ZemX

There are probably several that might work but I use '/e Idle1' (I assume Idle2 would work as well). I bind it to a macro button on my toolbar and punch that before using other emotes. Obviously, you still have the shield in hand though so whatever motions the next emote puts you though, the shield follows your hand.

The real problem is knockback as a secondary effect and, often, an unreliable one at that. If you have a power that ONLY does knockback then you can use it when you want to KB something and not use it when you don't. But when it's attached to your main damage-dealing attacks, NOT using them isn't a good idea. So you either reposition (costing you time), use KD converters (costing you an enhancement slot), or just do it and accept the consequences good and/or bad. I like using a Nemesis Staff to knock Super Stunners away from the team. Even if one person chases them down to engage, they'll maybe still only hit that person with their rez and not the whole team. And certainly I've seen KBers knock enemies INTO the pack too. There's no question it has its uses... if you can control when you use it.

It won't do the job by itself. Even with decent recharge, it will take too long to cover every enemy in a full team-sized group of mobs and be difficult to keep aggro without attacking. You need not just good recharge but also to be attacking. Without being close enough to taunt with the aura or PBAoE attacks, you will be even more dependent on ranged and ranged AoE attacks to get and keep aggro than a traditional melee tanker.

To understand taunt (the effect) you need to think in terms of another thing called "threat". Threat is like a counter (or a list of counters) on each NPC enemy. It's their "enemies list" and it has everybody on your team, their pets, etc. Anything that has attacked them. We all get ranked by most to least threatening. The NPC will attack whoever is at the top of their "most threatening" list. Taunt is NOT an override to this list. It does not jump you to the top of the list automatically and keep you there for the duration of the taunt. What it does instead is, first, apply a nice helping of threat to your own counter for that enemy. This alone often jumps you to the top of the list. The second thing it does is leave a taunt effect on that enemy for a certain duration. Every time you AGAIN attack that same enemy after taunting it, your attacks receive a very high multiplier to their threat. Meaning you can follow up your taunt with a Brawl and probably ring up more threat on that enemy than a Blaster with their best Snipe. The more you keep attacking that enemy, the more you count up threat. THIS is what keeps their attention. Not the taunt duration, but how high your threat counter gets on each enemy such that nobody else on your team can beat you for "most threatening" no matter how much more damage they do than you. A single Taunt power activation does a very nice amount of threat, but your teammates will quickly surpass that if they sustain fire on that same enemy for just a bit while you don't do anything else to them. And because it only hits five, you sort of have to use it multiple times. If you want this theme of yours to work better, you need to add ranged attacks. As a Tanker, any single target attack taunts the target and up to five enemies around your target. Any AoE taunts every target it hits. Claws would probably be your best choice for attack powerset since it has a couple ranged attacks that you can imagine are like Angel's wing feather darts or something. Shockwave and Focus. More ranged attacks can be found in pools and epics. Point is, if you want to taunt from range like that, you need to be cycling through attacks AND taunting and you need to spread it around to the group of enemies. What's making your idea less effective at keeping aggro than a traditional tanker who is "in the soup" is that you're getting no benefit from the taunt aura or from PBAoE attacks. A Tanker is taunting everybody around them for a 12ft radius constantly with the taunt aura on. So you can use ranged taunts and attacks to draw in stray aggro outside your little bubble of hate more easily. And PBAoE attacks can keep hammering those close to you. The one benefit to taunting at range is that enemy AoEs aimed at you aren't hitting your melee comrades. I do traditional tanking, but sometimes jump away from my team to range taunt enemies that are bombarding the team, like Nemesis troops with Storm Rifles.

I'll just pull the pin and leave this here.... We don't have the data needed to balance the ATs. The devs do. What data is that? Popularity. First, last, and only measure of whether an AT needs "balancing" is popularity. It's not clear times or what we think of their ATOs. We each have individual opinions but popularity is every one of those opinions put into a blender, mixed up, and then measured. Why should we aim for equal popularity? Because in a game where you have 'n' choices of what to play, you don't really have 'n' choices if some of those are simply not desirable. The more choices that are viewed as desirable, the more GAME there is. This is why giving us a reason to visit Kallisti Warf was such a good idea. It was there. It was a choice. But it was a choice nobody wanted to make before. Now it is. More of this. But with ATs and powersets this time!

No. DPA is literally an accident per the original design of this game. The original Live devs had no idea it even mattered.

Well, if this thread has accomplished nothing else, it has resoundingly answered the question of whether or not KB is still a "dirty word", I guess.

I think mostly it's that people aren't doing it. I don't mean single KBs here or there. I mean large AoE scattering of neatly bunched enemies. I just don't see that but really rarely and when it happens, people notice and comment. Otherwise, it's not a big deal because nobody's making it a big deal. Or else KD converters are just that common now. Probably both. I can recall someone with a Bonfire, not KD converted, dropping it at my tank's feet a couple times in one PuG. Eventually someone piped up about that and politely suggested not doing that or else looking into the magic of KB-KD IOs if they didn't already know about them. The worst example I remember ever was some Sentinel following my tank into every spawn and cutting loose with a Nova... that wasn't nearly powerful enough to kill everything. I think that one might have been enough even I commented on it eventually. But nothing else like that has happened to me in years.

My in game experience is that people are indifferent until KB starts really affecting them negatively and then they get vocal about it. If someone on the team is regularly scattering well packed mobs that others on the team are AoEing... someone will say something about it. And I don't mean me. If I am tanking and someone scatters my group, I don't get mad. I go find another group. If the scattered group follows me, fine. If it doesn't, I assume whoever scattered it is handling them. "You knock it, you bought it", is my way of handling this. And a lot of times, that's okay with the person doing the KB as well.

The 46% is for an enemy that is +5 to you, which can happen in a +4 mission difficulty. The unresistable part, however, IS unfair. Players don't get that. And some other NPCs don't either. It's weird. Like a bug they decided not to fix because the occasional dose of kryptonite can be interesting?

So what you're saying is that these obsolete bits of salvage are effectively the glue that holds this universe together?

The "Radiation Defender" Paragon Protector Elite variant is also bad news for a different reason, especially if they are +5 to you. Say goodbye to 46% resist when they drop Enervating Field on you (and anybody near you). And oh, none of that "resistance resists resistance debuffs" stuff either because it's unresistable. Minus 46%. No exceptions. There are various Tar Patch using enemies that can do the same thing, but not all of them. Thankfully, not the one the Neu CoT use.

I have unfortunately spent some time recently on various Steam message forums. I think they call this sort of thing "clown farming". Except we don't have a clown award here, so I'm just gonna give you a Moose.

You should definitely vendor it. This will guarantee that the devs decide to do something amazing with it in the next update and my stockpiles will soar in value. I'll be richer than @Yomo Kimyata!

This is less of a problem in Energy Mastery where, while you still have to take two other powers to get to Energy Torrent (a 40ft, 45 degree, 10 target cone), the other powers in the set are extremely useful: Focused Accuracy (for toHit debuff resistance), Conserve Power/Superior Conditioning, and Physical Perfection. Don't think Scrappers are in much different a situation than Brutes/Tankers. It's Stalkers who generally hurt for AoE because someone long ago had the idea they should be mostly single-target focused hit-and-run assassins. Stalker Martial Arts might be the dumbest thing the Live devs ever thought up. So generally, they have the same options for adding AoE as Scrappers, but they start out at least one AoE behind is all.

I'll second this one too. It's particularly bad, even later in the game, for those of us who aren't defense-based. High defense can avoid a lot of the toHit debuffs that are carried by attacks, but not the ones that are autohit from auras like Hurricane. I end up having to take Focused Accuracy on my resist based melees as it's one of the VERY few sources of toHit debuff resistance in the game.

I knew this looked familiar. I vaguely remember this discussion coming up before as well.

I am thankful I do not get motion sickness in video games, but for anyone who does, I am not sure we can say there's another change that HC devs have done that can actually make players physically ill the way this can. It was seriously a bad idea. It would be fine if the effect was just to drag you towards the Singularity, but the way it seems to work, especially when there's more than one acting on you, is to violently bounce you all over the area. And guess what? On a full team there tend to be at least two Family bosses with Singularities in EVERY spawn. So good luck if you are trying to use Break Frees to solve this. You either need to stay away at range or play a melee that has Repel mez protection. My fave tanker, a Rad Armor, doesn't. Sadly.

Teleport also activates the rocket boot aura since it includes a temporary hover effect. So while you are hanging in the air between teleports, your rockets are on. They actually turn on with the initial teleport animation that lifts you off the ground slightly and then they stay on after the Teleport and until you move (or it times out and you fall). Neat!

That was just a PuG.

If you had limited this to league and open-world broadcast, you'd have a point... but if you're complaining to people on a regular team? C'mon dude. "Here" is just fine. Target them. Find them. On rare occasions, I will drop coords in a team, like when I am dropping a Team Transporter after we've done a zone hunt and the next mish is elsewhere. "TT at $loc" and I can go right away without having to stick around. Or I'll do it on a mission where we're scouting multiple objectives in an outdoor area. But most of the time, I just want the team to come to me because we need to clear a room or something. But generally, I expect probably a smallish minority of people who play this game even know about $loc.

If minions lasted longer, it would be worth it. They are the most numerous enemies, typically, so you could say you're subtracting a decent amount of incoming damage if you mez them all, but yeah... the amount of damage they can do in the few seconds they are able to do it tends to be something not many people worry over. Cloak of Fear has been made very attractive in this latest update. OG... remains very skippable, IMO.

I'd say I'm immediately skeptical of these numbers because Ston's data, which might be a little old at this point, didn't show anywhere near a 30% difference between Scrappers and Brutes in Trapdoor +4/x8 clear times. It was more like 2% averaged across all melee powersets. Do you have a link to this data you're talking about?

Depends what you mean by this. The game certainly directs you to choose a Primal destination at 20 and this seems quite clearly to be the intended progression path designed in by the devs. If you don't leave, you don't have access to most of the TFs/SFs/Trials in the game or the continuation of the Praetorian storyline that occurs on Primal Earth. Fine if you intend to solo mission content only but again, from a game design standpoint, no, you're not "supposed to" stay past 20. You're supposed to choose a Primal faction, then have the option to return "home" later to experience First Ward and Night Ward. Still, they left tidbits like different conversation with the Doorman who leads to First Ward depending whether you are a Primal Hero/Villain or a Praetorian Loyalist/Resistance. So they at least acknowledged that people could and would stay.

Originally... Super Jump. I just loved hopping through Steel Canyon across skyscrapers or going rooftop to rooftop in Founder's Falls. Now... Teleport. Not because I love it more for travel. I like it less, actually. But it's just so damned useful INSIDE missions. I wasn't expecting that. Sure, Combat Teleport is faster, but for ONE power pick in the pool that handles both travel and gets me through/around obstacles in a mission? Can't be beat. Doorway blocked by a mass of enemies? BAMF! Feet webbed to the ground and I need to be up on an overhead walkway tanking right now!? BAMF! It's Monday? BAMF! Really fun thing to do as well: Bind a key for teleporting to a target. Pick a teammate, punch that key, and appear right next to them... even through walls. Next time an annoying Sky Raider or Sorcerer teleports away from you while you're attacking? FOLLOW him. It does have some quirks and gives you a blocked message in caves sometimes. But often it works and I've literally bounced between two split halves of a group tanking for both a few times. It's wild.