ZemX

I think it's a trick question. The problem lies in the fact that ANYONE can have followers and be considered the mastermind or ring-leader or, dare I say, "kingpin" of a criminal (or hero!) enterprise while at the same time being more well represented by another AT in this game. Bane might have a gang but he's obviously a science Brute. Prof X and Magneto are mutation Controllers. Statesman was a Tanker. Ms. Liberty is a Scrapper. All of these folks had/have followers or henchmen or paramilitary organizations that report to them. Doesn't make them MMs. Flipside of that, I suppose, is that you can call anybody with a gun a "pistol blaster" but that doesn't make Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Black Mask, or any of the other bat-villains NOT an MM. Those guys are totally MMs!

Yeah, street fighting is gut punches and roundhouse kicks. i.e. the sort of thing only a boxing/MMA fan would call "dancing". Of the melee sets I would say have anything approaching graceful leaping/spinning animations that could allude to ballet: Staff, Claws, Savage, and Katana. I don't list Dual Blades mostly out of personal dislike for the animations. They seem too abrupt and mechanical in the way they start and stop to me to be called "graceful". Savage has neat leap and spin type slashing attacks but might not fit your theme as it's somewhat bestial. The Build Up is like a "howling at the moon" animation except with more of a roaring sound accompanying it. And the slashes all paint red claw streaks in the air to hint at blood being drawn. Claws has the slashing but without the animalistic theme. Also has leaping, rolling, and spinning animations. If you really want to steer away from melee though, I would probably go Blaster with Dual Pistols and either Martial Combat or Ninja Training. I have not played this or any Blaster myself for very long but I have briefly tried DP/Ninja. It was a little weird because you have both the pistols and the sword but it was a strong fit for my "Samurai Houston" concept 🤪. The sword animations are from Katana set and include a basic slash, a leaping/spinning PBAoE (very graceful, I think), and the leaping up then slashing down of Golden Dragonfly. That said, I think DP/Martial probably works better thematically because you're not alternately pulling pistols or a sword out of hammerspace as you cycle through attacks. Martial adds Martial Arts secondary strikes. Storm Kick is your basic boot to the side of the head, if I recall correctly. Dragon's Tail is a low spinning leg-sweep around in a circle. Eagle's Claw is a kick to the face followed by a back-flip? Again, been some time since I played MA. Best to preview all that in the character creator to be sure. Aaaanyway, Dual Pistols has all sorts of spinning nonsense in its animations that might work for your concept if you are more comfortable with a ranged character. Then you can take or leave the melee attacks as you see fit for yet more spinning and leaping strikes. And you can supplement with pool attacks like Spring Attack and Whirlwind for even moar leaping and spinning. So much winning!

Have you tried... A STICK?! I am serious. You want Staff Fighting. My Rad/Staff Tanker wears the "Dance Legend" badge proudly and for a reason. Staff Fighting IS dancing... with a stick! Take Staff Fighting on anything but a Stalker. Not because Staff isn't great on a Stalker, it is. But you want to be SEEN! Also because Stalker's don't get Innocuous Strikes and Innocuous Strikes is you stabbing someone in the toes and causing THEM to dance with YOU! Staff has leaps (Sky Splitter)! Staff has lunges (Serpent's Reach)! Staff has baton twirling (Guarded Spin)! And most of all... STAFF HAS BREAK-DANCING! (Eye of the Storm). Overall, Staff is very fast and energetic. You are going to be rotating through these moves quickly and constantly. Pair it with Super Reflexes because someone with these dance moves should be untouchable! (and also because SR has no obscuring visual FX to get in the way of your awesome). Add the Speed pool and dial it up to Whirlwind for even more spinning! Because spinning is winning! Doooo it!

Afraid my Mid's is in the shop! And I haven't posted an updated Rad Armor build in a while here. But all my Rad Armor Tankers are gravitating towards the same build scheme. The main points of which are: 1. Panacea in Health. Perf Shifter in Stamina. No other slots in those powers. RadA has bountiful endurance and drain resistance. Plus, as Boss mentioned... 2. You put a Theft of Essense proc in Rad Therapy and now you have a self-heal that heals both the green AND the blue bars. I also drop in a couple Preventive Medicine IOs for heal/recharge and then the rest is damage procs, making it a mini proc-nuke as well. It slices, it dices.... now how much would you pay? But wait... there's more! 3. Overall your IO slotting for set bonuses will gear towards resistance and recharge. Hasten, recharge bonuses, Combat Jumping so you have a defense power for various useful one-slot-wonder IOs like Shield Wall, Kismet, and Reactive Defense. 4. Winter Sets, when you can afford it, to stack up some of that 2-slot bonus slow debuff resistance. This is key. You get hit by everything. If your recharge is debuffed, your heal and absorb shield don't come back fast enough, and you die. Dying is not permitted! But wait! Why am I getting hit by everything?? Why don't I just.... 5. NO! No defense! Screw defense! Dodging attacks is for people who feel pain. You are a resistance/absorb/heal tank. You laugh at pain! Plus you don't have defense debuff resistance. Any defense you build will be blown away in any situation where you actually need it. They can only hit you 95% of the time! What harm can that do? Speaking of hitting 95% of the time, btw... 6. Focused Accuracy. I wish I could say you can choose any Epic set but... I can't stay away from Focused Accuracy. Getting hit by everything means debuffs suck. A lot. And a lot of them are -toHit debuffs. If you don't want to be reduced to autohit Taunt bot, take Energy Mastery and then take Focused Accuracy at 35. Now, in addition to already being able to dance in Tar Patches because of slow resistance, you can ignore toHit debuffs too. Mostly. 7. Ground Zero. Another proc bomb. Also a good place to drop two more Winter IOs for the slow resistance. Avalanche set. I like Acc/Dmg/Rech and Rech/Knockdown. GZ has a long enough base recharge that you're gonna get 90% chance out of that proc. Also, GZ hits up to THIRTY targets (though it includes allies because it heals them). So GZ means you hit a huge number of targets. Tanker means the radius is enormous. And the KD proc is just funny. This feels honestly better than Shield Charge. You let this sucker rip in the middle of a big crowd of bad guys (or good guys!) and EVERYBODY takes a seat. Fill out the rest of the slots with damage procs. 8. Teleport - This is somewhat a matter of choice obviously. Take what travel you like, but Teleport has really grown on me lately because it can even be used inside a mission. Again with the theme of being hit by everything comes the possibility of having your feet glued down so you can't fly/jump. You're not rooted because you have immobilize protection, but you also can't even hop over a curb or railing in your way. Unacceptable! The blaster is being eviscerated! I need to get over there now and smash those guys so we can scrape that poor Blaster up off the tiles! No problem if you can teleport! Traffic jam at a door in an office or sewer map? BAMF right though that crowd! Also really nice for landing yourself in the exact middle of a big spawn of enemies without having to shoulder your way in there. Perfect placement for a big AoE like, oh hey! Ground Zero! Tellin you, teleport in there and while still hovering you let GZ go and it flattens everyone, you're still floating there in a classic superhero pose surrounded by devastation. /screenshot! 9. There is no 9! You are having so much fun by now it should be illegal! Okay.. this isn't a build. But it's the outline. If I can figure out how to properly install an updated Mid's I may give posting a build here a shot. Although I hear export doesn't work anymore. Booooo! Maybe I'll attach the file then.

Had this happen just last night. And this wasn't a team that was all over the place in the rest of the missions but then we swung into a Safeguard where the lead wanted to do all the sides in PI and then clear the map and... there must have been three sub-groups at least at different corners of the map at any given time. When I finally realized nobody was following me (the tank) I decided to try following the team lead. That helped. Eventually a few more glommed on and we had a working sub-group able to tackle sides but there were still stragglers fighting and dying who knows where else on the map. And it probably wasn't a case of vengeful soloists. They probably were having trouble following the erratic path we were tracing hither an yon around the map as those of us with Vidiotmaps installed went around nailing key-giver groups and then door side missions. I put that down to the fact most PuG radio teams seem to skip banks like 90% of the time. They just want to farm regular radio missions where it's easy to follow through an office or sewer map. People get out into the open map and just lose their minds. 🤪 Wouldn't trade it for anything though. It's not good vs. bad team. It's random vs. predictable. I prefer random. Surprise me, Paragon City!

Touch of Fear only toHit debuffs and terrorizes your main target. The rest hit by the AoE just get some negative DoT damage. You hit nine targets but there are only seven attacks in this log snippet after the Touch. Your main target might be cowering at this point and not attacking you yet with his debuffed attack chance. Try testing it again against just one enemy. The only other reason it might not go down against an enemy like this would be if they are already at the toHit floor. But that doesn't seem to be the case here. Should be 5% if this is an even-con minion. That enemy also doesn't have any special resistances to debuffing.

That you use in combat, certainly, but there's no reason not to slot even just one if that's all you can slot or feel like your build has room for. One FF:+rech is somewhat more than one-third the average +recharge benefit of three and for one-third the slot cost. It's somewhat more than one-third the benefit because of the occasional overlaps you'll get having multiple. You might not notice being sped up as easily while playing, which is probably what you're getting at here, but the benefit is there anyway. It's kind of like slotting LOTG:+rech. Each one provides the same incremental benefit for the same one additional slot cost.

Thanks for trying but I didn't need an example. I was already imagining they'd go to pains to say it was voluntary, but any way you slice it it's coming from a GM. If you can imagine someone too anxious to directly contact a player, I can imagine someone intimidated to receive such a "request" from a GM. The name business should be between players and involve GMs only if someone thinks it's gone wrong. That's just my take on it. I suppose then my answer to your original question is "no". I would not give the name up if asked by a GM, because they shouldn't be asking. I agree with the GMs being "hands off" as the devs have said they would be, if this policy goes into effect.

I would hope they don't ever do this. Coming from a GM it might seem like it's not a request no matter how they tried to word it. In several of these threads GMs or devs have repeated that they intend GMs to be "hands off" with respect to the policy and that it would run on auto. That makes sense. If you think these name release threads are heated, try adding case-by-case exceptions to the mix. That head-exploding gif is about how it would look for some players.

Teleport Target is a great idea on a Stalker or anybody who can stealth. I take it on some of my Tankers because they "stealth" by just running through everybody with a smile and an extended middle finger. These days though, a single well-built toon, even a Stalker, can do quite a lot on their own. But I also fondly recall doing the LGTF with my old Ninja Blade / Ninja Stalker in Live and surprising teammates by being able to free captives by myself. But it was just the magic of over-soft-capped melee defense. 🤪 Regardless, still wanted teleport to bring the whole team to the end AV fight anyway. In general, I prefer some carnage in a TF rather than unfettered speeding but there are certainly those I wish had MORE speed opportunities. Looking at you, Synapse!

(1) Times can vary a lot. Certainly if people are "speeding" vs. "kill most"(ing?) that makes a big difference but it can also vary just by team composition or difficulty setting. I am not sure there's an up to date guide for times but the amount of merits rewarded was supposed to have been adjusted in the past to be roughly proportional to how much time players were taking doing those TFs. It won't be super accurate, but it's a rough guide to judge them at least relative to each other. What will REALLY blow out the time needed is when a team lead wants to set it to +4 difficulty level and then half or more of the team ends up being under the team lead's level. But that's fairly uncommon. (2) "Speedy" just means that all missions will be done with an eye toward only the objectives. Any spawns of enemies which can be skipped, will be skipped. Glowies that have to be clicked will be found and clicked. To use Manticore's TF as example, there are missions where you have to clear the whole map. Those cannot be sped up, obviously. But missions where you only need to "Defeat the Security Chief and his men?" one or more (or everybody who can) will dash past all the mobs until they get, typically, to the last floor of the map, find the room the chief is in, and go to town on everyone in just that room. Maybe try to teleport in other team members who can't manage the run. The mission where a computer has to be hacked can be done by one speeder in stealth or just tough enough to ignore enemies. Other members of the team not actively involved in speeding to the objective typically just fight enemies to pass the time. I don't know if I would put too much effort into preparing for speeding since I've rarely run into a random team that couldn't. It's nice to have team members with Assemble the Team and Team Teleporter and sometimes you'll see people asking in their advert for team members who have such but more typically they'll either not mention it or just say it's a "would be nice". Unless it's a Shadow Shard TF that is... then you see people saying it's mandatory. That or pack a lunch. 🤪

And the name policy would let you do that easily. There's really been only a few people clamoring for the name policy to be MORE aggressive than it is. I think the way it's written now is more than generous and does allow reserving some names without too much trouble. I'm sure we'd all draw the line somewhat differently but for me, I look at the whole, "reserved for future use" situation like this: If I'm gonna play that soon? Great. If I'm not going to play that for at least a year or more? I should release it. The new name policy won't mandate that. You can absolutely camp names indefinitely if you're willing to actively refresh them. It's a compromise. If it were more aggressive than that it would start to sweep up more and more temporarily inactive players and that's not wanted. But giving people a year to refresh a level 6-49 character is much more reasonable even if it allows determined camping. Does it make it very much more difficult to camp 300 level 1 names though? Sure does. And good. What a tool that person is. I bet they filled entire closets with toilet paper during the pandemic too.

I bet you were reported by the guy who wrote the "Book of K'Gar" for that one radio mission.

Nobody listens to Zathras.

Fair. "Feasible" would have been the better choice of word there. But it's also not just more work. It's also about risk. I wouldn't be surprised if changing something like character names, which probably runs through the spaghetti code for miles, might have many unintended side-effects and high potential to break things. Regardless of poor word choice, the point is the same. They either aren't working on it or they are working on it in secret. The latter seems unlikely since I'd think they would want to know if the players even wanted that kind of system. Do some searching on Champions name system and you'll find a fair amount of debate over whether people like it or prefer unique names. As I recall, there was plenty of that discussion in the CoH community when Champions released. Not sure I'd personally care either way if it could be done without breaking all kinds of shit.

So you are both certain of it and unable to explain it? Why am I not surprised"? "It will be so because I say it will be so!" I have spoken with few people as confident of their bald-faced and baseless assertions as you. Have you considered a career in politics?

Things that don't need to be changed, shouldn't be changed. Or more colloquially, "If it ain't broke... don't fix it!" This wisdom is more than especially true in a 20+ year old code base. You think it's broke. Some of us others don't. It can't be put more simply than this. I think your examples of how someone is going to miss this and be surprised by name release are either contrived.... or well deserved consequences of being willfully uninformed about a game, especially an MMO, that one is playing. As I said before, the name release policy is just one of many things your hypothetical person who is ignoring all game news is not going to know about. If losing a name convinces Mr. or Mrs. Oblivious to pay attention to patch news every now and then, it's probably a good thing. There's all sorts of things they should know about to get the most out of this old game and no, it does not require daily visits to these forums either. And as @lemming just pointed out in the post above yours, even changes *I* think should be minor, aren't necessarily easy or possible in this creaky old client or server code. There were all sorts of conversations in past name release threads about account based vs character based and reasons were given by the devs for the way they are doing things. Those of us you're arguing with here didn't create this policy. People who have much more knowledge of the inner workings of the game did. Claiming there's "no reason" for it to be this way, as you have before, is presumptuous. This goes double for all the suggestions further up thread (including yours) that it might be possible to tweak the way names work to allow duplicate names on a server. Something similar to the Champions solution. But if THAT were possible, why did this name release policy even get created OR moved up to the warning phase again, by the people who know how hard it is to do stuff?

I don't presume to know how ugly the client code is, but it seems like at least once you log into a specific server it has to pull your whole character list from the server. At that point it should know if any are flagged. Seems like it ought to be possible to display a top level warning, regardless of which page of characters you are on, saying something like "One or more of your characters on this server is subject to name release within 'x' days." If you're playing on Excel, it wouldn't be able to tell you you've got characters going stale on Everlasting, but it'd be some improvement.

Nope. I am also a Rad Armor junkie and eventually noticed the same thing you did: It did not need multiple slots in Stamina. It has Gamma Boost, a self-heal power that can slot a +end proc, and it has decent built-in endurance drain resistance. But that's an example of something you can see in Mid's and it's fairly straightforward. One that isn't, again using Rad Armor as an example, is Defense. Rad Armor can't protect defense because it has no built-in DDR. But I built for it anyway... at first. And I seemed to be doing okay. I struggled a lot against enemies that debuff defense, but I expected that. And that's the problem. Was I doing okay because I built for defense or in spite of it? I had to go and rebuild for other things, ignoring defense, to find out that the set works remarkably well without really any added defense. Playing to all its other strengths is enough for other content. And for the hardest content, you need team buffs anyway. But I had to try it. Because just staring at Mid's I could easily convince myself that soft-cap melee defense was helping me when the truth is that vs. enemies that don't debuff defense, I didn't need it. And against enemies that do debuff defense, it was doing almost nothing. I might still have other wasted slots in my build. I have a LOT of psi resistance for example. Do I need that much? It's a rare damage type. Then again, super nice to have it when I am up against those enemies. But could I knock off 20% or so and still survive those psi enemies well enough? Maybe! Survival is like that. You only need enough of it. It's not like damage. You can always use more damage.

It literally is not. You claimed my entire argument was about missing a popup from a year ago. I JUST in that same post mentioned the other popup you will get when this system actually goes active. And those two things aren't even the only ways to know about the name release policy. Game news is displayed also on the launcher. The name release policy is mentioned in the FAQ. Warning flags have been appearing on inactive characters for a year and a half. Your imaginary person not only doesn't play their inactive characters, they do not even page through their character list EVER! Amazing! Not even when rearranging their active character list? When creating new alts? I suppose next you will also tell me they have blocked all global chat channels in game so they can't even accidentally hear someone talking about the name release policy after it's activated? Your hypothetical name release victim is avoiding knowledge of the game like it's spoilers for their favorite upcoming movie. The name release policy will be only one of MANY things they do not know about this game if this is how they behave. The reason we're talking past each other is that you've decided the assumption you base ALL of this on, that it is "easy to miss" this name release policy, is true. That someone has to be a daily forumite to even know about it. And you won't listen to any arguments to the contrary. So yeah... not much point in continuing.

Oh yes, that was the entirety of my argument. Oh wait... no it wasn't. But, I have to say, I was expecting you to say that your imaginary person would ignore the popup box informing them in-game of every patch change. After all, you invented them to do precisely everything necessary to make your argument work, so why would they do anything else? You: What if they don't visit the forums every day!? Me: They don't need to. They'll be informed in-game when this change goes live. You: What if they ignore that too!? Me: ... How is this not relevant? You asked if I was okay with someone else losing a name to this policy and I answered that I am okay with ME losing one of MY names to this policy if I am not active enough to log them in once a year. I get that you'd prefer this was about me taking something away from someone else. I am just pointing out what a horseshit argument that is. Sorry (not actually sorry). Knock yourself out but if it's gets down to use shouting "yes it is!" "no it isn't" "Oh yeah, well you smell bad!" it'll probably be time to hang it up. That said... "unfair" would imply I have some opportunity to know about things that someone else does not. But that isn't the case in your contrived argument. You have invented a person who is willfully avoiding knowing about changes to the game. The devs who make the change are literally putting it in their face and they are ignoring it. So no, I have no sympathy for your poor, willfully ignorant, totally made up person being surprised if they lose a character name they haven't even glanced at in passing for more than a year. You can certainly TRY to argue this point with me. But I am not going to change my mind for the simple reason that if it's MY OWN character and I lost the name because I hadn't even LOOKED at them in more than a year, I wouldn't be here crying and complaining about it, nor would I rage quit HC cursing the devs and that one rando on the forums who always said he liked the policy. I'd grab a thesaurus and rename them because that's the important life lesson that so many people have come into this thread (on just about every page) to teach me (ad nauseum)! That's it's not important if I don't have exactly the name I want. There are thesauruses and Googles and internets full of name generators! Names are easy! Names are cheap! Thanks you guys for explaining this to me! You're the best! Now that I know about thesauruses, I shall never fear the name reaper!

That isn't the problem. Your fictional victim of the name release policy doesn't NEED to log into the forums. Whenever there is an update, there is an in-game notification when you log in afterwards. You know that. There was one when the phase 1 warning system went into effect. There will be another when/if the name release policy is activated for real. And you have to stretch this to imagine someone who has managed not to see any of the warning flags on any of their other unused characters in an entire year and a half that the warning system has been in operation. I am not the one being unreasonable here. You aren't describing someone who can "easily" miss all this. You are describing someone who seems to be working very hard to miss all this and not care about major developments in the game they are playing. Exactly how much sympathy should I have for someone working so hard to not know anything about the game they are playing and then crying that they didn't know the rules? Are you intentionally missing the fact that we would ALL, myself included, be playing by these same rules? My own characters, if they are inactive that long, would be subject to name release. So the answer to your question, given I am advocating they turn this on, has already been answered. Perhaps you should take your own advice from the very start of your last post then, because it seems you can't see this from any perspective but YOUR own, doesn't it? We do not all see names as the sole and eternal property of the first person who happened to type them in on a server. These rules establish how you might keep that name and ALL would be subject to these same rules. While you are talking about me "taking" from someone else, you ignore that someone else could "take" from me. Except I don't call it taking. I call it me abandoning that name despite clear rules telling me how to avoid that and very generous time tables to accomplish it. You don't see it the same way. I get that. But I also don't have to agree with it. And my agreement is irrelevant anyway. I am not the one who will decide whether and when this ever gets turned on.

The warning flag will appear 30 days in advance for a level 6-49 character who hasn't been logged in for 11 months. But nobody has to wait for that flag to appear. You can pick any day of the year and refresh your unused toons if you really want to keep names you aren't using even once a year. Level 1-5 characters have to be refreshed monthly and only get 7 days notice. If that's a burden for someone who has many such characters... well... it's supposed to be. Name camping isn't being prevented, but it's going to require at least a little effort. This is all assuming the policy ever gets turned on. Far as I've heard, it's on an indefinite hold because of some problems. They won't turn it on unless they think it's reliable. Obviously they'd rather work on Page 7 for the time being so who knows when/if they will pick this up again.

You might want to use the /wdwsave command on that character. This will save all those settings you just worked out to the window settings default file. That way it will come up on new characters that way with your preferred window scale settings and tray/window positions. You can use /wdwload to manually load that file if you have other existing characters you want to update. I definitely needed to scale up the vendor window myself. The enhancement icons were so small I could barely read the level number on them.