be turned off. IIRC this was allowed once upon a time and it caused no end of problems on escort missions.

But can't you then just pick any low FX armour set and the science or mutation origin? Radiation in this case is backstory rather than power.

I couldn't agree more. I've always thought having reactions is a bad idea and I believe they contribute to many of the problems we see on the forums.

Not at all. As you can see it was a while ago and didn't exactly gain a lot of traction. I only brought it up because I mocked up what such a set could look like. I really think this is a gap in the IO landscape that would be worth filling.

I agree that this is a bit of a gap in the current IO line up. A while back I suggested the same thing:

I solo 99.99% of the time and a small proportion of that is spent dual boxing. If dual boxing was banned I would simply continue to solo 99.99% of the time without it. Dual boxing isn't a replacement for teaming, it's another form of soloing.

They could just instate a forum rule that says 'if you are asked to leave a thread, do so' and the outright bans follow if this is not obeyed. Going straight to the ban would indeed be too strong unless other rules had been broken.

Such as . . .? At the moment moderation seems to roughly escalate as follows: 1) Play nicely everyone, don't make me come in here. 2) Hid some posts, seriously cool it everyone. 3) Ok we're done, thread locked. I suggest an extra step between 2 and 3 where appropriate: 2.5) Ok X and Y, you were asked nicely and this isn't on. Do not post again in this thread or bans will follow. Again, I appreciate that this isn't as simple as the complete threadlock and it does require moderation being more publicly direct but it would be fairer to other posters in the thread. At the minute it can feel like everyone is punished for the actions of individual posters.

The short version is shut off xp at every level ending in a 4 or a 9 and do everything you can. There is a bit more to it if your OCD is very strong though. When I've tried this I've been aiming to get all my contacts to confidant status (full bar) but that raises an issue blueside. A lot of the old origin contacts share a pool of missions alongside those specific to them individually. So, if you tap out one origin contact before moving onto the next you can find there aren't enough missions left to get the new contact to confidant. Unfortunately, even bearing the above in mind my last attempt at this was spoiled by a contact I couldn't get a full bar on. I'd been cycling through all five origin contacts in each level range but I still ran out of missions. Other than that the main dangers are forgetting to do something (the atlas park safeguard is easy to miss) or just simply not shutting off xp soon enough. You have to be very careful of mission and story arc completion bonuses, particularly early on. Something I've been enjoying while doing this kind of challenge is to try to get field crafter more or less through drops alone. It gives some purpose to all the enemies you are wading through with xp turned off. You still don't pick up enough lv10 recipes though. It's also quite satisfying to pick up the exploration badges and history plaques as you go too. It's a different experience doing it when the mobs are still a threat.

Chapeau! I've had a few tries at this and given up every time. I'm settling for doing everything in flashback but in level order for my current run - it's going well, nearly finished 25-29. As well as missing out loads of hunts it means you get to keep levelling and can use a much more fleshed out build. Of course there are a load of missions that aren't part of a story arc or have a badge so these are out of reach doing it this way. I don't like playing on anything other than the highest settings I can manage though so it's still taking a long time...

This is a good point. I'm still smarting a bit about a suggestion thread of mine (years ago) that was locked after two posters took it upon themselves to get into a massive argument that wasn't even on topic. I get that from the moderators point of view a thread that is blowing up into arguments is a headache and locking it is a simple option but it doesn't feel very fair to those not directly involved - particularly the OP. Perhaps the moderators could look at removing problematic posters from a thread before resorting to locking it (assuming the opening poster themselves aren't the issue)?