InvaderStych

I was surprised it hadn't already been dropped. Yours are better. I was gonna find an image with text and edit it, but I got lazy. Big problem for me lately. 😛

Hey-Jimmy!

Hibernate was toggled on when I opened the chunk. YMMV.

Nope. Combat Teleport > Follow. IMO: Follow is far too slow and I cannot recall a single time it placed me within melee range of a target. In fairness there are some situations that will flummox CT and place you out of melee range as well, but those are outliers. With Follow it was every damn time. Whatever the trick was to using it, I never figured it out. 😄 Edit: If you haven't give CT a try. It can easily be bound to Target, shift-<movementkey>, mousechord, all sorts of things. Many guides on how to do so, most better than my hacked-up out of date files. But if you want some CT tips/tricks many will be happy to oblige if you have trouble finding the info.

I re-designed a scrapper into Hover/Flight/EvM well into Vet levels as a ground-pounder. After building up Mighty Judgement to T3. Target in Air! Target in Air! Target in Air! Target in Air! Target in Air! Target in Air! ... well, Pyro it is then. 🤣

Interesting, that's not how I read the spirit of the thread. Of course, I don't understand the impulse of trying to directly copy something given the plethora of ways we can adapt an inspiration into something of our own. I also don't understand the impulse to "Price is Right" the rules on copyrighted characters either. (aka, as close as one can without "technically" breaking the letter of the rule while clearly attempting to flip a bird to the spirit of the rule) Let's take my entry as an example: Legion. And well, technically, one could emulate a "super" who's powers are tied to DID or something similar (or whatever the current parlance for identity disorders happens to be) to really do it correctly would require access to GM/Developer commands for the Reality Manip aspects of the power-set. Even if I thought I could get close I'd still go a completely different direction in terms of look and head-canon because I don't want a copy. Personally, I never ask myself if I can make a Specific Character, but I definitely take inspiration from time to time and go from there. I wanted something that played like a Firebender, and after discovering that there are actually ways to get get close in terms of powers I made a toon that looks nothing like one, has his own (unwritten) backstory with no connection to the show, its characters, or the world in which it took place. The only similarities are throwing fire and kicking faces, which is really the only similarity I wanted in the first place. I know that's not the sort of thing you're talking about, but I do think that was the spirit in which the question was posed by the OP. It was certainly the spirit of my reply.

Just because I am sort of bored in game at the moment I toyed around with the blaster for a minute or three on beta. While likely pointless on teams, using KB/Repel to send a single mob into a distant group then triggering Fold Space is .. H I L A R I O U S. Doubly so when running Repulsion Field... Can't say I see a use for it, even if I worked out the clumsiness a bit. But worth the short time for the lulz. Forgot that the blasts are "Chance For" for the most part, which does lower the ranking on the Royalty scale. Let's call this one the Knockback Jester.

Depends on how one measures "recently." 😉 More Helpfully: No, nothing has changed, literally or figuratively. There really needs to be a word for when something is both. LRT/Fast Travel Accolade was released with i27pg1 in November of 2020 and there were pages upon pages of discussion of this topic during Open Beta prior to the release. For the OP: I'm sorry that the changes are not to your taste and that the current setup turns you off. Fortunately, as others have mentioned, there are plenty of ways to circumvent the "Long Way 'Round." in this game. IMO, that has always been one of this games hallmark features - even when we all waited for 14 levels for a travel power and called out in broadcast for a TaxiBot ride to our mission door. Even then this game was light-years ahead of contemporaries with respect to travel. Counter-Opinion: Grabbing the Starter Zone Explore badges is basically my SOP now when starting up a toon. Grab a 2XP, do some light street sweeping, and wind up with +/- 6 levels and the FT menu before I am done with my morning coffee. Edit: In fairness I don't start as many toons as some, and I take even fewer to 50. But I start enough of them that if I felt this was a hassle I'd skip it and circle back once I decided it was a keeper.

This is the most correct. I am certain that Ki-Push->Power Push is hilariously awesome, but definitely more mileage on either of those ATs from the blasts to be certain.

Yup. Strategically applied knock can be very useful. Knocking strays back into the kill-box, for example; especially if there's enough knock or repel to move hard targets. I know folks generally think of knock as being something that scatters mobs, but it can just as easily compress them as well. I'm not the best at builds, and this is probably better done with CC toons, but I am absolutely infatuated with T1 blaster secondary attacks with the Repel component. /MC's is a huge repel, some KB, and a brief hold. /Sonic's is a bigger KB, similar repel, no hold. /Nrg I have not examined in CoD nor actually rolled, but that secondary might be a good choice for the boosts. Force Mastery for the Repulsion powers (really just field, but if slotting up RB for knock shifts it from KD to KB then have-at) Nrg/ clearly for the KB, although Seis/ might be a second option. (And Water/, thanks Uun, forgot that one) Going with /Sonic gets Sound Cannon, but that's 0.67. Similarly /MC has 2 very reliable sources of 0.67, but not much else. The thing with though is that the pbAoE, and -Res aura in /Sonic get sort of neutered. BoS in Martial makes the distance a target is knocked largely irrelevant and takes the winter KD proc nicely. ... and while you'd probably get *more* powers with knock on a def/corr I personally tend to get overwhelmed with too many things to click. (Took one look at an Archery/TA corr and *everything* is a click! how do you folks do it? lol) So with that personal limitation: Energy/Martial/Force Blaster. Crap. I might have talked myself into an alt. 😛 With Combat Teleport. Obviously.

I have a Blaster without Hasten.1 I have a Scrapper that uses LBE in her ST chain.2 I now struggle to play the game without Combat Teleport.3 Which isn't a *bad* decision in the least, but it does mean sacrificing numbers in exchange for extreme mobility, fun factor, and Rule of Cool.

Sometimes I can hear the internet.

Mot doesn't understand the meta. 😉

Wait. I am easily confused. Are </= 1023 character bios their own category and the root of the contest is for full, extended bios? Should Vigi & Rogue submit as their blue/red residence suggests? 🙂

I understand perfectly well what the word means, thank you very much. That sort of talk does not foster discussion. I am, however, far more cynical about human nature than you are, apparently (or at least in this specific instance) and will admit that my assessment on his comments is likely tainted by that cynicism. Again, no, I understand perfectly the context. Were he to confine his comments to "Amazon did a poor job of this, and here is why" I would have simply dismissed him as an opportunist. But when he extends that to encompass "Good Advice for anyone embarking upon an adaptation of ..." or whatever the wording is, he is instructing future artists on what he thinks they should and should not be doing and what he thinks is, unfortunately, reactionary and lacks broader perspective because LotR is such a dearly beloved property and because he is capitalizing on a moment. Let me try this one more time, from another example. Because what we are talking about here is a question of execution. His word choice of "preach" and such is very deliberate, but the way he connects Amazon's botched execution of something to the broader idea of approaching adaptations from a personal/cultural lens just does not fly with me. He's effectively implying that all attempts to do so are doomed to fail and no one should ever try. He's just being a lot more polite about it than I am. Kurosawa's Ran is widely accepted as an "adaptation" of Shakespeare's King Lear. This is almost accurate. Kurosawa did not set out to adapt this work, but he did discover KL in the process of writing Ran and ended up with something near as makes no difference to an adaptation. A framework for all that he wanted to say with the film. With Japanese Actors, in Japanese, pulling the King Lear story/plot into Japanese History/Mythology, and making a deeply personal film with tons of cultural context, personal belief, and lots to say about that transitional period and its impact on Japan moving forward. All elements that would not have existed in the original King Lear stage play. He literally started with something to say, and adapted the plot of King Lear in order to say it. By Gore's "advice for creators," given somewhere around the time he's discussing the Jackson quote, Kurosawa should never have made Ran, widely regarded as one of his greatest films. Every critique written about the Amazon Tolkien Trailer could easily be made about Ran for all the same reasons, but no one does so because of the execution. Gore would hardly try to make the case that the film should not have been made, but if Kurosawa had followed his "good advice for anyone approaching an adaptation of a beloved property" the film would not exist. He's reacting to a list of poor executions and saying the effort is un-worthy without looking at the broader context and investigating counter-examples where the approach has worked. Re-makes are hardly new. We have been re-making/adapting British television here in the US since the late 1950s. I'll admit that it's an extremely harsh assessment of his position, but that middle bit where he says "everyone should avoid trying to do this sort of thing because a handful of people screwed it up big time" is just, I mean, seriously.... baffling.

With respect to Tolkien specifically, I will grant you a bit of that. His work and Orwell's work have very little in common. I think it is disingenuous for a person to state they are making an alternate regional mythology while simultaneously claiming there is no allegorical content within, but that's a completely different discussion that would require me re-reading all of the books, which is outside the scope of my point anyway. That reviewer stated: "The job of a writer/creator is to entertain not preach and push their political agenda." That is patently false, and in terms of societal evolution: dangerous. The bar at which people decide they're being "preached" to is preposterously, hilariously, embarrassingly low these days. It is just as low as the bar by which people measure how much they are "offended" by something. And this guy diving into the shit-storm so he can drive more views to his page isn't really helping that situation. The creative expression of personal belief is part of the very essence of a writer/creator's job. Being "entertaining" is the vehicle by which some artists accomplish this; he's an audience member, not a King serving by Divine Right summoning the court jesters. No artist need feel beholden to some individual's tastes, that doesn't make good art. This is something else that Amazon would do well to learn. Are there examples of works that use a hammer when a scalpel would be more effective? Absolutely. But that's no reason to say to all writers/creators they should leave their beliefs out of their work just because some trust-fund babies at Amazon botched a launch, and probably an entire series. In fairness, the points regarding preservation of old books/works are not far off the mark, but not for banal reasons like the act of giving elves a variety of skin tones made some people upset. There are far more nefarious things that can be done with digital text which we should be worried about. Honestly, and I can not emphasize this enough: The best course of action on this one is no action at all. This guy is playing right into Amazon's hands, but maybe that doesn't matter to him since it greases his palms in the process. Meanwhile more and more people divide further and further over meaningless twaddle. Trust me, if Amazon had dropped this trailer and no one said anything about it at all - just the sound of crickets chirping - they would have gotten the hint.

Thank you. I have subsequently learned through a mutual friend that they are safely in Lviv at the moment. I have also had some coffee, so I want to clarify a couple points with less ... emotional content. It is not the casting choices that lead me to this conclusion - it is the choice of IP combined with the poor quality of the trailer and the subsequent comments by reps of the show that lead me there. They phoned it in because they knew it would stir up some shit and get them eyeballs as a result. Love it. All About it. Give us Idris Elba as Aragorn. Mahershala Ali as Saruman. Make a version of The Hobbit with Aidy Bryant as Bilbo Baggins! Give us Shoreh Agashdaloo as Galadriel. No, even better: cast her as Gandalf because that would be just awesome. Hell, sit her down on a chair in front of a fire and have her read the Silmarillion out loud - I'd watch that 100 times. 🙂 I could not tell you a single thing in that trailer which was "changed" in terms of characters, no idea. None. That's not what matters here, and I neither agree with nor understand objections made through such a lens. And I definitely do not care if an elf is wearing armor or not. It's not AD&D, there are no rules that say magic users suffer a -10 penalty for wearing armor or whatever. Seriously. But Amazon knew full well the size of the bear they were poking, so they just went and got the biggest stick they could find. That's what matters here. I have no reason to doubt the skill or motivation of the actors. Why not cast them in an adaptation of an Ursula Le Guin series? One of any of hundreds of examples. I just don't believe that Amazon is being genuine here: I know they can do better in terms of production quality and there is no shortage of material. Plenty of authors writing from the voices they claim to want to represent who would be more than happy for an option deal. I would love to be wrong. I would love nothing more than for the series to be absolutely amazing in every way and for their intentions to be genuine, but ... ... to paraphrase the incomparable Ms Agashdaloo's Chrisjen Avasarala: One of us has the wrong impression about Amazon's intent here: I fear that it is you, but I hope that it is me.

The following is in no way, shape, manner, or form written to defend or support the Greed Merchants at Amazon. I have made my opinion of their work, motivations, and responses abundantly clear in my previous rant. So don't even come at me from that direction. This is strictly about that reviewer. Preposterous Drivel. Edit: Shard - I know I am quoting you, but all of this is directed firmly at that reviewer who is clearly capitalizing on the same moment that Amazon is doing: criticizing them to drive views to his channel. So not only is he wrong about the purpose of a writer/creator, he is a hypocrite. Please don't take this post personally, it's not you, it's him. Has he never seen any film starring Sydney Poitier? Did he watch Noah Hawley's Legion and completely miss the allegory about Mental Illness - wishing it was just another pop-corn series full of special effects? Did he watch Death Race 2000 (the original) and think it was just about people getting run over by cars? That Escape From New York was just an action vehicle for Kurt Russell? Oh, wait. Blade Runner is just about killing androids, right? Did he scoff at the museum scene in Black Panther when Killmonger sets the employee straight on the provenience of various stolen artifacts? Did he watch Citizen Kane without knowing the story of William Randolph Hearst? Does he just not listen to music at all? Did he read George Orwell and think "Man, this book about an Animal Farm would be so much better if it was just about animals?" For that matter does he believe that Orwell should never have written at all? Because Orwell would have vehemently disagreed upon the "job of writers/creators." https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/ Did he watch HBO's version of The Watchmen and think "This scene about the Greenwood Massacre? Sure could have done without that!" An event, by the way, most Americans had never even heard of before the release of that episode. Having lived the second half of my childhood close enough to that area to go there for BBQ on the regular, I was utterly SHOCKED at how many people responded with surprise at learning that those events actually happened. Even the egregiously rose-tinted version of Oklahoma history that was taught in schools there in the 80s covered Greenwood. Covered it wrong, but at least mentioned it. I mean do I really need to list examples to make this point? "... their job as writers and creators is to entertain ..." What a load of pathetic, selfish, entitled nonsense. Let's be perfectly clear: Nothing that Amazon has EVER created rises to the level of those examples above, much less the hot garbage on a moldy shingle they're serving in that trailer. But that reviewer is 100% wrong about the job of a writer or a creator. Amazon came at this "adaptation" from the wrong place, made what looks to be cheap trash, and is defending it in a way that makes their motivations clear - make money from controversy. Amazon has no genuine interest in social issues or commenting upon them, and trying to read their adaptation from that lens will always fail because their goal is money, not erudite commentary or influencing change. Please stop lumping this blatant trash with true, quality, and meaningful activist art. That is not Amazon's Goal. Cashing in on Controversy is their goal. If someone at Amazon truly cares about DEI as they are pretending to, then here is a list of 157 Afrofuturist works, including several multi-book series, which are easily worthy of quality adaptation: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/79707.Afrofuturism So, again, this is not about defending the shit-heels at Amazon. There is no shortage of source material in the world. They chose to do this specifically for controversy in order to cash in on the moment. I appreciate that the reviewer does some semblance of addressing that point, but he's dead wrong about the job of writers/creators in a general sense. There are not enough expletives available in any language to emphasize how incorrect and dangerous that sort of opinion truly is. ------------------------------- I should probably apologize for my tone and aggression here, but I am not going to because this whole discussion is the exact sort of irrelevant nonsense that keeps people divided and unable to come to consensus via rational discourse when the subject is something that actually matters and has real consequences. That reviewer is doing nothing but fanning the flames of discontent, playing right into Amazon's hands, and I wish he just wouldn't. Maybe it is because I fear for my friends in Kyiv from whom I have not gotten an update since the invasion began. But it really fucking irritates me that people have time to get their panties in a twist over something as unimportant as an Amazon Money Grab while the largest land invasion in Europe since WWII is underway and people to whom I am very close are in very real danger. So maybe give this irrelevant nonsense a rest?

Brak (Andy Merrill) - Institutionalized (Suicidal Tendencies cover from Dr. Demento's "Covered In Punk")

Smelters - I don't know if it is a variation of Melt Armor that they use, but when they stack it everyone is going to have a very bad day. Ancients of Sorrow - or any other "of Sorrow" if I was lucky enough for the bosses in the spawn to be some other kind. These are the Pantheon radiation wielders and they will drink your milkshake if ignored. Manticore - because F#$% Manticore.

Just for clarity in case others read through the thread: It's that the power is in a Scrapper Secondary (armor set) that is the determining factor, not just that they are auras. Quills and Irradiated Ground will both generate Critical hits being Primary powers. The fire damage proc from Brimstone in Stone Armor is the only current exception to this, as far as I know. Yeah, I like that. Very cool. I forget how good the yellow hues can look in game.

Two that are combination of personal bias and relatively low hanging fruit: Blaster, Sonic Manip: Deafening Wave - Remove the tag that causes it to "Ignore External Strength Boosts." No buffs from Aim or Sound Booster among many other things. Note the lock icon next to Activation Details. Thanks to @Bopper for pointing this out in a convo, explaining what it meant, and in the process teaching me a little bit about how to read CoD. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=blaster_support.sonic_manipulation.deafening_wave&at=blaster All Affected ATs, Psi Melee: Boggle - Adapt the revisions made to Touch Of Fear to make Boggle more useful, but without a damage component to preserve its non-notify nature for Stalkers. Match Activation/Activation-Before-Affect/Etc times to that of ToF (slight reduction for all of them, effectively) Single Target Confuse remains the same, applies "Boggled" status as it currently does. Short Version: "Boggled" is a hidden status that is separate from confuse and increases the change of triggering Insight on subsequent attacks hitting that target while Boggled. Thanks to @Replacement for figuring that out and posting a guide. AoE component (adjust radius and target caps as appropriate) applies 1/3 duration mag 2 confuse (ST is 15s Mag 3) and Boggled status to all affected targets. Yes, easier to straight copy ToF and make it a damage power, but that messes with stalker tactics apparently, and it's about the Boggled status more than anything else. Part and parcel to this, a blanket increase to the "Insight Chance" on each power both with and without Boggle active.

Sorry, was either buried in my botched attempt at a spoiler tag and editing or maybe I picked a version unavailable in your region. Dunno if that happens where you are but often vids are "unavailable" here for various copyright reasons. T'was Sir Stewart as King Richard from Mel Brook's Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Found another of the same scene, let's try this one, without setting a start marker: I suppose my joke could have been "From this day forth, all toilets in this Kingdom shall be known as Steves!" But yes, to reiterate, very interested in both seeing this movie and visiting that dope museum linked above. 🙂 Edit: Also, his response to the question: Perfect. Flawless. Exactly Correct.

This is Chapter 4 in The Tao of Combat Teleport.