Eva Destruction

Yeah, that was the AT requirement I was referring to. Tried it once without, and we just couldn't beat him. A Brute or Tank is nice to have but you usually get one or two anyway. The Corruptor/Blaster and Controller/Dom powers are pretty useless, I don't even know what the Scrapper/Stalker one does. Yeah, I only ever form them when they're the WST. It takes a while even then.

For the Redside SFs, my best guesstimates, assuming you ghost some of the longer missions. Tarikos: 40 mins Silver Mantis: 1 hr Renault: 1 hr Ice Mistral: 1 hr+? I don't do this one often Mortimer Kal: 30 mins Barracuda: 1 hr? It's longer than Khan with all the escorts in the last mission, and I hardly ever do it because of the dumb AT requirements RSF: no idea, I can't remember the last time I was on one that wasn't a speed run. Treespecs: 30 mins or so, the third one is faster because of Incarnate abilities.

I'm also on team no new Incarnate powers, also because they make existing content too easy. Disabling them outside of Incarnate content makes them kinds pointless, since there isn't much Incarnate content and there won't be much, if any, added any time in the foreseeable future. And, honestly, even the trials are too easy. When you have 24 players all stacking Destinys and Judgements and pulling their Lore pets out at once, enemies just evaporate. I'd be in favor of limiting Destiny to team only, or reducing the range, or the target cap, or something to prevent the crazy stacking, cutting the target cap and/or damage of Judgement, and nerfing the damage of the Lore pets. More Judgement options would be nice; psi and "generic" energy at least, maybe an earth one too although Mighty kinda fits with earth/stone powers thematically.

I mean, that's a possible interpretation and is definitely surreal and trippy. But if that's the intent, the exploration badge text doesn't really convey it, IMO. The overall impression I got from the badge text is "Rularuu is getting in your head and there's nothing you can do about it" with a side order of "and this is what the inside of your head looks like." It's lazy. No, I am not going to drink the weird bloody water, that is a stupid thing to do. The game mechanics don't support this godmoding either. And, why does the godlike superbeing have to be psychic? Is it just because so many defensive sets have a psi hole? He EATS DIMENSIONS, come on, you can be a little more creative with his actual powers, no? I realize the mechanics were somewhat limited when the Shadow Shard was first released, and the zones haven't been updated since, but still.

Telling me my mom made blueberry pie is ascribing quite a lot to the player character. What if I'm a robot or a demon or a clone and never had a mom? What if my mom was a superhero who was too busy fighting evil to bake pies? What if my mom was brutally murdered in front of me and that's what started me on my path as a cold-blooded vigilante who wears a trenchcoat and hangs around in dark corners and talks like Christian Bale?

Except the later dev teams have admitted that the lore bible is optional, and if it's not actually in the game they're free to ignore it. The Who Will Die and Dream Doctor's Personal Story content was written under that philosophy. I'm not sure if the Midnighter Archivist "plaques" or Darrin Wade's arc were, but they don't contradict the lore bible anyway.

I would rather the writers be lazy than write a bunch of garbage, like the text of the Shard exploration badges or the Who Will Die crap. If you can't make a zone seem sinister and alien without character hijacking, just stay out of the zone entirely. If some guy like Darrin Wade can harness the power of Rularuu, then either Rularuu isn't as cool as we thought he was or once again Some Guy is way cooler than we are. And the story is written from the perspective of a character who doesn't know the answer. I't's us, we're that character, and we don't know. There are very few people who do know, and they ain't talking; Dream Doctor is off doing mystic guy things and when he comes back he has more pressing matters to attend to, Mender Silos is a jerk and you shouldn't believe anything he says anyway, the other Midnighters involved in sealing Rularuu off are either dead or probably sworn to secrecy because they know there are people crazy enough to try to release Rularuu, the Shard natives would be mostly second- or third- generation (going by the timeline on Paragon Wiki, in which Rularuu was bound in the 60s, and assuming life expectancy in the Shadow Shard isn't very high) and have had their society disrupted on a mass scale at least twice and on a smaller scale constantly, so record-keeping isn't exactly a priority and oral tradition has gotten muddled, and Faathim is Mysterious and Cryptic and wouldn't want us to know too much either, since he's already had primal Earthers try to bind him to harness the power of Rularuu so you can't blame him for being suspicious. We have scientists and expeditions exploring the Shard and trying to learn about it, basically starting from scratch, so it makes sense that nobody knows much, even the people who care to find out.

I like that it's vague. Some things aren't meant for our puny mortal minds to comprehend, and that's okay. It gives the zone a Lovecraftian kind of vibe. A lot of the newer writing in the game had all the subtlety of a sack of bricks, (see: Dark Astoria) which would have made Rularuu into just another overpowered sack of hit points, if they'd expanded on the Shard lore.

It also works on blinkies, although it will also target ones you've already clicked if they're not the disappearing type. You don't need to type in the target's full name either, partial matches work. So, for example, "target_custom_next lead" will target anything with "lead" in the name, if you're looking for Outcast bosses for the badge.

It's hard to get a team together to fight some of the GMs that already exist.

I don't think these zones need a Faultline-style revamp in order to add new content. Boomtown has already been updated to reflect changes in the wider game world; set an arc around the Council base. The Freakshow are always doing dumb stuff, add some fun arcs set around their bit of Crey's Folly, they don't have to have any impact on the broader game world to be in character for the Freaks or for players to want to play them. I'm sure someone could come up with something for Eden and Terra Volta and Perez Park. And if the arcs are geared toward the higher end of the zone's level range and there aren't any hunt missions, which suck anyway, the fact that it's a hazard zone with hazard zone-sized spawns won't matter.

SR on Scrappers gets 95%, which is the hard cap. I can't imagine Tankers are lower. SR also has much higher def numbers than WP, and is trivially easy to softcap. Although I wouldn't consider Willpower "Noticeably underpowered" unless you're comparing to Bio armor which is overpowered.

That's fine, it means I don't have to share all the cool stuff I'm gonna steal.

Cone positioning is inherent to the set's playstyle at this point though. The variance in range and width of the cones is what makes it awkward, not the fact that it has cones in the first place. If you don't like that playstyle, AR isn't the set for you.

That would be awesome actually. I could spin the camera SO MANY TIMES. A wider cone, yes. A TAoE, no. Bullets do not work that way. (Yes, I am aware that Dual Pistols has bullets doing all kinds of things that bullets do not actually do, but the two sets are very different thematically.) Assault Rifle should not mechanically be like Archery because Archery is already like Archery. If you like the mechanics of Archery, play Archery. Sets shouldn't be clones of each other with different skins, it's lazy and boring and way less fun to make alts if they all play the same.

These powers are comparable to their equivalent powers in other sets. AR's crap single-target damage comes from its lack of heavy-hitter. Buckshot's DPS is on par with Energy Torrent and better than Frost Breath, cutting Beam, and Howl, which are also in the same tier. We shouldn't be using Fire Blast as a benchmark for blast set performance, since it's a high-performing set. These four powers are fine. It's only the lethal damage that makes them suck. And here we start getting into the stinkers. Same damage as Buckshot, with almost twice the animation time and a higher end cost and recharge. And scatter knockback on top of that to mess up all your cones. On the one hand, it's a less-resisted damage type. On the other hand, lower DPS than buckshot, and massive end cost. I would also speed up the DoT. Yes, 20 is asking for too much. Other blaster T9s have a target cap of 16, Full Auto should too. And it needs a reduction in animation time. It doesn't necessarily need more damage, since a faster-recharging but lower-damage T9 is one of the things that makes the set unique. But, back when these sets were initially introduced, Full Auto had an advantage in being a crashless "nuke" which the other blast sets didn't have. Now they all have them, and now that we all pay attention to DPS, Full Auto's only advantage is that you can spin the camera around like you're in the Matrix and it looks hella cool, which isn't much of an advantage when you're rooted for 4 seconds by a power that won't even wipe out even-con minions. My other fix would be to make some portion of the damage on Burst, Slug, Buckshot, Sniper Rifle, and Full Auto non-resistable. That way you're not making the set too overpowered against non-resistant enemies, but it's a fix for the set's biggest weakness. Give us some armor-piercing rounds for the frankengun. Beanbag is beanbag, it's meh but whatver. The only way I can think of to fix Ignite without changing it entirely for the people who use it as an area-avoidance power is to front-load the damage so enemies at least get hurt a little bit before they start running for the hills and accept that a lot of players will skip it.

The one who doesn't get the memo is usually the Brute who has decided they're soloing the TF up until that point, in my experience, and stand in the middle of the squishies with their taunt aura pulling the AV's attention away from the tank.

It has a 4-second cast time and a radius that's smaller than melee range. That's pretty crap as an emergency crowd control power. Especially in a set with a bunch of cones that encourage staying at range where you won't get surrounded by mobs in the first place.

Adding my vote for Assault Rifle. -The most heavily resisted damage type in the game, especially late game. -An AoE-focused set in which all but one of its AoEs have a 10-target cap -A T9 that also has a 10-target cap, and a far-too-long animation. -A short-range medium-width cone in Buckshot, a short-range wide cone in Flamethrower, a long narrow cone in Full Auto, and scatter knock-back in M30, makes it difficult to hit multiple enemies with multiple AoEs. -Ignite is useless. -Crap ST damage, which on its own, fine it's an AoE set, but see above re: the issues with the AoEs.

It will get you out of babysitting Captain Hotpants on an Underground run, though.

I'm fine with 1000. They spawn in groups all over PI so you can pick off grey-cons, or team up to farm the best Jaeger-farming mission which I'm sure someone has already figured out. 250 Sappers on the other hand...yes, they're minions, but they're limited to a maximum of one per spawn and Malta street spawns are rare. So that's a lot of Malta missions. I feel like this one should be 100.

So it looks like it's getting back the utility it had on live, minus the sustain. Now that the 30-second recharge is back, what is the reasoning for keeping the sustain in Dynamo? Can we please make this a customization option? Not everybody wants the VFX to stay active.

I don't want to start the "knockback is fine" vs "knockback is the devil" argument again, but.... I think it might be time to start looking at melee powers that do scatter knockback and think about changing some of them to knockdown. These powersets were created in 2004. It was a very different game then. Levelling took a lot longer, there was no end game, range actually was a defense through much of a Blaster's career, and the blapper playstyle was considered suicidal insanity. Things have changed, a lot, we have actual defenses now, blapping isn't a weird niche playstyle anymore, high level enemies are deadly at range. Specifically with Electric manip, you have two powers that do scatter, if you take them both that's two slots you have to spend on KB-to-KD IOs if you want to get rid of it, (And with new FoT having its chance of KB reduced you don't even get the mitigation of knockdown for the cost of that slot). It's kind of against the spirit of a set that excels in melee to send everything flying to the four winds. Yes, many Blasters still prefer a ranged playstyle, but not all sets are ideal for every playstyle, and /Elec shouldn't have to cater to ranged players at the expense of the melee players that it's best suited to. If ranged players want their KB back, let them spend the slot.

Or change the KB to KD,, in both FoT and Thunderstrike, if the goal is to encourage players to go into melee. Both KB and long-recharge CC powers are good for Blasters who didn't want to be in melee and are trying to get out, not so much for the Blasters-are-the-new-Scrappers crowd. There aren't any heal sets with damage in them though, and you'd need less end mod if you don't have Lightning Field sucking end anymore.

Change Burn into a 90-sec recharge stun? (I mean if powersets are going to be clones of each other, it's only fair.) (No I am not serious.)