Psi-bolt

So I'm nowhere near the best Kheldian player. I forced myself to level to 50 on both as a goal. So if what I'm about to suggest doesn't make any sense, I will not have any hard feelings if you all say the idea is dumb. But what I really wish for Kheldians is that the forms were ONLY buffs that didn't lock out all your other powers. Like I wish Human Form had all the ranged and melee attacks and that Nova Form buffed damage, to-hit generally, and recovery and Dwarf buffed the damage of the melee attacks only and your resistance + status protection. The Kheldian travel power would be a copy of the sorcery power Mystic Flight without the magic fx so that both Kheldians could fly and teleport when they wanted. The forms would be mutually exclusive from one another like Dual Pistols' stances, but otherwise you could switch back and forth. If I were really being sassy, I would add a minimal fx option to both so that you could have the buff on, but not need to use the sprite. More specifically, Nova wouldn't actually add any powers anymore since there is an analogue for all of its attacks in the primary. With respect to Dwarf, I would add the taunt & Smite to the primary and give the Dwarf toggle a taunt aura. This way a Kheldian could switch between a Blapper stance and a Tanker stance.

I mostly agree with this, but I think with Sentinels it's better as well. New Regen is an above average set on its own. When built for resistance and max health it's stupidly survivable, but as someone else said in the thread you do lose some damage potential to doing that in the form of less +recharge.

I think you're correct that this is the status quo for ATs. I wonder, however, if this is balanced. I'll give you a concrete example: I've been playing my EM/EA Tanker recently. While I agree that it is intended that melees risk extra aggro, I would say that the compensations they have for that make that a net benefit. The tanker in question can take on large groups of enemies with little danger. The ranged ATs, even ones I have gotten softcapped can't do that. Is that balanced? I don't know to be honest. I think the melees are fairly balanced against each other. I almost think that the ranged units are playing a different game. Maybe that's the idea. I do love my Blasters and that dangerous playstyle. I don't get the sense, however, that's what's intended for the other ATs.

I'm aware. I meant why they don't get a toggle in human form while having armor toggles.

That was probably true at the beginning....to a point. Damage auras existed for Tankers at least, but later sets have added actual attacks to the secondaries. And outliers like Fire exist, but that has internal tradeoffs for its attacks. They do, but understandable since they are "epic" ATs. Why Kheldians don't get status protection has always eluded me other than the default, "status effects have to effect someone." So I don't exactly disagree with this. But are these the tradeoffs solely to status effects or are they baked into the combination of offense, defense, etc. that makes up a whole AT? I would say the latter. If we look at the ATs as a whole, then I would probably agree that Blasters after Defiance probably have the best tradeoffs. Extreme damage, extreme risk. That's fair to me. It's actually fun in a way. I usually don't even try to increase the protection on my Blasters. It's a different playstyle and can be really fun. The rest....well I'm not sure that the tradeoffs are exactly worth it. If Defenders/Corrupters/Controllers/MMs could use their buffing powers on themselves, absolutely that would be a good tradeoff. This is obviously a matter of opinion but I don't see the same tradeoffs on an AT level. Some individual sets like Kinetics are clearly worth the risk in teams at least. Conversely, Sonic and Force Field (and even Electric to an extent) just provide status protection and so the tradeoff there is more intra-AT. On balance, I am persuaded that status effects have to do something and so just giving every AT status protection for free is undesirable. But I likewise don't think it's a problem if there were a way to build your character to reduce or eliminate. We can do that now with Rune, Acrobatics, etc. I don't think an Invention is too unreasonable. Perhaps spread it out more, reduce the MAG to 2, make it strong resistance, etc.

Is it free? Or too easy? To gain status protection against all the effects noted here you would need: 1) A defense power (admittedly the easiest requirement with Hover, Maneuvers, and Combat Jumping) 2) A resist power (not too difficult, but will require two power picks for most non Melee/Sentinel players until Epic Power Pools) 3) 6 additional slots I've been thinking a lot about the arguments that Rudra and MsSmart made earlier in the thread about what the devs intended. And I guess it is as good a time as any to describe why I thought it would be worthwhile to post this even though I intuitively agree with you that +4 status enhancers might be too much. My thought process about this suggestion started with a question: Is there a balance reason why melees/Sentinels get mostly full status protection and other ATs (mostly) don't. And I kept coming to the same conclusion. I think that the ATs that don't have status protection baked in, don't have it because status effects need to affect someone. Now I know some will reject that framing, but I would argue that there isn't a significant tradeoff in this game between having status effect protection and not. If you have status effect protection even the worst player will understand that they need to take those powers immediately. Status effects in this game last a very long time and it is possible for NPCs (going to ignore PvP for now) to mez lock you and kill you. That would kinda be OK if there was a significant tradeoff. Like ATs without status protection had some countervailing benefit. Blasters arguably do have such a benefit in the extreme damage they do. I'm not sure about the rest. Like many issues in this game, status effects seem to have been haphazardly implemented. This necessitated giving melees pretty much constant protection. Melees used to have drawbacks on some status effect protection. For example, Unyielding and Rooted used to require you to be immobilized to have the protection. That was take away to support tanking and to reflect how the game is actually played. But when they did that, they set up a pretty big disparity IMO in that some ATs ignore status effects and for others it's a deadly threat. I just think that's a poor implementation. I have played other games where status effects worked on everyone, but their effect wasn't so overwhelming. Star Wars the Old Republic had a good implementation I think. In that game basically everyone had a stun (which operates how holds do here), but it was on a 1 minute cooldown, only lasted 4 seconds and was single target. There were limited abilities that improved it, but for the most part that's all you got. Also, every character got a power that allowed you to break free of status effects on the same cooldown. Obviously that implementation wouldn't work for City of Heroes at this point. I mention it to note that I don't think that status effects are terrible, I think their implementation in this game is terrible. So with that in mind, I think that the status quo is simply unfair. I genuinely think that every character should have a means to obtain some status effect protection and not merely resistance. I don't know if my suggestion in the OP is the right way to do it. Maybe for ranged units it would be better if they had a "break free" type of click power that had a cooldown and several seconds of extreme protection to deal with situations where a character is mez locked. All that said, I appreciate the discussion.

What happens to powers that have dual types? Like most of Water Blast? Could I change that to pure Energy. I like the idea, but it seems dangerous in parts.

To be honest, I don't disagree with anything you wrote here. And I do think that my suggestion might be too much. Status effects in this game are so much more overwhelming and punishing than in other games, but there are tools to fight them. Would your view change if instead of MAG 4 protection, these were 50% resistance to the same effects?

I'm aware of all of these. In fact, I would expect Combat Jumping to be a sort of pseudo status protection toggle if this were implemented. I did consider having the sleep on Karma, but that would allows you to get Immobilize, Sleep and Hold in a single power. Not trying to be too crazy here! 😄

Well, I don't actually know if anyone will like this idea. I can see why we wouldn't necessarily want to do this, but it would allow squishy ATs to trade some slots (and a power pick) for a small amount of status effect protection. So we already have enhancers that grant KB protection of -4. What I suggest is that the Karma and Steadfast Protection sets be expanded to provide: Karma Hold Protection -4 Karma Confuse Protection -4 Karma Fear Protection -4 Steadfast Protection Disorient Protection -4 Steadfast Protection Immobilize Protection -4 Steadfast Protection Sleep Protection -4 Each set would get additional set bonuses consistent with them being low level Inventions. All of these would be rare recipes and cost 50 merits. You could even make them cost 100 merits. They would be added to the 10-30 level drop tables.

That would be very nifty indeed. I’m not a fan of most account wide badges. Outside of Steampunkette’s idea, I would prefer that the content to earn the badge be engaging and accessible instead. So shorten Synapse, have a more accessible way to get all the mayhem missions, etc.

I never said anything about reducing all TFs to 4 missions. Both Manticore and Numina have more than 4 missions, but I'm on record as saying that both are fine as they are. Citing myself: But heck, 2 missions would be fine if the story can be told in that length. I don't care about the number of missions. It can be 6 or in certain cases more, if there's a story based reason for that. But most of these long TFs don't even have enough of a story to worry about. Now primarily, my concern is with two specific Task Forces in the game: Synapse and Citadel. There is absolutely no story based reason for either of those TFs to take 10 and 9 missions respectively. I have noticed that you don't even argue that those can't be shortened. You just keep saying that you would lose story. I'll note that you didn't make this argument in the thread I started about reducing Synapse's filler even though you did post there. I'm sorta guessing that this is just forum PvP for you, which is great because I prefer that this stay on the radar.

The story of the Apex task force is to repel the Praetorians attack on Kings Row and Steel Canyon. It's a really cool TF that has you start in a section of Kings Row that is under attack by the Praetorians. Next you move into the sewers to destroy some pylons. Finally, in the first mission you end up by the Paragon Penny and repel the force attacking Kings Row. In the next mission you're flown to Steel Canyon but your helicopter is felled by Battle Maiden's magical swords. After defeating a few of them, you defeat Battle Maiden in the square where Valkyrie stands in Steel Canyon. The point is to repel the Praetorians. Apex's twin, the Tin Mage TF has you more or less doing the same thing but you start in the Rogue Isles. They are simple goals, but both Task Forces have more story elements than the Synapse TF. The story follows good creative writing in that it "shows it doesn't [just] tell" you what's going on. When you log into Apex's TF a war is going on. You're there to stop it. You feel the emergency in a way that you don't on older TFs that send you to random maps. If you haven't done it, it's worth doing. There's a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet that goes, "Brevity is the soul of wit." You really see that in the later Task Forces, where the developers moved away from boring kill-all maps just to have an NPC tell you, "Here's a clue, go to the next map and beat up everyone there." You're right that a TF is a story, but that story doesn't need 10 missions with 5 kill-all maps to tell that story. Let's be honest here, the content that we're discussing might as well be this. Some TF/SF (especially the red side ones) really are a story. But many of the longest Task Forces are tied together with barely anything happening in most missions purely to pad out the runtime. The length of the TF is not particularly correlated to whether the story is well developed. Penny Yin's Task Force or the Imperious Task Force actually tell a more complex story than the Synapse TF in less than half the number of missions. Like most of the later TFs these TFs use completely unique maps, with a the pathing being part of the story itself. Penny Yin is a more engaging follow up to Sister Psyche because of the unique elements and lack of filler. For example, in Sister Psyche you fight Clamor in a random sewer map, where with Penny it's in Terra Volta in a scripted fight.

As I stated, Synapse has two goals. You could condense that without losing story. That proposition is readily apparent to anyone who has read the story for Synapse so you decided to argue against another proposition (reducing everything down to 1 mission) that wasn't stated by me or anyone else. But just for laughs, let's play out your strawman. Let's say you're right and we could condense Synapse down to one mission. The story is so thin, that may not be the worst thing. But you know, we already have an example of a very short snappy TF that people love and is run quite regularly. The Apex TF. Despite technically being two missions, the second mission is really just a boss fight. The first mission is the meat of the TF in saving King's Row. What if Synapse were reduced to one big mission that has you moving through various parts of Steel Canyon like Apex. Perhaps in the first area you stop a group of Clockwork who are attacking the University looking for something. Next you enter a service door to the powerstation and stop them from diverting power to the King. Finally, exiting the powerstation, you do a boss rush of Bertha, Long Tom, the Clockwork Lord, and the Clockwork King in a tunnel on the way to Skyway. After exiting the TF Babbage attacks you. There you go Rudra. One mission. Honestly, good idea. I like the way you think! 😁

It's interesting, we have a real life example of this right now. Positron and Sister Psyche are there on Ouro right now. Certainly, the revamped Positron parts 1 and 2 and the Penny Yin TF are significantly more popular than the originals. But the originals still get done. There is a player named Blapparella on Excelsior who recruits for both quite regularly and has both TF down to a science. She fills in a few minutes each time. Nothing stops other players from doing them as well. I have done so. The thing about revamping all the old Freedom Phalanx sequence (although I don't think Manticore or Numina really need it) is that the originals would go into Ouroboros. Thus creating MORE content for both team focused and solo players. Sister Psyche for example allows you to fight Clamor as an EB and it's not a bad "prequel" to Penny Yin to do solo. So, while I would agree that if Citadel were revamped then the revamped TF would see much more use, it's just plainly incorrect to say that the choice would eventually be gone. It wouldn't. By any measure, options would increase.