Parabola

Plant is very strong and it lends itself to the two archetypes in different ways. For controllers it offers huge amounts of effective aoe damage that they don't normally get. Confuse, contained double damage roots and of course procced out creepers combine to do very respectable damage. Ideally you want a secondary that works with this, buffing recharge to cycle creepers more quickly and debuffing defence and resistance to make confuse even more deadly. Rad is a good secondary, the only slight niggle being that the debuff toggles pair something that helps confuse with something that hinders it. This isn't a huge issue though. Storm as mentioned is another good pairing, as is time. Traps and trick arrow are also decent pairings, I kind of enjoy the thematic mix of plant and tech too. Dominators enjoy having the extra aoe damage early on as this is something they tend to lack. They also like the fact that plant doesn't need to take too many powers freeing up room for secondary picks. I suspect plant is the easiest dom to level and the most exemp friendly because of these. In terms of secondary pairings it wants much the same things so thorns (huge defence debuffs) and sonic (res debuffs) are fairly natural fits. As doms are less reliant on confuse to carry their damage (once they mature at least) really anything will work though. I am currently levelling a plant/psi and psi offers nothing in particular to plant but the combination is still enormously strong. A side note for plant on either archetype is I've found it useful to have some form of stealth or -perception. Seeds is obviously your lynchpin control and being a cone it ideally wants to be carefully lined up to ensure maximum coverage. I've also been experimenting with using full stealth to drag the creeper patch into spawns, the downside of this is that as soon as it alerts them you attract aggro so you can't use it to tank in that way. Many spawns are quite spread out and my hope was that I could use creepers to pull them in a bit before firing off seeds but results have been mixed. Nothing beats toggle corner pulling if you have access to that.

The way IO's interact with this power is also worth bearing in mind. The radial control power accepts stun, knockback and taunt sets (on archetypes that do taunt), and the cone damage power accepts ranged aoe sets. Any basic enhancement like accuracy applies to both powers regardless of the source, however damage enhancement of course only affects the damage cone. Procs are only triggered by the power that accepts that type of enhancement, nothing double dips. I have fault on both tanks and a brute and slot it with acc/dam, acc/dam/end winter pieces, and then 3 damage procs and a ff+rech. I build heavily for accuracy and feel that even on tanks the radial control is a bigger area than the damage cone (also somewhat easier to aim), so I like putting in the taunt and kb damage procs alongside a single ranged aoe proc. If you have less accuracy you might get more mileage out of three ranged aoe procs. I think fault is a superb power. The accuracy of the control power has to be worked with but if you do it is very reliable mitigation. The recharge is quite slow at first but when your global recharge ramps up that becomes a strength as it's a good vehicle for procs. And it's enormous fun. Big, loud, stampy fun.

Fault is two powers activated with a single click. One is the old radial aoe control power that does stun, taunt (on tanks and maybe brutes?) and knockdown but no damage. The other power is a cone aoe damage power. Both powers roll to hit independently and the radial control power has an accuracy penalty. On tanks the cone damage power is affected by the arc bonus and if you take a step or two back from the pack seems to hit most of the area covered by the radial control. On other archetypes it will be a good bit narrower though.

The irony being that in my opinion stalkers are one of the most team friendly archetypes in the current meta. Any discussion of bad pug experiences tends to bring up the common habit players have of blowing up the minions and moving on, leaving bosses behind for squishies to deal with. Resurrecting bosses just makes this worse. Turn up to a team with a character specifically designed to delete bosses and a willingness to actually fight them and you are making a huge contribution.

I keep advocating for an HP buff that is related to team size: One person: normal HP. Two persons: 20% more HP. Three persons: 50% HP. All the way to 8 persons and... 200%? Numbers would be tweaked. This would let mobs last longer and not crippler a soloer. I suggested scaling enemy buffs based on team size ages ago. If we accept that we can't put the 'soloing 4/8' genie back in the bottle it seems the most sensible way to approach the problem to me. The hard mode content seems to be along the same sort of lines but it is so limited and is clearly time consuming to create. Universal buffs could be applied much more quickly and widely. My thoughts were that the buff would probably need to gradually ramp up between say levels 30 to 50 as lower level teams aren't often running into the difficulty ceiling.

If you go into the mission list and click the 'more...' button on any mission you get a pop-up window with the mission data and it often updates as you complete mission objectives. This is handy as you can read it while travelling to the mission or while beating up bad guys. However, as it currently stands this window disappears every time you zone (including entering the mission it is displaying the info for). It would be great if it could be permanently displayed and automatically refreshed with whatever the active mission data is.

SR does have a taunt aura. Overall I agree with your analysis though. SR offers something different to a set like Rad. It can be made to be an offensive armour simply by achieving a decent level of protection easily, therefore freeing up slotting choices in attacks. If I really want to go nuts with proccing out an attack set SR is one of the first places I start looking.

As Lunar Ronin mentions you have to be very careful with turning xp on and off. In addition I find the stop start process a little unsatisfying; I like the feeling of progress, I just want it to happen more slowly. Having said which even with a 25% xp option (also disabling patrol xp) I suspect I'd still need to switch to no xp periodically. It might be a bit more walk, walk, walk, stop than sprint, stop, stop, stop, though.

I don't think it would be necessary to increase inf gain and it would probably make it a less appealing idea to the devs for the kind of reason you mention. If you slow down levelling you gain more resources per level just with normal inf, merit and drop rates. When I've tried completionist runs I've always been impressed by how much stuff you accumulate. Having to sell off full enhancement trays at lv9 is a novel experience, the do's aren't worth much but it adds up against your limited expenditure at that level. Later of course you get loads of recipes to craft and convert, and loads of salvage and merits to do it with.

I'd like a 50% and 25% xp option regardless of the double xp status of the server. Even baseline xp rates are too fast for completionist runs. I'm not sure how they could be made to work with patrol xp though, it might need to be disabled.

I'm not seeing any noticeable improvement.

Not this update - as far as I am concerned FA has always been a must have. This update has just made it easier to run.

The tohit debuff thing is why I take focused accuracy on just about every melee toon. I figured out a long time ago that it's the debuffs that are the cause of 90% of high level deaths and I build accordingly. It's not a new problem for cot though. Prior to the upgrade they would constantly spawn death mages who run a -tohit aura. Getting into a fistfight with four of them wasn't uncommon and it was only winnable with focused accuracy.

Imo bio pairs best with attack sets that offer some mitigation and particularly those that can slot ff+rech in aoes. You want to recharge your clickie protections as fast as possible and give them space to do their thing. Bio/stone is my favourite tanker and I don't see why it wouldn't work on a scrapper too. Mace, axe, martial arts, etc would also be good shouts. That said my two most successful scrappers have been claws/nrg and mace/shield.

Something like this might work: /macro RB "unselect$$powexec_name Remote Bomb"

Had a quick play and found the free camera utterly disorientating. I'm not sure why that would be considered better by anyone but I'm pretty sure I'm not the target audience. I found the setting to put it back reasonably quickly.

No it's just that the patch notes are quoting the per tick value and the game is quoting the per second value. Both are correct but it's a little confusing.

The end cost is quoted per tick and it ticks twice a second. It used to be 0.39 per tick so 0.78 per second and it should now be half that.

Along somewhat similar lines I would love s.t.a.r.t options that throttle xp gain to 50% and 25%. No extra inf, no bonus of any kind, just reduce incoming xp. Periodically I like to try a 'smell the roses' run through the game and while turning xp off every 5 levels works it doesn't quite hit the mark. I like progress, I just want slower progress. In order for this to work I guess patrol xp would also need to be disabled or it would interfere with these options.

As I understand it they wouldn't be compatible. Homecoming have made a load of under the hood updates and improvements.

In the latest build controller telekinesis does not accept immobilize or controller archetype IO's. The power text says it does but I assume some setting is missing somewhere? Dominator telekinesis does accept immobilize and dominator archetype IO's though. (Hope this isn't confusing by the way - I didn't know whether to start a new thread or just tag it on to this one)

<snipped old problem>

I basically disregard trapdoor testing for this exact reason. If they are going to allow certain temp buffs or certain types of inspiration the whole thing is invalid. Allow everything or nothing. The character building game is one of trade offs, you accept limitations in one area to push your performance in others. By allowing certain limitations to be ignored they are favouring one set of decisions over others - it is no longer a level playing field.

Etc. Etc. Wind, writing in this voice does your arguments no favours at all. You might have years of experience with the powers and sets you are commenting on but in all honesty if I were a dev I'd struggle to not disregard your opinions out of hand because this just comes across so badly. One of the worst aspects of internet culture is that it teaches people that the only way to be heard is to make as big a noise as possible. In this kind of space it has the opposite effect though - I immediately stop listening and I suspect others will too. If you dial it all back several notches you might find people listen more. Mods - feel free to hide this post ... I just felt I had to say it.

Ah, it sounds like there is a bug then because it accepts accuracy on a controller: